Within, Jared stepped into a realm of warped corridors and overlapping horizons, the Demon Seal Tower’s inner world shimmering with impossible colors and folding skies.
He felt the life-threads of Cyanna and Coall growing clearer with every heartbeat. Jaw set, eyes bright with resolve, he turned toward the tower’s unfathomable depths and strode forward.
“Cyanna, Coall, hold on! I’m coming for you!” “Kid, something’s wrong…” the Vermilion Demon Lord murmured inside his mind. “The tower’s aura is savage, its spatial fluctuation deranged—either enraged or bracing for an intruder.”
Jared nodded, every nerve thrumming in grim agreement. The Demon Seal Tower no longer looked like silent stone. It felt like some primordial monster jarred awake, baring fangs at the night.
“Whatever waits inside, I’m going in!”
Resolve blazed behind Jared’s eyes, hot enough to make the air tremble. He had sworn to drag his friends out alive, and he never broke an oath.
He inhaled slowly and deeply, summoning every drop of power until his aura burned white-gold. Then he shot toward the gate like a comet.
Within the last three hundred meters, the world convulsed. An ancient, stadium-shaking bellow blasted from the stone.
The four stone lions sprang awake. Granite muscles flexed as thunder rolled from their throats. The runes ignited along their hides, hurling four pillars of white light skyward.
The beams braided together, forming a blinding net that draped the tower in a cage of law.
Runes pulsed across that lattice, exhaling equal parts imprisonment and extinction.
Ahead of Jared, space cracked like glass; razored fragments and raging spatial currents screamed toward him. This was no simple barrier. It was a dimension-rending kill array.
“Perfect!” Jared had prepared for this. His Nethersky Eye flared open, revealing every shifting joint and secret node of the array in crystalline clarity.
“Slash!” The Dragonslayer Sword rang free, its cry a dragon’s lament.
Jared drove his newborn sword intent into the blade, unleashing a Prismatic Sword Aura honed to sever space itself.
Zip!
The aura collided with the glowing net, screeching hard enough to carve marrow. Light and rune tore apart, leaving a jagged breach where even Heavenly Immortals would have been shredded.
But the maelstrom of spatial debris was already upon him. He flickered like a ghost, slipping between lethal fissures while the Dragonslayer Sword whirled, shattering every shard that dared approach.
Every time sword and net collided, dazzling sparks flared, and the very air rippled as if struck by invisible thunder.
Jared’s forearms went numb, hot blood churning in his veins, warning him he could not endure such force for long. This formation was far more brutal than he had guessed, a cage of shifting dimensions that meant to grind him into dust.
“Stop meeting it head-on. Find the heart of the array,” the Vermilion Demon Lord barked, his voice echoing like distant war drums.
Summoning the Nethersky Eye, Jared swept the battlefield in a heartbeat and locked onto the glowing runes pulsing between the brows of the four stone lions.
“Shatter!”
The Five-Element Nascence Power surged from every meridian, tunneling into the sword’s tip until the blade screamed with restless light.
Man and weapon fused, spinning into a living drill that bored through chaotic void currents, stabbing four precise thrusts toward each lion’s forehead.
Cling! Cling! Cling! Cling!
The quartet of chimes rang together, crisp, crystalline, like bells struck inside a cathedral of stone.
The statues froze mid-lunge; the runes in their brows guttered and died, snuffing out the flow of power.
Without that feed, the massive light-web sagged and wavered, its lethal pressure collapsing like a punctured lung.
Jared darted through the newly weakened mesh, then whipped his sword backward, cleaving the yellow charm that had reformed across the Demon Seal Tower’s gate.
Boom! The charm exploded, the gate yawned wide, and Jared stepped into the familiar, rotten gloom of the tower’s first level without a moment’s doubt. The stench hit him first, and his expression tightened.
What greeted him now looked nothing like the chamber he had left. The scattered corpses and bleached bones were mostly gone, as though swept clean by some grisly custodian.
In their place, a vast, intricate formation seethed at the room’s center, its lines etched in murky ink and breathing dense black vapors.
