Chapter 1,326.

Maseya, the Pavilion Grand Elder, mentioned having repeatedly searched the realmgate for clues. It should have been impossible for the culprit’s putrid aura to elude the scan of a Middle Monarch. It stood out like a sore thumb when placed against the crystal’s homogenous Dao of Life. The explanation lay in the unusual seam that was no thicker than a strand of hair.

The crystal emitted no spatial fluctuations. It was a realmgate purely reliant on the Dao of Life, connecting the Joyful Gardens’ Life-attuned Nexus Vein with the Unbounded Pastures. However, the Peak of Chaos was incomplete, and its imperfections became weaknesses in the link between dimensions.

The seam was such a gap, and it was glaringly obvious for a Life cultivator from the modern era. Zac had noticed the same thing during his brief encounter with the Threaded Lord. Zac guessed that the garden’s elders couldn’t see the seam, just as Zac couldn’t grasp the pieces of Life that remained missing in the present.

With a new option presented, Zac decisively returned to his original plan. He’d already seen enough of the Unbounded Pastures to know it was no paradise. It held dangers equal to the inescapable lines of the Threaded Hell. The unfettered freedom Zac felt from the crystal was even worse than the golden sphere’s, and there was no other Daos to temper its influence. It was for good reason the Threaded Lord warned him of returning to the Lower Planes too soon.

Zac emptied his Void of Life stockpile, and the blinding radiance surrounding him faded. Together with [Void Zone], he’d created a true buffer. The respite only lasted a moment against the ceaseless Life pouring out of the crystal—just long enough to clear his head and punch the seam with [Void Mountain]’s Dao-annihilating seal.

The blemish tore open without a sound, exposing a pitch-black vista starkly different from the crystal’s otherworldly views. Zac snuck inside before the opening could close, his mind screaming with peril as the world beyond the crystal twisted. The trembling Shackle of Earth faded as the seam closed behind him. Zac’s Danger Sense calmed down to a low roar, and his gut told him he’d just avoided a calamity.

Darkness and tremendous pressure waited on the other side. The pressure felt just like some of Zac’s riskier teleportations over the years, this time the result of two dimensions pressing against each other. Even Zac would have trouble enduring too long. Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to. The hidden pocket was no larger than a few hundred meters across, and his target was the only other thing inside.

A distorted, twisting figure made from golden light floated in the middle of the space. It flickered like the image on a TV with a bad signal, and it took Zac a moment to understand what he was looking at. It was actually a Garden Spirit; at least, he thought so. Its shape was eerily similar to a human's, but its spirituality was too identical to a Garden Spirit’s to be something else. It was even connected to the relevant shackle, though with a dark undercurrent.

Its shape wasn’t the only thing off. The spirit was the largest one he’d ever seen. The largest he’d encountered until now was the size of a cat, while this miscreation stood almost three meters tall. It wasn’t hard to see how it had ballooned out of proportion. Its insides were a mess of chaotic, heterogenous energy from over a dozen devoured spirits.

The captured energies seemingly held trace spirituality that constantly struggled to break out, like living prey trying to burrow their way out of a predator’s stomach. Some would most likely have succeeded if not for the intense dimensional pressure. Zac guessed the creature didn’t just pick this spot to hide. It was necessary to digest its prey.

The spirit was slow to react to Zac’s arrival. Zac didn’t launch an ambush, instead using the breather to recover from his approach and analyze the situation. He’d expected to find a warlock, not a mutated Garden Spirit. Nevertheless, it was clearly nothing like its innocent cousins. It reeked of malice, and it had already killed more than a dozen Late and Peak Hegemons in the blink of an eye. Zac also didn’t know if it was acting alone or if there was a hidden controller.

A second wasn’t enough to discover much. The spirit turned around, and a chaotic wave of mental anguish made Zac see double. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, stunned to realize the spirit possessed Mental Energy—something that should be impossible. Garden Spirits were energy incarnations made from pure Life. They lacked a true soul, a fundamental requirement to generate Mental Energy.

