The catastrophic recoil of the Absolute Gnosis Array violently blasted Rayn across the frozen mud. As the God Slayer's eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed into absolute unconsciousness, the entire battlefield completely froze.
Vespera's heart skipped a beat—an emotion the ancient spatial demon had not felt in centuries.
"Rayn!" Vespera screamed, her voice completely devoid of its usual arrogant calm.
She violently teleported to his side. The flesh on Rayn's stomach was aggressively necrotizing, turning a horrific, rotting pitch-black. The dark rot was spreading rapidly, violently poisoning his meridians. Vespera realized instantly that if the absolute genius of their team died here, their tactical formation would completely collapse.
"Retreat!" Vespera commanded, violently grabbing Rayn's blood-soaked robes. Her spatial Gnosis erupted, instantly wrapping Rayn's failing body in a protective, silver void.
Seeing their terrifying leader rendered completely unconscious, absolute panic gripped the Executioners.
Behind the massive, purple energy shield, the Supreme Leader slowly lowered the Absolute Gnosis Array. He looked at the unconscious Conqueror and let out a booming, arrogant laugh that echoed through the bloody valley.
"Run away, you pathetic Ashburg dogs!" the Supreme Leader roared, his voice laced with absolute, unadulterated triumph. "Take your dying leader and run! Enjoy your borrowed time! Because in exactly three days, my entire Battalion will march on Ashburg, and we will violently butcher every single man, woman, and child in your pathetic town!"
Hearing the arrogant threat against his town, Magnus—still entirely disguised in the tanned, muscular body of Peter—felt a catastrophic wave of absolute killing intent violently explode from his soul.
Magnus's green eyes burned with dark malice. He aggressively summoned fifty heavy golden coins, prepared to burn his own life essence to violently shatter the purple shield and butcher the Supreme Leader right then and there.
Suddenly, a heavy, blood-soaked hand tightly clamped around Magnus's wrist.
It was Victus.
"Don't go, sir," Victus grunted, entirely unaware that he was physically restraining his own adopted older brother. Victus was heavily bleeding, his Tier 6 armor completely ruined, but his grip was firm. "They are too strong right now. If you blindly charge that Gnosis Array alone, you are absolutely going to die. We must protect the Lord."
Magnus froze. He looked down at Victus's hand, then up at the hulking, battle-scarred brute's face.
For a fraction of a second, the blood-soaked battlefield completely faded away. A violent hallucination overtook Magnus's mind. Instead of a massive, heavily armored warrior, Magnus saw an eight-year-old Victus holding his hand in the Dawinton Palace courtyard, looking up with innocent, bright eyes and asking, "Brother, can you please play with me?"
Magnus violently swallowed the lump in his throat. The cold, sociopathic politician buried the memory deep within his soul.
He dismissed the golden coins into the void.
"You are right, Victus," Magnus whispered, his voice masking the heavy emotional weight. "Let us retreat."
Freddy and Victus quickly flanked Vespera. With a terrifying surge of spatial energy, Vespera violently ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, teleporting the five Executioners completely out of the blood-soaked valley of The Treachery.
They violently materialized on the absolute summit of a colossal, heaven-piercing mountain miles away—a peak so massive it made Mount Everest look like a pathetic ant hill.
The freezing wind howled across the jagged rocks. Vespera gently laid Rayn's body down on the frozen stone. Peter, Freddy, and Victus stood in a tight circle, completely terrified as they watched their invincible leader.
Rayn was completely pale. He was not breathing. The horrific, pitch-black rot had spread from his stomach entirely to his chest.
While the team panicked in the physical world, Rayn's consciousness was violently ripped from his body.
Rayn slowly opened his eyes. He was no longer on the freezing mountain. He was floating in an endless, pitch-black abyss.
"Welcome back to my domain, kid," a dark, mocking voice echoed.
Rayn turned around. Silas — the duplicate soul of Yaowangming(Rayn's previous life), and the reincarnated soul within Rayn's body., was casually sitting on a floating leather armchair. To mock Rayn's mortal sensibilities, Silas had violently manifested a tailored black suit and was casually tapping an elegant walking stick against the invisible floor.
"What the absolute fuck is happening, Silas?" Rayn demanded, his crimson eyes flashing with rage. "Why am I in the spirit realm?"
"Do not blame me for your own pathetic greed, Conqueror," Silas laughed. He casually waved his walking stick.
A massive, glowing television screen violently materialized in the dark void, broadcasting a live, internal scan of Rayn's physical body.
"How is a television working in my soul?" Rayn asked, entirely confused by the modern object in a Xianxia realm.
"Rayn, how many times must I violently remind you?" Silas sighed dramatically. "This is absolute mental space. I can manifest whatever I please to make my lessons easier for your mortal brain to comprehend. Now, shut up and look at the screen."
Rayn looked at the projection. The spiritual representation of his stomach was completely black. His profound, crimson blood was rapidly turning into a sludge of dark, necrotic acid.
"What is happening to my physical vessel?" Rayn asked, his voice turning cold.
Silas stood up, adjusting his suit tie like a pretentious professor. "Rayn, what I am about to explain is the absolute, fundamental law of cultivation. It might be complex, so completely empty your mind and listen."
Rayn firmly nodded.
Silas tapped his stick, and a massive, glowing hologram of Rayn's profound Core appeared in the center of the void.
