Five Hundred Years After Our Bond, My Dao Companion Has Mastered the Ruthless Dao

The demons engineered the emergence of the ancient secret realm Mirrorflower City. It reveals every obsession and fear in people's hearts, trapping eighty percent of the cultivation world's young prodigies inside. To escape, someone must appear within the city who can break free of every obsession and overcome every fear, then break out from within.

How can anyone live without obsessions or fears?

They would have to be dead, or possess the Heart of the Path of Ruthlessness, which no one in the cultivation world has mastered in thousands of years.

“Mirrorflower City is full of cruel punishments. The deeper your obsessions, the more you suffer!”

Someone secretly looked up at the Mountainsea Sword Venerable seated above them.

His Dao companion of five hundred years, the Dustmist Sword Lord, was trapped in Mirrorflower City too.

At their bonding ceremony all those years ago, the two had made a “Vow of One Heart” to the Heavenly Dao, swearing never to leave or forsake each other, in life or death. If either of them ever changed their heart, they would suffer the agony of ten fires burning their heart every moment. Even now, their love remained steadfast.

With the Dustmist Sword Lord's deep devotion to the Mountainsea Sword Venerable, his Dao companion and master, and his unshakable heart, wouldn't he be the first to suffer until death?

The Mountainsea Sword Venerable raised his sword, his brows cold, ready to force his way into the city from outside.

No one could stop him. Just then, Mirrorflower City broke apart!

A bloodied figure with a sword in hand slowly emerged.

“Who broke the city?”

“The Dustmist Sword Lord!”

“H-how did he break it?”

“Huh? Ha... Surely the Dustmist Sword Lord couldn't have mastered the Heart of the Path of Ruthlessness...?”

No one dared look at the Mountainsea Sword Venerable's expression anymore.

*** *** ***

The Mountainsea Sword Venerable was the foremost cultivator in the realm, a frigid sun that had hung high over the cultivation world for three thousand years without ever fading. He had a bearing that reached to the clouds, a nature as cold as snow and frost, and a beauty of unrivaled grace. His admirers were as numerous as fish crossing a river, and those who fell into demonic cultivation out of unrequited love for him were too many to count on one's fingers.

Five hundred years ago, the Mountainsea Sword Venerable held a bonding ceremony with a disciple who had joined his sect less than fifteen years earlier. The entire cultivation world was in an uproar.

It took Dustmist three hundred years to go from an illiterate, crooked-minded nobody who was useless as mud, to the Dustmist Sword Lord, a man whose name terrified demons and monsters, and whom no one in the cultivation world dared fail to respect.

It took Dustmist four hundred years to go from “a shameless, incestuous disciple who used his pretty face to seduce the Mountainsea Sword Venerable and defy his station” to someone even the Demon Lord, who had fallen into demonic cultivation for the Mountainsea Sword Venerable, admitted was “the only Dao companion worthy of him.”

The five hundredth year.

Mirrorflower City fell. Eighty-one Heavenly Tribulation bolts, each striking with the force of a thunderclap, forged Dustmist's Heart of the Path of Ruthlessness into perfection.

Dustmist emerged from the thunderbolts.

He looked up and saw a look of mockery on the Mountainsea Sword Venerable's usually cold face, a look he had never seen before. “Hah. Five hundred years of pretending to love me. You must have suffered terribly.”

‘It'll be hard to make up in bed this time.’

Dustmist thought it over, then knelt, bowed his head, and held his life-bound sword, Firefly, above his head in offering. “Please punish me, Master.”

[Reading Notes]

1. Dustmist's major is sword cultivation, and he also studies the Path of Ruthlessness. Whether he can ascend depends on his major. The additional discipline is just a hobby.

2. The top is powerful and adored by all, but secretly insecure. The bottom pursues the top, though it's not quite a “pursuit-and-regret” story, and there are no misunderstandings or anything like that. The top is an earthworm who transforms into a dragon, a demon pretending to be human. The bottom is human.

3. This idea came to me on a whim. I haven't decided whether the bottom will win him over. I'm just writing for fun and to relax.

[Synopsis screenshot from 2025-6-9]

Theme: May the vastness of mountains and seas bear Dustmist aloft; may the brilliant sun and moon adorn Firefly.