Gwendolyn listened, then caught her lower lip between her teeth.
"I already told you. If you help me restore the Frost Deity Branch''s glory, I can do anything for you. If you need it again, I can do that with you."
"And the cultivation art inside me is ice-aligned. My body runs cool. It''d be perfect for putting out your burning heat..."
Jared looked at Gwendolyn and smiled a little.
"Alright. We''ll talk about it when that burning res up again."
"Shameless..."
The words suddenly popped up inside Jared''s consciousness field.
Jared jolted. Then he knew who it was.
Aldric was speaking.
From the sound of it, that guy had settled in prettyfortably inside his consciousness field. He could even talk now.
Jared ignored him.
He took Gwendolyn with him and kept flying toward the Blightmist Wood.
The Blightmist Woody in the southwestern reaches of the Nether Mountain Range, a forest drowned beneath ck mist.
The trees there were tall and twisted.
Their trunks were covered in knobs and splits, like countless faces frozen in pain.
A thickyer of fallen leaves covered the ground.
Underneath was swampy mud.
Now and then, half-buried bones from unknown creatures showed through the soil.
ck demonic aura hung all through the forest, so dense it looked almost solid.
It moved without a sound.
Where it passed, leaves withered, rocks weathered away, and even the air turned heavy enough to press against the chest.
Jared and Gwendolyn dropped down at the edge of the mistwood.
"The demonic aura here is ridiculously thick."
Ayer of icy blue radiance lit up around Gwendolyn and sealed the demonic aura outside.
But the demonic aura was viciously corrosive.
Fine cracks quickly spread across the radiant barrier, like something had been gnawing at it.
"Can you hold up?"
Gwendolyn didn''t answer.
She poured more spiritual power into it, and the barrier steadied again.
Even so, her face had gone a shade paler than usual.
Keeping that shield up in this demonic aura was draining her hard.
"Let''s go," Gwendolyn said.
The two of them stepped into the fog forest.
Demonic aura rushed at them from every direction, like countless invisible venomous snakes trying to bore into their bodies and eat away at their spirits.
Jared''s chaotic force began moving on its own.
A thinyer of violet radiance spread over his body like armor and sealed the demonic aura outside.
The instant that demonic aura touched the chaotic force, it vanished like snow under a zing sun.
Gwendolyn had no such ease.
The Frost God''s power inside her was strong, but against demonic aura, it was
nowhere near as suppressive as Jared''s chaotic force.
The demonic aura kept grinding against her radiant barrier.
More and more cracks spread across the icy blue shield, and she had no choice but
to keep pouring spiritual power into it to hold it together.
After walking for about half an hour, Jared came to a stop.
"Your shield''s about to give out."
Gwendolyn didn''t deny it.
A fine sheen of sweat had already gathered on her forehead, and her breathing had grown a little sharper than usual.
Jared lifted a hand and sent a stream of chaotic force into Gwendolyn''s body.
Violet radiance flowed across the surface of her body and fused with her icy divine radiance, forming a shield woven from purple and blue.
That shield was several times sturdier than before.
The demonic aura struck it with a sizzling hiss, but it couldn''t push through even the slightest bit.
"That''s a lot better," Jared said.
Gwendolyn looked at him, and somethingplicated flickered through her eyes. "Thank you."
"No need," Jared said as he withdrew his hand and kept moving forward. "Come on. Don''t waste time."
The two of them pressed deeper through the fog forest for about another hour, and the demonic aura only grew thicker.
The trees around them had witheredpletely.
All that remained were bare ck trunks, like dry bones thrust up at the sky.
Countless bonesy scattered
across the ground-some from the human race some from the beast Ce some from demons, and some races too ruined to identify.
They all belonged to cultivators who had wandered into the fog forest by mistake
and never made it back out.
Jared stopped short.
"Something''s here."
The second the words left his mouth, the demonic aura around them started churning violently.
Pairs of blood-red eyes lit up in the dark.
So many of them that they packed the shadows thick, no fewer than fifty pairs.
They closed in from every direction and boxed Jared and Gwendolyn into the middle.
Mistshade Fiends.
These were native fiends of the Blightmist Wood.
Their bodies had condensed out of demonic aura, and they looked like ck panthers-only bigger, each one asrge as a calf.
Their eyes burned blood-red.
There was nothing in their pupils. No trace of thought, no trace of restraint, only raw hunger to kill.
Their cultivation ranged from True
Immortal Realm Level Two to True
Immortal Realm Level Four, and they
excelled at hiding themselves and
Taunching spirit assaults.
The one in front was thergest of the pack, and its cultivation had reached the
peak of the fourth tier of the True Immortal Realm.
It stood on top of a ck boulder, looking down at Jared from above, a low growl
rolling out of its mouth.
Jared swept his gaze around and counted them.
Fifty-three.
"I''ve got this. You focus on defense."
Gwendolyn nodded.
An icy-blue shield spread out around the two of them and formed a hemispherical
barrier.
Jared stepped out of the barrier and faced the Mistshade Fiends.
He raised his right hand, and a mass of chaos-me gathered in his palm.
Violet radiance and golden me twisted together.
Against the darkness of the foggy wood, it was blinding.
The instant the chaos-me appeared, the surrounding demonic aura bucked and
heaved like it had run into its natural enemy.
The Mistshade Fiends let out uneasy growls.
They could tell. That me held a deadly restraint over them.
The lead Mistshade Fiend roared, and every fiend lunged at Jared at the same time.
More than fifty fiends, ranging from True Immortal Realm Level Two to True Immortal Realm Level Four, came at him from all sides.
They were fast as lightning.
Thick demonic aura clung to their ws, enough to tear through the protective
spiritual power of a True Immortal Realm expert.
Jared didn''t give an inch.
He gave the chaos-me in his hand a light push.
The me split into more than fifty slender fire-serpents and shot soundlessly at
every Mistshade Fiend.
They weren''t especially fast.
But each Mistshade Fiend had already been locked on. No matter how they twisted away, the fire-serpents stayed on them.
The instant a fire-serpent hit, there was no explosion and no thunderous st.
Only a faint hiss.
The first Mistshade Fiend was pierced straight through.
Its body, gathered from demonic aura, turned paper-thin before the chaos-me. It
broke apart at once and dissolved into ck mist.
Then the second. The third. The fourth...
In less than three breaths, all fifty-some Mistshade Fiends were dead.
One after another, they turned into ck mist and scattered into the air.
ine
The leader the Mistshade Fiend at the peak of the fourth tier of the True Immortal Realm, let out a shrill screech a heartbeat before the fire-serpent struck it.
That screech carried a spirit assault.
It spread into invisible ripples and crashed toward Jared''s consciousness field.
Inside Jared''s consciousness field, the Aureate Codex gave a light tremor.
Golden radiance crushed that spirit assaultpletely.
The fire-serpent hit the fiend square in the head.
Its body burst apart into a sky full of ck mist, then was burned away by the chaos-
me until nothing remained.
Just like that, it was over.
From the moment Jared moved to the moment it ended, not even five breaths had
passed.