Back in Malevolent Path Hall, three months, a full season for mortals, had passed like a cough in the lifespan of an immortal.
Malcolm sat cross-legged before the Door of Reincarnation, gray tides of aura surging around him. For three whole months, he had not moved from this spot. While cultivating the path of reincarnation, Malcolm listened to the faint heartbeats that pulsed beyond the door. Every ripple meant another shard of Soul Devourer’s divine soul was refined, another step toward completing the puppet.
With each pulse, Malcolm felt his grasp of the Laws of Reincarnation deepen at a terrifying pace. Wisps of law nascence leaking through the seams of the door drifted to him—nutrient richer than any elixir—feeding the reincarnation techniques he had studied for ten millennia.
His cultivation had climbed from High Immortal Realm Level Three early phase to the middle phase, fingers already brushing the next threshold. More crucially, his control over the door itself was growing stronger.
Barely three months earlier, Malcolm had been able to crack the Door of Reincarnation only a sliver wide. Through that fragile opening, he siphoned stray power, shaping low-grade puppets of reincarnation or bargaining captured souls for meager scraps of cosmic law.
Today, everything felt different. It was as if that once-delicate thread linking his soul to the colossal bone door had been tempered by countless exchanges, thickening into a sturdy cable capable of ferrying entire rivers of information. Malcolm’s ashen eyes burned with a fierce, feverish light.
“I’m close… So close…” Malcolm whispered, tapping his skeletal fingers upon the bone floor. “Once that Reincarnation Puppet General is mine, I will use its frame as a conduit. The Reincarnation Realm will open wider, and perhaps, I will finally catch a glimpse of the Lord of Reincarnation’s true visage.”
If that happened, he would finally unearth the door’s origin and the true intentions of the three horrors that brooded behind it.
Suddenly, the chamber shuddered. A booming hum, so deep it rattled bone, erupted from the Door of Reincarnation. Every skull socket set into the door flared, unleashing geysers of gray-white fire that flooded the hall with blinding day.
Runes crawled across the bone surface, twisting and re-knitting themselves while shrieking like metal dragged across glass—the agonized wail of laws being warped and torn. Malcolm sprang upright, ashen eyes locked on the center seam.
Before his stare, a hair-thin fissure surfaced, spreading with frightening ease—an inch, a yard—until an ordinary man could have walked straight through. Yet beyond the gap waited no familiar palace, only a swirling abyss of gray and white that twisted the surrounding space and tugged at the soul like a hungry cyclone. Its silent suction made his heart pound.
From that maelstrom strode a man eight feet tall. He was long-limbed and erect, clad in form-fitting scales the color of dried blood; ghost-pale sigils flowed across each plate like moonlight on water. Six broad flesh wings arched from his back, their edges licking with tangible crimson flame within which faint gray runes flickered. His face, eerily reminiscent of Soul Devourer yet colder, seemed carved by an obsessive artisan.
Where green eyes once burned, there now spun twin vortices of pure gray—pupilless, light-devouring, endless. Even the limb Jared had hewn away had regenerated. The new flesh matched the old, though the scales lay tighter and the talons gleamed sharper. A single ash-white vein ran from shoulder to wrist, part seal, part conduit of dreadful power.
He stepped onto the bone floor; the impact rang out, a dull, final drumbeat. Behind him, the Door of Reincarnation folded shut, the quakes stilled, the flames withdrew, and the hall sank back into uncanny quiet.
The newcomer stood motionless, those cyclone eyes rotating until they fixed on Malcolm. He sank to one knee, head lowered, his voice a hollow mechanism.
“Master…”
A surge of irrepressible ecstasy flashed across Malcolm’s ashen pupils. He advanced with the deliberate solemnity of a priest approaching a forbidden altar. Halting before the kneeling figure, his brittle fingers drifted across the forehead, cheek, and shoulder, lingering with the delicate care of a curator inspecting a masterpiece still wet with varnish.
A tremor slipped into his breath. “Perfect… This is utterly perfect…”
He felt the dormant power caged inside that shell, a force retaining the full foundations of a Top Level High Immortal Level One cultivator. The body, reforged in the Reincarnation Realm, now boasted sinew harder and energy purer than it had ever possessed in life. More astonishing was the seamless bond between master and construct. Like arm to brain, a single thought would send the puppet moving—instant, unquestioning, incapable of doubt or defiance.
It was, without a doubt, a flawless engine of slaughter, near invincible beneath the True Immortal Realm.
“Rise.” Suppressing the thrill storming his chest, Malcolm spoke the word as though it were nothing more than routine.
The puppet obeyed, unfolding to its feet and standing off to the side, lifeless as carved stone. Its spine was ramrod-straight, each joint locked in textbook readiness, gray-white eyes fixed ahead while it awaited the next command.
“From this moment on, you are the Soul-Devouring Puppet… I appoint you commander of every Soul Hunter within Malevolent Path Hall, and you are to patrol the entire level twelve. Within level twelve, all cultivators of Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Eight or higher, whether disciples of sects, powerful lone cultivators, or reclusive old masters whose divine souls meet the required strength, shall all be captured, their divine souls stripped, and sent into the Door of Reincarnation… Should anyone resist, kill without mercy. Refine the flesh into low-grade reincarnation puppets and extract the divine soul twice over.”
The gray vortices in Soul-Devouring Puppet’s eyes accelerated for a heartbeat. “As you command.”
“In addition, if you encounter someone bearing chaotic celestial energy, Golden Dragon Bloodline, and Earthfire True Flame, capture them alive at any cost. Even if the body is ruined, the divine soul must remain intact. That individual is of singular value to me.”
Once more, the puppet answered without hesitation, “Understood.”
