Passing through the darkness, Solanky felt time itself grow slower and heavier than it had been in the world outside — the way summers used to stretch on forever when he was young, each hour bending lazily into the next. Then, all at once, his spiritual body plummeted, plunging into a stretch of dense, lush vegetation far below. His hands moved on instinct, weaving seals he'd practiced a thousand times over, and an invisible barrier bloomed beneath him, catching his fall like an old friend's steady hands.
He looked up. Only darkness answered him. The golden chain at his waist — the one tethering him back to the safe zone, back to his physical body — snapped clean in two. He didn't panic. Somewhere deep down, he'd known it would happen. That chain would only have held him back anyway.
He walked on for several meters before he felt them — sinister auras closing in fast, each one carrying the weight of a peak-stage entity. With his spiritual body now rivaling a powerful transcendent saint emperor, Solanky raised his hand almost lazily, and the spiritual energy around the incoming spirits twisted itself into countless tiny blades, encircling them in an instant.
He clenched his fist. "Blade world's annihilation," he said quietly — the way one might recite something learned so long ago it no longer needed thought behind it.
The blades spun into a blur and collapsed inward, shredding everything caught within their circle. The spirits wailed, cursed, thrashed — but it changed nothing. Their essences were already his. He walked forward and found what looked like an isolated pocket of space, its entrance a cave mouth swallowed in pitch-black shadow.
He stepped through.
On the other side, he emerged into a place that felt like a memory of the desolate god's realm — parallel to it, but not quite the same, the way a dream remembers a place you once loved. Countless transcendent malevolent spirits clashed here against the transcendent entities of the desolate god's realm and its neighbors, locked in a war with no beginning and no end in sight. This hidden battlefield stretched five times wider than the desolate god's realm itself, and the spiritual energy here ran purer, thicker, older than anything he'd felt even in the boundary realm.
Among the fighters, he recognized familiar faces — seniors from his own sect, pouring everything they had into their spiritual bodies, battling spirits that outnumbered them ten to one. One of the malevolent spirits caught his scent and surged toward him, drawing the eyes of the others like moths finding a flame. His seniors, recognizing him, froze in disbelief. They shouted for him to turn back, to fall in with their formation where he'd be safe.
Five spirits bore down on him. Solanky simply formed his seals and walked straight into them.
His seniors thought, for one terrible second, that grief or madness had finally claimed him. But what followed left them speechless — the five spirits fell in the space of a heartbeat, their essences already gathered into his hands before anyone had even seen him move. Both sides of that endless war stood stunned. Those spirits had carried strength comparable to a saint venerable transcendent, and they'd died without ever understanding what killed them.
That was when the real danger noticed him — ten saint emperor-level malevolent spirits, the strongest of the lot, turning as one toward the boy who'd just made a mockery of their kin. Solanky knew better than to underestimate this crowd; they wouldn't be caught the way the others had. So he ran. Not from fear, but from strategy — using the void shadow steps to scatter them, peeling them off one or two at a time. The spirits, watching him flee, laughed among themselves, certain he'd burned through whatever trick he'd used earlier and had nothing left to fight back with. They gave chase, hungry.
He activated his observational technique and felt it hum with a clarity he'd never known before — stronger here, in this strange place, than it had ever been back home, in the physical world or even the boundary realm. Piece by piece, a plan unfolded in his mind: the paths he needed to walk, the traps he needed to lay, all leading toward one goal — killing these saint emperor spirits, absorbing what remained of them, and pushing his spiritual body up to rival the mysterious woman's half step peak-turn strength, or surpass it entirely. He used the terrain like an old companion, setting seals and snares at every turn he passed.
What he didn't know — what he couldn't have known — was that a half step peak-turn malevolent spirit was already watching him from the shadows, patient, waiting for its moment. The same spirit that had wounded the mysterious woman not long before.
