Immortal Paladin

169 We Must Repent

I waved my hand toward Yi Qiu’s broken, unconscious form and channeled just enough mana to restore what I had wrecked. “Great Cure,” I whispered, and his bleeding cuts sealed. “Blessed Regeneration,” I added, watching the torn arm twitch as bone, tendon, and sinew began knitting back into place. I wasn’t being merciful. I was being practical. The moment he woke up, he would feel every shame of failure. Physical wounds were easy to fix. The emotional bruises I left behind would take a lifetime to forget, assuming he had one.

I turned slowly, deliberately, to the audience. From the top tiers to the lower balconies, cultivators from every corner of the world sat in postures too rigid to be called natural. Most had come to this Summit for spectacle and policy, for showmanship and alliances… but now, they stared down at a man who had just slapped the Martial Alliance’s master into a wall, and then healed him like he was nothing more than a bruised child. I looked them each in the eye, pausing long enough that it became uncomfortable. Then I asked the question.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Don’t you feel ashamed? Every one of you sitting here, nodding along, remaining ignorant to a genocidal history… and treating it like it’s just another item on the Summit’s agenda. Forget being an ‘item’ that needs to be discussed. Aren’t you ashamed of consenting to genocide?”

From the section marked with the Heavenly Temple’s banners, someone shouted, “It’s a lie!”

I raised a brow but didn’t bother looking for the voice. “If you’re comfortable with that lie,” I said evenly, “then by all means, continue telling it to yourself. Repetition doesn’t make it true. It just makes it easier to swallow. Now, you’ve heard the possibility of it, yet none of you dare confront the truth? Fools! All of you! ARE FOOLS!”

The silence that followed was heavy and telling. No one corrected me. Not Tian En. Not Yi Qiu’s people. Not even the representatives from the Union. The air was still thick with the qi backlash of our earlier clash, but now it hung with something more foul: complicity.

I turned toward Tian En, who, for all her grandeur and position, looked like she had swallowed something rotten. Her hand twitched at the hem of her robe, and her teeth ground against one another. But the fire I’d seen earlier, the pride and reflexive arrogance, had dimmed.

“You see?” I said to the room. “When your elders say nothing, you should start asking why. Silence, in this context, is an answer. Isn’t that right, Tian En?”

Her jaw worked as though she meant to spit at me, but to her credit… or perhaps her shame… she closed her eyes instead and exhaled. She was calming herself. Maybe she wasn't senile after all. Maybe she was just tired of fighting a battle she already knew she'd lost.

In a way, I admired that. Not because I needed her agreement or endorsement… I didn’t. But because even someone like her could recognize when the tide had shifted. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

That said, I couldn’t pretend this little speech would change much. The moment I walked out of here, they’d go back to plotting. This wasn’t an awakening; it was just a disruption. Still, I owed it to myself to cause at least this much. I wasn't throwing away Nongmin’s vision for a better world. But I also wasn’t going to play nice just because someone dreamed a dream.

For all I knew, this all had been a trap by a mysterious entity!

Nongmin had seen me slaughter these people in his vision. Whether it was precognition or interference, he saw a future where my hands were red. Did that mean some entity wanted them dead? Was I the blade, and this just a setup? Was all this theater… me standing here, ranting at these so-called leaders… just bait to draw me toward that fate?

I considered the possibility that Nongmin had simply hallucinated the vision. But knowing what Divine Possession felt like…. the clarity, the gravity, and the inevitability… I doubted it was false. It had the mark of something real, something prepared. And if so, then this wasn’t a crossroads. This was a trap.

Maybe it was a trap for me. Or maybe for him. Or maybe both of us. After everything I’d seen, the hell gates, the sealed realms, the children possessed by curses, the Outsiders… I could no longer rule out the existence of a divine-level trap meant to hijack our futures. A kind of ultimate possession, something meant to break or bend me.

I was reckless for standing here and inviting danger. I knew that. This was far worse than when I soloed that Hell’s Gate. Back then, I had a plan. Not a great plan, sure, but it was still a plan: get in, fight, survive. Simple. Here? I had nothing. I had no enemy to strike. No scheme to unravel. I was surrounded by old monsters pretending to be wise. And I was lashing out, not because I had a strategy, but because my conscience refused to stay silent.

This wasn’t some clever maneuver. It wasn’t a brilliant tactic. It was just me, fed up with their hypocrisy and bold enough to shout it in their faces. No objective. No endgame. Just a paladin’s temper and a modern man’s disgust.

