“Can’t find me now?” The taunt drifted from directly behind him, smooth as a needle sliding under skin.
Oronin whirled. The demonic sword stabbed backward, striking nothing but wind. A bar of golden light slammed side-on into his back with skull-rattling force.
Blood burst from his lips, staggered forward, boots scraping shattered stone. Jared was already there. Fists sheathed in molten gold hammered toward every vital point, a tide no shield could stem.
Driven back step by step, Oronin poured demonic aura into a ragged, failing guard. His uncanny spatial sense could no longer tag Jared’s location. Blow after blow landed unchecked.
“I refuse to believe this!” Roaring, Oronin slammed both palms against the earth. “Space Collapse!”
A sphere dozens of yards wide twisted and shrank, grinding cliffs and boulders to powder in its tightening maw.
Gasps rippled through the cultivator ranks, Infinides already tensed to intervene. Yet Jared stood at the epicenter like a man beneath gentle snowfall, utterly unruffled. He raised his right hand; a thin gray sheen unfurled across his palm.
“What power is that?” Aurelius frowned, even his vast experience held no match for that ghost-colored aura.
An instant before the crushing space touched Jared, the gray glow erupted, spreading outward-silent, cold, inexorable.
The buckling battlefield slowed, as though time itself drew a ponderous breath. Shattered rock reversed its ruin, shards re-seating into whole slabs before stunned eyes.
“Time… Time nascence!” Infinides cried out, disbelief blazing in his eyes. “He commands both time and space nascence at once!”
The declaration thundered across the field. Every cultivator stared at the lone figure, awe and dread mingling on their faces.
Never, throughout the recorded annals of level six, had anyone mastered two nascence powers in tandem.
Oronin’s face drained to a sickly white. He staggered backward and, with eyes that suddenly understood fear, hissed, “Impossible… That’s impossible… How could you possibly wield time nascence?”
Jared let the glow in his palm fade, fingers curling until the last mote of radiance winked out. Then started forward, one deliberate step after another. Each footfall sent a muted shudder through the scorched battlefield, as though the earth itself felt his resolve.
“I told you,” said, voice steady yet heavy with unquestionable weight, “Someone like you never required my full strength. Now… This ends…”
The words were still hanging in the air when Jared blurred. A breath later, re-formed in front of Oronin, right arm cocking back, knuckles wrapped in golden spiritual force threaded with a faint, smoky gray. The fist hammered forward, aimed straight at Oronin’s chest.
Oronin tried to slip aside, but every muscle locked. Time itself, bent by Jared’s will, froze in place. “N-No!” Oronin’s scream tore out, hoarse and hopeless.
The punch landed with a dull, thunderous crack. Golden power ripped through Oronin’s meridians, shattering channels that once funneled demonic strength. The gray tide of time nascence seeped deeper, gnawing at his very soul.
A fan of blood sprayed from his lips. His body arced like a severed kite, crashed, and skidded to a halt. The dark miasma that had always cloaked scattered, leaving a spent shell that could not rise again.
For one heartbeat, the battlefield held its breath. Then the cultivators’ ranks erupted, an avalanche of cheers, louder and fiercer than any earlier roar.
“We’ve won! He did it!”
“Mr. Chance felled Oronin, the man who mastered space nascence!” “Time and space together! Mr. Chance is unmatched beneath the heavens!”
Unable to contain herjoy, Yuliana sprinted across the churned ground, eyes shining with unfiltered delight and devotion.
