“Flaxseed, we’re leaving,” Jared said, already turning his back on the stunned crowd. Flaxseed froze for half a heartbeat, then the truth hit him, Jared had decided to stop fighting.
A sigh slipped past his cracked lips. He shot one last, helpless look at the cultivators still hurling curses, then shuffled backward beside Jared, melting into the shadowed edge of the Soul Convergence Altar.
There the two men stood, motionless witnesses to the unfolding ritual, bitterness, dread, and sorrow swirling together in their chests like an untamed storm. High on the platform, Edison allowed a triumphant grin to spread across his face.
“You all saw it, did you not? The traitor’s bravado has dried up!” shouted, voice ringing like a cracked bell. “Steady your minds, ignore him. In only a few breaths, your breakthroughs will arrive!”
With theatrical flourish, lifted the jade scepter once more, murmuring a string of ancient syllables that tasted of honeyed poison.
Soft light poured from the scepter, oddly gentle yet laced with a hypnotic pull. Beneath the dais, the black runes stitched into the stone flickered, came alive, and began knitting their earlier fissures shut.
The cultivators who had been hurled aside by Jared’s strike wavered. Doubt clouded their expressions for a heartbeat, then they closed their eyes again. sinking willingly back into Enaricus’ counterfeit sermon.
Pale-blue soul threads seeped from between their brows, drifting toward the carved trough like tiny, obedient rivers. Those glimmering strands merged in the groove, weaving a silent confession of their owners’ ignorance and tragedy.
Seeing this, Flaxseed’s teeth ground together.
“Fools… Utter fools,” muttered, knuckles whitening around his fists.
He simply could not fathom why men and women of cultivation would surrender their very souls for a phantom promise of advancement.
Jared watched without a flicker of emotion, eyes dark and still as winter water.
The Soul Urn swelled, grotesque as a pustule ready to burst. From its depths came an almost musical keening, notes thick with despair and torment-proof that many souls were already trapped Inside. Those spirits clawed at unseen walls, voiceless screams ricocheting in a prison no living ear could truly hear.
Time crawled. The scepter’s radiance blazed brighter with every breath, the runes beneath the altar pulsed like diseased hearts.
Soul threads thickened, shifting from soft blue to an ominous gray-white, the unmistakable hue of essence ripped from its source, each strand now tainted, foul, foretelling doom.
Thirty minutes passed. Enaricus abruptly lowered the scepter; the runes guttered and died.
The Soul Urn now loomed half as tall as a man, its surface crawling with warped spirit-marks that resembled faces contorted by endless pain.
A muffled chorus of walls reverberated across the altar, colder than moonlit iron, making every onlooker’s skin crawl.
“Congratulations on your breakthroughs, fellow cultivators!” Edison declared, bowing with oily courtesy. Pride, and something decidedly venomous, glittered behind his smile, as though were examining a masterpiece of cruelty.
The crowd’s eyes snapped open. Their bodies felt feather-light, inner energy marginally smoother. They truly believed a bottleneck had shattered. Drunk on this illusion, they never sensed what they had just traded away.
One young man in coarse linen threw a jubilant punch at the air. “Thank you! The barrier inside me really loosened!”
He beamed, already picturing a glorious future. His joy radiated so fiercely it was almost painful to witness.
A middle-aged cultivator burst Into trembling tears. “I have lingered at the peak of the Earthly Immortal Realm for three full years, today I finally crossed! Your kindness is beyond repayment!”
He dropped to his knees with a dull thud, forehead striking the stone again and again before the gold-robed cultivator, as though was both savior and second father.
