A voice suddenly rang out. “Leave?” It was a dry, mechanical tone, cold as metal, vibrating like the hidden gears of a cosmic law grinding into motion. Soul Devourer whirled, his cloak snapping though no wind stirred this desolation. Three ashen figures now enclosed him in a flawless triangle. They looked vaguely human, yet he could not be certain that they were alive.
Ancient gray-white robes draped their forms, wide sleeves brushing the dust-colored ground. Faces blurred beneath shifting mist; only the vaguest contours of nose and mouth remained.
Most horrific were their eye sockets: twin black hollows cradling gray-white flames that fluttered like candlelight in a tomb. Each flicker sent a shiver through the surrounding space, as though the rules of reality quaked in respect.
Their bodies seemed condensed from pure reincarnation aura, standing there as if perfectly fused with the gray-white world. Were it not for seeing them with the naked eye, Soul Devourer’s divine soul perception would not have detected their presence at all, just as a person could not sense the air around them.
The figure at the apex projected its words straight into his mind, the sound a serrated whisper. “Outsider… The Reincarnation Realm forbids the living.”
“Surrender your soul, enter the Reincarnation Pool, and you may be born anew,” the left-hand figure intoned, utterly void of emotion.
“Refuse, and you will be refined,” the right-hand figure finished, each syllable cold enough to freeze hope.
Alarm bells shrieked through Soul Devourer’s consciousness, and even his divine soul recoiled. The pressure pouring from the three ashen figures surpassed Malcolm in his prime. It was not mere power but a difference in existence itself—an ant before a dragon, shaking because the dragon happened to look its way.
“I am Soul Devourer,” he said, forcing steadiness he did not feel. “My arrival is an accident, and I meant no offense. I implore you, show me a path by which I may depart.”
Silence tightened, brittle as glass. The gray-white flames inside the ashen figures’ hollow sockets fluttered faster, their unreadable gazes locked on him without a word.
The humanoid figure in the center spoke again, a note of unquestionable authority in its voice. “Denied. Rule of Reincarnation, Article 1,372. Anyone who enters without the permission of the Lord of Reincarnation shall be considered an intruder. Their divine soul is to be refined, their consciousness stripped, and reincarnation completed.”
With that, the three ashen humanoids lifted their right arms together. The movement was mechanical, puppet-stiff, yet it carried a hypnotic, air-thieving rhythm that seemed to shrink the horizon. Chalk-pale palms unfurled, pressing down upon emptiness. No gale followed, no crackling surge, only a hush so absolute it erased the very memory of sound.
Soul Devourer felt the entire cosmos leaning upon his shoulders. It was not brute force but the weight of law—ancient, absolute, inescapable. He became a doodle on paper, flattened by an invisible hand from a higher world, incapable of understanding, resisting, or even fully feeling the horror that approached.
A roar burst from his throat: raw, desperate, doomed. The last embers of demonic flame kindled around him as six shredded wings beat the air in wild abandon, seeking even a hairline crack in that unseen prison. Alas, nothing yielded. Each flicker of fire snuffed out the instant it touched the crushing law; every movement thickened—an insect drowning in amber until even motion forgot him.
The descending palms seemed leisurely, yet they crossed time and space in a single, unavoidable heartbeat. A muffled, wet pop split the silence. The first palm landed atop his crown. Soul Devourer convulsed; dark-red demon blood sprayed from every orifice in seven gruesome jets. He felt the hub of his soul clutched, squeezed, then drawn upward, bucket after bucket hauled from a bottomless well.
Ten millennia of cultivation, the essence of a million devoured spirits, every memory, feeling, and epiphany—each was ripped free with mechanical indifference. A scream unlike anything mortal echoed across the ash-gray plain. The cry lasted a single heartbeat before silence reclaimed it.
The second palm settled over his sternum, and the world answered with a brittle crack. Splintered bone snowed inward. A death-cold current poured through the invading hand, seizing the heart that had beaten thirteen thousand years and freezing it mid-throb. Life withdrew like a tide; oceanic vitality shrank to a guttering wick in mere breaths.
Then the third palm descended upon his elixir field in the lower abdomen, the seat of power he once believed untouchable. The impact thundered, an internal detonation that made the gray plain flash white. A sound ripped across the desolate plain—a brittle crack that announced the collapse of something once thought eternal.
Soul Devourer had spent ten thousand years tempering his Soul-Devouring Technique, swallowing rare natural treasures until a blazing demonic core burned at his center. Now, beneath a single palm strike, all he had wrought toppled like a child’s sandcastle: the nascence of Soul-Devouring Demonic Flame, the core of Earthcore Demonic Flame, every pivot of power crumbling into listless ash.
The three attackers withdrew their palms in the same breath, already indifferent to the ruin they had caused. What remained of Soul Devourer slumped to the dirt, a sagging leather shell emptied of bones and hope, twitching once before lying still.
