“Earthfire True Scripture! Ultimate forbidden art! True Flame Scorches the Heavens, Sun Incarnation!” Gerald’s roar rolled across the ruin like liquid thunder; every syllable hissed, spat, and curled upward as though the words themselves caught fire.
“Ancestor, no!” Jared’s throat shredded itself on the plea, blood-flecked spit mixed with tears that burned hotter than the air. He lunged a step, knees wobbling, and knew even as he moved that he would never reach Gerald in time.
The title of that technique pulsed through Jared’s memory—the last line of the Scripture, the page everyone treated as legend. Burn away flesh, spirit, and every sliver of cultivation; trade an entire lifetime for a single, god-breaking blaze. When the fire spent itself, nothing remained—not ashes, not even a soul to wander.
The thought arrived alongside the sight: too late!
Gerald stood inside a pillar of white fire so bright Jared’s eyes watered red. Cloth vanished first, fluttering into sparks. Then skin, muscle, bone—each layer dripping away like wax on an invisible candle. The roar of the blaze swallowed every other sound until Jared could no longer hear his own heartbeat.
But the fire did not lash outward. It tilted, curious, then surged toward him, a tidal river of molten light. Heat slammed into his chest first, then broke every dam inside him. Earthfire True Flame tangled with his ragged chaotic celestial energy, with the fragments of five-element power, and with the stubborn roar of his Golden Dragon blood.
The collision hurt worse than the wounds already killing him, yet he felt something mighty and unfamiliar unfolding beneath the agony.
“Kid… Live…” The words dropped straight into Jared’s mind, no louder than a whisper, yet heavy enough to bend his knees. “Carry my share of living… Earthfire Pavilion’s future is yours now…”
Each promise hammered deeper than a command; they felt like parts of Gerald’s soul welding themselves to Jared’s spine. The voice ebbed, pulled away by the blaze. Where Gerald had stood, nothing lingered—not a scorch mark, not even a curl of smoke.
An era ended in silence more absolute than any mourning bell. Inside him, power convulsed—vast, rolling, unstoppable. It was not merely energy flooding veins; it was every principle of fire sharpening, rising, rewriting what his body understood as possible.
Earthfire True Essence, the distillation of Gerald’s lifetime, crashed through broken meridians, tearing weaknesses apart so stronger forms could bloom. Strength followed pain, and the pain was endless. Heat pulsed through Jared’s chest, knitting shredded organs, soldering splintered ribs. Deeper still, the incoming force brushed his own chaotic celestial energy, his five-element power, and the dormant Golden Dragon Bloodline, making them vibrate like touched harp strings.
Inside the dantian’s dark vault, the nearly shattered Origin Star wobbled like cracked glass, then steadied as Earthfire True Essence drenched it—thick, molten, and reassuring, as though magma had turned into a healer’s hand. Bright veins raced across the fractures, stitching themselves shut. Dull shimmer brightened to silver, then burst toward a brilliance so keen Jared almost flinched from a light that existed only inside him.
Bands of gold, green, blue, scarlet, and ocher rolled over the star’s surface, each hue a living current trying to speak its own language through color. Within the core, a hazy swirl of primal mist chased itself in tightening circles, waiting for permission to erupt. Outside, red-gold Earthfire True Flame licked the star like a patient forge, heat pressing outward as though it wanted to sculpt the darkness into armor.
A thread of almost-silent draconic song drifted up from the star’s deepest chamber; the Golden Dragon Bloodline stretching in its sleep, beginning to remember its own name. The four powers, each once stubbornly separate, slowly leaned toward one another, coaxed by Gerald’s life-for-life offering. His fading heartbeat echoed in the heat, insisting they learn to breathe together.
He couldn’t dam the sound, ripped from his throat, raw and involuntary. His neck arched, and he threw the cry upward, as if the ceiling of the cavern might answer or at least witness the pain hidden inside the power. This was no knife wound; it was creation in progress—bone and sinew arguing with a flood too big for them.