I turned my attention to Shan Dian, the Union’s representative. Of all the faction leaders, she had said the least… and yet her presence was electric, quite literally. Sparks crackled around her seat. Her long, dark hair shimmered like coiled voltage. She looked the most out of place here, younger and more modern in bearing. Perhaps that was why I walked toward her next.

She did not rise. She simply watched me approach, unmoving, power humming faintly from her robes.

“I just want to make it clear,” I said, gesturing around. “I’m not ignoring you. You’ve been awfully quiet.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

“So,” I continued, “since we’re airing dirty laundry, why don’t you share with the rest of the class what’s your take on genocide?”

The room didn’t breathe.

“Genocide is wrong,” she said.

The words didn’t hit me like a slap, or a blow, or even like thunder. No, they landed with the softness of falling snow… slow, heavy, and devastating in its own quiet way. I turned my gaze to her, Shan Dian of the Union, her hair dark like the night before a storm, her skin sun-kissed, and her seat ringed with crackling arcs of lightning. A threat to most, even when sitting still. Yet right now, all I saw was the clarity in her eyes. Wide, open, and bare. Like an infant’s gaze the first time they saw the world and recognized it for what it was.

I blinked, not entirely sure if I heard her right. I tilted my head slightly, still standing a few paces from her. “Okay…?”

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It escaped my lips before I could filter it. Maybe that came out too casual, too unguarded, but I couldn’t hide my surprise. I hadn’t expected that answer. Not from her. Not from someone backed by the Union, a confederation of warlords, mercenaries, and ambitious statesmen who bartered life and death like it was coin and bread. The Union wasn’t just indifferent to conflict. They profited from it. Engineered it. Designed entire doctrines around it. And yet, here she was, sitting with sparks dancing off her sleeves, looking at me not as an enemy, not even as a fellow cultivator… but as a person.

“Genocide is evil,” she said again, her voice softer than before, as if confessing to a ghost. “It’s wrong. We shouldn’t have done it.”

I felt the shift before I saw it. Her lip trembled. Her breathing hitched. She looked down and then up again, not to hide the tears, but to let them fall freely. They glistened like starlight, streaming down her cheeks without shame. Not the tears of a politician, not the kind you summon for pity or leverage. These were the raw, unfiltered kind, the kind you wept when no one was watching. Except we were all watching.

“I was raised to believe that every life under the heavens is treasure,” she continued, voice quaking but firm. “That even if we couldn’t save everyone, we should at least not be the ones taking them away. I tried to speak out once. I did. But they silenced me. Not with threats. Not even with violence. Just… indifference. Cold, orderly, bureaucratic indifference. And I let it happen. I let it happen because I thought there would be a better time. A right moment.”

She paused, her hands tightening into fists on her lap. Her shoulders trembled. I didn’t say anything. No one did.

“I kept telling myself it wasn’t genocide. That we were stopping a threat. That we were maintaining peace. That it was necessary.” She shook her head slowly. “But it was. It was genocide. And I helped by doing nothing.”

The silence that followed felt like a held breath across the chamber. A room full of high cultivators, legendary names, warlords, temple sages, and sect masters… and yet none of them dared interrupt, except me.

"Stop," I said, firm but not loud.

Shan Dian didn’t stop.

“We must repent!” she declared, her voice rising in cadence like a preacher before the altar. “We must repent or we will suffer the wrath of Heaven!”

That was when I realized something was wrong. Not just odd, or out of place… but wrong in the same way a dead body still smiling was wrong. It took a heartbeat, then two, for the weight of it to settle, but by then, the air had shifted. A hum beneath my skin, like the buzz of insects before a storm.

I knew her emotions were genuine… my Divine Sense didn’t lie. Whatever gripped her heart wasn’t a trick of the tongue or a performance for power. Shan Dian believed what she was saying. But belief, sincere or not, didn’t mean she was in control.

She continued her homily, hands raised, face streaked with crystalline tears, and I scanned the room. Dozens of high-realm cultivators, figures that would each command reverence in any court or sect, were staring at her, mouths slightly parted, eyes wide and unmoving.

All except three.

Shouquan, ever the immortal statue, wasn’t watching her. He was staring into space, not absentmindedly, but with eerie calm… as if he already knew how the script ended. Tian En, who was now seated just beyond the central dais, looked deeply unsettled. Her body was tense, her fingers twitching over her sleeves, and she kept stealing glances between Shan Dian and Shouquan like a child hungry for answers.

Yi Qiu remained unconscious, his breathing slow but steady, tucked beneath a small veil of my lingering regeneration spell. Thank the heavens for small mercies. At least one person in the room wasn’t hearing this madness.

