The journey back to the Blood Lotus Sect was different. Dver wasn't just walking; he was containing.
Inside his core, the lifeforce of three high-level Enforcers was swirling like a trapped hurricane. The Void had digested their flesh, but the raw, spiritual energy was too much for a Rank-98,412 Outer Court vessel to hold quietly. Every step Dver took left a faint, frost-bitten footprint in the mud. His skin felt unnaturally cold, his pulse slow and heavy as a mountain's heartbeat.
"You are overflowing, Vessel," the Void God rumbled, its voice vibrating in Dver's very marrow. "If you do not break the seal, your stolen heart will burst. Give in. Let the world see what you are."
"Not yet," Dver whispered, his jaw locked. "If I break through now, the tremors will reach the Inner Peaks. I need to be inside the Sect's defensive array. The ambient Qi there will mask the surge."
He arrived at the Sect gates just as the morning mist began to lift. He looked like a wreck—his robes were torn by briars, his face was smeared with dried mud, and he walked with a pronounced, pathetic limp.
As he crossed the threshold into the Outer Court, he didn't head for his shack. He headed straight for the Discipline Hall.
He didn't have to wait long. Deacon Shen was standing on the stone balcony, his eyes bloodshot, staring toward the Blackwood Forest. He had been waiting all night for his men to return with the broken bodies of Dver's family.
Dver stumbled into the courtyard, falling to his knees with a wet thud.
"Deacon... Deacon Shen!" Dver wailed, his voice cracking with a pitch-perfect imitation of exhausted relief.
Shen's head snapped down. His eyes widened as he saw the boy. "You... how are you here?"
Dver crawled forward, his fingers clawing at the dirt. "I... I heard! The rumors in the barracks! They said you sent men to Ash-Ridge to... to bring my parents for a visit!" Dver looked up, his eyes wide, watery, and filled with a nauseatingly fake hope. "Are they here yet, Senior? I haven't seen them in two years! Did the Enforcers find them? Is my mother okay?"
The silence that followed was deafening.
Shen's face went from confusion to a sickly, pale shade of grey. He looked at the boy—this weak, shivering piece of trash—and then back toward the forest. His three best Enforcers. His terror-horses. All gone. And here was the target, alive and smiling like an idiot, asking about the people Shen had ordered murdered.
"They... they haven't returned," Shen stammered, his voice losing its usual iron edge.
"Oh." Dver's face fell into a mask of tragic disappointment. He let out a shaky sigh. "Maybe the forest was too dangerous? I heard there are monsters... I hope nothing happened to them. They were such brave men, the Enforcers."
Dver stood up slowly, wiping his eyes with a dirty sleeve. "I'll wait in my shack, Senior! Please tell me the moment they arrive! I want to give my mother a hug!"
As Dver turned and limped away, Shen felt a cold shiver crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the mountain air. He watched the boy's retreating back, a seed of genuine, primal terror taking root in his gut. Who is this boy? What did my men run into out there?
The moment Dver stepped inside his shack and barred the door, the act vanished.
He collapsed into the center of the room. He couldn't hold it anymore. The stolen energy was screaming to be released.
"Now," Dver gasped.
He stopped suppressing the Void.
BOOM.
An invisible shockwave erupted from his body, blowing the dust from the floorboards and cracking the wooden walls of the shack. The black, abyssal Qi surged through his meridians like molten lead.
The 7th Level of Qi Condensation... shattered in seconds. The 8th Level... bypassed instantly. The 9th Level...
Dver's body arched, his eyes turning entirely black as the Asura's Iron-Blood Mantra forced his
blood to boil. His bones clicked and ground against each other, fusing into a structure stronger than spirit-iron.
In the center of the Outer Sect, a pillar of dark pressure spiked into the sky, muffled only by the Sect's grand defensive formation.
High above, on the floating bridge of the Inner Sect, a woman stopped mid-step.
The Saintess, Lyra, turned her head. Her eyes, clear as mountain springs, narrowed as she looked down toward the slums. She didn't see the shack, but she felt it—a sudden, violent vacuum in the spiritual air. Like something had just opened its mouth and swallowed the light.
