Jared and Luther launched from the black-ice ramparts of Coldabyss City, twin streaks—one gray, one jet—racing into the vast western sky. Wind clawed at their sleeves, yet neither slowed; the western region waited.
Between the northern lands and that frontier stretched several hundred thousand kilometers of wilderness and fractured kingdoms. Even at their fastest, the journey promised many relentless days in the air.
To avoid celestial patrols or hidden checkpoints, they chose the loneliest path. The Godgrave Mountains straddled the border of the northern and central regions. They followed its shadowed spine westward, trusting solitude over any safe road.
Legends claimed the range was an ancient battlefield where gods and fiends once clashed. Peaks speared the heavens, their tips lost inside a choking sheet of gray-black death mist. Inside that pall, the air thinned and heaven’s laws twisted.
Venomous insects and feral beasts prowled unchecked, while damaged wards still flickered and silent spatial tears gaped, ready to swallow the careless. Those very horrors made the trail perfect for fugitives; pursuers rarely dared venture so deep.
“Jared, crossing the Godgrave will take at least twenty days,” Luther warned, his voice muffled within swirling black haze. “We’ll meet no small number of dangers.” Black miasma curled from Luther’s robes, forming a loose cocoon that forced the death fog to break and slide away before touching him.
Jared answered with action. A faint gray film of chaotic force settled around him; every corrosive wisp that grazed it dissolved, then flowed inward as harmless motes to feed the turmoil within. “It’s fine,” he said, his voice steady. “The hardship will temper my new strength.”
He had reached Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Nine only days before. His meridians still sought balance amid the sudden tidal surge of power. The merciless terrain offered the perfect forge, and he welcomed its hammering heat. They tightened into twin comets and dove headlong into the battered range.
Peril pressed from every side once the jagged peaks closed overhead. Spectral remnants of primeval beasts lurked within the murk; one lunged without warning, jaws of cold flame snapping for their throats. The shale beneath a careless step crumbled, unveiling a rift that drank air and light.
Farther on, a fractured battle formation flickered awake, loosing phantom arrows by the thousands. Worse were moments when color bled away and memory rose instead, spawning grim illusions that clawed at buried fears.
The chaotic force treated fear and matter with identical disdain, tearing every hazard apart the instant it entered reach. The lunging specter unraveled first, its essence drawn into the gray vortex and refined as nourishment for Jared’s widening soul sea. With a casual sweep, he poured chaos into the quivering rift; its edges knit like wet clay, sealing before the mountain could rupture again. Ancient runic pillars eroded to dust under a gray drizzle, arrow storms falling silent inside a single breath.
The heart-devil mirages found no purchase; his will had been tempered through too many near-deaths, and chaos kept each lie at arm’s length. Moreover, illusion itself obeyed him; a stray thought overturned the phantom landscape, scattering it like smoke before a gale.
Luther, however, stumbled more than once. Each time, Jared flashed to his side, severing fangs, sealing cracks, or burning poison before it could steal a heartbeat.
“Mr. Jared, this chaotic force of yours… It’s almost too overbearing,” Luther breathed. Awe lingered in Luther’s eyes as Jared dispersed a spatial storm strong enough to erase a High Immortal Level Five; the impossible sight left him momentarily speechless.
Jared replied with a mild smile and let the comment fade into the fog. Even while traveling, his thoughts probed fresh angles: how else chaos might fold, stretch, or condense into unexpected forms. Since breaching Level Nine, his grasp of the Chaos Grand Path had deepened.
The energy no longer served only to erase; hints of creation thrummed at its core, begging experimentation. He tested that growth by molding chaos into flickers of flame, blades of water, even needles of lightning—each imitation weaker than its pure counterpart yet swift enough to catch an unprepared foe.
They pressed westward, sleeping in stone hollows by day and racing beneath moonlight, determined to leave no trail for patrols to follow.
***
Ten days bled away. By then, they had carved a path into the range’s gut, far beyond any whisper of civilization. The death mist now thickened until it almost clotted; visibility shrank to no more than a hundred feet. Rot tainted every breath, and even time seemed to slog, seconds dragging like feet through mud.
“Mr. Jared, there’s an unusual energy pulse ahead,” Luther said, halting mid-air, his gaze sharpening toward the deeper fog. He stopped without warning.
Ahead, the black fog writhed as if something under the surface had just drawn breath, and his gaze tightened on that bruised-gray knot of vapor. Loose gravel clicked once beneath his boots and then went still, the rest of his body locked in a hunter’s crouch.
Jared felt the disturbance at the same instant. An icy, hollow energy seeped out of the fog, colder than the mountain’s own death miasma, yet carrying the same ancestral scent; its touch crawled across his skin like frost with a pulse.
“Let’s take a look…” Confidence edged Jared’s voice; he shot forward first, his aura trimmed razor-thin, his figure cutting a gray streak straight toward the source of the pulse.
They skimmed over a low ridge made entirely of sun-bleached bones. When the ridge dropped away, the view in front of them opened like a curtain yanked aside. Here the fog parted, exposing a circular clearing roughly 100 feet across; the pale ground inside was completely bare and silent. In the dead center stood a ruined black stone hall, its silhouette harsh against the pale haze.
The building’s style was ancient and brutal; weather-pitted walls bore carvings of howling ghosts and twisted fiends. Many sections had collapsed, yet the remaining lines still hinted at former grandeur.
The same frigid death energy now poured from somewhere deep inside the hall, steady as a heart that had forgotten how to stop.
“This looks like… an ancient Ghost Clan sacrificial temple?” Luther’s eyes sparked. “I’ve seen drawings in clan records. The Ghost Clan spanned the heavens in the old era and raised countless temples to honor the Sovereign of the Netherworld.” His breath caught. “Never thought ruins like that would still stand out here…”
Jared studied the hall, a faint crease forming between his brows. “Stay alert… Something’s inside.” He sensed a presence lurking in the depths, at least High Immortal Realm Level Four, its aura tangled with rage and chaos like barbed wire.
Both men muted their own energy and drifted through the shattered doorway without a sound. The interior stretched far wider than the exterior shell allowed, proof of spatial expansion magic woven into the stones.
Thick dust and splintered bone covered the floor; half-peeled murals lingered on cracked walls, still showing worship, warfare, and cultivation scenes of the Ghost Clan. Deeper in, a ten-foot-tall statue reared above everything else, ferocity frozen in stone.
The idol possessed three heads and six arms, each hand gripping a different weapon: blade, sword, halberd, shield, chain, and seal—the formal image of the Sovereign of the Netherworld revered by the Ghost Clan. But time had butchered it; two of the heads were missing and four arms had snapped away, leaving jagged stumps.
At the statue’s feet crouched a living creature, hulking and tense. The beast resembled an enormous lizard over five feet long. Dark-red scales armored its body, three serried rows of bone spines rose along its back, and a bone-hammer tail lay coiled with malignant promise.
Its head looked almost draconic, but not quite; acidic drool pattered from its jaws, boring fresh pits into the stone floor. A heavier death aura than the mountain’s own swirled around the creature, soaked with resentful wills—same origin, yet refined to a purer, more violent pitch.
