Ren Ming rose back through stone and earth, surfacing on the same lonely cliff that overlooked the dark plains.
The world exhaled around him.
Wind combed across the ridge, tugging at his hair, carrying the smell of distant forests and damp rock. Above, Sky Spill's night was clear and cold, stars scattered like powdered frost across a black sea.
Inside his senses, two tiny flames burned.
One was anchored here, to this spot on Sky Spill Planet—a little sliver of luminous intent he had left behind in the soil. The other burned far beyond this universe, pinned to the training dimension near his manor in Kuoh, a candle stuck in the sky of his inner Heaven.
He watched them both.
The Sky Spill candle had burned down nearly to the base, wax eaten through by the steady crawl of time.
The one in his Heaven—his "home" side—had barely melted. Just the top shaved off, a faint curve instead of a clean cylinder.
He didn't need the Immortal Soul Bone to see the ratio, but it did the work anyway—turning impressions into tidy vectors, time into simple numbers.
Roughly a day here.
Minutes there.
Good, he thought. But "roughly" isn't good enough.
He wanted something he could lean his Dao on.
Ren's lips curved.
"All right," he said quietly, the word rolling into the wind. "One full day. Let's make it count."
His gaze slid south.
Past the faint glow of Sky Fortune City's walls. Past the ring-shaped continent's comforting, ordered structure. Toward a darker pulse—something wild and ugly, a rhythm of slavery and blood humming beneath the earth.
Southern Wilderness.
He smiled, small and sharp.
"Let's see how your beasts bite."
...
True Essence was different from DxD's energies.
Devils wrapped themselves in demonic power, slick with sin and desire. Angels brandished holy light that carried rules in every beam. Gods wielded authorities—concepts dressed as weapons, shaped by belief and system.
Here, the power in the air was simpler. Closer to the Nine Worlds' worldly energy: heaven-and-earth force waiting, quiet and patient, for someone to refine it.
Ren inhaled.
Myriad Origin Scripture unfurled through his meridians. The loops shifted, their pathways subtly re-aligning to match this world's format, the way a craftsman adjusted his grip on a familiar tool.
True Essence flowed into him.
It came thick and eager, saturated with the flavor of this realm's laws. When it met the solidity of his Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique and the flexible, boundless foundation of his Tenth World core, it compressed automatically, stripped of noise.
The sensation was… clean.
Less like swallowing lightning, more like drinking cold spring water after weeks of instant soup.
He let it thread through his bones, his blood, the Ancient Ming Bloodline coiled in every cell.
The bloodline stirred.
It responded like a predator scenting fresh prey—devouring impurities, chewing through alien law, converting True Essence into something his Dao could accept. Threads of foreign energy lost their foreignness, quietly woven into his own tapestry.
"Not bad," Ren murmured. "I can work with this."
He stepped off the cliff.
Air caught him like a familiar friend. His body rose, weight and law agreeing that he had no business falling. He turned south, flying low over the forested hills as dawn crept toward the rim of the world.
...
Southern Wilderness was loud.
Not like a city's noise. This was the noise of things that had never learned to whisper.
Jungles breathed in deep, humid gusts. Beast cries rolled over the mountains—low bellows like drums, shrill screams like tearing metal. The land itself muttered; somewhere far off, a volcano's low growl vibrated through layers of stone.
Beneath it all was another kind of sound.
Chains.
Not literal. Not yet.
But the residue of them—the karmic echo of iron and rope and desperate fingers—was woven into the region's Qi-lines. Southern Wilderness had been a slave society for too long. When tribes lost, their people were taken, branded, sold. When tribes won, they called it order.
Ren walked through that history with his hands in his pockets.
The first beast found him before the sun did.
It exploded out of the underbrush—a massive cat-like thing with bone spurs running down its spine and a maw full of serrated fangs, True Essence condensed in its throat.
To a local Houtian martial artist, it would have been a calamity.
Ren tilted his head.
"Come here," he said.
The beast pounced. Claws flashed, air tore.
