Blood boiled in Mina's throat.
Golden runes of divine energy writhed beneath her pale skin, burning like liquid fire.
"Please..." she gasped, her fingers clawing at her collarbone.
Death was not a choice; it was a divine mandate radiating from her glowing system interface.
Her patron, the Constellation of Mercy, had judged her a liability for witnessing a systemless entity.
Now, the very blessing that had kept her alive was tearing her apart from the inside out.
Ruan watched her writhe, his expression carved from cold stone.
Anger, old and sharp, flared in his chest.
"A god of mercy," Ruan muttered, his voice dropping to a dangerous quiet.
Stepping forward, he grabbed her shoulder.
"Don't touch me!" Mina shrieked, tears of blood leaking from her eyes. "The system... it will kill you too!"
Ignored, he drove his palm straight into her chest, right over her heart.
Qi, pure and uncorrupted by any celestial system, flooded her body.
It was like pouring cold well water into a furnace.
Inside her veins, the golden divine script met a raging torrent of mortal willpower.
Shock wave after shock wave of pure kinetic force rippled through Mina's nervous system.
"What... what is this?" Mina gasped, her eyes bulging.
Her system interface flickered violently, static buzzing across the semi-transparent blue screen.
Divine authority was being physically shoved back, squeezed into a tiny, dormant knot near her sternum.
Ruan closed his eyes, concentrating on the flow of his inner energy.
He did not use mana.
He did not call upon a constellation.
His power was his own, forged through a century of brutal, isolated training in the high mountains where the air was thin and the gravity was crushing.
With a sudden, sharp twist of his wrist, he severed the invisible thread of divine connection linking her to her patron deity.
Mina collapsed against him, panting heavily.
Cold sweat soaked her hair, plastering it to her forehead.
"You... you blocked a god's decree," she whispered, staring at him as if he were a monster.
"I suppressed a parasite's itch," Ruan corrected.
He pulled his hand back, leaving her shivering on the damp earth.
His gaze drifted to the twig he had used to slay the Star-wolves, now lying discarded in the dirt.
Instinct screamed at him to run.
He should leave her here.
He should disappear back into the deep valleys, find another cave, and rot in isolation as he had done for a thousand years.
Caring for another mortal meant drawing the eyes of the heavens.
He remembered the scorched remains of his master's temple, the blackened bones of his martial brothers.
They had tried to protect the weak, and the Constellations had erased them from history.
If he kept her alive, she would become a target for their wrath.
And yet, looking at her broken leg and trembling shoulders, a cold resolve settled in his stomach.
"Where is the nearest human settlement?" Ruan asked.
"Sector 9," Mina stammered, pulling her knees to her chest. "It's three miles east. But you can't go there without a registration."
"Lead the way," he said.
"I can't walk," she pointed out, gesturing to her mangled leg.
Ruan didn't offer a hand.
Instead, he tapped her knee with the toe of his boot, sending a tiny thread of Qi into the fractured bone.
Mina gasped as the shattered pieces clicked back into alignment with a sickening pop.
She stood up tentatively, her jaw dropping as she realized she could bear weight.
"Move," Ruan said, his voice flat.
---
Walking through the ruined forest, Ruan kept his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his rusted sword.
Every rustle of the leaves made him tense.
He hated this.
He hated the smell of the damp earth mixed with the metallic tang of the Star-wolves' blood.
He hated the girl walking two paces ahead of him, casting furtive, terrified glances over her shoulder.
"Why did you save me?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
"You were noisy," Ruan replied.
"But you used Qi," she pressed, her eyes wide with a mix of awe and terror. "My grandfather used to tell stories about martial artists. He said they were all wiped out during the Great Cleansing. He said their power was forbidden."
"Your grandfather was right," Ruan said.
"Then why do you have it? Are you a survivor?"
"Silence."
His word cut through the air like a razor.
Mina flinched, clamping her mouth shut.
Ruan's chest tightened.
Survivor.
That word tasted like ash in his mouth.
He had slept while his world burned.
He had meditated in a temporal rift while his brothers-in-arms bled out on the battlefield, their swords shattered by divine lightning.
He was not a survivor.
He was a coward who had arrived a thousand years too late.
Memories of the Heavenly Sword Sect rose unbidden in his mind, sharp and painful.
He could still hear the rhythmic wooden thwack of practice swords striking training posts in the early morning mist.
His master, an old man with eyes like polished obsidian, would pace behind them, striking their calves with a bamboo switch if their stances faltered by even a hair's breadth.
"A sword is not a tool of a god," his master had said.
"It is an extension of your mortal will. If your will is strong enough, even the heavens must bow."
Ruan had believed those words.
He had trained until his hands bled, until his bones ached with a deep, permanent fatigue.
