I, Chen Que, was kneeling on the scorched earth of Mount Qingwu, still clutching the tattered pages of the Nine Chapters of Qingwu that an elder had pressed into my arms before his last breath.
They said we were hidebound and stubbornly upright, and refused to cooperate with the Nethersea to suppress the Nine Luminaries Alliance. So the righteous path's blade fell faster than the demonic cultivators'. The blood of three hundred people soaked through the sixteen years I'd spent learning to preserve heavenly principles and extinguish human desires.
Later, I swallowed a poisoned tempering pill given to me by a demonic cultivator, thinking I was about to become a demon. But when the backlash came, I bit through my tongue and refined the demonic nature into my meridians. On the day I reached the seventh layer of Qi Refining, I gripped half a Qingwu sword and took a Golden Core elder's Righteous Qi Slash head-on. As blood sprayed across the ground, I laughed and shouted, "So this is the 'heavenly principle' of the righteous path?"
They called me the remnant of an evil sect, while the Nethersea wanted to honor me as an heir to the demonic lineage.
But I insist on following a different path: evil bones bearing righteousness, a righteous heart making room for evil.
When the Nine Luminaries Alliance's Monument to the Righteous Path and the Nethersea's Demonic Banner have both burned to ash, I will show the world that good and evil have never been carved in stone by anyone. They are forged by walking through blood.