The spirit’s face looked vaguely marsupial, if the critter had been grafted with a few other races before being left to bloat in a stagnant pond. It was clearly losing its sense of self, taking on features of its prey. Dark threads spread through its body like a second set of pathways. Their evil aura was distinct from the garden spirit’s. They made Zac think of the Kan’Tanu who’d succumbed to their Heart Curses. Were the threads the real enemy?

Zac’s suspicion turned into disgust when the spirit’s chest wriggled to manifest a human face. The woman’s skin wriggled like worms were buried inside, and her twisted features were locked in a soundless scream. There was no spark of sapience in her eyes, only hunger and chaos. The inhuman display was so macabre that it took Zac a moment to realize that he actually recognized her.

Remove the distortions and madness, and she’d look a lot like the second victim. Her name was Ching’Ru, a descendant of a former elder and the first Inner Disciple to die. The victim before her was an Outer Disciple and generally considered a trial run.

“Ching’Ru? I’m working with the Joyful Gardens. Let me bring you back to the elders. They can free you from your curse,” Zac shouted while rotating his Soul Cores.

Not expecting an actual response, Zac was gauging the creature’s response to specific names. The monster had swallowed both souls and spirits and agitating the trapped resentment would weaken it from within. The creature’s answer came in the form of violence. Another wave of madness battered Zac’s mind as the spirit turned into a streak of twisted Life.

Whatever caution usually kept it safe was absent, replaced by an all-consuming hunger that made Zac’s hair stand on end. It clearly wanted to add another soul to the heretical brew stewing in its stomach. A probing fractal blade tore right through it without causing damage. If anything, it had the opposite effect.

The fractal blade dimmed as it passed through the spirit’s body, and Zac grunted from a light backlash when the skill’s Dao of Life and Life-attuned Energy were robbed. Zac frowned as his instincts suddenly warned of greater danger. Not taking any chances, he used his prepared items the moment the spirit came within range.

Four sapphire eyes created an azure net that quickly enclosed its prey. Zac threw out a lutestring next, another spirit-sealing treasure borrowed from the Joyful Gardens. The string emitted a tune holding none of the sect’s signature joy, only reproach and subjugation. It wound itself around the trapped spirit’s throat, acting like a collar.

The combination was supposedly enough to trap a Half-step C-grade spirit, and they held no Dao of Life to be absorbed. The fallen spirit’s oversized aura remained within the bounds of Hegemony, so it should have been enough. Still, Zac’s unease grew stronger, prompting him to throw out two more talismans.

The talismans erupted in flashes of light imbued with his Earthly Dao of Defiant War. They were something like spiritual concussion grenades. The talismans were strong enough to directly shatter the souls of most Peak E-grade cultivators, and Hegemons without sufficient defenses would have their minds rattled. The talismans were only Early D-grade, but an unstable spirit should be highly susceptible.

Zac had more follow-ups prepared, most notably ensconcing the spirit in [Void Zone]. The spirit made his plans irrelevant by suddenly disappearing, dodging the shockwaves while effortlessly escaping its bondage. Zac felt a small drain on his Void Energy before his head erupted with agony. The spirit had somehow bypassed his Soul Defenses and [Void Zone] to sneak into his Soul Aperture. Worse, it managed to appear in the depths of his Life-Attuned core.

Soul-wrenching pain wracked Zac as the parasite began siphoning his Evolutionary Core. Like a mosquito, it injected something while it fed. Zac was flooded with a storm of images and impressions. The spirit had turned its insanity into a weapon. At the heart of it was a hunger so intense, so painful, it overwhelmed all else.

It twisted all memories, framing all thoughts to think of ways to satiate the cravings. The soul-wrenching hunger was more cutting than most mental attacks, and Zac wasn’t surprised the combination had led to so many deaths. Unfortunately for the attacker, they’d picked the wrong target.