The chasing spirits pressed closer, and two of them stumbled straight into his trap — sealed away in an instant, teleported into the storage bag where the essences of the dead already waited. Solanky felt something like quiet joy at that; the others hadn't even noticed they were short two comrades. Then two more fell the same way, vanishing into another trap laid elsewhere along the path.
Down four now, the remaining spirits finally began to understand the shape of the trap closing around them. They slowed. Hesitated. Solanky had been leading them in circles all along, back toward where the chase had first begun.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The half step peak-turn malevolent spirit descended from above, slow and almost admiring, offering something like praise for Solanky's cunning. Solanky had sensed him long before that — his observational technique had marked his presence from the start — but he'd let it go, unbothered, since the spirit hadn't seemed ready to strike. With a spiritual body at the saint emperor level, just a hair below half step peak-turn strength, Solanky feared nothing beneath the true peak-turns. And with the techniques passed down to him, techniques built for peak-turn beings, he could hold his ground against a half step peak-turn spirit even now — his spiritual body three full tiers above what his physical form could achieve.
The spirit lunged, fast as memory. If not for the observational technique flaring to life in that instant, the blow would have landed and left him broken. Instead, Solanky shifted just slightly, let the strike whisper past him, and answered with the finger of terror — his fingertip finding the spirit's back in the same breath it overextended past him.
The moment his finger touched down, something began to unravel inside the spirit — a slow, eroding ache that tore through its spiritual body and stripped away forty percent of its strength in an instant. It had never imagined, not even in its worst nightmare, that a saint emperor's spiritual body could bring it this low, here, in its own domain.
Solanky didn't let up. He surged forward with a second strike; the spirit threw up a barrier in desperation, but strange flames — his flames — burned through it like paper, and the finger of terror found its chest.
He knew what came next, though. A cornered half step peak-turn spirit could detonate its halo, or absorb it whole and rocket up into the true peak-turns level — and if that happened here, in this crowded battlefield full of his sect's transcendent entities, it would be nothing short of a massacre. So he gambled. A plan with maybe a fifteen percent chance of working — force the spirit to reveal its halo, snatch it away, and flee back through the darkness to the safety of the safe zone, where no malevolent spirit could follow without being cast back out.
It was a reckless plan. But reckless had gotten him this far.
First, though, six saint emperor spirits still remained. He called his spear spirit forward and gave the order. Weapons forged by true peak-turn beings grew spirits of their own over time, given enough years, enough battles — and they could act on their own once commanded. The spear vanished and reappeared in the heart of the remaining spirits, and heads began falling before most of them even registered the blade was there, their essences drawn up and absorbed as it moved.
With the field cleared, Solanky turned back toward the wounded half step peak-turn spirit — now down to sixty percent of its strength — and stretched his finger out, aimed for the space between its brows. The spirit's face twisted into something wild, desperate, and its hand shot up toward the crown of its head, dragging the halo into view. Solanky held his breath, waiting for it to fully emerge before he made his move.
But his observational technique caught something wrong. The spirit's strength — which should have kept falling — had ticked back up, from just under sixty to sixty-one percent, and climbing.
He didn't hesitate. He called the spear back and swung it down across the spirit's raised arms, severing them clean. He'd realized, in that instant, that the spirit could absorb the halo's power even before it had fully surfaced — a trick he hadn't accounted for, but one he wasn't about to let finish. Using the void shadow steps, he closed the distance and appeared above the crippled spirit in a blink. With the seals he'd prepared and stored away for exactly this moment, he wrapped the halo inside a spherical seal formation, struck the spirit one final time with the finger of terror, and dove through a portal he felt pulling him back toward the safe zone.
He activated the void escape method with everything he had left, tearing through the darkness until he burst out into the light, five meters clear of the safe zone's edge. Behind him, the half step peak-turn spirit — down to forty percent now, burning what little life energy it had left — chased after him in a frenzy, desperate to reclaim the halo that held its very essence. Without it, it would cease to exist.
It reached for Solanky one last time. But its hand met only an invisible wall, stopping it cold before the barrier hurled it backward into the darkness, its roar of fury swallowed by the black behind it.