This was no blunt shattering. Their defenses were being denied the right to exist, their foundations peeled away molecule by molecule until nothing remained to remember them.
“W-What power is this?” the sect master gasped. He felt the bond between his spirit and the array torn apart, strand after strand. The gulf in power was so absolute that tremors of dread clawed straight into his soul.
In barely three heartbeats, the sect defense formation, strong enough to withstand a Heavenly Immortal Level Five assault, popped like a soap bubble in sunlight—silent, total, leaving not even dust to mark its passing.
The backlash hit every disciple linked to the formation at once. Blood fountained from hundreds of mouths, and the collective breath of the sect turned ragged and weak.
Now naked of protection, they stood helpless beneath the undisguised, murderous dragon’s power radiating from hundreds of true Draconians circling overhead. A thunderous roar, ancient, primal, rolled across the mountains.
Coall seized the opening, his bellow shaking loose snow from the peaks.
The midnight-scaled colossus folded his wings and clove the air, the wind itself screaming around his descending bulk. His mountain-sized body crashed into the ornate gate tower that had proclaimed the sect’s glory for ten thousand years.
Stone exploded. Dust boiled upward. What had been a monument to Myriad Arts Sect now sifted through Coall’s talons as powder.
“Kill…” The single icy syllable fell from Jared’s lips like a verdict already signed in blood.
The Draconian army moved at once. They poured through the shattered gateway like a tidal flood, each scaled warrior a cog in a vast, merciless war engine that swallowed the courtyard whole.
Fire Dragons exhaled sheets of living flame that turned pavilions into roaring pyres. Lightning Dragons called spears of skyfire that shredded meditation chambers.
Wind Dragons spun vortices so sharp they sliced apart every desperate formation thrown in their path. Ice Dragons breathed winter itself, flash-freezing entire plazas into glittering graveyards where breath crystallized before it could leave a mouth.
The disciples fought, charms glowing, treasures arcing like comets, yet against draconic strength, hide, and innate sorcery, their arts looked like children’s paper in a hurricane.
The gulf in individual might, compounded by the dragons’ overwhelming intent to slaughter, meant the contest was never a battle at all, only the unfolding of an inevitable culling.
Jared did not descend into the chaos. His gaze speared through smoke and stone, fixing on the solemn hall deep within the sect where a statue of their founder presided.
He stepped forward once. Space folded like silk. All walls, all attacks, all distances ceased to matter, and in the next blink, he stood inside that quiet, vaulted sanctuary.
Inside the main sanctum, dozens of white-haired elders stood shoulder to shoulder. Their robes fluttered in the hush, their breath heavy with power as they locked themselves into an intricate defensive array before the altar.
At the heart of that formation rose a three-story sculpture of warm white quartz. Its features were blurred, yet every curve radiated a teaching aura, bathing the hall in rolling tides of pure, majestic faith-forged soul energy.
“Blasphemous fiend. Do not dare defile our founder!” One elder in royal-violet silk lunged ahead.
Fury tore at his eyes as he hurled a gleaming Eight Trigrams Mirror into the air; its blazing light speared toward Jared like a heavenly verdict.
Jared never even looked. He merely brushed his sleeve.
A sound like worlds colliding, then mirror and master alike shattered beneath an unseen hammer, bursting into points of light that vanished before they touched the floor.
Before the remaining elders could breathe, Jared stretched his hand toward the quartz effigy, fingers closing on empty air.
“Seize!”
An invisible vortex howled out of that single word, swallowing the distance between man and monument. The statue trembled violently; its holy sheen flickered in panicked waves.
The fragment of the Myriad Arts Sect’s founder, together with ten thousand years of accumulated worship, strained to hold its ground, suddenly alive and afraid.
“A stray echo, and you think you can bar my path?”
Power stirred in Jared’s consciousness field. The Golden Tome fluttered open within him, releasing a breath of law so sovereign that the hall seemed to kneel.
Like vassals before a king, the statue’s will broke in an instant. A needle-thin column of milk-white soul energy ripped from the idol’s brow, streamed across the void, and sank into the Bloodsoul Orb now floating above Jared’s palm.
“No!” The surviving elders could only wail as the sect’s symbol, the very fountainhead of their lineage, dimmed to lifeless stone before their eyes.
