Reincarnated with a lucky draw system-Chapter 499: CARNAGE

Time snapped back into motion with an almost audible crack.

"Huh?" The cultivator blinked, confusion twisting his features.

The sword still hung in his grip, but the target had vanished from its path.

Chen Mo stood tall before him now, uninjured, steady, eyes burning with cold clarity.

It was absurd. Impossible.

The cultivator’s mind reeled, struggling to process the shift.

One heartbeat ago, the prodigy had been a dying dog on the floor. Now... this.

"You... How did you—?" The words stumbled out, voice cracking with disbelief.

Chen Mo gave no answer.

Words were too generous for a traitor like this.

Instead, he reached to his side and drew the blade he had refused to sell, even when hunger clawed at his insides.

The sword was battered: chips missing from the edge, faint cracks spiderwebbing along the fuller, rust staining the once-bright steel.

To every other cultivator, it was trash, fit only for the scrap heap.

To Chen Mo, it was everything.

Su Yueqing had pressed it into his hands years ago, her smile soft and certain.

"Keep it close," she had whispered. "It will protect you when I cannot."

He had carried it through every trial since, starving rather than parting with the last piece of her he still possessed.

Now he held it again, grip steady, the familiar weight grounding him amid the storm inside.

The cultivator’s eyes widened as he stared at the blade, and at the man wielding it.

A shiver raced down his spine. Fear, real and primal, coiled in his gut.

Memories flooded back unbidden: the sect master’s rare praise, the way elders had stepped aside for Chen Mo in the halls, the effortless dominance he had once shown in the arena.

The illusion that Chen Mo had been nothing more than a lucky bastard from a lower realm shattered like glass.

What stood before him now was the monster they had all once feared.

"Senior Brother, I’m sor—"

Chen Mo didn’t let him finish.

Disgust burned hotter than any pain he had felt moments earlier.

This man had spat on kindness, betrayed guidance, and laughed at suffering.

No more.

With a single, fluid swing, Chen Mo’s damaged blade sliced through the air.

It met the cultivator’s arms in a clean, merciless arc, severing both at the elbows.

The sword clattered to the stone. Blood sprayed in bright arcs.

"Ahhhhhh!!!!"

The cultivator’s scream shattered the air.

He staggered backward, clutching the stump of his right arm as blood jetted in thick pulses.

His eyes bulged in disbelief, fixed on the severed limb twitching on the filthy stone floor.

The entire marketplace froze.

Hundreds of eyes, vendors mid-haggle, passersby with baskets, children clinging to parents, snapped toward the source of the commotion.

A stunned hush fell over the crowded stalls, broken only by the wet drip of blood and the cultivator’s ragged sobs.

"My arm! My arm!!!!" he wailed, collapsing to his knees.

Snot streamed from his nose, mixing with tears and spittle as he rocked back and forth, shameless in his terror.

Chen Mo felt nothing. No pity. No hesitation.

He raised his chipped sword again, the blade still slick with fresh crimson, and stepped forward to finish it.

"Senior Brother, stop!" The cultivator’s voice cracked with desperation.

"You don’t want to kill me. It’s against the Orthodox Alliance’s laws! Kill one of your own sect and they’ll hunt you like a rabid dog. You’ll be an outlaw, everyone will come for your head!"

Chen Mo’s expression didn’t flicker.

"I will be coming for every single one of them as well," he said quietly, voice cold as winter steel.

"No one escapes my wrath."

The cultivator’s pupils shrank to pinpricks.

Dread washed over his face as he understood: there would be no mercy, no reasoning, no second chance.

"Please, Senior Brother, spare_"

The plea died unfinished.

Chen Mo’s sword flashed once, clean, precise.

The cultivator’s head toppled from his shoulders and rolled across the stones, leaving a wet trail.

His body slumped sideways, still pumping blood from the ragged neck.

Silence gripped the marketplace like a fist.

A bone-deep chill passed through every onlooker.

Faces paled.

Hands trembled.

The metallic tang of blood thickened the air until it coated the tongue.

"Senior Brother!"

The younger disciples who had followed the dead man rushed forward, horror twisting their features.

"You, you won’t go scot-free for this!" one of them snarled, voice shaking despite the bravado.

Chen Mo didn’t bother answering with words.

He let the sword speak.

One brutal swing cleaved the disciple from collarbone to hip.

The body parted in two neat halves that collapsed with a heavy, meaty thud.

Blood sprayed in a wide fan, painting nearby stalls red.

Chaos erupted.

Screams tore through the market.

People shoved and trampled one another in blind panic.

Stalls overturned.

Baskets of fruit and herbs spilled across the ground.

The realization struck like lightning: the crippled beggar they had all mocked, spat on, and stepped over had returned, not broken, but reborn, and utterly unhinged.

Those who had jeered loudest scrambled hardest, shoving past strangers, desperate to vanish into alleys and side streets.

They knew, deep in their guts, that Chen Mo remembered every insult, every kick, every laugh at his expense.

And they were right.

Rage still burned white-hot in his chest. He moved like a reaper through the fleeing crowd.

The disciples of the Heaven’s Ascension Sect died first.

Chen Mo cut through them without pause or discrimination, limbs hacked, torsos opened, throats slit in sprays of arterial red.

Blood splashed across his face, soaked his ragged robes, dripped from his hair in warm rivulets.

Instead of revulsion, he felt cleansed. Refreshed.

Each death fed the furnace inside him.

No one who crossed his path survived.

"You there! Stop this madness at once!"

Cultivators wearing the badges of the Orthodox Alliance burst from the edges of the market, drawn by the screams.

One moved with practiced speed, flashing behind Chen Mo in a blur of movement, sword already raised.

Chen Mo didn’t even turn fully.

His body twisted with impossible fluidity.

The blade in his hand stabbed backward, straight through the cultivator’s dantian.

The man gasped as spiritual energy leaked from the wound like dying fireflies.

Chen Mo wrenched the sword upward in a single, savage motion.

It tore from core to chest to throat, splitting the man open like overripe fruit.

Before the body could fall, Chen Mo spun and drove the point through the eye of the second attacker.

The steel punched through skull and out the back of the head with a wet crunch.

Gore dripped from the blade in thick strings.

The sight was grotesque, bodies torn apart, entrails steaming in the open air, faces frozen in final expressions of shock and agony.

Chen Mo didn’t care.

He killed.

And killed.

And killed.

Until his entire body glistened crimson, robes heavy and clinging with blood.

Piles of corpses ringed him, disciples, enforcers, bystanders who had drawn weapons too late.

The once-bustling market had become a slaughter yard, the ground slick and dark.

Only when no more screams rose, when no more movement stirred within his sight, did he finally stop.

Chest heaving, sword dripping, Chen Mo stood amid the carnage and slowly lowered the blade.

Awareness returned in fragments.

The coppery reek of blood.

The silence broken only by distant, muffled sobs. The weight of countless staring eyes from rooftops and hidden corners.

He felt no regret.

Not a flicker.

Only a deeper, colder certainty: this was merely the beginning.

Revenge still waited, vast, patient, inevitable.

With that iron resolve hardening in his heart, Chen Mo turned and walked away from the blood-soaked market.

He moved without hurry, leaving the dead behind.

He would bide his time.

Gather strength.

Gather forces.

And when he returned, he would turn the entire cultivation world upside down.