Your role in the final battle of the war starts small. Your undead troops defend you and the living cultivators on your side, uncomplaining meatshields. There's a few enemy cultivators in the vanguard of the Nightless City's defenses who fall in those first sallies, and you turn them against their fellows. But Wen Ruohan is wise to your tactics now, and those efforts get put down quickly.
Still. No one was prepared for what you'd do when, midway through the first night, your side breaches the outer wall. They didn't think you'd be able to reach through their wards so easily, and gain immediate access to the ancestral tombs and graveyards of the city. And maybe normally you couldn't, not so quick, not so brutally -- but you made a tool they didn't expect.
You hold up the Yin Tiger Seal. Power pulses out of it, and your sanity goes with it.
The battle took three days, you learn afterwards. You struggle to keep the dead turned only on killing your enemies, but that restriction makes less and less sense to you by the time you hit the shrouded sunrise of the second morning. You're pulling in vast quantities of resentful energy now, gathering it into yourself to push the Seal's range out farther and farther. Somewhere in there you stop having to grit your teeth to do it and it gets gleefully easy again.
For the first two days, you're laughing on the battlefield as your dead tear through, genuine joy as you see them fall on the enemy lines and break them. Every fire on the field is rotten green with resentful energy, and the terror of your allies is only outweighed by their desperation.
But the third day dawns, and everyone is flagging, and the Nightless City has not yet fallen. You're steeped so deeply in demonic cultivation by then that you hiss openly at the sunlight. You no longer feel human yourself. You feel hollow, your bones sucked dry of marrow and your blood replaced by screams and grudges. You stop trying to filter through the individual spirits' wants to direct them, and simply press down hard on their rage, driving them with it like a whip. Part of you goes with them, every time.
The Tiger Seal only goes quiescent again, when every enemy on the battlefield is dead. It's taken all your effort to ensure it is only every enemy, and not everyone.
When its power drains out of you, you believe yourself a corpse. You collapse into a pile of your fellow corpses, and stay there.
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Still. No one was prepared for what you'd do when, midway through the first night, your side breaches the outer wall. They didn't think you'd be able to reach through their wards so easily, and gain immediate access to the ancestral tombs and graveyards of the city. And maybe normally you couldn't, not so quick, not so brutally -- but you made a tool they didn't expect.
You hold up the Yin Tiger Seal. Power pulses out of it, and your sanity goes with it.
The battle took three days, you learn afterwards. You struggle to keep the dead turned only on killing your enemies, but that restriction makes less and less sense to you by the time you hit the shrouded sunrise of the second morning. You're pulling in vast quantities of resentful energy now, gathering it into yourself to push the Seal's range out farther and farther. Somewhere in there you stop having to grit your teeth to do it and it gets gleefully easy again.
For the first two days, you're laughing on the battlefield as your dead tear through, genuine joy as you see them fall on the enemy lines and break them. Every fire on the field is rotten green with resentful energy, and the terror of your allies is only outweighed by their desperation.
But the third day dawns, and everyone is flagging, and the Nightless City has not yet fallen. You're steeped so deeply in demonic cultivation by then that you hiss openly at the sunlight. You no longer feel human yourself. You feel hollow, your bones sucked dry of marrow and your blood replaced by screams and grudges. You stop trying to filter through the individual spirits' wants to direct them, and simply press down hard on their rage, driving them with it like a whip. Part of you goes with them, every time.
The Tiger Seal only goes quiescent again, when every enemy on the battlefield is dead. It's taken all your effort to ensure it is only every enemy, and not everyone.
When its power drains out of you, you believe yourself a corpse. You collapse into a pile of your fellow corpses, and stay there.