“Hmph. I knew your hearts were rotten! You barge in with parlor tricks to spy on me? Today you enter and never leave. The Thousand-Bamboo Soul-Locking Array could use fresh blood to season its birth!”
Dark mist surged around Luther’s frame, ready to lash out. Jared lifted a hand, palm toward Luther, stilling him. His own face remained unruffled as he studied the shifting bamboo and the crawling sigils.
A faint shake of his head dismissed their theatrics. The formation is elegant, wood spirits woven with illusion, confinement, and killing intent…
Whoever laid it knows wood-based arrays, yet forgot that nature flows, it never forces. Push it too hard and the stream chokes.
Jared drifted one step ahead. The sole of his boot landed on the faint junction where several sigils intersected, a spot no broader than a coin.
He set his boot onto the pattern. No boom rolled out of the ground, only the faintest snap, brittle and sharp, like a bead of colored glass giving way.
The teal lines beneath them quivered. In the space of a breath they lost their spine, shriveling into dull sand, the way a snake collapses once the staff pinches out its bones.
The frenzied bamboo froze mid-whip. Phantom leaves that had roared like a green storm sucked backward, tide reversing, until the grove stood plain and still.
Jared stepped again. The air felt viscous, yet it parted around him as though he were sliding through a curtain of water, and an instant later he was breathing on the opposite edge of the grove.
Lyza was planted beside a thick stalk of purple bamboo, fingers still fixed in a spell sign. Shock clung to her face, as if her mind lagged several heartbeats behind her eyes.
That Thousand-Bamboo Soul-Locking Array, her proud masterpiece, the trap that had once butchered cultivators of the High Immortal Realm, had shattered beneath a single casual step. She had not even caught how he did it.
While the astonishment still widened her eyes, Jared’s shape flickered and re-coalesced three feet before her. No crashing aura pressed on her chest, no blinding radiance wrapped his fingers. He simply raised two fingers together, sword-sharp, and aimed for the space between her brows.
At his fingertip the air dimpled inward. A thread of gray chaos pulsed there, swallowing light, exhaling a chill that made even thoughts want to freeze.
The defensive halo around her body looked suddenly flimsy, paper that had wandered into fire. Instinct screamed, if that touch landed, she would not leave a corpse.
Pupils contracted. Blood withdrew from her skin. She had no time to think of dodging, much less raise a guard. His fingers halted a half-inch from her forehead, immovable, deliberate.
Jared lowered his hand, clasped both behind his back, and regarded her with an undisturbed calm. “Shall we talk properly now?”
The bamboo glade held its breath.
The killing array and the illusions that had painted the sky were gone, as if childhood nightmares that fled with daylight.
Only the bead of cold sweat sliding from Lyza’s temple, and the tremor in her still-raised fingers, testified that death had hovered here.
Panther, Monkey, and the rest finally burst past the outer boundary, saw the tableau, and froze like children who had walked into a funeral they did not understand.
Lyza drew a long breath, forcing the storm inside her chest to lie down.
When her gaze found Jared again it carried awe, caution, and an unexpected glimmer of, was that hope?
Anyone who could break the array so lightly and press death so close could never be a lapdog of Jade Immortal Manor. If the manor possessed such a man, their rebellion would already lie in ashes.
“Senior… Your power is astounding. I misjudged you and acted rashly.” Hands folded, she gestured toward the deeper grove, tone now respectfully steady.
“Please, come with me. We should discuss this in detail.” She hesitated, eyes sliding to the stupefied Monkey, something unreadable in her look. “Monkey, you come too. This time you truly have brought us someone extraordinary.”
The name jolted Monkey out of his fog.
Blankness cracked into wild joy, and he stared at Jared with a shining cocktail of reverence and excitement.
Jared inclined his head and trailed after Lyza, the hush of the bamboo closing around him as she led him toward a small lodge woven entirely from living green stalks.
Lyza lifted the reed curtain and Jared ducked in with Luther. Behind them, Monkey crept, so careful it made Jared’s shoulders tighten.
Inside, the place was almost bare, just three bamboo chairs and a writing table, yet the air tingled, richer and cleaner than the forest outside, as though a hidden array were pulling breath straight from heaven.
Lyza set her hand over the nearest chair. “Please, take a seat…”
Jared lowered himself onto the chair, and Lyza took the one opposite, solemn purpose settling over her features.
Jared kept his voice even. “Ms. Lyza, those two cultivators beheaded at Soulfall Slope, what do you know? What crime did they commit, and who swung the blade?”
Lyza let out a tired breath. “Inside Jade Immortal City, even whispering about them is dangerous. We have only scraps of rumor… Officially, Jade Immortal Manor says they ripped open the barrier, deserted level thirteen for the Lower Realm, and broke a celestial decree, so they had to die.”
“They slipped to the Lower Realm on their own?” Jared echoed, the muscles between his brows knotting. “Has that ever been punished this severely before?”
Lyza’s eyes sharpened. “That’s the strange part. Plenty of cultivators have sneaked to the Lower Realm before. They pay a fine, endure a week of confinement, nothing fatal… But to execute them in public, at Soulfall Slope of all places, and use the Soul-Refining Grand Array… That has never happened…”
“We think the pair must have uncovered something the Manor, or the celestials behind it, cannot risk leaking. Killing them, then grinding the souls to ash, was the only way to seal the secret.”
Jared felt his chest drop, as if the floor of the lodge had given way beneath him.
The dread was familiar, confirmation, not surprise, and that made it worse.
Sidney had explored more corners of the cosmos than half the academies combined, and his wife was just as sharp. They hurried back to level thirteen, then surfaced here on the Azure Firmament Immortal Continent. It no longer felt random, it felt like a warning Jared had ignored.
He leaned forward. “Do you know when they were taken? Where? Did they fight back or leave any last words?”