Zac knew hunger more overbearing than this, hunger capable of devouring the Heavens. This shallow, mindless hunger wasn’t enough to breach the bastion of his mind. He was also different than the previous victims in one critical aspect. This devourer of Life had targeted his Evolutionary Core like a starving beast, not realizing that there was another Soul Core nearby.

He was already rallying his forces of Death while stuffing the spirit full of replaceable Mental Energy to stop it from consuming his soul. The beast was initially content mindlessly devouring whatever it was presented, but the streaks of darkness within its body flickered before Zac could strike. The sinister energy injected something into the storm of foreign memories.

The memories gained a tangible shape, forming a tight belt around Zac’s Evolutionary Core. Only the outer rim was legible, generally depicting scenes of tranquil cultivation in the Forest of Unbounded Spirits. Most memories came from Ching’Ru, with a few from the vantage of her contracted spirit. The inner memories were too twisted and jagged to read, ruined by whatever led to the birth of this monstrosity.

The spirit had sacrificed the outer memories to block Zac’s assault while it hid behind a memory larger than the other ones combined. The pitch-black sphere felt like a tumor, or worse, a parasitical egg. It emitted a mysterious attraction, and Zac found his mind drawn into its depths. Instead of a memory, Zac found himself looking at an extremely sinister book.

Its pages opened without prompting, and Zac grimaced with disgust. Its pages were made from the skinned faces of both beasts and humanoid races. Dense runes of a foreign script were drawn with pitch-black ink, following the natural contours of the faces. With so many races with differing features and orifices, no pages looked alike. The haphazard notation created a controlled disorder that screamed of evil.

Only the mouths of the skinned faces were aligned, all locked in a silent scream like Ching’Ru’s. The arrangement created a hole in the middle of the book in which black energy swirled. The energy was exactly like the spirit’s dark streaks reeking of rot, only purer and unmarked by the Dao of Life. His mind screaming of danger, Zac forcibly yanked his mind out of the black sphere.

Zac’s instincts proved right once more. He was alarmed to find his Duplicity Core running red-hot, a sign it was desperately resisting an imposed Karmic Link. Knowing he’d encountered something exceedingly dangerous, Zac opted for speed over finesse. The threads of Death gave up their assault on the wall of memories to let through the main artillery—his Inexorable Core.

The two Soul Cores collided, causing a familiar apocalyptic scene. Life and Death intermixed, triggering the next round of their eternal war. The collision dislodged the spirit, and the horrifying sphere faded by half. A second collision expelled the parasite and shattered the sphere entirely.

The broken egg reverted into black threads. An inverted mountain teeming with antiquity descended before they could return to their host. Void and evil clashed, and evil was routed. The Duplicity Core calmed down while it still had energy to spare, confirming the crisis had been averted. The book had failed to leave a karmic mark.

Losing the black threads roused the spirit from its feeding frenzy. Realizing the dangers, it ran for its life. Zac’s pursued with a storm of Death. His soul had been wounded, and he refused to leave empty-handed after letting this thing use his aperture as a playground. Dozens of tendrils infused with Sealing Death wrapped around the malevolent spirit before it could escape, and an outer barrier of Void Energy isolated it from the universe.

The spirit fiercely struggled against its bondage. Each collision rocked Zac’s Soul Aperture, but his containment held. It wasn’t solely thanks to his inherent advantage over a Life-attuned creature. Losing the black threads had left the spirit weakened.

Zac also knew he’d failed to eradicate the threat. He’d destroyed some of the threads by ramming [Void Mountain] straight into them, but most had slipped away. They’d escaped just as inexplicably as the spirit had appeared inside his aperture.

The spirit’s motley composition was growing more unstable by the second without the inner framework and dimensional pressure to keep it in check. It shed pieces of its body every time it railed against its cage, and it didn’t seem to care. Zac was soon working as hard to keep it together as to keep it trapped.

