The dome was silent.
Aryan lay on the broken ground like a discarded doll someone forgot to throw away. His face was pale—not the healthy pale of fair skin, but the gray-white pale of something dying slowly, deliberately, with maximum agony.
His lips were cracked. Blood had dried into black streaks across his right cheek. His left eye was swollen shut. His breathing came in shallow gasps, each inhale a negotiation with shattered ribs, each exhale a small surrender to pain.
Every breath was a gamble. Every heartbeat was a petition to remain alive for one more second.
He was a child in body, but the agony he endured would have murdered grown men.
Would have shattered their minds.
Would have left them begging for death.
Aryan simply lay there.
Breathing.
Suffering.
Existing in the space between life and obliteration.
The dome remained empty.
No contenders.
No spectators.
No one to witness this.
Because the Crown Rank Instructor must never look small.
But right now, Aryan could fit inside a shoebox.
[System: "Congratulations! You've unlocked a new achievement: 'Barely Alive.' Reward: absolutely nothing."]
Aryan tried to inhale. His ribs protested like rusty gates being forced open, screaming in silent agony. The sound came out as a wheeze that didn't quite reach his lungs.
[System: "Host Chakra Status: 2%. Survival probability: 12%... no wait, you moved slightly. Updating calculation: 9%. Your movements are literally reducing your survival chances."]
He didn't respond. Couldn't respond. His throat felt like it had been lined with broken glass.
[System: "Death risk assessment: 88% if you attempt any movement beyond breathing for the next 10 minutes. Recommendation: become a statue. Statues are good at not dying."]
Aryan's mind moved despite his body's paralysis. Calculations. Desperation math. How much time until the next batch arrived.
The answer was not comforting.
Twelve minutes Maybe fifteen.
He had twelve minutes to go from "dying on the ground" to "sitting on a throne looking invincible."
That seemed... optimistic.
His broken fingers twitched.
Slowly.
Violently.
Pathetically.
He pressed his left palm—the only usable limb—onto the scorched black soil.
And pulled.
Not with technique.
Not with cultivation finesse.
Not even with proper chakra channels that flowed through meridians and energy centers.
With desperation.
The dome responded like a dying beast being forced awake by an alarm clock it despised.
Black soil cracked beneath his hand. Chakra began to seep upward—reluctant, ancient, irritated at being disturbed.
The sensation was like drinking from the plumbing of a building. Unrefined. Wrong. But effective.
[System: "Host is now absorbing dome infrastructure. This is equivalent to drinking from the plumbing of a building. Not recommended, but... effective. Also, your chakra meridians are currently screaming. Should I be concerned?"]
Aryan: (Barely audible) "Shut up."
[System: "Absorption detected. External dome reserves: Upper Rank x10 = 200 units. Lower Rank x25 = 160 units. Listener Rank x30 = 120 units. Total available: 480 units. Host tank capacity: 1000 units. You are basically a chakra black hole that complains about being hungry. Congratulations?"]
The soil glowed beneath his hand. Cracks widened. Reality itself seemed to bend inward, funneling energy toward his desperate form.
The chakra flowed into him like molten iron stuffed into a child's veins.
It hurt.
It helped.
Both were simultaneously, devastatingly true.
Outside the dome, in the preparation zones, four people moved with the certainty of those who didn't yet understand they were walking into apocalypse.
Roshni of Suryavanshi Lineage stood in a preparation booth, sharpening her gauntlet-blades like she was filing divorce papers against mercy itself.
Each stroke of the whetstone was deliberate, ritualistic, meditative.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Her eyes were distant, calculating.
She'd analyzed the Bheem fight from the observer section.
She understood something the others hadn't fully grasped, that Aditya raj
could be outmatched.
Crown rank Instructor could bleed.
The question was whether Aditya raj could break.
Sita of Lotus Pavilion stood alone, her lotus sigil glowing softly as her enhanced mind ran calculations at speeds that made normal human thought look like continental drift.
Her fingers traced equations in the air, leaving faint trails of light.