Those gods had not bowed. They had simply unleashed a deluge of divine fire that turned the mountain to glass.
Mina watched him closely as they walked, her gaze lingering on his chipped, ancient sword.
It looked like junk.
Any low-tier hunter would have discarded it for a system-forged blade with bonus stat attributes.
Yet, she had seen him move.
He had moved faster than the eye could follow, his movements fluid and natural, devoid of the rigid, calculated animations forced by system skills.
"Your sword," she ventured, breaking the quiet. "It doesn't have any mana runes. How did you cut those monsters without a skill?"
"A blade cuts because it is sharp," Ruan said, not looking back. "Not because a system tells it to."
"But without skills, you can't bypass their physical defense," she argued, her mind struggling to reconcile her years of academy training with what she had witnessed. "Star-wolves have iron-hide passives. Normal steel shouldn't even scratch them."
"Your system makes you lazy," Ruan replied, his voice flat. "You rely on numbers to fight. If the system says you cannot cut, you believe it. A true swordsman knows that nothing is uncuttable."
Trees began to change, their bark replaced by a synthetic, metallic sheen.
Purple vines pulsed with a faint, artificial light, wrapping around the trunks like glowing serpents.
This was the corruption of the system, transforming the very earth into something alien.
Ruan felt a deep, twisting disgust in his gut.
Even the dirt under his boots felt wrong, lacking the rich, vibrant energy of the old world.
"Does the system control everything now?" Ruan asked, his voice cutting through the silence.
Mina started, jumping slightly at his sudden question.
"Yes," she said, nodding quickly. "Everything. The air, the water, the safety zones. If you don't have a system interface, you don't exist. You're just... an error in the world."
"An error," Ruan repeated.
"Unregistered humans are hunted down by the Peacekeepers," Mina explained, her voice dropping. "They say that systemless people are unstable. That they attract monsters. But... my grandfather said the gods just didn't want anyone they couldn't control."
Ruan's jaw clenched.
A thin vein throbbed at his temple.
Control.
That was the true nature of the gods.
They had turned humanity into livestock, feeding on their devotion and fear, rewarding them with crumbs of "system power" while keeping them entirely dependent.
He looked down at his own hands.
They were calloused, scarred from decades of swinging a blade until his muscles tore and rebuilt themselves.
His power belonged to him.
No deity could take it away, and no system could measure it.
He needed to know who had survived, if anyone.
Were there others like him, hidden in the dark corners of this ruined world?
Or was he truly the last spark of a dead era?
Thinking of being entirely alone made his chest tighten, a familiar, suffocating pressure settling behind his ribs.
He didn't want to be a savior.
He didn't want to carry the legacy of the martial arts on his back.
But the anger burning inside him was too hot to ignore.
Those deities had taken everything, and then they had turned his people into mindless, smiling puppets.
He would make them pay, even if he had to tear down the sky block by block.
"We are close," Mina said after another hour of tense silence.
Foliage thinned out, replaced by jagged concrete ruins and rusted rebar jutting from the earth.
In the distance, a massive wall of gray steel loomed against the darkened sky.
Towering searchlights swept across the desolate wasteland, casting harsh white beams over the gravel.
"That's Sector 9," Mina whispered, pointing toward the colossal barrier. "It's one of the last bastions for unblessed humans and low-tier hunters."
Ruan squinted.
Static hummed through the air around the wall, buzzing with a strange, artificial energy.
It felt greasy, like static electricity on a cheap synthetic blanket.
"What is that barrier?" Ruan asked.
"An Aegis Shield," Mina explained. "It's powered by the Constellation of the Steel Aegis. It keeps out high-level monsters and unregistered entities."
Ruan scoffed.
A god's protection.
Humanity had truly traded their freedom for a gilded cage.
"They will scan us at the gate," Mina warned, her voice trembling again. "If your energy is unregistered, the system will flag you."
"Let them try," Ruan said, walking forward.
He didn't care about their systems.
He needed answers.
Who were the leaders of this new world?
Where were the temples of the Constellations?
He would find them, one by one, and drag them down from their high thrones.
Approaching the towering steel gates, Ruan felt a sudden spike of hostility from the wall.
Mounted turrets, sleek and black, swiveled in their direction.
A crimson light flickered from a massive lens positioned above the archway.
Mina froze.
"Wait," she whispered. "Something is wrong."
Before she could step back, a cone of blinding red light washed over them.
Ruan felt the energy of the scanner washing over his skin, trying to read his soul, searching for the mark of a god.
It found nothing.
No system.
No constellation's blessing.
Only an endless, bottomless abyss of pure, condensed mortal power.
At the steel gates of Sector 9, a high-frequency scanner screams in a synthetic voice: 'Warning: Sovereign-level anomaly detected. Zero divine signature. Initiating extermination protocol.'