“Why?! Why are you doing this? Who are you?!”

A fire raged around the source of this voice. A burly man covered in sweat and ash fell to his knees in the middle of a courtyard while the building around him had transformed into an inferno of heat and flame. Thick smoke filled the air and stained his body. The man had only a torn and burned up pair of boots and breeches. There were a few red lines sliced into his skin, something had torn through his clothing and then cut into him, but that part of him had also been burned, sealing the wound with a light burn.

His head twisted left and right, as if to look for someone, but he found nothing and yelled his words to the sky. The smoke surrounded him and he started to cough, he wanted to escape but he was surrounded by a fiery inferno and he breathed in the smoke, screaming in pain as the air was so hot it scalded his lungs. He fell to his knees and tried to call out again, but all that came from his mouth was a pained gurgle before he fell unconscious.

A block away, a dozen equally burly men with bare chests hung upside down. A cord tied their ankles together and strung them from the eaves of a large hall. The many of them hanging in such close proximity to each other was reminiscent of an abattoir, a butcher house. Such a comparison was especially apt when taking in the full scene, as the floor was covered in a layer of blood, dripping from the slashed throats of those dozen men.

The large hall was decorated with a very specific theme. There was a huge gong at the central place behind the main seat, and each of the pillars that supported the hall had different percussion instruments hanging from them, all of ancient style and make. For a musical history aficionado of this world, it would be quite the impressive collection. Around the outer edges of this hall, there were at least a hundred drums of many different styles and sizes.

Other than the dozen men hanging from their ankles in the center of the hall, there was a pile of bodies stacked up outside the entrance. The two huge doors had been propped open with their unmoving bulk, and there was currently only a single living person inside that hall.

That person’s golden eyes portrayed a look of sad futility. There was no enjoyment in what he had done, and he gazed down at a length of almost invisibly thin thread held between his hands. It could only be seen when the light reflected off of it at just the right angle, but there were a few large drops of blood, dripping from the center of it in a way that almost made them look suspended in mid-air.

Of course, those golden eyes belonged to an otherwise ordinary looking man, wearing simple grey robes with a blue silk belt sash. There were a few small stains of red upon the edges of his sleeves, and his hands were far from clean, but the rest of him was remarkably free of damage.

That man was, of course, Sage. He was surprised at how clean he looked from the outside, despite the fiery inferno that he had turned this place into. A section of this city had been cordoned off with a wall, and labeled as the exclusive territory of the Gu Clan, quite similar to how the old Lang Clan was situated. Within that territory, every single building had already been lit on fire, save for the Clan Hall. The large building had an expansive courtyard around it, and the flames from the other buildings had been unable to spread to it. The three sets of gates to the Gu Clan territory were all thrown wide open and many fled screaming into the night while others from the city rushed in to fight the fire. As hard as they worked, the fire was already too large to be stopped, but the large wall around the Gu Clan territory worked in their favor to control the fire.

Sage wasn’t genocidal. The majority of the women and children of the Gu Clan had escaped from the flames. He was breaking one of the established rules of the cultivating world, destroying a clan without pulling up the roots. Those people he left alive might one day grow strong and come after him or those he cared for, but he could not bring himself to make that last step. It was one thing to kill those who wanted to kill him, to get revenge for those who had been wronged, or put down those who were truly evil. It was another thing entirely to kill those people’s friends, family, and employees, merely because they could nurse a grudge and one day come after you for revenge.

Sage personally hunted down the six who had joined the hunt for his life. Those men who beat their drums and boosted the army that wished to cut him down. In the process he poisoned many of the Gu Clan guards and lit many fires. With a mere wave of his hand a burning house could become a raging inferno, turning small combustions into uncontrollable fires. The Soul Clone had already spent years becoming accustomed to his new Thermal Law and every one of these buildings were like dried kindling in the face of his combined Primal Law and Heavenly Flames.

Once he left those six in dire straits, he went to the Gu Clan Hall and strung up their leaders.

Sage had always hated that ridiculous trope in action movies. The hero would mercilessly shoot and kill dozens of henchmen, fighting their way to the evil fellow or fellows in charge. Then, they would capture the big bad and lock them up, making them pay for their crimes. Truly absurd. The hired goons and people taking orders were put to death or accidentally killed in terrible ways, while the actual party responsible for arranging everything gets peacefully put behind bars? The way he saw it, such treatment was the opposite of what should happen.

There were many guards that Sage was forced to kill to reach this point, but he tried to spare as many of them as possible, using poisons to incapicitate as many as he could. Those six men that had fought against him? He put them into terrible situations without outright killing them. In his opinion, even they were acting on orders. As for the ones in charge? They were strung up like livestock and he subjected them to a death by a thousand cuts, using his silk to slice them and slowly bleed them to death.

As the ones in charge, they should be held responsible for the actions of their clan. He didn’t know what pressures they faced or why they made their decisions, but it was still the duty of those in charge to pay for their mistakes.

Sage had begun his revenge, and he chose to start with those who had directly come to kill him. He knew they were likely someone else’s pawns, and in order to figure out who the masterminds were, he’d find out from those pawns. It was also fitting that those pawns all had grudges against him. The Violet Light Sect, the Fu Clan, the Artful Life Alliance, and Whitestaff. He chose to strike out at the group with the least of a grudge against him first. His grudge with them stemmed from Hei Bai, a former member of theirs, along with the debts owed to them by Lionheart Town. He disrupted the slave trade they profited from, as well as snubbing them when they were his supposed creditor.

Why did he attack them first? They were simply the easiest target.

The Artful Life Alliance as a whole had enough strength to almost match the other First Rate powers. They had contributed two Nascent Souls to that task force that nearly killed him, while the Fu Clan and Violet Light Sect only had one. That strength was also their weakness, because the Artful Life Alliance was not a single group, but a collection of smaller Sects and Clans. By pooling their strengths and resources, they could gather quite a force, but each of those individual groups were much weaker.

The Yincha Sect had a Nascent Soul, and the Sound Sword Sect had another. Sage guessed there might be one more Nascent Soul among the many parts of the Artful Life Alliance, but as long as Sage didn’t run into that mysterious person, he could run rampant over them. Even if he didn’t hide his face and loudly proclaimed himself as their killer, he would still be able to run wild, just like ‘Skyfire’ Jiang Hua, who destroyed the Lang Clan. Would the Yincha Sect and Sound Sword Sect come after him in force? Did they dare to leave their homes undefended to try and hunt for him?

Just as mysteriously as he appeared here, he disappeared, leaving behind only a bit of rough soil where the Warp Worm tunneled into the ground.