After his battle with Varec Illume of the Illume family, Jaquan left the Vernon continent with quiet resolve. He had flown for weeks, bound for the Reign continent. He had two goals in mind: one, to grow stronger, and two, to meet his ex-wife, whom he'd heard was residing at the Sabre Sect—one of the strongest sects on the continent.
He knew it was foolish.
But emotion often supersedes reason.
He didn't seek apology or reunion. Only a single truth: that he had survived. That their son was thriving. That the man she abandoned had regained his cultivation and had gotten stronger.
But fate isn't kind to intentions wrapped in pain.
The moment Jaquan entered the Rage Forest, he felt the qi shift—a subtle warping, as if the forest itself repelled his presence. The trees leaned strangely. Leaves shimmered with an unnatural hue. And the beasts... they didn't stalk. They hunted.
Within hours, he was caught between two Enlightened Realm predators—one bearing obsidian antlers woven with spatial glyphs, the other a serpentine abomination whose breath corroded the fabric of light. Jaquan, a peak Diamond Realm cultivator, unleashed every strike he had—Thunder bolt, Thunder Crescent Blade, and even his strongest technique of his Spirit Thunder Art: Thunder Surge. And still... they overwhelmed him.
For two days and nights, Jaquan ran for survival.
His boots split. His robe was torn. Qi reserves dipped into marrow-level exhaustion. He fed off dew and realm moss scraped from bark. Each breath was shallow. The forest bent around him—realms colliding in the form of corrupted beasts and gravity slips.
Then he stumbled upon it while dodging a blast from one of the beasts:
An underground ridge tucked behind a collapsed waterfall, sealed by ancient cultivation barriers. Symbols etched in older-than-recorded-time languages shimmered around its mouth. Jaquan had no choice. He crawled inside as spatial distortion shredded the air behind him.
But rest would not greet him.
Something stirred deeper within.
A beast. Not merely enlightened—but evolutionary. Its body rippled with molten patterns, eyes bearing the shape of twin crescents. Jaquan tried to flee, but one strike sent him careening into a void fissure—an unseen pocket realm threaded between reality's fractures.
And everything went black.
____
He awoke to firelight.
And pain.
His body throbbed—bruises, fractures, and internal ruptures tugging at every breath. But warmth cradled him. Not just of fire, but of presence.
She sat beside him.
A woman unlike any he'd ever seen. Beautiful is an understatement. Her red hair spilled down her back like a wildfire tamed by grace. Her skin bore the bronze touch of sun and scars kissed by time. Her eyes—amber, flecked with copper—watched him with neither pity nor fear. Just calm.
She didn't ask his name.
Didn't question his origins.
She simply helped.
And Jaquan, who once commanded legions and shattered mountains, let himself be healed.
Her name was Lara.
She had been trapped in this realm long before Jaquan's arrival. She was running away from home, but her pursuer had been drawing close, and that's when she entered the same ridge Jaquan did—and got trapped in this place that seems to have no exit.
But Lara had endured the loneliness. Not through brute strength, but by adapting. She learned to convert realm-reactive petals into healing draughts. To crush steam-extracted beast cores into stabilizing elixirs. She rewrote formation glyphs using flame-thread ink spun from silk spiders and sandglass.
And now, for the first time in five years, there was someone else.
She didn't hide her surprise or excitement.
She didn't disguise her loneliness—and welcomed him.
Day by day, she nursed him back to health with healing draughts brewed from realm-reactive petals and steam-crushed beast cores. She sang in a tongue he didn't recognize. She stitched his wounds with flame-infused thread and used her qi to stabilize his fractured meridians. For two weeks, he couldn't move, but Lara never left his side.
Their bond grew slowly as they conversed—nothing major. Just him thanking her for saving him, and each time she did something for him. They exchanged names, and she told him about this realm—how they were trapped there—and about places that were dangerous and the safe zones.
When Jaquan was finally able to move his limbs again and restore sixty percent of his strength three days later, he went out while Lara was cultivating to see if he could find an exit somewhere. Over these five days of outings, he sometimes stumbled into beasts—thunder beasts that threatened to devour him—but he managed to survive.
But on the fifth day, he arrived at a place dense in lightning qi, nestled between two ridgelines pulsing with unstable gravity. There, he found ruins etched with thunder glyphs. Storm symbols older than continent lore. Their presence stirred something within him.
At the heart of a lightning-shaped podium, buried beneath fog that only parted when he touched it with bare hands, lay a scripture sealed in crystallized qi:
The Dominant Celestial Thunder Cultivation Technique.
He didn't understand it at first. The script bent light. The instructions warbled—half-spoken in the mind and half-imprinted on bone. But he tried.
And the technique responded to his Thunder core.
His trial began at twilight.
Jaquan limped toward the podium and invoked the first glyph. Thunder cracked from the podium's base—and struck him.
His body convulsed.
Meridians twisted.
Energy tore through him, wild and ancient—like a forgotten being reclaiming a vessel.
For five days, Jaquan hovered between clarity and coma. The first phase of technique reshaped him. Not gently. Not kindly. But effectively. It shattered old qi circuits and rebuilt them with lightning precision.
And when Jaquan awoke, the podium was silent—but the glyphs had changed.
They waited for him now to be ready for the next phase.
They recognized him.
He wasn't whole.
But he was tempered.
Forged not in war—but in quiet agony.
Lara, who had already finished her cultivation four days ago, stumbled on him here and realized he was cultivating. And though it looked painful, she didn't disturb him. Now that he has taken a break, she's looking forward to chatting with him—even if all he talks about is his son Jalen, how good of a boy he is, and how much he hopes Jalen is doing well.