He caught its skull in one palm.
Hell Suppressing weight rolled through his arm, his bones, his muscles—a mountain's worth of refusal focused into a single downward press.
Bone cracked.
Momentum stopped as if a hand had closed on time itself. The beast's body slammed into the ground with a dull, wet boom, the impact carving a shallow crater in the jungle floor. Dirt erupted around its collapsing limbs.
Its struggles lasted less than a breath.
Ren didn't feel strain. His physique didn't even warm up.
He let it die quickly.
Blood steamed on the forest floor. The smell of iron and beast True Essence rose, thick and hot. Nearby lesser beasts, roused by the roar, quieted all at once, instincts howling at them to stay away.
He watched the carcass for a moment.
The Ancient Ming Bloodline reached out, sifting through escaping True Essence, swallowing some of it, rejecting the rest. The beast's power was nothing to him, but even scraps were fuel when you could refine everything.
He shook his hand lightly, more out of habit than necessity, and moved on.
He wasn't here to hunt trophies.
He was here to feel.
...
Time bled into motion.
He walked, and the wilderness came to him.
Bandits tried to surround him on a narrow mountain slope. They wore pieces of looted armor and tribal hides, crude inscription patterns burned into their weapons—crooked lines of fire and wind that leaked True Essence like cracked barrels.
They thought they had the advantage.
Ren glanced at their formation once.
The Immortal Soul Bone along his spine sang, reducing their "formation" into a childish doodle. Vectors, flows, angles—the Bone turned it all into simple diagrams. They lost before they finished tightening the circle.
"Wrong angles," he told them, conversational tone at odds with the killing intent that began to gather. "You're leaking twenty percent out the back."
He nodded at one man's feet.
"And you're standing too close to that rock."
They blinked.
He tapped his foot.
The earth bulged.
A stone spike surged out of the ground, catching the lead bandit under the chin and lifting him off his feet. The man's body spasmed, then went limp, spear clattering from nerveless fingers.
The rest stumbled as the slope shifted beneath them.
Ren lazily stomped. The mountain answered his Dao, turning soft here, hard there, undermining their stances, dulling their momentum.
He walked into their midst without drawing a weapon.
Fists, elbows, knees. No wasted flair.
Each strike carried chaos-refined force—power that had already passed through Myriad Origin's loops and come out dense and obedient. Bones shattered. True Essence defenses crumpled, brittle glass under a hammer.
One man tried to run.
Ren appeared in front of him.
"You picked this path," he said quietly. "Listen to where it ends."
He drove a simple punch into the man's solar plexus.
The impact cracked ribs inward; the man's heart burst like an overripe fruit. He died without managing a scream.
When the last one fell, groaning and half-buried in disordered stone, Ren looked down at him.
"Your country doesn't give you much," Ren said, voice calm. "I get it."
The man bared bloody teeth, eyes full of hate and fear.
"But if you're going to prey on the weak," Ren finished, Ancient Ming Bloodline already stirring, "you'd better be ready for something like me."
He reached out—not physically, but with blood.
The Ancient Ming Bloodline extended like a silent tide. It swallowed the bandit's remaining True Essence, the dregs of his bloodline, even the sharp, ugly knots of killing intent hardened in his bones.
Power shifted in Ren's veins, thickening by a margin too small for most beings to notice.
He noticed.
The corpse went still.
He turned away.
The road stretched ahead, empty and full, soil carrying the terror and awe of distant tribes who would never know his name.
Inside his chest, his Dao Heart stirred.
This rhythm—a road walked with his own feet, fists and blood deciding life and death—fit him in a way no council meeting, no political negotiation in Heaven or the Underworld had ever quite managed.
He thought of Shigune's hesitant steps, Lavinia's fluttering butterflies of frozen time, Le Fay's grimoire and nervous pride. Of Rias' Throne of Ruin and Akeno's quiet, lethal lightning.
He loved them.
He'd keep giving them paths that matched them—fields of flowers, training dimensions, chances to rewrite themselves without being devoured.
