Mo Lingtian immediately halted his flight upon hearing the voice. He had been fighting hard not to accept the grim possibility that his companions were already corroded by the sheer lethality of the death zone.
"Your friends are probably already dead," the commander stated bluntly, slowly descending from the sky. As his armored boots landed on the ground, a fraction of the thousands of death soldiers behind him saluted by striking the base of their spears against the earth.
"Is there a way to save them?" Mo Lingtian said, slowly turning around as he hovered in the air.
"I don't know much about this energy either; I only know how to fight," the commander said, clutching his spear with his metal-gloved hands.
"Aren't you a commanding general of this army?" Mo Lingtian asked in frustration.
"Bringing the dead back to life is a taboo forbidden by the Heavenly Dao. It is something only cosmic powerhouses can do," the commanding officer replied, looking up at the foremost triad of the commanding force still hovering in the sky.
"They... they can help me, right?" Mo Lingtian said, also looking up at the triad suspended high above the commanding forces. They had their eyes closed, their arms crossed closely to their chests, and their long red drapes dancing freely in the wind.
"When we first awakened in this maze, we found those three already here. In confusion and anxiety, all seventy of us attacked them at the same time. The one at the center utterly devastated us with just a wave of his hand," the commander said, crossing his arms over his armor-covered chest.
"The least of the commanding forces here has the combat power and law understanding of a sovereign immortal. If there's anyone closest to a cosmic powerhouse in here, it's him, the chief commander," the commander continued, now turning to look at Mo Lingtian, whose eyes were still fixated on the foremost commander amongst the triad.
"But... except the two by his side, he has never spoken a word to anyone. Every communication he makes is done only through those two," he said with a sigh as he rested his hand on Mo Lingtian's shoulder. The other commanders hovering in the air looked down at Mo Lingtian in shock and confusion when they saw nothing happening to him after the commander made physical contact.
"Lingtian," a soft, alluring voice echoed through the death zone.
In a split second, everything within and outside the death zone came to a pause. The time freeze extended far beyond the mountain, spanning across the entire wilderness, covering sects, the Lunar Region, cultivators from all walks of life, rivers, the oceans, the birds, the clouds, even the wind, everything except Mo Lingtian came to an absolute halt when that voice spoke.
"Wh... what is this," Mo Lingtian said as his heart drummed violently in dread and fear. Everything around him had transformed into an eerie, total stillness of monochromatic gray. The entire world had been stripped of its colors and locked in a volumetric stasis.
"Come here!" the soft voice spoke again.
Immediately, Mo Lingtian appeared directly in front of the central figure amongst the triad. The commander slowly took off her golden-forged mask, revealing her face.
"A woman!" Mo Lingtian exclaimed softly.
"Lingtian, I can help you bring back your friends," she said as her long ebony hair rested on her bronze-armored shoulder.
"How did you know my name?" Mo Lingtian asked, forcing his mouth to say something against the oppressive weight of the time freeze.
"There are many things I cannot tell you now," she replied, staring deeply into his dark green-hued pupils.
"But if you can master the death energy here and form a death domain, I promise to bring back your companions to life," she continued, waiting for his reply.
"Okay, I agree with your conditions. How do I master the death energy to form a death domain?" Mo Lingtian said, his heart still palpitating as he watched the colorless, frozen world from the side of his eye. It was terrifying how one person could enact a time pause over the entire realm.
"I... I don't know how. Something in you resonates with the death energy here, and I was hoping you would find a way," she replied, a bit flustered.
Mo Lingtian sighed before descending back to the ground.
"Thank you. I will definitely master the death energy and form a death domain," Mo Lingtian said, bowing down slightly.
"Good. I'll be waiting," she replied. She waved her hand, and the time freeze dissolved instantly as color flooded back into the environment.
Everything and everyone immediately resumed their course, completely oblivious to the cosmic time freeze they had just been under.
"She used that skill again, didn't she?" the commander said when he saw Mo Lingtian, who was beside him a second ago, now descending from the sky where the triad hovered.
"What are you people? Where did you guys come from?" Mo Lingtian asked as he gently landed on the physical ground. The commander sighed, shaking his head slowly in response.
"If he didn't tell you, it's not my place to let you know. Wish you luck in finding your friends," he said before ascending back into the sky. The fraction of the thousands of death soldiers on the ground struck the base of their spears once more as he departed.
"It seems like they don't know she is a woman," Mo Lingtian thought to himself, looking up at the central commander as she secured her golden mask back in place.
"Young man, don't disappoint me. I'll be waiting," the female commander's voice echoed in his mind before she, along with the entire death army and the commanding forces, suddenly disappeared as a thick gray mist swept completely over the area.
Mo Lingtian turned around, peering into the dense darkness of the death zone, trying to figure out where he would start.
He brought out the Devil Converging Seal. The seal floated inches above his palm as he studied his devil energy automatically fusing with the ambient death energy.
"If I control the death energy using the Devil Converging Seal, the process would be too slow. Dispersing all my energy into tiny fragments could take at least five hundred years to complete, and my core might not be able to contain the death energy that'd follow even if I were able to fuse them together," Mo Lingtian said to himself with a sigh, his brow furrowing in deep deliberation.
"What if I use my core as the very foundation of the seal?" Mo Lingtian thought, but just as quickly as the idea surfaced, he mentally debunked it. Using his Devil Core as the foundation of the seal would completely shatter his sea of consciousness, throwing him back to the crippled state he was in when he first crashed into the death zone and that was only if he successfully set it up.
After hours of thinking, analyzing, and frantically flipping through the pages of the forbidden book to find an alternative, he always arrived at the same grim conclusion. There was no other alternative. There was nothing else he could do.
He closed his eyes and forcefully seized the Devil Core within his sea of consciousness, slowly dragging it out of his physical body. The process was excruciating, searing his meridians and agonizing his soul, yet he didn't let out so much as a whisper. Only his face reflected the unfathomable torture, his jaw locked tight as thick veins bulged violently across his flesh.
As soon as the core violently tore its way out of his chest, Mo Lingtian collapsed onto one knee. Blackened blood immediately began seeping from his eyes and the pores of his skin. In the center of his chest, a deep, gaping cavity remained looking exactly like a wall that had been brutally hammered through.