Malcolm and Morven’s faces locked, shock sliding into raw terror while their eyes traced the fading after-image Jared’s casual stroke had left in the dust. They finally understood what Jared had meant when he said the fight could end whenever he wished. To them, it was no boast; it was a plain statement of physics.
Jared tipped his chin toward the pair. “Your turn…” The words sounded calm, yet the instant they landed, Malcolm and Morven shrank as though an ice cellar had opened beneath their feet.
“Impossible! Absolutely impossible!” Morven screamed, voice shredding itself against the cavern walls. Spittle flew as he raged, “Tricks, sorcery, smoke! You‘re faking it! Die for me!”
Sanity snapped, wounds forgotten; he rammed the Ninefold Nether Demonic Technique to its ragged limit. “Nether Styx—Ten Thousand Ghosts Devour the Heavens!” he roared, every syllable cracking the dark. Thunder rolled in answer. Behind him, a curtain of pitch-black world unfurled; serrated ghost shapes surged out, howling as they dived for Jared. Their hollow mouths promised rot for spirit and marrow; whatever price Morven paid, he no longer cared.
Across the ruinous wind, Malcolm felt the same blade at his throat; hesitation vanished. “Reincarnation Annihilation! Myriad Arts Return to the Void!” he intoned, dread and devotion tangled. The phantom Door of Reincarnation behind him bucked like a chained beast and vomited rivers of chalk-pale reincarnation aura. The vapors clenched before his chest, swelling into a cyclopean gray eye. When the lid snapped open, a beam rich with oblivion tore outward and even the air began to decay.
Two High Immortal Realm titans, corners pressed, hurled their defining attacks as one, dwarfing what the three Reincarnation Guardians managed together. The summit buckled beneath Jared’s boots. Above, sky and sun smeared into one bruised stain, as though daylight had been scraped away. Reincarnation Peak shivered like an animal smelling the axe. The roar of colliding laws hammered his eardrums, daring him to blink.
Jared let the challenge settle, the moment he dropped restraint and reached for the whole of his power. He slid one foot forward, nothing more than the length of a single stride. The mountain answered with a deep, metallic hum. From that quiet step, an ashen radius bloomed outward, one hundred yards across before the echo faded. Inside the ring, rivers of unborn elements curled around one another—fire, water, earth, wind—spinning, devouring, birthing in endless succession.
A pale-gold dragon silhouette coiled through the haze, singing a soundless hymn. This was no simple barrier; it was a seedling cosmos, a Chaos World still wet with first light. The forms from the Primal Unity Refinement Tome drifted across his memory: here, now, in living color. Chaotic Domain, first pattern—barely an embryo, yet its nature already towered beyond ordinary celestial fields.
Spectral wraiths rushed the boundary, eager as moths to flame. The newborn currents shredded them, drank them, and grew on their stolen essence. The pillar of reincarnation light speared in next, rippling the shell for a heartbeat. Five-element cycles dismantled it, Earthfire True Flame scoured it clean, and chaotic aura swallowed the remainder.
“My turn…”
The words drifted through the domain as steady as slow rain, untouched by strain. Jared raised his right hand, pressed index and middle fingers together, and leveled them toward Morven and Malcolm.
“Chaos Origin… Unification Finger…”
At his fingertip, a pinprick of gray condensed so dense it seemed to swallow its own edges. In that mote lurked the strength to birth worlds and the appetite to end them. The gray left him without even a sigh. Where it drifted, space blinked out, revealing bottomless dark beyond geometry. Time buckled around it; light sloughed off; the very laws quivered like glass too close to flame.
Across the gap, Morven’s and Malcolm’s pupils tightened to pinpoints, their auras fluttering with mortal dread. They hurled shields in layered panic—Ninefold Nether Demon Shield, Reincarnation Barrier, soul-bound relics—each layer igniting the next in frantic bloom. Jared watched, certain the gesture would matter as little as mist to lightning.
Something broke the silence: a weightless pop, as though the air itself had snapped. Before the echo settled, a thread of ashen light speared forward. Wards, walls, everything meant to stop power, parted the way butter parts for a hot knife. Jared‘s gaze tracked the beam as it bored through Morven’s brow, slipped out the back of his skull, then punched straight into Malcolm’s chest. Ashen light blossomed behind Malcolm like a second heart—hungry, merciless.
Everything halted. Dust hung mid-fall, stray sparks froze in midair; Jared‘s own heartbeat dragged into syrup. Opposite him, Morven’s features—madness, fury, raw terror—stiffened into a grotesque mask. The old demon lowered his gaze, searching for a wound over his heart and finding none. Then his eyes crossed toward the bridge of his nose, where a pin-prick of gray bloomed and began to crawl outward. Where the dot passed, flesh unraveled into smoke, soul-light guttered, and power fell away like wet plaster.
Jared felt the void behind that color, an undoing older than creation itself. “N-Not… Possible…” Morven forced the syllables through cracking teeth. From his crown downward, he sifted apart, inch by inch, into lazy swirls of soot. The terror Jared had known since childhood, the Ancestor of the Ninefold Nether Palace, simply wasn’t there anymore.
Malcolm, still pinned on the far side, fared even worse. Jared could taste the metallic panic rolling off him. When the gray lance bored through his chest, Malcolm’s reincarnation mantra had leapt alive on reflex, circles of pale script skittering beneath his skin. That defense met the chaotic force head-on; the two magics chewed each other and everything nearby.
“Argh!” Malcolm ballooned, ribs groaning, skin straining like overfilled leather. Streams of pallid vapor burst from his nostrils and ears along with black-red pulp. Jared saw the man’s reincarnation core buckle, splinter, and finally cave. He stepped once—space folded—and he stood breath-close to the dying man.
The swirling boundary of his Chaotic Domain recoiled into his body like a tide obeying the moon. He lowered an open palm, not quite touching the ruptured sternum. A gentler strand of chaos flowed out, stitching fractures long enough to hold the pieces together.
“The Flaxseed clan’s souls, do you still have them?” Jared locked eyes with him, voice colder than permafrost.
Malcolm’s cultivation lay in ruins; life seeped out of him like water from cracked stone. “The Flaxseed clan? Hahaha…” Malcolm’s laugh scraped like broken glass. “Those insects’ souls were taken by the Supreme Master long ago. You want them? Step through the Door of Reincarnation. But once you pass inside, you’ll join them… Become another puppet… Just like them… Hahaha!”
The laugh cut off mid-breath; his head lolled, eyes glazing before Jared.
