The Weak Prince Is A Cultivation God

The endless field shifted again, and Iris knew it wasn't the wind this time. The flowers darkened, their colors bleeding into the soil as if the ground itself was drinking them dry. The air grew heavy, every breath tinged with the metallic irk of blood.

Lanard stood in front of her, his figure sharpening against the backdrop of a sky now dimmed to rust.

"You've seen the rivers," he said. "But you haven't yet heard the story of the seventh."

The field dissolved into shadow. In its place rose a landscape drenched in war — banners torn and smoldering, mountains split and bleeding molten stone, the ground a blackened wasteland littered with broken weapons and bodies too numerous to count.

"There was a man once," Lanard began, his voice low but resonant, "a warlord whose name was erased from the scrolls of Heaven and Earth. Not the greatest cultivator of his age, nor the most cunning tactician. Yet he became something no army could resist — a calamity wearing human flesh."

The air rippled, and the warlord appeared. He was no towering giant or shining hero, but a man in tattered armor, his face veiled in shadow.

He walked through a city aflame, his boots wading through streets already thick with blood. Behind him, walls crumbled. Before him, crowds fell without even raising their weapons.

"In the Warlord's Ascension War, he bathed in the blood of a hundred million," Lanard continued. "Cities turned to rivers, rivers to seas, seas to deserts of bone. The sun itself dimmed for seven years, as if it could not bear to watch."

The vision shifted, showing oceans dyed red. Ships drifted like coffins. Bones clattered on windless plains. Armies dissolved into panicked mobs before the warlord's advancing shadow.

"But it wasn't power that defined him," Lanard said, stepping closer to her, his eyes sharp. "It was the price."

The battlefield dissolved again, leaving only a circle of thirteen towering pillars — each carved from a human spine, each etched with runes that bled faint crimson light.

The ground between them was bare earth, cracked and scorched as if something had tried to crawl its way out for centuries and failed.

"To inherit the Seventh Vein," Lanard said, "a successor must take upon their soul all the blood the warlord spilled. As more than memory… as truth."

The pillars beat, and the air between them screamed. She could hear it — a sound from her ears, a shrieking in her mind.

Faces appeared in the air, twisted by pain or rage or despair. The noise swelled until it was nearly suffocating.

"Every scream," Lanard said. "Every gasp. Every betrayal. Every fragment of grief. You will drown in them. Live them. Die from them. Again and again."

The scene sharpened, showing a figure — faceless, nameless — kneeling inside the circle. From the moment they took their first breath within it, their body trembled, eyes wide in horror. And then they began to writhe, clawing at their own skin as though trying to tear the voices out.

"It does not end in days or weeks," Lanard said. "It goes on until your own mind is buried beneath the weight."

The image twisted — showing one candidate collapsing into a heap of stillness, another tearing their own throat open just to silence the screams, another laughing in a madness that would never stop.

"The weak die screaming," Lanard said. "The strong beg for death."

The scene changed again. This time, the candidate inside the circle did not fall. They stood. Slowly, at first. Then their head lifted. Their eyes glowed with a black-red light, and the very air warped around them.

"But the chosen…" Lanard's voice grew quiet. "…the chosen stop being human."

The figure took a step, and the pillars shattered in a shockwave of dark energy. Armies outside the circle dropped their weapons before they even saw the inheritor's face.

Men screamed and fled from shadows that hadn't moved.

"When the malice of a hundred million is finally bred into something new," Lanard said, "the inheritor rises as the Heir of the Devil. A living calamity whose very presence poisons the will of armies, rots courage into terror, and burns mercy from the heart."

He moved to stand beside her, the battlefield stretching endlessly around them.

"Their Qi turns black-red, thick as molten iron. Their aura becomes a weight that claws at flesh and thought alike. It is the most brutal inheritance known in the mortal world — not because it grants strength, but because what comes out the other side is something the Heavens never meant to exist."

The vision darkened, leaving only the warlord's shadow standing over mountains of skulls.

"The Blood Domain Arts speak of only seven who have survived the ritual in all recorded time," Lanard finished.

Iris was silent for a long moment.

She stared at the circle of pillars, at the faint glow of runes that seemed to breathe like living things. "And you're saying," she finally said, "I can choose this suffering… and if I survive…"

Lanard nodded. "If you survive, you will awaken as something worthy of thrones."

Her eyes narrowed. "How long will it take?"

"Six months," Lanard said without pause. "A year. A decade. Once — a hundred years. It's always different. No one knows why. Time bends differently in the ritual. You will not age. You will not starve. But you will never leave until it ends."

Iris lowered her head, her mind turning. She thought of Solaris. Of the faces she'd lost. Of the taste of defeat still burned into her chest. She thought of her enemies, smiling as they tortured away the last of her dreams.

When she looked up, her eyes held no doubt.

"I'll do it."

Lanard studied her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then the faintest curve touched his lips.

"You," he said quietly, "are the strongest sheep I know. And those wolves…" His gaze sharpened, almost cruel. "…won't see what hits them."

He stepped forward, and with a single gesture, the field, the battlefield, the void — all of it — fell away.

They stood on bare earth now, black as charred bone. Around them, thirteen pillars erupted from the ground in a slow, grinding roar. Each one spiraled with carvings of bone-white runes that bled red light, pulsing in time with an unseen heartbeat.

The air thickened until it felt like breathing molten metal.

The ground within the circle steamed, as though the soil itself was being boiled from the inside.

Lanard's voice carried above the oppressive stillness. "Once you enter, there is no turning back. If you die inside, I will not be able to reach you. No one will."

"I understand."

He gave one last nod, then moved to the edge of the circle. "Step forward, Iris."

She did.

The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the runes ignited in full. A column of red-black light surged upward, swallowing the sky. The air screamed with the voices of countless dead, their cries weaving into a single, endless howl.

Lanard's voice was calm, almost soft. "Let it take you."

And then the ground beneath her vanished.

Iris fell, not into darkness, but into a tide of blood and memory that rose to devour her whole. The circle burned on and it's pillars casted long shadows across the empty plain.

Lanard stood outside, silent.

The ritual had begun.