Life bled from his stare. Once-lurid emerald pupils dulled to lifeless gray, a lone shred of awareness treading water in an ocean of agony and despair.
Through that crimson haze, Soul Devourer saw the three ashen humanoids form a perfect triangle around him, their synchronized steps as precise as clockwork gears. Both pairs of hands lifted, weaving a seal so ancient and intricate the air itself seemed to pause, studying each stroke in reverence.
The instant the seal locked, the reincarnation aura blanketing the plain roared awake. Endless chalk-colored mist surged from the sky, earth, and empty air, writhing like a billion venomous serpents until it wrapped him layer after suffocating layer, shaping a cocoon wider than a house.
Inside that living chrysalis, Soul Devourer’s final flicker of consciousness felt its own extinction with knife-edge clarity. Flesh liquefied first, the gray mist reducing muscles, organs, and marrow to raw motes of energy before recombining them along unknown blueprints. His demonic soul followed—memories plucked and bottled in unreachable vaults, emotions peeled away and ground to dust, self-awareness eroding like wind-worn stone.
Yet something was spared. Millennia of battle instinct were distilled, hardened, and branded onto the newborn shell. His cultivation, stripped of its devouring stain, remained as pure comprehension of the laws of nature—a blank engine awaiting orders. Even the mechanisms of his Soul-Devouring Technique were rearranged into a silent program, ready to run the moment a master gave the command.
This, as it turned out, was not annihilation. This was reconstruction: erase the being once called the Soul Devourer, salvage the useful parts, then forge them, by some unseen template, into a flawless instrument.
A heartbeat before the last ember of self winked out, Soul Devourer finally understood what was happening. The Reincarnation Realm was no sanctuary of rebirth. It was a factory, an assembly line run by the very laws of reincarnation. Intruders were smelted, their consciousness stripped, value catalogued, and recast as puppets, weapons, or vessels.
And the three wardens towering over him wielded power beyond legend, each likely a True Immortal Realm cultivator or higher, yet no living creature at all. They were flesh-and-mist incarnations of reincarnation itself, extensions of the world’s skeletal frame.
“Jared… Malcolm…”
The echo of that hatred vanished with the mind that birthed it, scattering like dust within the circling gray current. The cocoon tightened, shrinking from a ten-fathom sphere to the height of an ordinary man, then hardened into a blurred human outline that hung motionless in the air.
The three ashen humanoids watched in silence, statues hewn from storm-lit cloud, their stillness deeper than time. The central figure lifted a skeletal hand. At his silent command, the faint outline of a human drifted forward, as though tugged by invisible strings, and settled, weightless, upon his waiting palm.
His other hand rose, fingertip gliding across that phantom skin. Ash-white vapors, as thin as spun silk, seeped into the form, mapping every secret fold, every buried meridian.
“His Top Level High Immortal Realm Level One foundation is perfectly intact. The core of his Soul-Devouring Demonic Flame has been stripped of its devouring trait; it now functions as a pure consumption module. The Earthcore Demonic Flame nucleus remains whole and can fuse with the reincarnation aura.”
From the left came a second voice, identical in pitch yet half a note higher: “Battle-instinct retention, ninety-seven percent. Missing fragments concern berserk patterns triggered by extreme emotion—insignificant.”
Flames fluttered inside the hollow sockets of the warden on the right. “Memories have been sealed in the Reincarnation Pool, Unit 372. Emotion module erased. Residual self-awareness is now zero.”
The leader withdrew his finger. The miniature body spun slowly above his palm, lit by the pallid sky. He delivered the verdict, flat and final. “He meets all the specifications for a Reincarnation Puppet General. Place it in the Reincarnation Pool for three months. When the shell and law module merge, it will be ready for command.”
The left warden turned toward the colossal Door of Reincarnation. A tremor slipped into his monotone. “How fortunate for those insignificant beings outside that door. A High Immortal Realm Reincarnation Puppet General is rare even in the higher worlds.”
After a beat, the right warden added, “The authorized individual is Malcolm Vayne. Contribution has reached the threshold for claiming a Puppet General. According to the rules, one may be claimed.”
“Very well. Commence procedure.”
Speech ended, the trio drifted backward. Their outlines bled into the air like ink in water until the land of ash swallowed them whole. Silence remained—deep, endless, suffocating—draping this realm of reincarnation like a funeral shroud. As it turned out, the so-called land of rebirth did not resurrect the fallen; it manufactured indistinguishable puppets. This was no miracle. It was a fraud made of spell and bone.
