“It was them… Really them…” The words cracked as they escaped him, half whisper, half growl. His hand shook around the silk; nails bit deep enough into his palm to draw blood he barely felt. He had braced for confirmation, yet when truth struck, it carved straight through bone, an ice pick of grief twinned with a firestorm of rage.
Mr. Morse, the scholar Jared had dragged from the shattered steps of the Celestial Stairway, the polite sage who reappeared at level twelve and pointed him toward the Ancient Energy Refiners’ Abode, had seemed untouchable.
And Sidney’s wife, barely reborn, her eyes still learning sunlight, had clung to tomorrow like a child to a lantern. Yet here, in the reeking throat of Soulfall Slope, they had been.
“Where are their bodies? Why is there nothing left?” After scouring the perimeter, Luther straightened, confusion darkening his eyes.
Even decapitation should have left torsos, he muttered, brow furrowed. Even if someone cleaned up, they would have missed at least a smear.
Jared forced every breath to level out, then fanned his awareness over Soulfall Slope inch by inch.
Near the foot of one pillar, a pinprick wobble in space shivered against his senses. Thick death aura and rancid resentment lay over it like tar; without his chaotic force, he would have missed the pulse entirely.
“There’s something underneath…” He shaped two fingers into a blade, swirling chaotic force answered, sharp and quiet, and he traced a single line across the base.
A wet, tearing hiss split the stillness. The basalt shell parted, revealing a narrow throat of darkness angling down, barely wide enough for one body at a time.
From that wound gushed denser death and resentment energy, braided with a strange spatial pressure that made his skin crawl toward the cut.
A ragged opening gaped where the hillside should have been smooth. Faint glimmers of sigil-dust still clung to the rim, proof of the concealment and sealing art he had just torn apart with raw chaotic force. Any ordinary cultivator would have walked past without sensing a thing.
“Is that… A tunnel down, or the mouth of some pocket realm?” Luther’s whisper scraped the back of his neck.
The man’s uncertainty fluttered in the stale air like a moth looking for flame.
Jared drew one steadying breath; metallic rot filled his lungs and dared him to hesitate. He ignored it and sprang into the dark.
Boots slapped stone a heartbeat later; Luther had jumped too.
The passage angled downward instead of dropping straight. Its cramped walls were glass-smooth, as though some patient tide had licked every edge away for centuries.
With every step the air thickened, stale death first, then the sharper tang of resentful breath he could almost taste. Under it, a pulse of warped space throbbed against his ribs, as if directions themselves were flexing.
Nearly three hundred feet in, the claustrophobia ripped open into cavernous breadth.
At the heart of the chamber squatted a circular pool as wide as a small courtyard. The liquid inside was thick as clotting syrup, a dark wine that kept belching bubbles.
Each pop sprayed the stench of iron and something more feral, screaming spite that tried to crawl up his nostrils.
Above the blood, countless pinpricks of warped gray-white light drifted like tattered fireflies. They struggled without sound, shards of souls denied any door forward, their misery radiating like cold fire.
Higher still, embedded in the stone dome, a fist-sized rhombus of the same pallid light spun slowly. It breathed the exact law of rebirth Luther once wielded, only purer, domineering.
Recognition pricked behind his eyes.
Crystal, pool, the killing topography of Soulfall Slope, together they sang one purpose, grind every loose spirit that died here until nothing but obedient ash remained.
His gaze locked on the rim of the pool and refused to budge. Scraps of clothing and splintered belongings lay there, hopeless flotsam on a red shore.
A broken long sword-plain, old, unmistakable, caught the dim glow.
Mr. Morse never let that blade leave his side…
Beside it rested a smooth jade hairpin still breathing the faint warmth of wood-aligned qi, it belonged to Sidney’s wife.
Other shredded tokens, all carrying the couple’s scent, sprinkled the stone like breadcrumbs that ended in blood.
No bodies waited. Only the silence where bodies should have been.
“Their remains were… Melted in the pool?” Luther’s voice cracked dry.
Jared drifted toward the rim.
Each footfall thickened the killing heat in his chest until chaotic aura roared out, devouring every thread of death-fog that dared approach. He knelt and lifted the severed sword as gently as if it were a living limb.
A ghost-thin imprint flared along the steel, Sidney’s final will. Rage, defiance, terror for the woman he loved, then abrupt blankness.
A raw howl tore from his throat, the sound of a beast that had just found its pack butchered.
Sidney felt his fury before he saw it. It broke open like a furnace door, blasting heat made of rage, grief, and savage self-reproach straight into Luther’s bones.
Jared’s eyes flashed blood-red. A chaotic aura boiled off him, gray eddies clawing across the cavern and whipping the blood pool into a violent, sloshing tide.
“Celestials… Jade Immortal Manor… Good…” he growled, each word trembling with the promise of something awful, “Very good…”
The words left his lips like shards of black ice, too cold to melt even in the fevered air.
“Mr. Morse… If I let this debt stand, I deserve no breath,” he said, his tone settling into lethal calm. “I will scour Jade Immortal City, no beast, no child, no stone left alive. Every celestial lackey on Azure Firmament will die beside them.”
A column of killing intent burst upward, punched through the ceiling, and spun above Soulfall Slope as a funnel of ashen wind.
Luther shrank back, the cavern light strobing between gray and red. He had followed Jared through wars and graves, yet he had never seen the man lose the reins like this.
The pressure rolling off him was so vicious that even Luther, a High Immortal Realm Level Five ghost, felt his spectral heart stumble.
If Jared unleashed that storm, Azure Firmament would drown in blood, and this was only the opening rumble.
Jared straightened slowly, the motion controlled again, and lifted Sidney’s keepsakes as though they might break from a breath.
The crimson shimmer faded from his eyes, but what remained there was worse, rage cooled into something deliberate, bottomless.
“Luther…” he spoke the name as though it were a lever he meant to pull.
“Here,” Luther snapped, spine rigid before he realized he had moved.
“Find out,” Jared said, each syllable landing like a hammer. “Use every contact you own. I want the name of the Jade Immortal Manor butcher who swung the blade, and the coward who ordered it. Drag the celestials into the light with them, every last accomplice.”
“Understood…” Luther bowed, knowing the mountain before him was nothing compared with the volcano at his back.
“This cursed passage stays buried,” he muttered, glaring at the hidden tunnel.
The look he threw at the stone throat was the same that had just promised genocide.
“Mr. Chance, disturbing it now will draw every nose in the city,” Luther cautioned. “If we want the names of the executed and the one who signed the order, we’ll need allies. Let the passage rest until we tie more hands to our side.”
He forced a slow breath through clenched teeth. The roar in his skull ebbed, inch by stubborn inch, until edges sharpened—damp alley stones, Luther’s steady outline, the pallid sky trembling above them.
Rage alone would change nothing, he could feel that truth settle.
Jared angled toward Luther, voice low enough that the wind had to lean in. “What kind of faction are we supposed to reach?”
Luther answered without hesitation, the words grinding like flint behind his teeth. “Look at the Azure Firmament immortal Continent now, every city afraid of its own shadow. Someone, somewhere, has to be pushing back in the dark… If we find that resistance and fold ourselves into their network, we can gather intelligence for half the cost and twice the speed.”
He found himself nodding before the sentence had finished shaping itself.
“Fair… Then we track down the kid who peddles rumors.”
Jared had dealt with hidden circles before, none opened their doors without a trusted broker to vouch. So, the chatter-monger would have to do.
Only a fool tried to scam the Knowledge Pavilion, and that boy had done it with a grin, exactly the kind of recklessness they could use.