Previous Crown dome size = 50 m radius
Bheem's fight duration = 67 seconds
Expected chakra depletion of a normal fighter of his caliber Would be at least 60-70%.
But something was wrong here she looked into the abyss of Black Dome.
She opened her eyes, and something in her expression shifted.
Unless he did something desperate.
Bhaskar's scales bristled.
The beastmaster stood with his arms crossed, each scale rising and falling as he breathed.
His instincts—honed through years of bonding with dangerous creatures—were screaming something.
Something wrong.
He could feel it.
A disturbance in the chakra networks.
A tremor in the energy that bound the arena together.
It was like someone was plucking at the threads of reality itself.
Zhang Xuan was having a meltdown.
"Every time," he muttered, adjusting his armor for the hundredth time. "Every single time I'm involved in something important, the universe decides to explode. We're going to walk toward the Listener Rank domes, and they're going to vanish. Or the ground's going to open up. Or Roshni's going to accidentally cut off my head in the confusion."
He paced frantically.
"My bad luck doesn't just affect me. It's a probability field. When I enter a stable system, the system destabilizes. When I participate in normal events, they become catastrophic. This is statistically inevitable. I'm calling it now: fifty-four percent chance of something world-ending happening in the next three minutes."
Roshni, without looking up from her blades: "Shut up and keep walking."
Zhang Xuan: "This feels personal."
But he moved with them anyway, because there was no other choice. There never was.
The four led the procession forward—toward the preparation platforms, toward the Listener Rank instructors, toward the Lower Rank training domes, toward the Upper Rank battle arenas. Toward Crown Rank. Behind them, thirty-six other contenders followed. Listener Rank mostly, some Lower Rank, three Upper Rank challengers who'd made it this far through luck and skill in equal measure.
They were walking toward their trials.
None of them understood they were walking toward an apocalypse.
Exactly forty-five seconds after Aryan began pulling chakra from the external domes, the earth moved.
Not gently.
Not a tremor.
The ground SHOOK.
The preparation platform cracked down the middle like an eggshell under a hammer. Spectator stands shuddered. The audience gasped collectively—a sound like a thousand voices breaking simultaneously.
The thirty-six contenders stumbled. Some fell to their knees. Dust erupted from the cracks in the stone.
Roshni caught herself on a pillar, blades still gripped in her hands, eyes narrowing as understanding began to dawn.
Sita's lotus sigil flared violently—calculations accelerating, trying to process what was happening.
Her enhanced mind could feel the chakra distortion.
It was massive.
Exponential.
Centered on the Crown Rank dome.
Bhaskar's scales rose completely vertical.
His beastmaster instincts were screaming danger.
Predator.
Ancient threat.
Something waking up.
Zhang Xuan nearly fell completely, his white fighting robe fluttering.
"I TOLD YOU!!! I TOLD YOU MY BAD LUCK WOULD DO THIS!!! THIS IS STATISTICALLY INEVITABLE!!! WHEN I WALK FORWARD IN IMPORTANT MOMENTS, REALITY COLLAPSES!!! THIS IS MY FAULT!!! I HAVE WEAPONIZED MISFORTUNE!!"
Bhaskar, voice serious and cutting through the chaos: "Zhang, shut up. Not everything is your fault."
Another crack split across the preparation platform, wider than the first.
Zhang Xuan: "...that one is still probably me."
The crowd erupted into chaos.
"WHAT'S HAPPENING?!"
"IS THE DOME FAILING?!"
"IS IT AN EARTHQUAKE?!"
"GET US OUT OF HERE!!"
One million people, suddenly terrified. The energy of anticipation transformed into pure dread. Families grabbed each other. Spectators stood, looking for exits. Vendors abandoned their stalls.
In one section, a commoner fainted dead away, his body crumpling like a discarded puppet.
In another, an elderly woman began praying—not to one god, but cycling rapidly through all thirty-three crore deities, hedging her cosmic bets: "Brahma, protect us! Vishnu, save us! Shiva, forgive us! Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Hanuman, Ganesha, Agni—"
A Lower Rank Instructor, watching his dome vanish, quietly whispered to his colleague: "I resign. Effective immediately. I'm getting a job in the merchant district. Less death. Better benefits."
