This was not the simple slowing of a clock. It was a wicked fusion—Space Prison interwoven with Time Deceleration—forming an absolute cage that mocked every escape he knew.
Within that flawless prison, Jared stood sealed, a living butterfly pinned beneath glass.
Above his head, a colossal hand coalesced from the purest, deepest demon haze. It appeared from nothing, five talons of night reaching down from a void.
The hand blotted out what little light remained. Creases carved across its palm like canyons, nails gleamed like newly forged blades, and in the hollow of its center, countless wraiths writhed and screamed, exhaling rot and ruin.
It began to descend. Even before contact, the pressure made Jared’s bones groan aloud, a high, brittle whine. The spiritual shield hugging his skin flickered like a candle far too close to death’s breath.
“Jared!”
“Mr. Chance!”
Sylvia and Neville felt their hearts split. They could taste the power packed inside that demon palm; it was the sort of strength that would grind a peak-level Heavenly Immortal to dust without effort. If the hand struck, Jared would not leave so much as a memory behind.
“We fight, even if it kills us!” Neville roared, ignoring the impossible gulf between his own cultivation and the Soul Devourer’s abyssal might.
He ignited his Netherlord force. Power erupted from him like a volcano tearing free of earth; demonic markings blazed across his skin, and beads of blood oozed from every pore.
Forming a desperate seal with both hands, he bellowed, “Netherlord World-End Seal!”
A vast, obsidian sigil, reeking of death and annihilation, flowered over his crown. Within its rim, a gate to the underworld cracked open, unleashing the chorus of ten thousand howling ghosts.
This was Nethergate Sect’s last and most forbidden art. One use demanded a price few dared consider, but Neville had already thrown his life upon the scale.
The black sigil charged, unstoppable, and slammed toward the demon hand pressing down on Jared.
On the opposite flank, Sylvia smothered the tremor that rattled her soul and forced the Heaven Gate legacy to its uppermost limit.
She raised her blade vertically before her brow. Resolve flashed across clear eyes—clean, cold, unbreakable.
A surge of sword intent burst from her, vast and pristine, steeped in righteous energy that clawed up through the suffocating demon miasma like dawn through midnight.
“Heaven Gate Sword Art, Judgement!”
Sylvia’s shout rang like shattering crystal. At once, the ice-blue blade in her grasp burst apart, unfurling into a pillar of raw radiance that speared from broken stone all the way into the brooding sky.
Within that blinding shaft shimmered ghostly balconies and roofs, a phantom palace born of divine intent. The beam, driven by the same righteous hunger that carried Neville’s Netherlord World-End Seal, knifed toward the vast black palm smothering the heavens.
The Soul Devourer did not even bother to raise his eyes. He simply pressed down, adding the faintest ounce of pressure to the descending hand.
“An ant trying to topple an elephant. How very foolish…”
Boom!
Neville’s crimson seal met the shadowed palm first. There was no earth-splitting clash—only silence, then ruin.
The seal, forged from Neville’s lifetime of cultivation and the last embers of his Netherlord force, melted like frost under noon sun.
A sickening hiss rose as pure demonic aura corroded, unraveled, and devoured every trace of power. Even the law of death woven into the seal cracked apart and was ground to dust, absorbed whole by that terrible hand.
A wet, brutal cough tore from Neville’s chest. Blood fanned across the air as he was hurled backward, a limp kite cut from its string. He slammed into a distant wall, sank deep into the shattered masonry, and hung there, motionless, his fate unknown.
Sylvia’s sword light, still pulsing with Heaven Gate Sect’s righteous energy, struck the palm a heartbeat later.
Szzt! This time, sound exploded, pure sword light colliding with absolute corruption, spawning jagged sheets of brilliance and raging eddies of energy.
Heaven Gate Sect’s technique did sting the demonic aura. The palm’s descent hit a momentary snag, and several wailing spirits in its center flickered out beneath the cleansing glare.
