When Jared’s legions darkened the skies above their valley, the sect defense formation ignited from peak to peak. Countless disciples stood upon the walls, faces taut, spell-sigils swirling like constellations around their clenched fists.
At their head strode the white-haired sect master, a man whose cultivation teetered at the pinnacle of Heavenly Immortal Level Three. Behind him, the elder council fanned out like a living phalanx.
“Jared Chance!” The old master clasped his hands, voice steady yet edged with iron. “Your deeds have reached even our quiet halls. That statue embodies our lineage and the very luck of our gates. We cannot surrender it. Should you press the matter, every soul beneath this roof will fight until neither jade nor bone remains intact!”
A roar answered him, thousands of disciples in flawless unison.
Magecraft speared upward, weaving their defiance into a single, unbroken banner of will. Ancient they were, proud, and here they would make their stand.
Jared regarded the tableau—ranks set, shields humming, hearts ablaze—with an expression as calm as moonlit glass. He lifted one palm. From it drifted the Bloodsoul Orb, now swirling with crimson so dense it looked molten.
Within, the Vermilion Demon Lord’s soulfire had swollen to a knife-edge threshold. All it lacked was one final draught—the pure, founder-forged soul energy sealed inside that alabaster statue—to trigger the rebirth of an ancient body waiting to claw its way back into the world.
In order to rebuild the physical body for the Vermilion Demon Lord, Jared saw no path but this; every turn of fate had already herded him toward the iron gates of the Myriad Arts Sect, and there was no doorway left behind him for retreat.
Cold purpose settled over him like nightfall, blotting out any lingering doubt.
“I have said it once,” Jared’s voice rang out, clear enough to rattle the cliffs. “Those who ride my current will flourish. Those who stand against me—perish. Myriad Arts Sect, will you flourish, or will you perish?”
At the final echo of his challenge, hundreds of Draconians advanced in perfect unison. The dragon’s power they carried rolled forward in a colossal tide—an ocean turned to living pressure—that slammed into the sect defense formation shielding the mountain like a midnight wave battering a lighthouse.
Overhead, thunder stitched the sky while black clouds knotted together, as though the end of days had chosen this very valley for its doorway.
In front of the sect gate, the air itself turned to glass; every breath felt like inhaling shards of ice.
Jared’s decree—flourish or die—cracked through every disciple’s chest like celestial thunder, leaving behind the chill of a blade pressed to the spine.
Wave after wave of draconic might pounded the shimmering barrier. Runes flared, colors bled, and the dome quivered with a tortured hum, as though the array were a drum skin stretched too tight and about to tear.
The sect master stood at the fore. White hair lashed about his shoulders, and his robe snapped in the collision of opposing auras.
In his gaze flickered a final, steely resolve. He understood the fork in the road more keenly than anyone: surrender the statue of the founding ancestor and sever the lineage, turning a millennium of heritage into dandelion fluff, or refuse and face this storm-crowned slayer who had already leveled more than one sacred mountain.
“Jared!” he shouted, the single name erupting from his throat like a battle horn. “For ten centuries the Myriad Arts Sect has stood through tempests and droughts, and our way has never broken. Today, even if rivers of blood run down these steps, the ancestor’s likeness shall not be mocked. Disciples, hear me!”
“Yes, Master!” thousands answered together, a rolling roar that sent loose stones skittering.
Their reply soared upward, fierce and unafraid, proof that resolve could be forged as sharp as any sword.
“Return all arts to the source, shield our tradition!” the master cried, flinging his hand into a new sigil.
At once, every elder and disciple poured their power into the grand formation.
Light blazed white-hot. Ancient runes surfaced, weaving themselves into chains of Heavenly Law that wrapped the barrier in fresh, unbreakable links.
Deep within the mountain, the ancestor’s statue awakened, casting a soft radiance that dove into the shield and drove its strength even higher.
“Stubborn to the last…” Jared murmured, voice flat as frost.
No flicker of sympathy crossed his eyes. He required only the statue’s concentrated soul energy. Whether the Myriad Arts Sect thrived or fell meant no more to him than smoke on the wind.
Slowly, he lifted his right hand, fingers closing around empty air. He did not bother to draw the Dragonslayer Sword. The gesture alone made the very sky creak, as though reality itself suspected it was next to break.
“Heavenly Law, Disjunction!” Jared’s voice cracked through the frozen silence like iron striking flint.
A force without color or sound, yet towering above any mortal energy, burst from him as quicksilver spilled across the sky. In an instant, it poured over the entire sect defense formation of the Myriad Arts Sect.
It was Jared’s deeper mastery of the Heavenly Law embedded within the Golden Tome, a subtler command over creation’s own source that few living beings even sensed, let alone wielded.
Before every horrified pair of eyes inside the sect, the shining dome, the flowing runes, the chains of law they had trusted for millennia began to unravel. An unseen titan’s hand simply erased them from the rim inward.