Fear spread like a contagion.
In the normal stands, among one million ordinary spectators, in a section so unremarkable it was practically invisible, Ganpath sat.
He was old. Weathered. His face was the geographical map of a thousand bad decisions and exactly three good ones. In his hands: a clay cup of the cheapest wheat wine available. The kind that tasted like fermented regret mixed with desperation.
He took a slow sip.
Beside him, curled in his lap like a tiny lizard, was Tarask.
Tarask was small now—no larger than a human arm. Saffron scales that shimmered with draconic light. Tiny wings folded along his sides. Eyes that glowed with intelligence that belied his lizard-sized body.
This was a Chakra 3 Stage 1 dragon.
Aryan had taken him from Vaikunth Dham itself—the realm of the gods. And through a luck-based contract that neither of them fully understood, Tarask was bound to Aryan now. Connected. Synched. Feeling everything his master felt.
Right now, Tarask was trembling.
Ganpath's Perception Activated—his Max Intelligence stat, the curse that had driven him nearly insane, salvaged only by Aryan's Max Luck strike that literally reset his consciousness with a lightning bolt—allowed him to see what others could not.
Chakra flows. Energy distortions. The invisible rivers of power that bound the world together.
He saw the impossible truth:
The Central Dome was consuming the External Domes.
Not violently. Not chaotically.
Methodically. Deliberately. Like a predator drawing life from prey.
The ten Upper Rank domes—their protective barriers were dimming. Fading by the microsecond. Like candles being slowly suffocated by a closing hand.
The twenty-five Lower Rank domes—their glow was being sucked inward, drawn toward the center like moths to flame, like iron filings to a magnet, like breath pulled into a vacuum.
The thirty Listener Rank domes—they were dying. Their chakra reserves flowing invisibly toward the Crown Rank Instructor's dome in rivers only he could see.
All of this—all of this immense, civilization-level chakra—was flowing toward the central dome like tributaries converging toward an ocean.
And the center dome was expanding. Growing larger by the second. Its protective barrier stretching outward like a living thing feeding on the corpses of lesser creatures.
Within five minutes, there would be no other domes left.
Just the central dome.
Growing.
Hungrier.
Ganpath muttered, slurring slightly: "Heh... the boy's done it again. Chakra depletion crisis. Desperation move. Sucking domes dry like some kind of vampire mosquito bastard child."
He took another sip of wine.
"Clever bastard. Stupid bastard. Both simultaneously. Always both things with him."
Tarask shifted in his lap. The tiny dragon's eyes glowed brighter. Brighter. Brighter.
He felt his master's pain even from here. Even through the distance. Even though the binding should have been too weak at this range.
But desperation creates bridges that normal chakra networks cannot cross.
Tarask hissed softly—a sound of ancient draconic fury and concern.
Ganpath patted the dragon: "Don't worry, little scale-baby. Your bond-mate is stupidly alive. He always is. That's his curse. That's his luck. He survives things that should kill him and then complains about the scars."
He drank more wine.
"Poor bastard. Probably doesn't even know what he's doing, just pulling chakra from the ground like some kind of desperate child vampire."
The Listener Rank domes vanished first.
Thirty protective barriers, each containing hundreds of kilograms of refined chakra, each designed to protect training spaces for intermediate cultivators.
They didn't fade gradually.
They collapsed inward simultaneously.
It was like reality tearing. Like the fabric of existence being ripped at the seams. Like the universe itself was sighing and giving up.
The barriers didn't waver or dim—they snapped, and the chakra contained within them was pulled toward the center in streams of invisible light.
Spectators in the Listener section suddenly saw their domes disappear.
They were left looking at empty space where protective barriers had been moments before.
The Lower Rank domes went next.
Twenty-five of them.
Larger.
More powerful.
Designed to contain battles between advanced cultivators.
They collapsed inward the same way.
All simultaneously.