But his own path…
His own path wanted mountains and nameless enemies whose only mistake was standing in front of him.
...
The sun climbed.
Southern Wilderness' air grew hotter, heavier. The scent of wet earth turned to something harsher—burnt wood, sweat, fear.
The trees began to thin.
Smoke pillars marked scattered villages. Farther out, he felt the faint clatter of chains, heard snatches of conversation carried too clearly by wind over rock.
"…Fire Worm…"
"…if you see their tattoos, run…"
"…Fog Valley tribe went under without a sound…"
Fear ran through the words like poison.
Ren's mouth curved, humorless.
Fire Worm Tribe. Right.
He remembered the threads of this world's story—how, in another life, a young man would one day slaughter the Fire Worm leaders, burn their slave system down in a single night, and leave their name as a warning.
In this path, that young man hadn't yet taken his first step.
His domineering side smiled.
"Let's start the clean-up early," he murmured.
...
He found the first group by "accident."
In truth, he let his Dao Heart tug.
His feet carried him down a narrow slope into a fog-choked ravine. Damp clung to his skin. The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and old blood.
Chains clinked ahead, faint under the sound of coarse laughter.
Ren stepped around a bend.
A dozen men stood in a loose bunch.
They wore armor of stitched hides and bronze plates. Tattoos curled along their arms and necks—worm-like patterns, glowing a sullen red in the gloom. Fire essence gathered in their palms and around their blades, crude but vicious.
Behind them, a line of captives knelt.
Men and women in torn clothing, faces hollow, eyes glazed with the particular emptiness that came from understanding that one's life had become someone else's property.
A little girl flinched as a Fire Worm warrior jabbed her shoulder with the butt of his spear, the impact knocking her to the ground. The man laughed, drawing his weapon back for another poke.
Ren's smile vanished.
"Garbage," he said softly.
The word rode the fog like a knife.
Heads turned.
"Who—"
He was already in front of the closest man.
Ren's fingers closed over the warrior's face.
Bone creaked under his grip.
"You're not even good monsters," Ren said. He sounded more bored than angry. "Just cowards who like chains."
He squeezed.
Skull collapsed like rotten fruit.
Blood sprayed, warm and bright against the cold gray air. The corpse crumpled, body folding around a broken neck.
Before it hit the ground, he moved.
A blade wreathed in red flame slashed toward his ribs.
Ren tilted his body half an inch. The attack brushed his clothes and met the pressure of his Hell Suppressing Physique—flame stuttering, True Essence choking as the world around him momentarily decided fire was optional.
He plucked a sword out of mid-air as it fell from dying fingers—a crude iron thing with low-grade flame inscriptions etched along the tip.
His Dao touched the weapon.
The sword shivered, complaining softly as higher law slid through its struggling pattern.
Ren weighed it once.
Then he cut.
There was no flourish.
His arm moved, and the world along the sword's path simply agreed to separate. Necks parted in neat lines. Arms tumbled away from shoulders. Fire Worm warriors looked momentarily confused—the kind of confusion that came when nerves hadn't yet delivered the news that their bodies were no longer whole.
Blood hit the fog in red curtains.
A few tried to launch techniques—fire snakes twisting from their palms, crude totems flaring above their heads. Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique rumbled, and the air around them thickened. Flames choked mid-roar, strangled by reality's sudden refusal to cooperate with their level of comprehension.
Ren stepped through them.
He drifted like a shadow through collapsing bodies, borrowed sword drawing simple arcs. Each stroke was efficient, terrifyingly casual. The ravine filled with the wet percussion of falling flesh.
The last warrior broke.
He spun, dropping his spear, sprinting for the bend in the ravine. True Essence exploded in his legs, muscles straining beyond what his realm should have allowed—a rat trying to outrun a storm.
Ren appeared in front of him.
"No," he said gently.
The man had just enough time to see the smile on his face, to understand that it was the last thing he'd ever see.
The sword twitched.
The warrior fell in two clean pieces.
