Jared studied the bead again, gleaming, blood-red, utterly silent, while a faint crease deepened between his brows. With the power and spiritual sense he now commanded, even relics cast for gods rarely escaped his notice. Yet this tiny sphere remained mute, as though it belonged to the mortal realm, not the heavens he walked.
“Skyfiend Sect hid you so carefully,” he murmured, turning the bead under the thin light. “What secret are you guarding?”
Jared whispered to himself, steadying his breath as he bled a thin strand of chaotic immortal energy into the blood-red pearl cupped in his palm. The energy vanished as if poured into bottomless water. The orb lay cold and mute, giving nothing back.
He pricked a finger. A drop of fresh crimson spattered onto the surface, disappeared at once, yet the pearl remained stubbornly inert.
Jared weighed a harsher option—drawing the Dragonslayer Sword and cracking the thing open—when the world tilted without warning.
Deep inside his consciousness field, the Golden Tome, usually a silent, mist-wreathed scripture, buckled beneath an unseen pull. Brilliance surged.
Buzz!
A geyser of pure gold light shot out of Jared’s brow, solid as a pillar, draping the scarlet orb in its blazing mantle. That radiance felt like the marrow of the cosmos itself—vast, sovereign, cleansing everything it touched.
Smothered by the canon’s glory, the pearl could no longer pretend to sleep.
“Argh!”
The cry that erupted was ancient, venom-soaked, and soul-rending. It tore at spirit, not air.
Coall and the other Draconians, busy tallying loot nearby, jerked around, their faces blanched, feeling that scream claw straight at their cores.
The pearl’s surface churned like a boiling sea of blood beneath the relentless gold. A dense, towering shadow, far older and stronger than the fragment of the Soul Devourer Jared had just faced, was wrenched out into open dusk.
Dark crimson and half-formed, its features blurred yet unmistakably twisted, the specter radiated vicious energy and primordial savagery that darkened the air.
“Who dares shatter my slumber?! What fool soils my sacred soul with such power?!” the apparition roared, voice ringing with rage and disbelief.
It thrashed against the golden light bindings, every convulsion rippling with Celestial Lord-level might tempered by countless ages.
The sheer weight of its soul energy pressed outward, oppressive and thunderous.
*Skyfiend Sect’s founding patriarch?*
Jared’s eyes narrowed to flint. The guess settled in an instant, cold and sharp.
*So the sect kept a monster like this hidden all along…*
This pearl was never treasure, only a cradle for that ancient remnant. The patriarch’s shadow writhed, scarlet gaze locking onto Jared with ravenous delight.
“Such flawless flesh… Such boundless blood… Such fresh, young soul! Hahaha! Heaven has favored me at last. Boy, your body now belongs to me!”
Obsessed with rebirth, it ignored the very light that made it tremble, whether from eons of dormancy or sheer hunger to live again.
A streak of blood-red lightning tore from the revenant and shrieked across the void, a burning serpent aimed straight for Jared’s brow. In a single breath, it meant to storm his mind and steal the throne of his flesh.
“You want to die that badly?” Jared answered with a chill, contemptuous snort.
Instead of raising walls around his consciousness, he flung every gate wide, as though inviting a guest to step deeper into a trap.
He was curious. Inside his domain, what storm could this ancient ghost possibly muster?
The shadow slipped through every threshold without resistance, plunging into Jared’s inner sea.
It expected a brittle soul it could crush at leisure and was already savoring the coming feast. Instead, at the field’s center hovered a colossal Golden Tome, older than memory, flooding the dark waters with a radiance that seemed to prop up worlds.
The tome revolved in regal silence. Chains of living sunlight, lines of pure law, spiraled outward, filling the boundless ocean with holy fire.