The Lower Rank instructors—who'd been standing in the centres of their domes, preparing to fight the next batch—suddenly found themselves exposed.
Vulnerable.
Standing in public with nowhere to hide their fighting spaces.
They looked around in shock.
"What happened?!"
"Our domes—"
"They're being consumed!"
"WHAT IS HAPPENING?!"
Their voices carried across the arena. Confusion. Fear. Genuine terror.
The Upper Rank domes collapsed last.
But even stronger barriers. Even more dangerous. Ten of them, each containing enough chakra to power a small province, to sustain wars, to reshape geographical features.
They didn't collapse gracefully.
They got ripped apart.
The energy cascade was so violent that shockwaves rippled across the entire arena. Spectators near the Upper Ranksection were thrown backward by the force. Children screamed. Vendors scattered. Chaos bloomed.
The Upper Rank instructors found themselves standing in the open, their carefully controlled battle spaces now public spectacle.
They were exposed. They were vulnerable. They were naked in ways that had nothing to do with clothes and everything to do with shame.
As all this chakra was absorbed, the central dome expanded.
Not quickly. Not in one dramatic moment that defied physics.
Constantly. Relentlessly. Like a living thing feeding.
The dome that had been 50 m in radius began to become 60 m.
Then 70 m.
Then 100 m.
Then it kept growing.
The arena inside grew larger.
The black soil spread like oil across water. The burnt trees multiplied—or rather, they revealed themselves, having been hidden in the expanding space. The blood moon got larger as it rose higher in the expanding sky.
Reality was being restructured in real time.
Inside the expanding dome, Aryan lay on the ground, having absorbed approximately 480 units of chakra from the dying domes.
It was enough.
Not quite half his maximum, but enough.
He looked toward the System.
Aryan: (Barely audible) "Do it. Activate Another Chance."
[System: "Initiating Another Chance skill. Effect: Complete cellular regeneration through rapid healing. Cost: 10% of current chakra. Side effect: Complete sensory overload. Host will experience every wound simultaneously at 10x intensity for duration of healing. Estimated duration: 45 seconds of absolute agony. Are you sure? Because I'm not sure. I'm genuinely concerned about your decision-making."]
Aryan: "Do it."
The sensation began.
It was not gradual.
It was instantaneous.
Every broken rib.
Every torn muscle fiber.
Every shattered bone.
Every inch of damaged flesh.
Every drop of spilled blood.
He felt it all simultaneously.
Not sequentially.
Not in progression.
All at once.
His right shoulder—the joint completely shattered from the collision with Bheem—started to regenerate. Bone fragments realigned themselves with sounds like snapping branches. Cartilage reformed. Ligaments knit back together. Tendons reattached.
The pain was inconceivable.
It was like his shoulder was being shattered and reformed a thousand times simultaneously. Like he was dying and being resurrected in every microsecond.
For a moment—just a single moment in the chaos of agony—Aryan saw her face.
His mother.
Not in this world, but the last one. A memory from a life he shouldn't remember. Dark eyes filled with love and worry.
Hands that had held him when he was small.
A voice that had whispered that everything would be okay.
That single memory—that ghost of love from a dead world—was enough.
Enough to keep him from letting the darkness take him. Enough to endure the next ten seconds of healing.
His ribs—fractured, some cracked clean through—began to mend. Calcium deposits rebuilt themselves, bone knitting together at impossible speeds. The fractures sealed. The cracks vanished. New bone grew where old bone had shattered.
But the sensation was like someone was hammering nails through his chest while simultaneously pulling them out. Like his ribs were being rebuilt while still inside his body, still pressing against his lungs.
[System: "Host, your pain levels have exceeded recommended emotional capacity. Initiating… nothing. You chose this. Enjoy your suffering. It builds character."]
His lungs—filled with blood and fluid—began to clear. The blood was reabsorbed. The damaged tissue repaired. His breathing opened up.
The sensation was like drowning in reverse. Like his lungs were being turned inside out and put back in again while still active. Like he was breathing water and then breathing air and then drowning again.