Silence crashed over the ravine.
The captives stared.
To them, a stranger had walked out of the fog, said a handful of quiet words, and butchered their tormentors before most of them could even gasp.
His aura stayed coiled inside himself, hidden behind Myriad Origin's neutral veil. To their senses, he felt wrong—but not in the crushing, divinity-drenched way of gods.
Just… deeper.
Ren exhaled, slow.
The sword hummed faintly in his grip, inscriptions reacting in awe and terror to the unfamiliar flow of his True Essence. He rolled his wrist, letting the Immortal Soul Bone trace the patterns carved into its edge—simple fire-binding arrays, methods for caging natural flame and releasing it in bursts.
In his mind, the design unfolded into clean diagrams.
"This isn't bad," he mused. "Crude, but useful."
He lowered the sword.
Chains clinked as captives flinched.
Ren flicked his fingers.
True Essence moved.
Metal groaned. Shackles rusted in fast-forward, iron dulling to flaking red. Links snapped, fetters falling open. The residual energy from their bindings flowed into Myriad Origin's loops, stripped and repurposed as fuel.
"If you want to run, run," he said, still not looking back. "If you want to fight… start with anyone wearing those tattoos."
He walked away, leaving bloody prints and broken chains behind.
For a moment, there was only stunned silence.
Then voices cracked—sobs, gasps, disbelieving laughter. Hands reached for wrists that no longer hurt. Someone whispered thanks to a god who hadn't done a thing.
Ren's steps didn't falter.
He'd never been particularly interested in playing hero for every valley.
But he was perfectly happy to remove trash along his road.
...
It didn't stop there.
The day became a tapestry of movement and violence.
He followed the stink of fear and the pulsing heat of Fire Worm campfires. Any time he felt the particular, oily flavor of their tribal mark, he drifted closer.
Scouts on a ridge, laughing about the slaves they'd taken that morning.
He lifted a hand.
A single finger pressed into the dirt.
Stone flowed like water, then spiked upward into a forest of jagged spears. The scouts didn't even scream. One heartbeat they were alive; the next, the ridge was decorated with skewered corpses.
A supply group hauling chains and sacks of dried meat along a narrow ledge.
He exhaled.
The ledge crumbled.
Their bodies plummeted into a ravine whose walls he had quietly reinforced with earth-intent, ensuring that bones would break neatly on impact.
A small slave train—two dozen captives, six Fire Worm guards, one mid-tier warrior with hotter tattoos and better armor.
That one he met personally.
He disarmed him with a twist of borrowed steel, severed tendons with the borrowed sword's flat in ways that ensured he'd never stand again, then let Ancient Ming slide into the man's blood and drink.
Power shivered along Ren's veins.
Not enough to matter.
More than enough to keep his Dao Heart humming.
Word didn't have time to spread properly.
By the time one patrol realized the last wasn't back yet, its own members were already corpses cooling in the afternoon heat. Messengers turned to run, only to find their legs suddenly heavy, ground killing their momentum as if they'd sunk into swamp.
He didn't touch the central tribe.
Not yet.
Fire Worm's main camp—its chiefs, its Earthcore flames and its storehouses of stolen lives—could wait.
Today was just a taste.
Every clash, every kill, burned patterns a little deeper into him.
Martial World's laws pressed against his skin, its heaven-and-earth energy testing him, prodding at the anomaly that walked its soil. He pushed back, not with arrogance, but with simple existence.
I'm here, his Dao said. I move how I want.
With each exchange, the feeling in his chest settled.
This is right. This is mine.
...
By the time the sky bled orange, he was back where he'd started.
The same high cliff. The same wind. The same endless forest rolling out beneath him like a dark sea.
The rock was cool under his boots.
Ren stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, eyes half-lidded, listening.
The two candles burned on.
The Sky Spill anchor—his "field" candle—was a stub now, flame small and stubborn, wax almost entirely gone.
The Heaven anchor—tied to the training dimension—had shortened, but only a little. A neat notch cut into its side.
