God-Tier Villain

He shut his right eye and opened it again.

The tribulation lightning stored behind it blasted out into the hall.

A thunderstorm tore through the cavern, wrapped in trailing threads of black fire.

In midair the lightning knotted itself into a roaring thunder dragon and a lunging tiger.

One from above, one from below, both converging on coordinates their target believed nobody could see.

The Heaven Demon Ancestor threw up a barrier.

Far too late.

The two hammered down together and ripped him back into the visible world, body and all, the tiger’s jaws clamped shut on his knee, the dragon wound tight around his remaining arm.

The scream out of him didn’t sound human.

The grayish film of medicinal energy shredded under fine arcs crawling all over it, it thinned to mist and evaporated.

Soren had touched the Blood Demon Ancestor once, and analyzed him.

He knew the three grand Ancestors’ methods and their trump cards.

Among them was an Immemorial taboo techniques that only worked if all three cultivated it in step.

The Heaven-Melting Earth-Assimilating Technique.

Using it, a practitioner could devour a fallen comrade’s corpse and bloodline whole, two bodies merged into one, his own consciousness holding the seat, and the strength that came out the other side was permanent.

So the second Soren saw him creeping toward the corpse, he knew what he was reaching for.

He certainly wasn’t risking his life to arrange a decent burial.

He meant to swallow the Earth Demon Ancestor, to turn a dead partner into an extension of his own strength.

The Heaven Demon Ancestor roared until something tore in his chest, he hated Soren the way a man hates something he wants to break open and drink from the bones.

Under a baptism of lightning that tore at him from every side, he lasted seven or eight seconds.

Then he came apart with a boom, and what had been a body turned into fine red vapor.

Soren called the lightning back into his eye, and the demonic pattern faded from his pupil.

At the bottom of it, Soren thought of the pair as rats with schemes. Nothing more.

So he had no interest in gathering their blood essence or dragging their souls back with the Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form.

"The Heavenly Demon Alliance was never the real threat," he said.

"The threat is the furnace they’ve been feeding."

"And the Immemorial Ancient Evil God Tribe sleeping under it."

"I’m going down to take a look."

"Whatever Alliance members are still crawling around up here, they’re yours."

He gave Victoria a warm smile, she had no objections, she inclined her head. "Understood."

Her silhouette flickered once and was gone, long before he set foot in the first stronghold, the Strategy Encyclopedia had given Soren the exact sequence of formations leading into every one of the Alliance’s bases.

This was only one of three.

The other two sat elsewhere on the continent, down entirely different chains.

He had already pushed the sequences into Victoria’s mind.

With her handling them, there was no chance of a wrong step.

Soren walked to one of the stone walls.

A flick of his wrist drove a pulse of demonic energy into the rock, and an intricate formation surfaced under the stone.

This was the key to the entrance, the door down to the sacrificial furnace and the sleeping ground below it.

In all likelihood only the Alliance’s three grand Ancestors knew the proper way to open it.

Since it was a formation, Soren didn’t need to think at all.

The formation-breaking methods Celeste had worked out were already mapped and stored in the Strategy Encyclopedia.

He followed the steps it fed him and cracked the thing without effort.

In roughly the time it took half a stick of incense to burn, the key lit up.

A portal opened in front of him.

Soren stepped through alone.

The world blurred and stretched.

A brief swimming dizziness came and went.

Then everything snapped into focus, he stood in an underground cavern hung with thick red mist.

In front of him lay a swamp that ran on further than the light did.

Things writhed and twisted through the mire in their thousands, they looked like snakes and moved like bloated maggots, packed so tightly the entire surface crawled, and the sight turned the stomach.

Across that expanse, on a hexagonal altar rising out of the muck, stood an enormous sphere.

A furnace, perfectly spherical, cast in dark purple-cyan metal.

Its surface was carved over every inch with obscure runes and veined channels, currents of energy moved visibly through the grooves, the sound they made was the sound of water running somewhere out of sight.

Soren dropped into a crouch, gathering force into his legs to jump the mire and land on the altar.

His demonic energy didn’t answer, something in this place had it pinned inside him, he couldn’t push a single thread of it out.

In this life, that had never happened to him.

A Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor’s reserves, sitting right there in his dantian, sealed off from the world outside his own skin.

A restriction was working in this space, and he couldn’t see the shape of it.

Luckily, whatever it was had no reach into his mind.

The Strategy Encyclopedia was anchored directly to his soul, while his soul lived, nothing outside his body could lock him out of it.

Lines of glowing text assembled across his vision.

[The Heaven Demon Ancestor recovered a cluster of Immemorial insect Gu left by the Ancient Evil God Tribe from an ancient ruin.]

[From that cluster he bred a parasite called the Rotten-Bone Maggot.]

[The organisms in front of Master are those maggots.]

[They evolved specifically to feed on the flesh and blood of the Demon race.]

[They continuously release a gaseous miasma.]

[Inhaled, it suppresses and locks the circulation of demonic energy.]

[The population cultivated in this swamp numbers approximately thirty-nine million.]

[Even for Master, extended exposure is not survivable.]

[One hour is the absolute limit.]

[Beyond one hour, Master’s dantian and demonic meridians will suffer permanent structural damage.]

The corner of Soren’s mouth twitched, he looked out over the heaving carpet of maggots with open disgust.

Even locked out of his own energy, raw physical strength would put him on that altar in a single jump.

Doing anything more complicated once he got there, destroying a furnace for instance, was another matter entirely.

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