[System: "If you scream any louder, I will file a noise complaint on your behalf with the Council of Cosmic Entities."]
His wounds—dozens of cuts, gashes, lacerations across his entire body—started to close. The skin knit. The bleeding stopped. The damaged flesh reformed.
The sensation was like being on fire while simultaneously being frozen. Like his entire body was being rebuilt while still conscious and aware of every single cell changing.
Aryan's mouth opened.
A sound emerged.
Not a scream.
Not initially.
It was something deeper.
Something primal.
Something that didn't belong in human vocal cords.
It was a ROAR.
A ground-shaking, reality-bending, bone-marrow-vibrating ROAR.
The dome—now massive, now consuming the full arena—amplified this roar.
It echoed across one million people.
It vibrated through bone. It made teeth ache and eyes water. It shook the stands. It made the air itself vibrate.
It sounded like dominance. Like fury. Like a god declaring war on weakness itself.
Across the arena, one million people felt this roar and thought:
"He's angry!"
"He's frustrated with the weakness!"
"The Crown Rank Instructor is furious!"
"He's calling us! He's challenging us! He wants to FIGHT!"
They stood. They cheered. They screamed.
Because the roar sounded like power.
Like a predator done playing with prey.
Like a force of nature announcing its presence to a trembling world.
Roshni thought: "He's lost patience. He wants real challenge."
Sita's calculations flared: "The roar contains frustration. He's bored by previous opponents."
Bhaskar's instincts screamed: "That's not just anger. That's hunger. That's a predator calling to other predators."
Zhang Xuan muttered: "That's the sound of something that's about to kill us all. Statistically, our survival probability just dropped another 8%."
But they kept walking anyway.
Because there was no other choice.
In the stands, Ganpath muttered: "Poor bastard's dying on the inside while screaming like a demon. That's some fine acting, actually. That's survival instinct pretending to be arrogance. That's a boy learning how to fake invincibility."
Tarask hissed in agreement, his tiny body trembling.
Because only they knew.
Only they understood.
The roar wasn't arrogance.
It was agony.
It was a boy's body being rebuilt cell by cell, and his voice being the only outlet for pain that should have been impossible to survive.
The roar faded.
Silence.
Absolute, deafening silence.
One million people, waiting.
Holding their breath.
Praying to gods they weren't sure existed.
Then the voice came.
From the center of the massive dome, a voice emerged.
It was Aryan's voice. But it was different. It had been modulated somehow—deeper, colder, carrying an edge that hadn't been there before.
It sounded like death itself pronouncing judgment.
"Come and challenge me."
The words carried weight.
Absolute authority.
Finality.
"I will decide what rank you truly belong to. Come. All of you."
Not a question.
Not an invitation.
A command.
[System: "Note: You sound like you're about to commit war crimes. Excellent performance. Oscar-worthy. I would give you 9/10 for dramatic delivery. Lost one point because you sound like you're about to cry."]
The response was immediate.
"HE'S CALLING THEM!!"
"HE WANTS THE FINAL BATCH!!"
"THE CROWN RANK INSTRUCTOR IS READY!!"
"THIS IS IT!! THIS IS THE FINAL CHALLENGE!!"
One million people, standing, cheering, screaming.
Because the voice sounded invincible.
In the VIP balcony, Principal Devendra wrote in his notes with clinical precision, "The Crown Rank Instructor is frustrated by the weakness of previous challengers. He has consumed the external domes to create a larger arena—a grander stage for true combat. He is calling the final batch because he wants to face genuine opposition. This is not anger. This is a cultivator demanding excellence from those who would challenge him. He teaches through trial. He elevates through victory."
He didn't realize the truth.
Aryan barely survived Bheem.
Aryan is still trembling.
The roar was a scream of healing pain.
The command is desperation disguised as dominance.
He's not calling them because he wants challenge.
He's calling them because he needs them to come. Needs the distraction. Needs to forget about the agony still echoing in his nervous system.
Ganpath's drunk observation was simpler: "Poor kid's dying but sounds like a demon king. That's survival instinct. That's learning to fake it until you make it. That's basically all of human history, actually."
