Her expression remained cold and imperious, but the voice inside her mind was howling:
Beg me!
All you have to do is kneel. Crawl to me and kiss the hem of my robe!
Admit in front of everyone that you can't live without me, and I'll let you go!
Do it now! Stop being so stubborn!
If that Sword Bone is truly gone, you'll be nothing but a cripple. And then the only place you'll have left is by my side!
She had already woven her net, every thread accounted for.
She believed that as long as I drew breath, I would forever be a thing she held in the palm of her hand.
Too bad.
She miscalculated one thing.
I didn't intend to live.
I straightened slowly, shrugging free of the Hall of Judgment disciples pinning me down.
I didn't look at the Sword Sovereign on her throne.
Instead, I let my gaze sweep across the place I had called home for twenty years.
Every blade of grass, every tree. I had bled to protect all of it.
Now, looking again.
Filthy.
"You won't need to do it yourselves."
My voice was quiet, but the wind carried it to every ear in the square.
The next second.
I raised my right hand.
Two fingers pressed together like a blade, the last flicker of spiritual energy I'd burned my life force to gather condensing at their tips.
Squelch.
The wet sound of a blade entering flesh.
My hand drove backward, plunging into my own spine.
Blood erupted in a torrent.
It soaked through the white prisoner's robes, pooled across the jade-white stone beneath my feet.
"You've lost your mind!"
Seraphina shot to her feet, every shred of composure ripped from her face in an instant.
Under the stupefied, horror-stricken stares of every soul present,
I clenched my teeth and hooked my fingers around the vertebrae.
And wrenched.
"Ngh!"
The pain tore through me like my soul was being split in two, and a strangled groan escaped my throat.
But I didn't stop.
Inch by inch, I dragged the Sword Bone out of my own body, crystalline and gleaming with cold light.
Flesh came with it. Meridians snapped and trailed behind.
The wet, grinding sound of tearing sinew turned the entire square deathly silent.
I stood drenched in my own blood, the still-dripping Sword Bone clutched in my fist.
My body swayed, barely upright.
"The Sword Bone you wanted."
I looked at Seraphina. Looked at her face, white as a corpse.
Her inner voice was nothing but shrieking panic now: No! Stop! Stop it! I won't go through with it! I don't want it anymore!
I smiled.
Smiled until tears ran down my face.
"Master, this cultivation, this bone and blood. Today I return every last bit of it to you."
My fingers closed like a vice.
Crack.
The supreme Sword Bone shattered in my bare hand, reduced to a cloud of glittering dust.
Crystalline powder mingled with a mist of blood, drifting down over the entire sect like a rain of crimson snow.
I owe you nothing.
"I wish you both a lifetime of happiness. In life or death... may we never meet again."
The system countdown hit zero.
[Host extraction successful.]
My body grew weightless.
In the suffocating silence, my flesh began to break apart.
Like the last embers of a dying fire, I dissolved into motes of light.
Seraphina let out a scream so raw it cracked her voice:
"NO!!"
She lunged from the dais like a woman possessed, but her hands closed on nothing but drifting sparks.
I scattered on the wind.
Not a wisp of my soul remained.