"Let us review the absolute arsenal you possess," Silas began analytically. "When you first awakened, you inherited exactly twenty-one powers. Eighteen foundational mortal Daos, plus the supreme Crimson Conqueror Gnosis. On top of that, you forcefully assimilated the White Griffin artifact, becoming its host. You also awakened this world power—the Void Scribe."
"I am completely aware of my own arsenal," Rayn interrupted, his frustration boiling over. "Just get to the absolute point!"
"Patience, you arrogant child!" Silas snapped, his demonic aura violently flaring. "Because you possessed so many conflicting powers, I instructed you to merge them into a single, unified matrix known as The Collector. But here is where you completely ruined everything."
Silas zoomed in on the hologram of Rayn's core.
"You fed 500 bodies and 70 gallons of blood to the Gambler's Heart. The demonic entity violently awakened. It attempted to consume your profound core to take over your body. However... there are two heavily dormant, terrifyingly ancient powers hidden at the absolute bottom of your soul. One is a primordial mix of Black and White void energy, and the other is a True Crimson power."
Silas visibly shivered. "Those hidden ancient cores scared the absolute shit out of the Gambler's Heart. Terrified of being erased, the Gambler's Heart fled and parasitically fused itself directly into your Collector matrix. Now, it is violently clashing with Void Scribe power inside your meridians. That spiritual friction is literally rotting your physical body."
"Can my powers fight with each other?"
Silas nodded.
"Yes. Every ancient power possesses a certain degree of consciousness. When you were injured before, you didn't know how to heal yourself. But the Conqueror Power used its own consciousness to heal you."
Rayn stared at him in confusion.
"They have consciousness?"
"They do," Silas replied. "But they only awaken that consciousness when you are in absolute danger… when your life is hanging by a thread."
Silas paused before continuing.
"That is why your powers are fighting each other. They are fundamentally different from the Eighteen Mortal Powers. Those powers have no consciousness of their own. They simply obey your will and act according to your commands."
"But your four powers are different."
Silas raised four fingers.
"Conqueror. The Black-and-White Power. Crimson. And Void Scribe."
"All four possess their own consciousness. They can think, react, and make decisions on their own."
Rayn's expression darkened.
"So… they were fighting because they were trying to protect me?"
"Exactly."
Silas looked directly at him.
"The Gambler's Heart was trying to destroy you and want to control your core. Those four powers sensed the threat and refused to let it happen. They fought against it—not to kill each other, but to protect you."
He paused.
"Your powers weren't fighting because they hated one another, Rayn."
"They were fighting…"
"Because each of them wanted to be the one that saved you."
"But I never awakened the Black-and-White Power or the Conqueror Power."
Silas replied calmly, "You didn't need to."
Rayn frowned.
"They sensed the danger. Even though you had never awakened them, they could still perceive the threat. They used their Gnosis—their innate consciousness—to manifest their power and attack the Gambler's Heart."
Silas's expression grew serious.
"They weren't fully awakened, but they knew you were in danger."
"They were trying to scare the Gambler's Heart away."
"So my powers are fighting with Gambler Heart," Rayn deduced intelligently. "Why can't my core handle it?"
"Because your core is weak," Silas stated bluntly.
Silas waved his stick, creating a chart of five glowing tiers in the void.
"The Cultivation of Cores is strictly divided into five absolute stages," Silas explained, stepping into the role of a harsh master. "They are:
Origin Core
Blood Core
Astral Core
Eternal Core
Divine Core."
Silas pointed at the lowest tier. "You are currently only in the initial Origin Core stage. The only reason your fragile Origin Core hasn't violently detonated from holding twenty-plus powers is because you have latent, heaven-defying Dragon blood running through your veins. If any normal cultivator attempted to hold this much Gnosis, they would instantly explode."
"When your power eventually advances," Silas continued, "you will break through to the Blood Core stage. Your profound core will physically merge with your bloodstream, making your body infinitely stronger and expanding your capacity. But until then, your Origin Core is exactly like a tiny glass cup, and you are trying to pour an entire fucking ocean into it."
Rayn's mind raced as his supreme intelligence processed the mechanical logic of the world. "The container is full. I need to make room."
"Exactly," Silas smiled darkly. "Your physical body is ordering you to evict a tenant. You have exactly two absolute options, Rayn."
The hologram split into two glowing choices.
"Option One," Silas decreed. "You permanently shatter your Collector matrix. You lose the ability to seamlessly swap between your foundational powers, binding yourself to a single, rigid path. But you will have enough space to stabilize."
"Option Two," Silas continued, his eyes glowing. "You permanently sacrifice the White Griffin. You forcibly rip the supreme beast spirit entirely out of your core and release it back into the wild. The empty space left behind will allow you to safely absorb and suppress the Gambler's Heart."
Rayn clenched his fists. "Can I just violently destroy the Gambler's Heart and keep everything else?"
"Absolutely not," Silas laughed, shaking his head. "It has completely merged with the walls of your core. If you try to aggressively rip the Heart out now, your Origin Core will violently shatter, and your physical body on that mountain will instantly die."
Silas leaned forward, leaning heavily on his walking stick. His dark, demonic smile stretched from ear to ear.
"The time for greed is entirely over, Conqueror," Silas whispered, his voice echoing through the void. "Make your absolute, ruthless calculation. What is your choice? Do you sacrifice the Griffin... or the Collector?"