Murong Xiaoya's face was without expression. She raised her hand slightly, and the scarlet molten iron pooled on the cavern floor from the melted chains rose up into a fire serpent, which slammed into the sealed stone door with a roaring wave of scorching heat.
With a thunderous crash, the stone door was reduced to powder in an instant, and the scarlet fire serpent continued surging through the opening beyond.
The blazing light it gave off illuminated the space behind the door completely.
From where she stood in the cavern, Murong Xiaoya could now see a cast iron punishment rack suspended in the air by chains, its frame crawling with dark red rust, and locked upon it was a single person.
That person was none other than Murong Xiaoya's eldest brother.
Her eldest brother had committed a grave transgression in the past, for which Murong Hong had punished him with imprisonment in a dungeon. She had not seen him in years, and never could she have imagined that when they met again it would be here.
Murong Xiaoya's form became a stream of flame and appeared before the rack in an instant, her gaze fixed on the figure before her.
His body was covered in wounds. Beneath his skin, masses of bulging tumors shifted and moved, surging up toward his throat at one moment like fists-sized spiders, then crawling through the flesh beneath his skin the next like centipedes.
Murong Xiaoya could sense clearly that within his body there were simultaneously dozens of powerful and foreign martial True Qi currents, crashing through him endlessly in every direction.
Ivory-colored bone spurs had torn through the flesh of all four limbs, their tips already hardened with clotted blood marrow, and the person as a whole barely looked human at all.
Murong Xiaoya furrowed her brow slightly, then reached out casually from a distance. The iron stone wedged in her eldest brother's mouth was seized and cast away.
In the next instant, the sealed chamber erupted with the sound of his agonized, heart-tearing screams.
"...I beg you... kill me... kill me..."
The moment he could make a sound, as though sensing someone had come, he screamed without stopping through his torment and pleaded desperately to die.
"I am Xiaoya. Brother, why are you here?"
Murong Xiaoya looked at the scene before her and simply asked in a cold, detached voice.
Her entire body was wrapped in scarlet flame at that moment, her face wavering in the rising waves of heat.
At those words, his screaming suddenly became frantic and rushed, "Xiaoya? Is that you... truly you..."
"At last... at last I have waited long enough... quickly... quickly kill me..."
The ruined figure bound to the rack found strength from somewhere and suddenly began to thrash with all his force.
The motion he produced was slight, but it was clear he was already giving everything he had.
Murong Xiaoya said nothing, for she could tell that every word her eldest brother spoke was the truth. He truly, desperately wanted her to kill him.
She hovered in the air surrounded by flame, the swirling molten gold vortexes in her eyes drawing back and disappearing, though the aura she gave off remained overwhelming.
"Tell me everything that happened. What was your connection to Second Uncle?"
Hearing this, her eldest brother ground his teeth, forcing down the agony of the True Qi tearing through him, and broke into sudden, jarring laughter, "Second Uncle... he was a monster through and through..."
As he laughed, his face became savage, filled with boundless fury and hatred, "He said he would teach me a supreme art... let me escape Father's imprisonment... but in truth he was using me as a furnace..."
"He kept gathering the cultivation of powerful martial artists... and poured it all into my body... he did not even spare our two patriarchs..."
"He made me endure the daily assault of these incompatible True Qi currents... made my life worse than death... and all of it... every last bit of it... was for you, Xiaoya..."
At that, her eldest brother stopped abruptly, as though wanting to look at his younger sister, yet finding he could not manage it no matter how he tried.
He fell silent for a moment, then suddenly said, "I... am the gift Second Uncle prepared for you..."
With that, he broke into laughter again, and in that laughter was rage, hatred, pain, bitterness, and beneath all of it, a deep and absolute despair.
Hearing this, Murong Xiaoya said nothing. She simply watched him laughing in his madness and asked quietly, "Why?"
His laughter cut off abruptly. His voice came out in agony, "Second Uncle said... the martial cultivation inside me... belongs entirely to you..."
"Only by absorbing the martial cultivation within my body... can you accomplish what you wish to accomplish..."
"Though... I am curious... what is it you actually want to do..."
Hearing this, Murong Xiaoya was silent for a moment. The expressionless look that had held her face until now shifted, just slightly, and she spoke slowly, "The Murong family is gone."
The moment those words fell, the agonized cry that had been forming in her eldest brother's throat seized up completely. Then he burst out screaming, "Murong Hong and his stubbornness... I always knew the Murong family would come to ruin by his hand sooner or later... all I did was kill a few people to practice..."
But before he could finish, he felt a hand close suddenly around his heart, and at the same moment Murong Xiaoya's flat, emotionless voice reached his ears, "Brother, your sins run deep. Let me give you release."
"And Second Uncle, I have already killed him."
The moment she finished speaking, his heart shattered and became a mist of blood, and the endless pain that had been tearing through his body began rapidly receding from him...
In that moment, it seemed he had truly found release. He had time only for a final few words, "Be careful... Second Uncle..."
The next instant, the blood mist condensed into a thread of refined blood and drifted through the air toward Murong Xiaoya's heart.
But unlike what had happened when she killed Murong Fu, the dozens of martial True Qi currents that had been held within her eldest brother's body also came streaming through the refined blood as their medium, flowing rapidly toward Murong Xiaoya's heart as well.
Seeing this, Murong Xiaoya's eyes grew slightly intent, yet she did not stop it, and absorbed the refined blood and every trace of that martial cultivation in full.
In an instant, the vertebrae down Murong Xiaoya's spine cracked one after another in a rolling chain, and as those powerful martial Qi currents surged into her meridians and flesh, her body was split open by countless fissures in a single moment.
But very quickly, a dazzling radiance of red-gold burst from her heart and swept through her entire body in an instant, sending blood-colored lines growing out across every crack and fissure, absorbing and dissolving those terrifying martial True Qi currents one by one.
As all the martial True Qi currents continued to merge into Murong Xiaoya's body, her aura climbed at a breathtaking speed.
Wisps of gold-red fire mist even seeped from the surface of her skin, spreading and drifting outward, scorching countless honeycomb pits directly into the stone walls of the sealed chamber.
At the same time, the red-gold flames around her blazed as though they could burn heaven and earth, and then condensed into a pair of lava wing-shadows, each more than ten feet across.
When those wing-shadows shifted with even the faintest motion, the entire surrounding cavern shuddered under the force of wind and fire, trembling continuously as fragments of stone rained down from above.
And when every last current of martial True Qi had been absorbed, the aura Murong Xiaoya gave off had risen to a level that was utterly terrifying.