Then I saw it… Shouquan’s skin. His hands had darkened from white to ash-grey, but not like bruises or withering. They were crystallizing. His forearms gleamed with a black sheen, jagged edges crawling up like molten stone frozen mid-boil.

I reacted without thinking. My body moved before my mind caught up. I crossed the gap between us and seized Shan Dian by the throat.

Her body jerked, her eyes widened, but she didn’t resist. Her tears kept falling.

“We must repent,” she said again, hoarse and unwavering, even with my fingers clamped tight around her windpipe.

“Snap out of it,” I growled. “You’re not in control. Something’s... riding you.”

But she wasn’t listening. Or rather, she wasn’t there. Her gaze met mine with such terrible peace that it made my skin crawl. Not serenity born from understanding… but the hollow calm of someone emptied out, someone whose soul had been hollowed and filled with borrowed faith.

Shouquan’s head tilted slightly, the last bits of flesh turning to onyx. Still, he didn’t speak. If he noticed me throttling Shan Dian, he gave no sign.

I looked over, searching for Tian En… then froze. Her hands had changed too, her fingernails now brittle obsidian, her knuckles cracked and shining black. She stood, suddenly aware of her own transformation, and let out a soft gasp… not from pain, but horror.

“I… I didn’t…” she murmured.

Her voice cracked. Her knees buckled. She looked mortified, not at me, not even at Shan Dian, but at herself. Whatever was happening, she knew it. She recognized it.

“We must repent,” Shan Dian repeated again, weaker now, her voice fraying like fabric worn thin. Her limbs went slack, but her eyes stayed locked on mine, burning with false light.

I let go.

Not out of mercy. Not out of guilt. But because I looked around and saw that everyone else in the chamber… dozens of them… were kneeling. All of them. Bows broken, backs arched, foreheads pressed to marble tile. Some were crying. Others muttering. But they all said the same words:

“We must repent.”

Again.

And again.

A low, rhythmic chant. Like a mantra bleeding out of them with no origin, no prompt, no leader.

“We must repent.”

My stomach turned, not from fear, not even revulsion, but from the undeniable scent of external will.

“Shouquan,” I said sharply, my voice echoing too loudly in a room full of whispers. “Say something.”

He didn’t move. He couldn’t. His lips were stone now. His face had cracked into that of a statue.

“Damn it,” I muttered.

I activated my Voice Chat, pinged every contact I had, blasted mana through the weave with two words:

“DON’T COME!”

Because whatever this was, it seemed to be even beyond my power.

"What the-"

In the span of a breath, everything unraveled.

I didn’t notice it right away. My grip on Shan Dian's throat had remained firm, her body trembling not from fear but from something more primal…Was it conviction, or maybe something worse? Fanaticism? She kept repeating the words with eerie serenity, her voice like a lullaby sung at the edge of death.

“We must repent.”

No matter how hard I shook her, no matter how tightly I squeezed, she did not resist, did not flinch. Tears streamed from her eyes in an endless flow, glistening like liquid crystal, warm against my palm… too warm, as if they carried something not meant for this world.

Then my fingers stopped moving.

At first, I thought I had simply frozen in hesitation, that maybe something in her sorrow had reached me. But then the numbness spread. I looked down and saw the faint shimmer of black creeping up my wrist, jagged and glossy like onyx. I tried to draw on my mana, tried to will my arm to move, to scream a command with the Voice Chat, anything… but no spell answered, no thought reached outward. My soul stirred inside me, caught in a strange delay, as though it too had noticed too late the trap we had all walked into.

All around us, the cultivators I had just antagonized moments ago now wept like children… on their knees, heads bowed, and chanting those cursed words.

“We must repent. We must repent.”

Their faces were soaked in tears, their expressions twisted not by fear, but by an ecstasy that bordered on worship. I had thought they were simply moved, or maybe caught up in the theatrics, but now I realized the truth. Their minds had been taken, their wills no longer their own. Whatever had touched them… it hadn’t been a spell. It hadn’t been a technique. This was possession… but not like mine, not like Divine Possession. This was a full override. An infection of mind and soul so complete it masqueraded as faith.

And then, as if the heavens themselves had snapped their fingers, everything stopped.

No sound. No light. No pain. No time.

I felt nothing.

There was only blackness.

Not the kind you feel when you close your eyes, not even the kind you see when you're unconscious. This was a void, a suffocating abyss that wrapped around me like cold hands with no body. And in that last instant before I was truly gone, before my senses collapsed entirely, I heard it… one last whisper that echoed through my very soul.

“We must repent.”

Then nothing remained.