“You arrogant b*st*rd! You’ve truly pissed me off!” Soul Devourer bellowed, his emerald pupils blazing, fury eclipsing reason. Never in all his campaigns had he met an adversary so suicidally insolent.
With a thunderous snap, his six wings beat once, and his colossal frame vanished. It wasn’t speed; it was near-teleportation—the rudimentary command over space granted to those who had attained the High Immortal Realm. A streak of black-and-crimson light split the air, and the armored leviathan reappeared less than three feet from Jared, close enough to feel each other’s breath.
“Soul-Devouring Claw!” The next second, a claw larger than Jared himself tore through the air, ghostly shrieks curling around its razored edges as it raked for his face. Death’s stench and soul-rotting power rushed ahead of the blow, eager to grind life and spirit into dust. Black-red demon light writhed around each talon, warping the very space it touched. This was a full-force strike from a wrathful High Immortal Realm Level One, lethal enough to erase any Top Level Heavenly Immortal Realm cultivator in a heartbeat.
“Jared!” Lindsay shouted, terror lodging in her throat.
Yet once again, Jared’s response shattered every prediction. He neither panicked nor dodged, nor even raised a guard. He simply stood, calm as midnight, watching the mountain-splitting claw expand within his pupils. And just as those talons kissed the tip of his nose, he lifted his right hand, slowly, almost politely. Five fingers opened, palm presented to the oncoming apocalypse.
Jared lifted his hand with languid grace, nothing more than the absent-minded swat one gave a stubborn gnat. Yet even that trifling gesture tugged at the scorched air, making the furnace-hot atmosphere shudder as though warned of something terrible to come.
“Chaos Origin! Fire Domain!”
The four quiet words slipped out like an ancient oath, calm yet carrying the hush of forbidden scripture long buried under ash and time.
Buzz!
A deep metallic hum answered him, and then the world lurched. From Jared’s open palm, an unseen shockwave unfurled, racing outward faster than thought. Within a span of heartbeats, a radius of a thousand yards twisted grotesquely. Light bent, sound blurred, and even the roiling magma below seemed to stutter in disbelief.
Pale gray vapors—primordial, formless, like the breath of the universe’s first dawn—interwove with blinding ribbons of scarlet-gold fire that promised to burn everything to cinders. Two utterly opposite forces, born to clash, now mingled without friction. Together, they knitted an eerie dominion that belonged to Jared alone. Inside that sphere, the familiar laws of creation buckled. Old foundations were silenced, suppressed.
A newborn order bloomed in their place—chaotic, uncharted, yet so inclusive it seemed to cradle every possibility at once. Here, the Law of Fire roared with childlike joy while every spatial principle shrank, twisted, and knelt.
Soul Devourer’s taloned strike, an attack meant to shatter high-grade celestial steel, plunged headlong into the newborn fiery domain. In the blink that followed, the fiend’s pupils constricted to pin-pricks. His claw, a weapon that had crushed worlds, moved as though mired in endless quicksand, its speed cut to a tenth.
The black miasma of death, soul-rotting energy, and every corrupt law he commanded touched the gray chaos and the scarlet fire, and hissed away like hot iron speared into snow. It was ink dripping into clear water; his deadly pride was dissolving grain by grain. The power he prized, the power that eroded all things, was being stripped apart, devoured, erased.
An unbearable hollowness gnawed at him as he felt his strength bleeding out, faster than words could name.
“What… What sorcery is this?” The triumphant sneer froze on Soul Devourer’s face, replaced by raw astonishment and a flicker of panic he could not quite smother. He had prowled for ten thousand years, devoured legions of cultivators, and catalogued countless bizarre techniques. But never had he witnessed such an uncanny force. It felt as though the cosmos itself had fashioned a counter-curse precisely for his Soul-Devouring Technique.
Jared spoke again, the single syllable soft as falling petals. “Break…”
His spread fingers curled in gently, no harsher than plucking a flower, yet the gesture carried the finality of a closing vault. A thunderclap exploded, and the domain answered his command with merciless, incandescent wrath. A deep, muffled thud rolled through the infernal stillness. It did not split the heavens, yet it struck Soul Devourer like a hammer swung straight into his chest.
From the tips of his colossal talons, cracks rippled outward. Black-red scales weathered like ancient stone, each segment flaking away until the mighty claw disintegrated. Shards of armor and sticky demon blood met the swirling heat of the Chaotic Fire Domain and vanished in hissing vapor. No ash remained; an era of gathered power simply ceased to exist.
A strangled grunt tore free. Soul Devourer’s towering frame staggered three steps backward before he could steady himself. Every footfall punched a canyon of fractures into the obsidian ground. He stared down at the stump that ended just below the elbow, black blood pattering into the cracks like bitter rain. Cold emerald eyes widened, horror wrestling with utter disbelief.
Across the scorched field, Jared lowered his hand and clasped both arms behind his back. His robe drifted in the furnace wind of his domain, each fold moving with effortless poise. He studied Soul Devourer with eyes as calm as moonlit water, as though he had merely brushed lint from a sleeve.
“You think far too highly of those paltry skills of yours,” Jared said with detached contempt. “Chaos is the womb of creation, and it is also the solvent that erases creation whenever it pleases… Your Soul-Devouring Technique may frighten vagrant spirits, but before me, it’s utterly worthless. And that High Immortal Realm badge you flaunt? It’s so trivial that it scarcely deserves my attention.”
