Soul-Search Technique. The memories hidden in these remnants may be broken, even dangerous, but they are the quickest path to the sect''s truth. If it leads me to the Soul Devourer, the risk is worth it.


    Without another heartbeat of hesitation, Jared''s fingers wove an ancient,byrinthine seal.


    Invisible tendrils of spiritual soul forceshed outward, wrapping the drifting fragments of consciousness, ready to tear their secrets free.


    His awareness had only brushed the first sliver of a soul when-


    Change struck like a silent scream.


    An icy, limitless will-vast as the star-strewn void and twice as cruel-punched through space itself, ignoring every boundary of distance. It brimmed with ughter, indifference, and the arrogance of something that viewed all life as dust.


    Daylight dimmed. The sky itself seemed to recoil.


    Above Jared''s crown, a hand of purest soul energy coalesced-colossal, formless, yet detailed down to every spectral fingerprint.


    It blotted out the heavens, forged from a billion wailing spirits pressed into one tyrannical palm. Thews of the world quivered. Space twisted and cracked.


    The hand performed no flourish. It simply began to descend-slow, final, irresistible -intent on crushing everything within thirty yards.


    Before it touched earth, its pressure smashed into Jared''s heart and spirit like a mountain range of iron. Breath vanished. Blood thickened. Bones groaned. Even his thoughts slowed to a crawl. Life itself was being ground beneath a higher existence. Only one who had reached at least Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Seven-or worse-could wield such might.


    This is a top elder of the Infinite Soul Demon Sect, he realized, terror crashing through him. They seeded a retaliation seal inside every disciple''s soul!


    Panic roared through his veins. If that spectral handnded, Jared knew he would be erased, body and soul, without a trace.


    Run. I have to run-now!


    In the blink of an eye, every scattered thought inside Jared''s mind fused into a single, blinding mandate-survive.


    Faced with the colossal will overhead, even the faintest notion of resistance failed to form.


    "Run!" Jared bellowed.


    A guttural roar tore from his chest. Internal fire whooshed to life, Firestride Step red underfoot, and his Golem Body wrapped him in a thin shell of incandescent gold.


    His left hand snapped out. A gentle but irresistible force swept the dazed tiger man, Gavin Stone, and the leopard-tailed woman, Yvette Shadowstep, into his orbit, while his right arm scooped the trembling small fire unicorn tight against his ribs.


    "Spatial Fold—now!" he shouted, voice cracking with strain.


    Drawing on every scrap of his grasp over spatialw, he wrenched the air before him until it rippled like warped ss. His body blurred, half phantom, half flesh-a streak of prismatic haze bnced between existence and nothingness. That flicker rocketed toward the only clear gap beyond the treeline, away from the titanic hand descending from the void.


    He moved so fast the eye could not keep pace; by the next heartbeat, his outline simply vanished.


    The moment he disappeared, an earth-shaking detonation ripped through the forest.


    The massive hand of energy finally mmed down.


    There was no heroic thunder, only a dreadful hush—as though all creation had beenmanded to return to dust.


    Space itself shattered like a mirror. Shards copsed inward, curling into a pit nearly thirty yards wide that fell into a bottomless void, Light, air So, the very breath of the


    world-everything was gone deaving behind a hollow circle of perfect, deathly nothing.


    An unseen shoek wave surged after Jared, a silent tsunami of


    annihtion: Where it swept, the earth tore open into deep furrows, and every de of grass powdered to dust. Though he had fled far, the wave''s outer edge still mmed into his Golem Body with


    bone-splintering force.


    Blood burst past his lips with a wet hiss. Reeling, he staggered mid-air, crimson arcing behind him like a morbidet tail.


    Yet Jared endured the excruciating agony that rattled his soul. Using the shock''s momentum, he hurled himself forward even faster, never daring to look back.