He reached along the thread stretching between them.
His Dao sense slid through the space between worlds. On the other end, his Heaven answered. Soul Palaces hummed. He felt the familiar presences he'd seeded into that inner cosmos: Rias' crimson star burning steady, Akeno's lightning-threaded sky, Asia's gentle, unwavering light.
Time.
He watched the candles one last moment, then let his Universal Travel Art brush the difference.
Patterns unfolded in his awareness—Biblical seals, Infinity's borderless edges, Great Red's dream-trails, the twisted ruin of Trihexa's path, all rewritten to speak one simple language: distance and duration.
"…about fifteen minutes there," he murmured.
One day here.
About a quarter of an hour at home.
Ninety-something to one.
Good enough.
The forest below seemed to lean in, sky deepen, Qi-lines tightening around him like fingers trying to keep hold.
Martial World didn't like losing a guest like him after a single day.
Ren smiled at the pressure.
"I'll be back," he told the world, tone relaxed. "You've got good flavor."
He lifted his hand.
Lines of Dao rose around him—Nine Worlds solidity, Tenth World flexibility, Three Immortals introspection, Eight Desolates ferocity, Biblical system logic, Infinity's quiet infinity, Great Red's wandering dream-tracks, Trihexa's irreversible finality bound in chains.
His Universal Travel Art seized the concept of "home" and "now" and refused the distance between them.
Space rippled.
He stepped.
...
The training dimension smelled faintly of rain.
Again.
Ren appeared on the same floating stone platform he'd left from, cross-legged posture unchanged, as if he'd never moved.
Above him, the sky was that slightly-too-perfect blue he had shaped—Dao runes drifting lazily like curious fish. Below, the "ground" was a wide plain of pale stone and short grass, scarred by recent training: impact craters, melted depressions, sword cuts that had bitten deep into conjured rock.
He let his senses spread.
The dimension's internal time hadn't noticed his absence.
Akeno's lightning imprint still hung in the air like a memory of a storm, faint afterimages fading along the Heavenbreaker Circuit's paths.
On a distant plateau, residual destruction clung to the scars Rias had carved into it, Throne of Ruin's echo still whispering power.
Beyond the thin seam connecting this place to his manor, he felt Asia moving in the kitchen, humming softly to herself as she tidied up. Other auras flickered around the manor like stars in a cozy sky.
Fifteen minutes.
Maybe less.
Ren huffed a soft, disbelieving laugh.
"That'll do," he said.
A part of him—the part that had once been a guy in a small modern apartment, working a boring job, daydreaming about cultivation arcs on a screen—wanted to grin like an idiot.
One full day of lower realm adventure, of punching big cats and turning slavers into fertilizer, traded for a handful of minutes back home.
His Dao Heart, already pointed forward, quietly locked that ratio into place.
Training.
Exploration.
Courting.
War.
He didn't have to pick one. Not with this kind of leverage.
He lifted his hand and tugged.
The candle-anchors responded. The last wisps of their energy flowed into Myriad Origin's loops, stripped of context and reassembled as pure fuel. The probe-thread snapped, leaving behind only understanding.
Then he sat exactly as he had before the idea hit—cross-legged, palms on his knees, eyes half-lidded.
The training dimension hummed around him, obedient as ever. Clouds rolled. Dao runes drifted.
On the other side of the seam, the manor lived its life.
Fifteen minutes.
He could already imagine Rias' expression when he eventually told her he'd gone "for a walk" and came back with a day's worth of Southern Wilderness blood on his hands.
His lips quirked.
Then another image rose in his mind, sharp and unwelcome and inevitable.
A woman made of snow and starlight.
A soul torn and frayed, wrapped stubbornly around a gray cube.
A last, furious refusal to fall apart.
Mo Eversnow.
Ren opened his eyes.
He stayed still.
Outwardly.
Within his Heaven, twelve Fate Palaces stirred.
Their light didn't blaze. It folded inward, becoming denser, more focused, like stars collecting themselves before dawn.
