Far from war-torn lands, deep inside a hidden valley where spirit-mist draped emerald cliffs, silence reigned.
Jared Chance sat cross-legged beside a luminous spring, faint ripples casting silver rings across the water. A veil of soft chaotic radiance circled him, and beneath that light coiled a slumbering dragon’s aura, subtle yet sovereign.
High above, the rainbow celestial clouds summoned by his breakthrough had already scattered. The valley, once shaken by celestial phenomena, now lay calm, though within his body the storm had only begun.
The Heavenly Immortal Realm was not a mere increase of strength; it was an elevation of existence itself. Life-essence refined to near divinity, senses tuned to the whisper of cosmic law.
Within his elixir field, a sea of chaotic immortal force expanded endlessly. At its heart, the Chaotic Fire Lotus intertwined with a filament of draconic energy, weaving a core of power both unbreakable and inexhaustible. Beneath the silent drizzle of starlight, the change had been absolute.
Jared’s spirit and flesh had marched together through the crucible of a breakthrough, every cell and every stray thought purified, compressed, then reborn.
His spiritual sense now could scour thousands of miles, and the body that contained it felt as unyielding as any high-grade defensive artifact—metal and miracle interlaced.
For a heartbeat, he floated inside that newborn stillness, mapping every hidden filament of Heavenly Law that now answered to him. Then, a tremor, thin yet insistent, shivered across the valley floor.
Somewhere beyond the cliffs, the concealment wards he had tossed up in passing began to ripple, not with malice but with a cautious, measured probing, as though someone were knocking on a door they were terrified to break.
A summons murmured beneath the vibration.
Jared frowned, waking up from his meditation. His golden slit pupils flashed into existence, then folded back into ordinary gray as he let his mind surge outward like a tide.
What he found waiting at the entrance stole a rare flicker of surprise from him.
Standing just inside the moon-bleached mist was a figure he had never expected to see on the Tenth Heaven: the Vermilion Demon Lord!
The man’s dark-red robe, all embroidered storm-cloud sigils, hung looser than Jared remembered.
Exhaustion and an ancient sorrow pressed around his eyes, and yet he made no attempt to force the barrier. Instead, he bled tiny threads of demonic essence against the array, testing, pleading, anything but hostile.
“Sir?” Jared’s voice slipped through the formation like wind through reeds, puzzled and calm. “What brings you to Level Ten?”
He lifted a palm, dispersed the seal at the mouth of the gorge, and a clear path yawned open.
Relief sparked in the Demon Lord’s eyes. He hurried down the stone corridor, saw Jared seated by the spring, and quickened again, boots scraping rock in his haste.
“Jared, it is you!”
Emotion cracked the man’s usually steady baritone; gratitude, exhaustion, and something like hope bled together. “I have searched these endless skies for days, chasing only the faint scent of your dragon’s power and the scars of an old battle. At last, I found this valley!”
Jared rose, gestured toward a flat slab of green stone, and pressed a cup of spirit-spring tea into the Demon Lord’s hands. Steam drifted between them, gentle and bright.
“You should be guarding the woman you love on Level Nine,” he said softly. “Crossing the realm wall is no small gamble. What has happened?”
The question was genuine; Jared knew the Vermilion Demon Lord’s roots ran deep in that lower sky, roots twined around the crystal coffin of a woman whose resurrection he awaited as one awaits dawn.
The cup trembled in the visitor’s grip. He inhaled once, ragged, eyes shining with pain and desperate appeal.
“I come to beg…” he managed, voice roughening. “I have nowhere else. It is for Selene… For Selene alone.”
“Selene?” Jared’s breath caught. The name rang inside him like a bell.
“Yes,” the Demon Lord whispered.
Grief deepened the lines on his face. “I believed her body would rest untouched until the faint chance of revival arrived… But these past days a quiet decay has crept in—minute, almost invisible, yet I can feel life fleeing and death seeping through every pore.”
His fingers clamped around Jared’s arm with startling strength. “You know better than any: the body is the house of the soul, the root of rebirth. If it rots, the future perishes with it…”
“If the flesh continues to rot and the soul is gone for good, then the very last thread of revival will wither away, perhaps forever… I… I refuse to watch that happen to Selene…” Vermilion’s voice broke, the words scraping out of him like gravel.
Breath caught in his throat, ragged and thin, as though sorrow itself were throttling the life from his lungs. He pictured the woman he loved, her body once radiant yet now wasting in a crystal coffin—flesh turning to dust, hope turning to emptiness. The image clawed at him until his knees all but buckled.
Jared’s jaw tightened, the weight of Vermilion’s terror settling across his own shoulders.
He knew little of necromantic resurrection, yet even he understood that without an intact body, no miracle could bridge death’s abyss. For a man of Vermilion’s stature to unravel like this, the situation had to be desperate indeed.
“Tell me what you need,” Jared said, voice low but steady. “Is there some relic, some method that can preserve her body until you find a way to bring her back?”
Hope flickered in Vermilion’s crimson eyes as he gave a fervent nod. “I scoured every ancient record I could lay my hands on and found a single prescription: the Ninefold Body Refinement Pill… It will not raise the dead, but it locks a body’s vitality in place, seals away decay, and even feeds the flesh a trace of nourishment…”
“It buys the time we so desperately lack. Yet every ingredient is a rarity beyond measure. Three chief components cannot be found on this plane at all. They lie in realms above… Level Ten, Eleven, or even Twelve…”
Vermilion drew a weather-worn device from his robe and pressed it into Jared’s palm. “Everything is listed here, especially the core trio: the Thousand-Year Frostblood Lotus of Level Ten, Jadeheart Marrow from Level Eleven, and the Nine Orifice Divine Soul Herb from Level Twelve. Omit even one, and the pill is worthless.”
Spiritual sense poured from Jared and into the device. Schematics of the pill bloomed in his mind—properties, habitats, planetary alignments. Each herb read like a distant legend.
Those three primary medicines only gestated in brutal, near-mythic locales and demanded impossibly strict conditions before ripening.