There were no signs of the dark streaks in the hidden space. Zac suspected they were long gone. That sinister book was connected to someone or something extremely powerful. It had lent some of its power to the Garden Spirit to usher its transformation. The entity then abandoned its minion after it failed to deal with Zac.

Zac shook his head and returned to the dimensional wall’s weak spot. He’d accomplished what he set out to do. The sooner he could rid himself of his unwelcome passenger, the better. There was a gaggle of angry elders waiting outside who could deal with the mystery surrounding the dark threads.

He escaped the way he entered, relying on [Void Mountain] to open a temporary path. He’d only been gone for a moment, yet Zac no longer felt a looming threat when next to the crystal. Was the entity on the other side so fickle they’d lost interest after a few seconds? Zac wasn’t planning on finding out if sticking around would expose him again.

The journey out of the realmgate was worse than the way in. He had no guiding shackles to follow, and his soul was both drained and damaged. Thankfully, Zac received timely assistance from the memory domain. Capturing the Garden Spirit had significantly changed the timeline, causing another drain to the memory domain’s Imperial Faith.

The memory lost some of its vigor, weakening Life’s unrestrained influence. It was just enough for Zac to escape with his sanity intact. He kept the nullification sphere going as he stumbled out of the golden sphere. He would have preferred keeping his Bloodline Talent hidden from the infuriated elites waiting for him, but deactivating it would expose him to the sphere’s mental corruption.

“I caught it! I caught the culprit,” Zac croaked before anyone could speak or resume their attacks.

To prove his words, Zac yanked the struggling spirit out of his Soul Aperture. He kept it contained within [Void Zone], afraid it would slip away if it were allowed to reconnect to the Dao of Life. He couldn’t be sure which abilities belonged to the dark threads and which came from the spirit itself.

“That’s not possible!” Liu’An wheezed upon seeing the struggling monstrosity.

“Is that Ching’Ru? What’s—” one of the Core Disciples said, his face pale with horror.

“We have to distance it from the gate!” Zac urged with anxiety. His adrenaline was wearing off, and he was running low on Void Energy. [Void Zone] was already losing its ability to resist the call of the Unbounded Pastures.

“Come,” Litheweave said, once more breaking the stalemate.

Zac rushed out of the field, surrounded by the elite squad. Two elders stayed behind, likely tasked with cleansing the nexus. They didn’t need to go far before reaching a secluded spot away from the golden glare. Lui’An approached to take the captive spirit, only to jolt away from [Void Zone] like she’d been burned.

“What, how?” she gasped.

“The how doesn’t matter. You need to figure out a way to keep it trapped after I deactivate my domain. I think it can move unhindered through the Dao of Life,” Zac said.

Litheweave gravely nodded. “Give us a moment. We’ll erect a containment.”

Zac warily looked on as the elder took out a frayed rope. It gave Zac an uncomfortable feeling, though different from the sinister book. The rope emitted a strong sense of helplessness. Litheweave carefully tied a series of complex knots while another elder installed poles in a circle around him.

Seeing their actions, the spirit began to struggle more fiercely, but it was in an even worse state than Zac. It could only helplessly watch as Litheweave hung the rope through loops in the knots, creating a flimsy fence. Litheweave and two other Monarchs sat down outside, chanting something that didn’t reach the sealed area.

Standing in the middle of a magic circle would normally make alarms go off in Zac’s head. This time, he didn’t care. Why bother resisting? Nothing mattered. Existence was futile, only a delay of the—

Zac drew a sharp breath, realizing he was leaning against a tree with a small monkey in his lap. The spirit and the weird rope were nowhere in sight. Instead, Mei’Er was sitting next to him, playing a soothing melody based on their joint harmony. Zac opened his mouth to ask what was going on and what happened to the spirit. No words came out.

Mei’Er’s smile said the situation was under control. Zac exhaled and closed his eyes. His mind was in an extremely fragile state, and everything else would have to wait. The song continued to nourish his soul as he drifted to a restorative slumber. Instead of futility, his heart was full of hope.