The Vermilion Demon Lord gave a curt nod, scarlet eyes dimming to embers. He and Jared resumed their slow pursuit, matching the cultists’ footprints as though the earth were strung with tripwire.
The Ghostspring vanguard reached the first stalks of the Jade Bamboo Grove. Jared had barely inhaled the grove’s cool scent when the air convulsed. Emerald light erupted skyward, bright enough to carve green shadows across his cheek.
Leaves sheared from the stalks, each one hardening mid-flight into a jade razor. They slammed toward the intruders like a sideways cloudburst. From the soil, ink-dark vines burst forth, writhing toward ankles with the hunger of snakes smelling blood.
“Ambush! Defense formation!” the Great Elder’s shout cracked through the grove, sharp as a whip. He drove the Whitebone Staff into the soil. A ripple of gray death-mist unfurled from the impact, meeting the leaf-blades and hissing them into powder.
Beside him, the Third Elder rattled his Skull Bead Chain. A pane of green light expanded outward, sheltering their ranks beneath a sickly glow. The remaining black robes answered with venom clouds, flickering darts, and cold hellfire, each strike colliding against the grove’s fury in rolling detonations.
Jared grudgingly respected the synchronicity. Level twelve devil-cultists or not, they moved like one organism, the two High Immortal elders steering every counterstroke. Each sweep of the Whitebone Staff smeared rancid fog over a clump of bamboo. The glossy stalks withered on contact, collapsing into black mulch. The Third Elder’s ghost-green flames licked the vines, burning them faster than they could recoil. Yet the grove refused to stay dead. New shoots erupted from ruined soil, and every severed vine multiplied like a hydra answering insult with numbers.
Somewhere deeper, a bass tremor began, collecting strength until Jared’s teeth clicked. An unseen will was gathering itself.
“Stop stalling!” the Great Elder barked, chest heaving. “The ward is draining Peach Blossom Haven itself. Every heartbeat makes it stronger!” Pale with fury, he slammed the Whitebone Staff again. “Deploy the Ghostspring Life-Extinguishing Array. Carve us a path!”
“Yes!” his disciples answered, their voices converging into one guttural vow. Ten figures in soot-black robes fanned out beneath the drizzling moonlight.
Jared, from the thicket‘s shadow, watched each man ram a lacquered banner into the soil, then bite his tongue and smear hot blood across the cloth. At the formation’s heart, the Great Elder and the Third Elder planted their feet, palms touching the air, pouring swelling torrents of power into the newborn pattern. The earth bucked with a hollow boom. Black radiance burst from the ten banners; tar-thick liquid gushed out, racing across the ground. Wherever it swept, leaves shriveled, the air thinned, and even space itself hissed as if being eaten.
Seeing this, Jared’s gut knotted. Ghostspring Life-Extinguishing Array… The technique devoured the casters‘ own blood and strength to birth a wellspring that erased everything it touched.
The oily flood slammed into the emerald barrier woven through the bamboo, and the clash screamed like metal scraped raw. Green luminescence and black fluid tangled, each bite producing a puff of gray ash where living stalks had stood moments earlier. Yet the spreading sludge began to slow, the ward’s pedigree showing; layer after layer of scriptural light kept forcing the corruption back.
For a breath, neither side advanced. Jared exhaled once and slipped from cover, boots barely kissing the damp leaves. He arrowed straight toward the banners, not the men who tended them.
“Chaos Origin… Flow Severance!”
Fingers blurred. Ten threads the width of hair, colored a quiet stone-gray, sprang from his tips and spiraled toward the energy nodes where banner met earth. Each line had congealed from pure chaotic aura, hungry to unravel whatever system it touched. They entered without ripple, gliding between ghostspring and banner like scalpels through water.
Soft, wet pops followed. The ten banners trembled, the crawling black glow upon them guttered and thinned. Their feed lines were gone, severed in a blink. The Great Elder and the Third Elder whipped around, horror splashed across their faces, just as Jared drew the gray filaments back and met their stare with ice-still eyes.
The pattern buckled, and the recoil struck instantly. All ten robed cultists coughed arcs of blood, their strength collapsing like tents in a storm. Deprived of fuel, the ghostspring sludge recoiled; emerald light surged over it, boiling it to mist. Worse, the kickback tangled their own currents, and when the bamboo sigils lunged again, panic scattered their defenses.
“You wretched brat! Who in blazes are you?!” the Third Elder roared, eyes veined and wild. “You dare strike at us from the dark?”
The Great Elder spat the word across the courtyard. “An ambush?”
Jared let it hang, enjoying the sting it left in their pride. He dipped his chin as though granting a favor. “I’m only borrowing your strength to crack the seal,” he said, voice almost bored. “Charging a little interest while I’m at it.”
His gaze slid over them. “Now, time to send you on your way.”
The Great Elder’s laugh burst out, raw and cracked. “Arrogant whelp! Formation or not, I can butcher you like a chicken!” Saliva gleamed at the corner of his mouth.
Jared only marked the distance between them. The elder thrust his Whitebone Staff forward and the courtyard dimmed. A pallid streak, too fast for breath, drove at Jared’s face, sealing every angle of escape. At its tip a pin of ghost light gathered, sharp enough to drill through any high-grade shield. Off to the side, the Third Elder rattled his Skull Bead Chain, each skull’s hollow stare igniting with swamp-green fire. Nine needles of that flame lanced toward Jared from nine directions, pairing with the staff for a killing net.
Two High Immortal Level Two elders, both seething, poured everything into the strike, and the air itself flinched. Jared lifted his right hand as though silencing a noisy room. No flare of power yet, just the promise of it in his steady palm. The faint Chaos Vortex Mark in his palm winked awake, a coal catching wind.
“Chaos Origin… Return to the Void Vortex!”
Space folded. A three-foot-wide swirl of sullen gray air blossomed before him and began to turn. Its center felt bottomless, like staring into a starless gulf, while four muted colors chased each other along the rim. The staff light and the nine green threads flew straight in. They vanished without so much as a spark, the vortex sipping them down like water through cracked earth. Only a faint ripple puckered the air, gone before sound could form.
“Impossible!” Both elders’ voices broke in the same disbelieving rasp. Their pupils shrank to pinpoints; for the first time, Jared saw real fear stirring behind their practiced cruelty. They had thrown everything, and it had slipped away like smoke.
Jared stepped forward, closing his fingers around empty air. “My turn…”
The gray vortex shuddered, then spun the other way, shrinking fast enough to whistle. A pull erupted—fierce, wordless, everywhere at once—drinking in light, aura, even the scent of dust. Jared felt their panic before he heard it; the elders’ life force, spell power, and something deeper peeled off them, tunneling toward his hand.
