Blaine shouted, “Jared, my young friend, be careful!” He caught the shift first; the puppet’s ash-gray eyes flicked away from Blaine and locked onto him. The black spear shivered in its grip, then darted straight for the center of Jared’s forehead.
No flourish, no tell, only murderous precision—the kind forged for battlefields, not arenas. Jared had spent the last heartbeat begging for that lunge. “Chaos Evolution! Return of the Five Elements!”
The Dragonslayer Sword stayed silent at his hip; instead, his hands folded before his chest, fingers weaving a seal so intricate it burned behind his eyes. Light bubbled up inside him—gold, green, indigo, crimson, ochre—five colors racing along his veins, converging between his palms until they compressed into a single murky bead. He recognized the weight of it at once: the Five-Element Unification Pearl, humming like a newborn world.
The instant the pearl surfaced, the charging spear jerked as though yanked by invisible chains. Its tip hovered three inches from his skin and quivered, unable to close the distance while the reincarnation aura threading the shaft bled into the pearl and vanished.
“Your strength comes from reincarnation,” Jared murmured, eyes fixed on the puppet’s hollow stare. “But even reincarnation was born out of chaos.”
He lifted his right hand, fingers curling as if seizing something no one else could see. The pearl detonated into five torrents of color that snapped around the puppet’s limbs, neck, and midsection, knotting tight like living fetters.
“Chaos… Strip away…”
At the whispered verdict, the reincarnation sigils etched across the puppet’s gray scales flickered violently, as though the carving itself screamed. Then the battlefield forgot to breathe.
A translucent veil unfurled from the center of the puppet’s brow, spilling cold light like a projector coming to life. Within that screen, Jared watched a younger Soul Devourer hurled through a stone gate, assaulted by three gray figures that peeled mind from flesh and rebuilt the remainder as a shell. The cruelty of the process—ripping soul, erasing will, forging a new body—flared in unbearable clarity, every second tattooed into his sight.
“No… Avert your eyes!” Malcolm lunged to block the image, but Gerald’s molten chains coiled around him and dragged him back.
The projection refused to fade. It continued past the forging, showing the puppet submerged in a dark pool among countless others, each one rising and sinking like discarded weapons awaiting deployment. Finally, the helpless construct was handed to Malcolm—no thoughts left, only reflexes honed for slaughter. There had never been immortality here, no resurrection; only theft, dissection, and remaking.
The phantom image snapped dark, leaving only the battlefield roar and the Soul-Devouring Puppet staring into space. Gray-white spirals churned behind its empty pupils, tightening until, for one horrid heartbeat, something like pain twitched across the dead face. Jared felt the hair on his arms prickle; that wasn’t programmed reflex, it was memory, clawing upward, then collapsing as unseen chains yanked it down. A heartbeat only, yet enough to rip the lie wide open.
Across the torn plain, every cultivator who had pledged themselves to the Malevolent Path Hall saw that flicker of agony. Silence fell harder than any war-drum. For a breath and another, nothing moved.
“T-That was the Soul Devourer?!”
“They turned him into a puppet?!”
“So immortality means turning us into that?!”
The first tremor of panic rippled through the ranks like frost racing over steel. Eyes that moments ago burned with zeal now shimmered with doubt, fear, and a dawning, murderous fury.
“He lied to us! The Door of Reincarnation never granted life everlasting! It’s a trap!”
“We were fools, cheated!”
The cry spread like plague fog, swallowing order wherever it touched.
“Hold the line! Steady!” Witherbone Demon bellowed, but the command reached no ears willing to obey. Pockets of soldiers broke away—some fleeing, others whirling to drive their blades into the bewildered Soul Hunters beside them. The coalition’s formation disintegrated into a storm of clashing agendas.
“Now!” Jared’s voice cut through the uproar like a thrown knife. “Counterattack!”
The word echoed back from thousands of throats—raw, hungry, united. A surge of bright resolve washed over Jared’s side, electric and undeniable. Blaine seized the opening. His Three-Headed Flame Lion King roared, hurling three fused beams of crimson, gold, and blue that battered the Soul-Devouring Puppet backward. Without missing a beat, Blaine swung into the cluster of Soul Hunters, his Beastbone Battle Axe carving gore from bone.
Oswald’s sword intent flared, a silent howl that multiplied his plain iron blade into a storm of mirrored edges. Morven stumbled under the thousand-fold assault, retreating step after desperate step.
Aurelian poured everything into the Five-Element Barrier. Five ribbons of light arced overhead, sealing the panicked deserters within a dome that rained relentless elemental fury on their pursuers. Gerald, bleeding from a split pauldron, detonated a scarlet fire-lotus that hurled Malcolm a hundred yards away. Nine lesser dragons of flame spiraled together, forging a single leviathan that tore through the enemy ranks.
Jared tightened his grip, the moment he’d prepared for finally within reach. He left the Soul-Devouring Puppet drifting behind him and pivoted toward the upper sky. Far above, the Vermilion Demon Lord traded brutal blows with the towering Fiend Ghost King, one of the Ninefold Nether Palace’s three dreaded commanders.
The demon lord’s courage held, but the clash of High-Immortal strength had already carved exhaustion into every motion. Jared could taste the moment slipping away.
“Mr. Vermilion, fall back!” Jared’s voice threaded through the chaos.
The demon lord’s shoulders hitched. “Kid, those three ancient wraiths aren’t something you just shoo away…”
“Leave them to me!” The certainty left no room for bargain.
Jared stepped once, and the step folded distance; in the next blink, he stood at the fight’s molten center. Facing him loomed the Fiend Ghost King, a two-story mass of emerald flesh and tusks, brandishing a bone hammer big enough to flatten a hill.
“Hahaha! Another morsel come to die!” The wraith’s laugh rattled like chains in a well. He hurled the whitebone hammer downward, the sky shrieking around the blow.
Jared did not bother to draw his sword; the gesture felt unnecessary. He raised his right hand instead. Five colored filaments flared across the back of it, converging in his palm where the Five-Element Unification Pearl pulsed into being once more. This time the pearl’s heart churned with a thin spiral of ashen haze—something new, something hungry.
Softly, he named the technique: “Return of the Five Elements, second tier!”
He flicked the sphere forward with a motion gentle enough to dismiss dust from his sleeve. The pearl arced in a comet’s curve, painting the air in five muted hues before kissing the descending hammer. No thunder followed; instead, the hammer simply began to unmake itself. Metal, bone, and malice turned liquid-thin, then vapored away faster than snow beneath a forge’s breath.
In the blink it took Jared to exhale, the decay raced up the haft toward the wraith’s colossal arm.
“N-No!” The Fiend Ghost King shrieked, trying to release the handle, but time itself refused to give him that mercy. The pearl clung like a disease of light, advancing along sinew and shadow; wherever it passed, flesh crumbled to gray dust.
Three breaths later, the mighty High-Immortal wraith was gone—body, hatred, even spirit erased without a trace.
Silence rolled across the battlefield. Every gaze snapped toward Jared. In his open palm, the Five-Element Unification Pearl turned in slow, deliberate orbits, ribbons of color layering until they resembled a silent storm.
