Jared ignored the rising panic behind him. His right hand lifted from the stone recess, bringing with it the half-man-tall Soul Urn.
A thread of Black-White Flame danced at his fingertip. With almost casual grace, touched it to the vessel’s clay skin. The flame looked fragile, a candle flicker, yet power rumbled inside it like a star held in cupped palms.
Soul-engraved runes webbing the urn split apart with a brittle crack. Pale blue soul threads seeped out, drifting upward, and the instant they tasted open air, they scattered like spooked sparrows, fleeing into the distance.
They were only remnants, spirits torn from former owners, now weightless and lost, drifting on invisible currents in search of a home they would never find.
“S-Soul threads…” the white-haired elder whispered, voice quavering with disbelief. In a single breath, grasped the awful truth, everything Jared had warned them about was real. Their so-called advancement had been nothing more than the siphoning of their very souls.
Remorse struck like a hammer. How could have swallowed the golden-robed stranger’s promises so easily?
“Friend, please, return our souls!” the middle-aged cultivator who had earlier wept now collapsed with a thud, forehead striking stone.
Blood soon streaked his face, yet kept bowing, crimson drops spattering the ground in pitiful rhythm.
One after another, the other cultivators fell to their knees, tears mixing with dust. “We were wrong! Have mercy! Give our souls back!”
Their voices tangled into a single thread of despair, clinging to any chance of undoing their fatal mistake. Jared regarded the pleading crowd without a flicker of sympathy.
The Black-White Flame unfurled again, this time enveloping the entire Soul Urn. He drew a long, steady breath and set his Heart-Focusing Sutra into motion.
Within the vessel, every soul thread that once belonged to the Soul Convergence Altar’s disciples unraveled, refined, then flowed like liquid silver along his finger and directly into his core.
They snapped at the hand that tried to save them, so why should I rescue them now?
His aura thickened visibly, dense, dark, and formidable, while the twin-colored fire around blazed higher, crackling like miniature suns.
“Y-You can’t-stop! Those are our souls!” one cultivator howled, eyes bloodshot. He lunged, but Jared’s sheer spiritual pressure punched to the ground and held there like an iron mountain.
He writhed, arms, shoulders, even fingertips straining, yet could not lift a single inch beneath the crushing weight.
“You can’t do this! We admit our fault!” another cultivator screamed, voice shredding into hopeless echo. Tears burst from the man’s eyes and streaked down his soot-stained cheeks.
A few paces away, Jared stood motionless, pulling strand after strand of soul energy into the waiting maw of the Soul Urn.
They might have spotted the plot, yet lust for a “breakthrough” blinded them. They even turned their blades on Jared, and now their misery was of their own making. A flicker of pity stirred in him, but disappointment weighed far heavier.
“You monster! I’ll hound you, even in death!” the burly, bearded cultivator roared. He glared as though could flay Jared alive, yet not a single muscle obeyed him. Jared’s eyes turned arctic. One casual flick of his finger released a spark.
The spark unfurled into a dragon of living flame, its coils swallowing the bearded man in a single rushing breath. No scream had time to form; the body collapsed into a lonely mound of ash.
The chamber fell silent. Every remaining cultivator trembled, lips sealed by raw, urgent fear. In that instant, they understood, this was no soft-hearted savior but a man who killed as decisively as breathed.
Jared closed his palm. The Black-White Flame winked out, and more than half the soul energy inside the Soul Urn was already his.