He felt every cell split, reconsider itself, and solder back stronger. Meridians stretched like wires pulled taut, then thickened, iron replacing twine. Even his spirit tightened, grains packing into steel. His breath became a wind tunnel, each exhale louder, the pressure stacking higher and higher inside the chamber of his chest.
The invisible wall that had caged him at the top of Level Four tore like wet paper, fragments dissolving before they hit the floor. Power settled for half a heartbeat, announcing Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Five with the certainty of sunrise.
But the surge only crouched, gathering for another leap. Gerald’s gift, diminished by age yet still drawn from a High Immortal’s ocean, kept pouring. Compared to Jared’s own cup-sized vessel, even a third of that sea felt endless. The tide lifted him through the middle waters of Level Five, swept him past its far reefs, then deposited him on the very edge of its final shore.
A thunderous boom echoed inside and out, as though mountains were slamming doors. Another barricade, one he hadn’t even known existed, shattered under that sound. The flood receded, leaving him at the very crown of Level Five, one slender breath from six. Yet he sensed the statistics meant nothing. The true evolution lay in how the four forces now answered a single command, their merged essence cleaner, stranger, and entirely his.
Jared uncurled, rising to his feet, testing new balance that felt lighter and heavier at once. The skin that had been a map of cuts was smooth again, flawless as untouched jade. He felt the night wind creep through the rents in his clothes. Each ragged flap brushed skin that shone like polished stone, and beneath that pale surface four muted colors pulsed, weaving over one another in slow, restless flashes.
He lifted his right hand into the starlight. Beside the familiar five-hued sigil on the backs of his fingers, a new brand unfurled: pure molten gold shaped like an ascending flame. The two emblems slipped around each other, thread over thread, until they formed a single pattern whose curves felt older than language.
Dragonslayer Sword trembled somewhere beyond his vision, then sang—a thin, hungry note that rippled across the ruined plain. Before the echo faded, the blade streaked back to his palm and settled there with the eagerness of a hawk returning to wrist and leather.
Gray streams of primordial mist curled along the steel. Five shifting colors braided through the haze; sparks of earth-fed flame licked the edges; behind them all, a pale gold dragon-shadow flickered in and out of being. The powers did not struggle; they folded into one another, stretched, and snapped tight, becoming a single, four-colored blade of light that towered three hundred feet above the ground.
He kept the blade suspended, letting it vibrate rather than fly. Even restrained, its presence warped the night; air buckled, stitched itself, and tore again in ragged loops, as though the sky had grown too thin to bear the weight of the sword.
“Morven… Malcolm…”
The words dropped from his tongue without tremor, quiet enough that the nearest flames scarcely shivered. He lifted his eyes toward the two men who had lured Gerald to his death. No rage, no grief, only the distant chill one feels while watching ants scatter across a stone.
“This stroke… Is his funeral gift…”
The sentence ended; the sword aura did not wait. It lunged forward like a tide that had finally found a breach in the seawall. For a single heartbeat, the battlefield locked in place—ash mid-air, blood mid-drip, every scream caught behind its own teeth. Jared felt viscosity where there should have been wind, as though the very seconds had turned to resin around him.
The blade of light seemed unhurried, yet every yard between vanished the moment his focus touched it. Color drained from Morven’s and Malcolm’s faces, leaving both the gray of unlit ashes. Seasoned reflexes tilted their shoulders before thought could catch up; even so, terror showed in the way their elbows locked and in the tightness of their jaws.
“Together! Now! Hold it back!”
Black vapors boiled out of their pores, thick as tar, swirling into a shield three yards deep. Faces twisted inside the dark surface, hundreds of them, mouths open in soundless, eternal anguish. Malcolm’s own panic flared just as hard. He hacked three gouts of scarlet essence into the air, each drop etching itself into a rune before sliding into the gray mist around him. The reincarnation aura blushed dark red, thickening into nine concentric veils that snapped shut before his chest.
Jared recognized the strain in their eyes; they had emptied every secret drawer they owned, gambling everything on these final walls.