The Immortal Soul Bone along his spine sang a quiet note, turning emotion and memory into clear lines—complexity into simplicity.
He followed those lines.
Why had the Magic Cube felt that way when it brushed him?
Why had the soul inside—broken, exhausted, crushed by fifty thousand years of hatred and regret—not responded with hostility, but with that faint, brittle attention?
Because she was still fighting.
Because the world she came from had used her as an excuse for calamity and never given her anything back. Because her story, as he had once read it on a glowing screen, had ended in a way that had never quite sat right with him.
He exhaled.
Now that he understood the time ratio, confidence settled around him like a cloak. He could move here without stealing too much from there.
"All right," he murmured. "Let's make this fair."
He wasn't thinking of "rescues" or "repayment."
His Dao Heart had gone past that.
He was thinking of roads.
Her road.
His.
What it would mean to set them side by side, instead of letting hers remain a crippled trail in someone else's story.
He lifted his hand.
The training dimension noticed.
Sky dimmed a shade, as if a cloud had passed over an invisible sun. Formation lines tightened, responding to the Universal Travel Art coiling through them. Paths through the void unfolded: Nine Worlds teleport arrays, Biblical world-linking seals, Infinity's borderless edges, Great Red's dream-tracks, all answering a single command.
"Sky Spill," he said softly. "Same night."
Space rippled.
He stepped.
...
Night pressed close again.
One instant, the training dimension's blue sky arched over him; the next, Sky Spill's cold stars burned overhead, sharper and more distant.
He'd returned a little off from Sky Fortune City.
On purpose.
The cliff beneath his boots was higher and lonelier, wrapped in silence. Below, forests and stony outcroppings stretched without sign of human life. No village lanterns. No patrol torches. Only beast-eyes glimmering in the underbrush and the soft drone of insects.
Good.
He rolled his shoulders once, loosening muscles that hadn't had time to stiffen, and turned inward.
The Magic Cube sat in his Inner Void like a star locked inside a dark pocket.
Grey-black.
Edges perfect.
Its six faces were engraved with black inscriptions—the same ancient patterns that had once scared half the Divine Realm into madness.
Even without trying, he could feel how it wanted to work.
Crush souls.
Erase spirit marks.
Refine memory into something clean and digestible.
It didn't care who it did it to.
Ren let the Immortal Soul Bone look.
Lines and loops bloomed in his mind: soul structures layered upon soul structures, formations whose complexity would have turned Divine Lords pale unfolding in front of him like simple arithmetic.
"So that's how you ask for blood," he murmured.
The Cube's hunger wasn't for physical blood so much as for what blood carried—life essence, soul-tinted power, the echo of someone's martial comprehension. Mo Eversnow had used that hunger as a lifeline, siphoning every scrap the Cube devoured to rebuild herself, millimeter by painstaking millimeter.
He didn't have a pile of Divine Realm bones lying around to help her.
What he had was his Heaven.
His twelve Fate Palaces.
His own bloodline.
Ancient Ming stirred.
It rose under his skin like a beast called by name—hungry, possessive, already imagining how the Cube's soul-structure would taste if he let it.
Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique settled, weight flowing down his legs into the cliff, telling the land beneath him to sit.
"Easy," he said under his breath. "We're helping someone."
He opened his hand.
His Inner Void dilated.
The Magic Cube slid out of that private darkness to hover above his palm, spinning slowly. Night wind parted around it, unwilling to touch.
For a moment, he simply held it there, letting Martial World feel its runaway treasure again.
Then he moved.
Chaos energy, refined through Myriad Origin, surged along his meridians. He wrapped it in a sheath of pure neutrality—no flavor of devil or angel, no hint of DxD's strange laws, just the quiet pulse of chaos pressed into shape.
In his Fate Palaces, countless Dao runes flickered.
He compressed them.
Spear intents, sword laws, fire comprehensions, ice domains, thunder paths, space cracks, destruction fragments—under Myriad Epoch True Self Canon's direction, all of them folded down into something denser, sharper.
