“Flaxseed, you‘ve grown bold, haven’t you?” Jared turned, voice soft but edged. “Vanishing without a word and charging up to level seven with power that flimsy, you nearly lost your soul back there.” Behind the rebuke lay a current of concern that ran deeper than the words allowed.
“I… I just didn’t want you worrying,” Flaxseed muttered, scratching at his scalp. “And I thought, maybe if I hurried I’d find my clan’s wandering spirits sooner…”
The last syllables dwindled to a childlike whisper. Guilt clouded his features, shoulders slumping beneath the weight of his own recklessness.
“Not worry?” Jared’s sigh slipped free. “Running alone into a nest like this is exactly what makes me worry.” His tone softened as said, “Tell me everything you uncovered from start to finish.”
His eyes held steady on Flaxseed, offering the reassurance of a fortress despite the gathering storm around them.
“I pieced it all together at a teahouse, then saw the altar myself,” Flaxseed said, voice shaking with fury. “Those priests advertised some grand sermon, cultivators flocked in, hoping for enlightenment. Instead, their souls were siphoned off! If I found out days later, who knows how many more would be hollow husks by now!”
Rage vibrated through him, raw and roaring, like a cornered lion forced to watch its pride fall. Jared’s expression grew grave, shadows pooling beneath his eyes.
The Celestial Palace, supposed keepers of divine order, consorting with Demonic Cultivators and butchering cultivators. If word spread, the entire heavenly realm would quake.
Visions flashed behind his eyes, citadels burning, refugees spilling across shattered roads, the sky itself torn by warring factions. He understood the stakes. This darkness had to be cutout before it poisoned every corner of the realm.
“We head for the Soul Convergence Altar. We find out exactly how they steal those souls, then we end it…”
Resolve settled over him, solid as a mountain range refusing to bow to any storm.
They slipped into a tailor’s shop, exchanged their attire for coarse black robes favored by level-seven drifters. and used a wisp of aura to blur their features. Two anonymous wandering cultivators seeking a sermon, nothing more.
Their strides were unhurried yet unyielding, each step echoing with the pursuit oftruth and an unbreakable devotion to justice.
The Soul Convergence Altar rose atop the central dais of Blackwind City, ringed by a sea of cultivators. Most had come chasing breakthroughs or a coveted place within the Celestial Palace, faces alight with yearning.
Their eyes shimmered with desperate hope, hungry for any fragment of enlightenment the “holy” priests might offer, never suspecting the price those teachings would demand.
A cultivator in a golden robe, Edison Hews, stood alone at the heart of the stone dais, a figure draped in shimmering gold robes. In his raised hand glinted a slender jade scepter shaped like a Jade scepter.
His voice rolled across the plaza, bright and irresistible. “Friends, today’s open sermon will draw the hidden breath of heaven and earth into your bodies and lift you past every bottleneck. Quiet your hearts and follow my lead!”
Unseen at the fringe of the crowd, Jared let a thread of divine sense slip from his brow. Like an invisible hand, that thread swept across the platform, brushing every hidden corner.
Almost at once, felt the wrongness, a ring of black runes buried beneath the dais, oozing a sinister pulse as though guarding ancient secrets.
Those runes fed a narrow recess at the center, and from that cavity drifted the sickly scent of a Soul Urn. Even the jade scepter in that cultivator’s hand breathed a faint, soporific mist, coaxing the gathered cultivators into languid trust.
That narcotic aura, as soft as spider silk, wrapped itself around every robe and wrist, lulling its victims toward sleep.
“Watch the centers of their brows,” Jared murmured. He kept the words low enough for only Flaxseed to hear, as though a louder breath might awaken something hungry in the air.
Flaxseed focused and saw it, threads of pale blue soul essence seeped from each meditating forehead, drifted toward the jade scepter, and slipped unseen into the waiting recess.
