“You won’t get away!” The elder’s grin stretched. “Within the Sacred Mountain the array senses every step; run where you like, it finds you!”
Jared halted mid-air. He pivoted and faced the advancing handprint squarely. “Ha! Who said I was running?”
Placing the Dragonslayer Sword upright before his chest, he lowered his lids until the world vanished behind them. Inside his core, the Chaos Genesis Seed spun like a hurricane. Golden Dragon Bloodline boiled, and nether aura surged in chilly currents.
Under the Twin Essence Convergence Art, the three forces began to overlap, pressing into one molten knot of power. Chaos formed the base, Golden Dragon blazed as the yang, and nether aura chilled as the yin.
Triune Convergence—three becoming one to shatter all techniques.
“Slash…” Jared’s eyes opened, and he swung. No dazzling fan of blades, no earth-splitting momentum. Only a plain gray sword gleam, thin as a strand of hair, slipped forward without a sound toward the blood palm.
At first the elder dismissed it, but the next heartbeat wiped the smirk from his face. The instant gray touched crimson, the massive palm began to melt. It did not crack; it dissolved like frost under a noon sun, vanishing grain by grain.
The trapped wraiths shrieked, curling into trails of smoke that vanished on the wind. The gray line kept going, drilled straight through the collapsing imprint, and arrowed for the elder’s heart.
“I-Impossible!” Panic shattered his composure, and he hurled every protective treasure he owned into the air. A gold shield, a jade talisman, a blood banner—seven, eight top-tier artifacts layered themselves between him and the incoming line. The gray gleam treated them as empty air, punching clean through barrier after barrier.
Hiss!
The beam pierced the final screen and slid into the elder’s chest. His body went rigid, and he lowered his gaze to the point of impact. No wound, no blood—yet his life force spilled away as though a plug had been pulled.
“W-What… power… is this…” The words crumbled with him; his flesh mottled to gray dust and drifted apart on a silent breeze.
One strike had slain a top-level Level Nine High Immortal. Granted, the elder borrowed that realm through outside force, but Jared’s result remained a thunderbolt for anyone watching. Jared drew back the Dragonslayer Sword; a faint pallor crept over his cheeks. That single cut had burned through roughly seventy percent of his reserves.
Heat flooded Jared’s veins. Muscles cramped; bone marrow felt scraped raw. Triune Convergence always came with that razor-edge price, and the ache now crawled under every breath. He refused to linger. The bitter recovery pills clicked against his teeth; he swallowed them dry, felt a cool surge roll down his limbs, then kicked off the rock and streaked toward the summit.
Wind howled past stone. Not a single celestial moved to bar his path; only the red chains of energy flickered beside him, silent witnesses. Moments later he broke onto the summit ledge, boots skidding across jagged rock. An immense stone platform stretched before him. At its heart, eight blood-soaked altars stood in an octagonal ring, each one pulsing like an exposed wound.
Every altar towered about one hundred eight feet high. Intricate sigils cut the faces, and fresh crimson threaded through the grooves, filling the night air with metallic stink. A lattice of scarlet force linked altar to altar, weaving a single array. Suspended at the exact center hovered a massive heart the color of wine, pumping with deliberate rhythm.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Each dull beat made the entire Sacred Mountain shudder under his boots. Countless capillaries of blood-light streaked in from every direction and vanished into the waiting heart. The more it drank, the harder it hammered; waves of baleful aura rolled outward, thick enough to raise gooseflesh on his arms.
Jared could feel something gestating inside that muscle: Lord Mournwright’s lingering will, a nascent corpse-spawn eager for slaughter. If the heart reached full term, the corpse would rouse, shackled to the Celestial Palace as their perfect butcher. It had to die now.
His gaze swept the eight altars, then fixed on three clustered near the eastern arc. The golden-crowned cultivator had sworn that crushing those three at once would snap the Grand Blood Sacrifice Array. But each altar sat inside its own ward, threads tied to the rest; strike one and the other seven would lash back like linked traps. He would have to force it anyway. He chose the three nearest, drew a steady breath, and gathered strength for a single, tri-point strike.
But a familiar voice broke across the platform. “Jared, you actually came!”
Jared turned. Lucian stepped out from behind one altar, Lyria gliding beside him. Not just those two—figures materialized on every flank, their silhouettes thickening in the bleeding light. Over thirty celestials closed in; the weakest carried the weight of High Immortal Realm Level Six, while several gray-haired elders radiated Level Nine oppression.
They had been waiting; the trap was already sprung!
“I didn’t think you’d gamble with the Fourteenth Firmament,” Lucian said. His gaze flickered, equal parts shame and heat. “Failing to you back on level thirteen scarred me. Today I erase that scar myself.”
Lyria’s voice rang out cold. “You ruined the Celestial Palace’s grand design and butchered our people. You aren’t leaving alive!”
Jared let his eyes drift over them, his expression untroubled. “All of you think that’s enough?”
“Arrogant whelp!” One Level Nine elder snorted. “Your talent is rare, but this is the Sacred Mountain. The Grand Blood Sacrifice Array doubles our might. Alone, how will you stand?!”
Another elder added, “The Hall Master prizes genius. Yield your Golden Dragon Bloodline and the secret of your chaotic force, and live. Refuse, and die here!”
Jared laughed softly. “Recruit me… so you can hollow me out later, the way you tried with Lord Mournwright?”
The elders’ faces darkened. “Stubborn fool! Die!” More than thirty celestials lunged at once.
