Chapter 232: Death Gaze!
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound of his own blood hitting the obsidian tiles was deafening.
In his chest, the Peak Realm Path of Killing was not sitting quietly.
It was a monster that had outgrown its cage.
KILL!
The thought was not his own. It was a searing, razor-sharp needle driving directly into his prefrontal cortex.
KILL. SLAUGHTER. TEAR THEM OPEN. DRINK THE MARROW!
"Ngh... ahhh!" Creed clutched his temples, his fingernails digging into his scalp until his own skin tore.
The memory of the giant warrior cleaving through millions of demons was not just a lesson; it was an infection.
The sheer, unfathomable density of bloodlust he had absorbed had completely overwhelmed his Will!
His fundamental source of Will, which was meant to govern his mind, was being drowned beneath a tidal wave of ancient, genocidal slaughter.
His vision went completely red.
The pristine walls of the Resonator disappeared, replaced by visions of his classmates.
He saw Damien Blackthorne. He saw Marcus Delacroix. He saw Nicholas Grey. He saw Instructor Varien.
His mind wasn’t thinking of tactics. It was calculating the exact pressure needed to crush Damien’s windpipe. It was visualizing the sound of Nicholas’s silver skull caving in under the blunt end of his spear. It was thirsting to rip Marcus’s intestines out and paint the academy walls with his noble blood.
"Stop... shut up... shut the fuck up!" Creed roared, his voice cracking into a ragged, feral scream.
He tried to suppress it using the Path of the Mountain, but the mountain was being eroded by a sea of blood. He tried to slip away using the Path of Freedom, but the bloodlust was tethered to his very marrow.
His heart was hammering at three hundred beats a minute. The capillaries in his eyes burst, turning his pupils into twin pools of terrifying, unbroken scarlet.
He was losing his mind.
If this bloodlust breached his conscious barriers, he wouldn’t walk out of this chamber as Class Captain.
He would burst through the doors as a deranged, feral slaughter-demon, massacring the first student he saw until the Gold instructors arrived to execute him like a rabid hound.
’Think, Walden! THINK!’ Creed screamed at himself, his teeth grinding together so hard enamel cracked. ’The Old Monk... what did that crazy bastard say?!’
"Killing itself is not an act of cruelty or malice," the memory echoed through the crimson storm. "Killing is just a tool. It is an art of removing an obstacle. If the bloodlust controls your hand, you are not a killer; you are just meat waiting to spoil."
’Don’t fight the river,’ Creed realized, a tiny spark of desperate clarity cutting through the madness. ’Give it a mouth. Channel the flood!’
He couldn’t crush the Peak Realm Path of Killing. His Will was too weak. So he had to give it an outlet.
An Art.
His existing Art, the Line of Death, was a physical vector—it required the spear, the strike, the physical thrust to manifest. It couldn’t siphon the mental pressure currently threatening to blow his skull apart.
He needed an Art of the mind. An Art born of pure, unadulterated perception.
Creed forced himself up onto his knees. He didn’t pick up his spear. He slammed his palms onto his thighs, forced his chin up, and stared directly at his own reflection in the obsidian mirror beneath him.
In the dark stone, a monster stared back.
A young man with blood streaming down his face, a glowing brand on his brow, and eyes that burned with the madness of a thousand massacres.
Creed locked eyes with his own reflection.
He took the roaring, screaming ocean of bloodlust threatening to shatter his soul, and instead of trying to weave it into a thread, he funneled it.
He used the Energy Knitting technique, not on his force, but on his raw mental intent! He compressed the chaotic, screaming fury of the demon-slaying titan down... down... past his chest, up through his throat, and forced it entirely behind his retinas!
The pressure behind his eyeballs became agony. It felt as if molten lead was being poured into his optic nerves.
"Look at me," Creed snarled at his reflection, his voice dropping into a guttural, terrifying vibration that rattled the chamber’s acoustic seals. "LOOK AT ME!"
BZZZZZZT!
The obsidian floor beneath his gaze cracked.
Not from physical force. Not from Aura.
From the sheer, concentrated density of murderous Will passing through his pupils!
The crimson fire in his eyes compressed from a raging bonfire into two terrifying, pinprick-thin beams of absolute, soul-freezing lethality.
Death Gaze!
The realization clicked in his soul like a vault door sliding into its housing.
It was an ocular Art born directly from the Peak Realm Path of Killing. It was an eye-contact execution.
A single glance imbued with the absolute certainty of slaughter. Against anyone with a weaker Will, a single instant of eye contact would instantly shatter their mental equilibrium, drowning their subconscious in hallucinations of their own violent dismemberment.
Even against an equal or superior opponent with a monstrous Will, the Death Gaze would act as a psychic sledgehammer—freezing their neural responses for a critical split-second, breaking their spell-weaving, and disrupting their breathing rhythms.
The moment the Art formed, the unbearable pressure in his skull vanished.
The chaotic bloodlust that had almost driven him mad was instantly siphoned into the new mental conduit, obediently coiling behind his irises like a leashed Cerberus.
Creed slumped forward, his hands catching him before his face hit the cracked obsidian.
He took a slow, shuddering breath.
The crimson light in his eyes slowly receded, leaving his irises their normal, piercing blue—though deep within the pupils, a faint, dark ring remained, like the outline of an eclipse.
He was in control.
He had survived the crucible.
A slow, breathless grin began to spread across Creed’s bloody face. He leaned back, sitting on his heels, and began to laugh.
"Hahaha... hahahaha... holy shit."
He wiped the blood from his nose with the sleeve of his uniform. The sheer, intoxicating wave of dopamine hit him then—a pure, electric rush of triumph that made his skin prickle with goosebumps.
He had done it.
He had not only broken through to realms that should have been impossible, but he had forged a brand-new Art out of the jaws of absolute madness.
"Eight hours down," Creed murmured, glancing at the chronometer embedded in the far wall. "Sixteen to go."