He took another sip of wine.
Tarask hissed agreement.
Inside the dome, Aryan sat on his throne, breathing hard.
His body was healed. Completely.
The Another Chance skill did its work perfectly.
But his mind was wrecked.
[System: "Chakra absorption summary: Upper Rank domes (10 units) contributed 200 chakra units. Lower Rank domes (25 units) contributed 160 chakra units. Listener Rank domes (30 units) contributed 120 chakra units. Total absorbed: 480 units. Host maximum capacity: 1000 units. Percentage of tank filled: 48%."]
Aryan: (Hoarse voice) "We absorbed sixty-five domes and barely filled half my tank."
[System: "Correct, Host. You are a biological anomaly. Standard cultivator maximum capacity is 400-600 units. Your capacity is 1000 units. This is why desperation becomes necessary. This is why you are constantly on the edge of dying. Your needs exceed the supply of reality."]
Aryan didn't respond.
Just breathed.
[System: "Also, your healing scream has classified you as a sonic weapon. I'm not sure if that helps or hurts your reputation at this point."]
System noticed something but he couldn't tell if he's right or not.
The four stood before the massive dome.
It was enormous.
The dome was no longer the 50 m-radius structure it had been hours ago.
It was now 150 m across.
Size of a small castle at this point turned into a fighting arena.
The protective barrier glowed crimson and black—saffron from the domes it had consumed, black from the wasteland within.
The dome trembled.
It breathed.
It hungers.
Roshni studied the dome with her warrior instincts analyzing every detail. Exit routes. Structural weaknesses. Chakra flow patterns.
"This dome is alive," she whispered.
Sita's calculations accelerated. Her lotus sigil glowed, fingers tracing equations in the air:
Previous dome radius = 50 meters
Host maximum capacity = unreadable mathematically
Absorbed dome = 65 domes
She opened her eyes.
"He's dangerous," she said softly. "He's hiding it with pain in his voice so that we blindly attack him. That roar wasn't desperation. It was dominance. It was—"
She paused.
"—it was real."
Bhaskar's instincts screamed: "This arena feels hungry. It's not a dome. It's a mouth. And we're walking into its teeth."
Zhang Xuan ran calculations frantically on his internal system:
Previous survival probability = 40%
Current survival probability = 15%
Likelihood of catastrophe with my involvement = 85%
Expected outcome = half of us die and the other half wish they did
"Guys," he said quietly. "Our survival probability just dropped below 20%. This is bad. This is really, genuinely bad. We might actually die in there."
But he stepped forward anyway.
Because there was no other choice.
Because sometimes the only way forward is through the mouth of the beast.
Behind them, the thirty-six contenders moved forward.
They were terrified.
Excited.
Desperate.
This was it.
This was the final test.
This was what they'd trained for.
But the dome was so much larger than they expected.
And the Crown Rank Instructor inside was so much more terrifying than any rumor suggested.
Among the thirty-six, one voice rose.
A High Rank cult contender—arrogant, muscular, his aura glowing with confidence that bordered on delusion—stepped forward. He pushed past Roshni roughly, his shoulder checking hers with deliberate force.
"Get back, princess," he snarled. "I'm going to face this calamity. You might hurt yourself."
Roshni's hand moved toward her blade, but Sita placed a hand on her wrist.
A cold wind passed through the arena.
Not from the dome.
Not from the weather.
From something else.
Something that noticed arrogance.
Something that was watching.
The contender didn't notice. He simply grinned, stepping toward the dome entrance with overconfidence burning in his eyes.
A cold wind passed again, carrying whispers only he could hear.
The forty contenders stood before the massive dome.
Aryan sat on his throne inside, fully healed but spiritually shattered, his soul no longer of Aryan but something much stronger than that.
The blood moon watched.
The void stirred.
And somewhere in the darkness, destiny adjusted its calculations.
Something was coming.
Something had always been coming.
But this time the thing coming is far scarier than Aryan with his luck.
And now the real game was about to begin.