The silence in the shack didn't last.
Dver had barely finished stabilizing his new, 9th-level Qi Condensation core when the door didn't just open—it was turned into splinters.
Two Enforcers, their faces hidden behind demonic iron masks, stormed into the cramped space. They didn't speak. They didn't read a scroll. One of them lashed out with a heavy manacle made of black, Qi-suppressing iron, aiming to pin Dver to the floor.
Dver didn't fight back. He collapsed into his usual, pathetic heap, shielding his head with his arms. "P-please! I didn't do anything! The air just got heavy, I swear!"
"Shut up, trash," the lead Enforcer growled, his voice muffled by the iron mask. He grabbed Dver by the scruff of his neck, hoisting him into the air. "Deacon Shen reported a forbidden energy spike from this hut. You're coming to the Discipline Hall. If you've been using demonic pills to fake a breakthrough, we're going to peel the skin off your back."
Dver let himself be dragged through the mud of the Outer Sect. Thousands of disciples watched, whispering and mocking as the "lucky survivor" was hauled away like a common thief.
Inside his mind, the Void God was snarling. "Let me snap their wrists, Vessel. They touch us with such filth."
Wait, Dver commanded. They are carrying us exactly where we need to go. Why walk when you can be carried to the Inner Gate?
Dver wasn't taken to a cell. He was thrown into the center of the Blood-Pit Arena, a massive, circular stone theater carved into the very base of the Inner Mountain.
The air here was thick with the scent of old copper and ozone. High above, on the obsidian balconies, sat the Inner Court disciples—the elite, the beautiful, and the cruel. They looked down at the fifty "candidates" gathered in the pit like they were watching insects in a jar.
Deacon Shen stood on a raised platform, his eyes burning with a mix of fury and genuine fear as he stared at Dver. Beside him sat a woman draped in silks so white they seemed to glow.
The Saintess, Lyra. She didn't look at the other forty-nine disciples. Her gaze was fixed entirely on Dver, her chin resting on a pale, elegant hand.
"The rules are simple," Shen shouted, his voice echoing off the obsidian walls. "The Inner Court has no room for cowards or flukes. You fifty have reached the 9th Level. Only five will leave this pit as Inner Disciples. The rest will remain here as fertilizer for the mountain."
The crowd above roared with laughter.
"The trial is the Labyrinth of the Flayed," Shen continued, a sadistic smirk returning to his face. "In ten seconds, the floor will drop. You will be in the tunnels beneath the mountain. Kill each other. Harvest the jade tokens from your peers. The first five to reach the surface with ten tokens each... survive."
The other disciples immediately began drawing weapons, their eyes turning murderous as they eyed the people standing next to them.
Dver, however, remained slumped, his bottom lip trembling as he looked at the stone floor. He looked like a lamb in a slaughterhouse.
"Wait," a melodic, crystal-clear voice rang out.
The arena went silent. The Saintess, Lyra, stood up. She walked to the edge of the balcony, looking down into the pit.
"That one," she said, pointing a slender finger directly at Dver. "The one who looks like he's about to faint. I want him to carry a Scent-Cloud Censer."
The crowd gasped. A Scent-Cloud Censer was a ritual tool that emitted a thick, pungent smoke that could be smelled for miles. In a labyrinth where stealth was survival, it was a death sentence. It turned the carrier into a beacon for every killer in the tunnels.
"He seems so... fragile," Lyra said, her voice dripping with a terrifying, artificial sweetness. "I want to see if his luck holds out when everyone can find him."
Dver looked up at her, his eyes wide and "terrified." But deep in his soul, he felt a spark of genuine interest. She wasn't just suspicious; she was trying to force him to stop pretending. She wanted to see the monster.
"She's giving us a buffet," the Void God hissed, delighted. "She's calling every sheep in the maze to come to the wolf."
A guard tossed a heavy, smoking bronze burner at Dver's feet. Dver picked it up with shaking hands, the thick purple smoke instantly swirling around him.
"Go," Shen barked.
The floor beneath them vanished.