To the Cube, that stream of force would taste like dozens of lower-realm masters dying around it.
Not enough to drown the soul inside.
Enough to be noticed.
The Immortal Soul Bone matched that pattern to the Cube's expected input.
Lock.
Key.
He twisted.
A slow stream of soul force poured from his fingertips into the Cube.
Not the full, terrifying weight he could unleash if he felt like being stupid. A carefully measured trickle, balanced between "meaningful" and "overwhelming."
Inside the Cube, something stirred.
He felt it before he saw it.
A presence like a snowfield under cold moonlight.
Quiet.
Still.
Smothering.
Not dead.
The sense of someone who had layered calm over rage for so long that fury had frozen solid.
Mo Eversnow's divine soul.
He didn't speak her name.
He didn't announce himself.
He simply let his soul force brush the frayed edges of her essence, carrying nothing but warmth and a neutral, stabilizing law. The Immortal Soul Bone adjusted patterns instinctively, smoothing tears, redirecting broken pathways, knitting shredded fragments just enough to stop the constant, grinding bleed that had been her reality since she'd burned herself in the Divine Realm.
Awareness flickered.
…Who?
It wasn't a word.
It was impression—surprise, wariness sharpened by fifty thousand years of betrayal, the cautious reach of a woman who understood better than anyone that "help" often came with daggers.
Ren's fingers tightened just a fraction.
He didn't hide what he was doing.
He did hide himself.
His true weight stayed far away, coiled deep in his Heaven. What he let her feel was the "shape" of a lower-realm anomaly—a soul strong for this planet, unusual, but still within the bounds of things a Realm of Gods expert might plausibly produce and then throw away.
Warmth seeped into the snow.
The howling storm in the near distance—her endless, raging hatred for Tian Mingzi and the ones who had destroyed her Holy Land—didn't vanish. But it folded in on itself, compressed into something more focused.
The raw tearing eased.
The sensation of being perpetually shredded by the Cube's default patterns dulled, like a blade finally lifted from an open wound.
Curiosity sharpened on her side.
Whoever you are… you are not… Tian Mingzi. Not those beasts.
She didn't push further.
Not yet.
Ren smiled faintly at the stars.
He didn't send words.
He wasn't interested in making a grand entrance as some inexplicable monster who could feed the Magic Cube with his own soul, stabilize a Divine Lord-level Saintess, and rewrite the rules she'd been suffering under for fifty millennia.
If he came in too hard, too fast, she'd be a fool not to suspect him.
And Mo Eversnow was many things.
Not a fool.
"Let's build this slowly," he decided.
He let the flow of his soul force shrink to a slender thread—just enough to keep the new stabilizing pattern running, enough to leave a distinctive "flavor" she could recognize whenever the Cube stirred again.
If she wanted, she could treat him like a mysterious expert from the Divine Realm—a crippled powerhouse whose cultivation had collapsed for reasons of his own, now lurking in some forgotten corner of the lower realm.
In Martial World, that wasn't even a strange story.
While that thin connection remained, he looked deeper.
Not at her.
At what she carried.
The Magic Cube's inner structure rotated in his awareness—a labyrinth of soul-paths and memory caverns, of spirit-mark erasure arrays and storage chambers that had once housed countless souls and secrets.
Ren's Immortal Soul Bone sang.
Complexity became simplicity.
Layers peeled away.
Behind Mo Eversnow's battered soul, beneath the patterns she had carved into the Cube to survive, something else waited—a deeper law, an origin older than any Verdant Feather Holy Land, older than any Divine Realm war.
The crystallized will of a True Divinity who had died so long ago that even his name had become rumor.
Ren's smile widened, slow and predatory.
"All right," he said softly, to the cold night and the indifferent stars. "Let's see what you're hiding."
And with his soul still feeding a steady trickle of warmth to the woman in the snowfield, Ren Ming turned his gaze fully on the Magic Cube itself—
And began to look deeper.