The vows still echoed around the Gate of Heaven, yet Jared no longer savored the triumph. The Soul Devourer remained a poisoned thorn; leave it buried, and the infection would one day rot the empire he had only just forged.
So he ceded every administrative burden to trusted lieutenants, stationed a legion of Draconians to guard the newborn sect, then departed with Coall, Cyanna, and three hundred elite Draconian warriors. Their destination was the fabled Nether Blood Sea.
The Nether Blood Sea lay at the far-western rim of the Ninefold Heaven, a ragged scar where, legends claimed, ancient gods and demons had once torn each other apart.
Long before the expedition glimpsed its shores, a stench like carrion-soaked iron clawed down their throats. An icy dread, aimed straight at the soul, rode on every gust.
On the horizon, sky and earth appeared swallowed by an endless smear of dark crimson. It was no sunset; it was an ocean brewed from the mingled blood of a million fallen deities and beasts.
The viscous sea heaved like molten syrup. Each surge did not toss foam but unveiled wailing faces, contorted, skinless, eternally screaming.
Above that loathsome tide, red-black thunderheads gathered year-round. Bolts of blood-colored lightning forked through them, rumbling like drums for a funeral that had never ended.
Even the fabric of space turned brittle here. Jagged rifts—inky and starless—yawned open without warning, then stitched themselves shut, each rip threatening to swallow anything careless enough to draw near.
Below, the landscape stretched out like a charred parchment, an endless plain scorched midnight-black. Titanic skeletons jutted from the soot, their ribs taller than city walls, splintered weapons still clenched in petrified hands. Though ten thousand ages had passed, a sovereign pressure still pulsed from every bleached bone.
“Damn it, this place gives me the creeps,” Coall muttered, his gravelly voice echoing through the stagnant haze.
He shook his massive dragon head as though he could fling the cold malice coiled around his very soul. Even a creature of the Draconians, scale thicker than steel, spirit forged in primordial fire, felt an instinctive shiver crawl beneath the armor of its hide.
Azure vapors spiraled around Cyanna, the aura of a celestial dragon woven into her breath. It burned away the nearby filth like frost meeting sunlight.
“This hatred has brewed for eons,” she warned, her voice as cool as winter glass. “The laws here are fractured; it will dampen our strength. Stay on guard, every one of you.”
Jared nodded once, solemn. Drawing even a thread of ordinary spirit energy felt like sipping through stone. The very air reeked of feral bloodlust. Were it not for his gift of devouring such miasma, flight itself would have been a burden.
He sifted through Mortimer’s stolen memories and the clues gathered later. All paths pointed to the Soul Devourer’s lair, somewhere deep inside this cursed Nether Blood Sea, in a chasm called Soulgrave Abyss.
Jared cast his spiritual sense outward. Turbulent currents snarled in his mind, shredding clarity. He managed to probe only a few dozen miles before the chaos spat his awareness back.
“Slow and steady,” he instructed. “Feel for any surge in souls. That will mark our trail.”
The Draconian army eased forward, enormous bodies gliding like a wary serpent skirting a hunter’s snare. Crossing into the sky above the Nether Blood Sea, they collided with an even denser tide of despair that pressed against scales and skin threefold.
Sensing living hearts, legion upon legion of wailing spirits burst from the crimson waves, blood-stained phantoms shrieking like iron scraping glass. Individually weak, yet numberless and fearless, they lunged for the soul rather than the physical body—a plague made of claws and grief.
“Cleanse them.” Jared’s command fell like a hammer. The order rippled through the ranks.
Cyanna moved first. Her dragon aura erupted into a rainfall of azure light. Wherever a droplet landed, a specter evaporated, howling, then vanished as harmless smoke.
The other Draconians answered in kind: streams of dragon fire, arcs of lightning, spears of wind, shards of ice. Their talents and spells blossomed over the Nether Blood Sea, mowing down the endless swarm.
Jared kept his hands still. Eyes narrowed, he pushed his mind as far as the storm of laws allowed, hunting for the faintest unnatural ripple beneath the carnage.
They drifted on, witnessing horrors fit for apocryphal scrolls: islands built entirely of interlocked bones, mangled colossal corpses adrift like rotting continents, and natural whirlpools of pure liquid scarlet that swallowed everything in silent hunger.
