The giant’s eyes bulged, every swallow of wine inside him turning to icy sweat that slicked his skin. He felt the man’s core flare, a desperate swell of raw power trying to tear free.
Jared pressed his palm harder. Heatless darkness slid from his fingertips, slipped under bone and tendon, and clamped every channel shut. Muscles that had just bunched for a counterstrike sagged at once. The captive’s eyes bulged, yet not even a finger twitched.
Jared watched him stare into the gloom where his outline slowly resolved, helpless to do anything but watch. He let the half-light touch his face. He knew the effect—a young, unlined mask, eyes cold enough to scrape frost from stone. The contradiction always unsettled people, and tonight he needed the terror sharp.
“W-Who… Who are you?” The words rasped out of the big man’s throat like rust scraped off iron. Jared gave no answer, letting the question hang, brittle and useless. He leaned in until his breath stirred the man’s matted hair. The alley smelled of damp stone and panic.
“A month ago, Soulfall Slope… A man and a woman died there. Was that your work?”
The big man went rigid, as though the name of the place had turned his spine to glass. Disbelief flickered, drowned immediately by a darker, widening dread. Jared noted the flicker of recognition. It was good; the other party understood exactly why this visit had come. Direct, unavoidable, and, judging by the way sweat sprang through pores, the most horrifying confrontation the brute had ever faced.
The big man tried to shake his head but found even falsehood too heavy. At last, he managed a jerky nod.
“Whose order? Julian’s? Or Quentin’s?” Jared’s voice stayed flat, each name dropped like a stone into still water.
“M-Mr. Fay… He carried the City Lord’s writ… My brothers and I… We only carried it out…” The confession scraped out in uneven gasps, the lack of air already painting his lips a bruised blue.
Jared tightened his fingers, just enough for the man to feel how close the doorway to oblivion now stood. “Did they say anything before the end?”
“N-No… The formation cut all sound… They only glared at Mr. Fay… So angry…” The freezing pressure reached his very soul; panic spilled past cracked composure. “I… I only followed orders, spare—”
A sound like thin ice snapping under a boot whispered between them. Light left the man’s eyes in a single pulse. The chaotic force rushed through marrow and mind alike, scrubbing every trace of life clean.
Jared opened his hand. The heavy body slumped, then sagged into dust, clothing and all, swept apart by the same wind that crawled through the alley. Silence closed over the narrow passage again, as though nothing had ever disturbed its darkness. What others called High Immortal Realm Level Four felt, to Jared, like the simple, dull work of splitting kindling.
He stood where the street dropped into shadow, night folding over his steady face. The first… Done.
He raised his chin toward the city lord mansion, its blazing windows crowning Jade Immortal City with borrowed daylight. Past the glare, his gaze speared the western annex, a tight, stone-walled compound the guards called the Executioners’ Quarters. Fewer lamps burned there, leaving the buildings to exhale a cold, metallic hush.
Lyza’s last report said Miles, elder brother to Garth, held tonight’s watch. Garth’s blood had merely opened the account. Miles would settle it. Neither butcher deserved dawn after what they did to Mr. Morse and his wife.
Jared slipped back into the dark, skating along tiled roofs and narrow alleys so quickly even the air failed to stir. Every muscle answered him the way silk answers wind. The nearer he drew to the mansion’s heart, the thicker the spears of vigilance stood. Uniformed patrol guards in jade-colored robes crisscrossed set routes, blades bouncing against their hips. Hidden meshes of warning sigils stretched beneath the eaves like spider silk. None of it looked perfect to him.
He let his awareness seep out, silent as mercury, sliding between ordinary detection nodes. The chaotic force inside him read energy the way fingers read Braille. Circuitry of power and rule unwound before his mind like glowing threads, knots bright where laws intersected.
The Quarters sat just inside the western wall, buffered from the inner court by layered gardens and side yards—outer ring, but still bristling. A pale blue shield wrapped the compound, equal parts alarm and armor. He paused under the fake boulder thirty paces out, tucked inside its leftover shade. Touching the barrier without study would be noise he could not afford.
He watched its light breathe, expand, contract—slow, steady, predictable. Between breaths, a heartbeat of blindness flickered across the weave. Jared stared at the shimmering shell of force until every muscle around his eyes cramped. Only then did the tiniest quiver appear, a flaw that blinked for less than a hundredth of a heartbeat, invisible to anyone else. He could see it; more importantly, he could reach it.
He let numbers tumble behind his eyelids, matching each pulse of the barrier, counting the rise, the fall, the pause in between. Patience steadied his breathing. Beyond the stone colonnade, night wind combed through the garden, making the leaves whisper. A patrol passed along the outer path; boots thudded, softened, then faded.
Now!
As the energy peaked and began that microscopic tilt toward the trough, Jared moved. No blur followed him, no hiss of air. He thinned into something like smoke, slipped through the vanishing seam, and was simply on the other side. The membrane of light did not even ripple.
Inside the Executioners’ Quarters, the pressure clenched around his ribs, heavier than before. A faint blood-metal smell hung in the air, braided with a killing intent that had been stewing here for years. Buildings squatted in harsh lines, all black stone, brutal and bare, nothing like the cloud-graced halls elsewhere in Jade Immortal Manor.
Jared’s spiritual sense crept forward like cautious antennae. The compound spread wide, dozens of standalone courtyards. Most were dark, only a few spilled light. At the very center, the Duty Room blazed, two guards planted at its door, their auras far from weak.
Guided by the sketchy map and the threads of breath, Jared fixed on a corner court, quiet, out of the way, yet pulsing with the iron surge unique to a High Immortal Realm Level Four body-cultivator. The flavor of that surge matched Garth’s—same blood, but tighter, more savage. It had to be Miles.
