The journey back to the Blood Lotus Sect was different. Dver wasn't just walking; he was containing.
Inside his core, the lifeforce of three high-level Enforcers swirled like a trapped hurricane. The Void had digested their flesh, but the raw, spiritual energy was violently clashing against his mortal bottleneck. Every step Dver took left a faint, frostbitten footprint in the mud. His skin felt unnaturally cold, his pulse slow and heavy as a mountain's heartbeat.
"You are overflowing, Dver," the Void God rumbled, its ancient voice vibrating in the marrow of his bones. "If you do not break the seal, your stolen heart will burst. Give in. Let the mountain see what you are."
"Not yet," Dver whispered, his jaw locked tight against the agonizing pressure. "If I break through out here, the tremors will reach the Inner Peaks. I need to be inside the Sect's defensive array. The ambient Qi of the lower courtyards will mask the surge."
He arrived at the towering iron gates just as the morning mist began to lift. He looked like an absolute wreck—his grey robes were torn to shreds by Blackwood briars, his face was smeared with dried mud, and he walked with a pronounced, pathetic limp.
But as he crossed the threshold into the Outer Court, he didn't head for the safety of his shack. He headed straight for the Discipline Hall.
He didn't have to wait long. Deacon Shen was standing on the stone balcony overlooking the courtyard, his eyes bloodshot, staring obsessively toward the tree line. He had been waiting all night for his men to return with the broken bodies of Dver's family.
Dver stumbled into the courtyard, deliberately tripping over his own feet and falling to his knees with a wet thud.
"Deacon... Deacon Shen!" Dver wailed, his voice cracking with a pitch-perfect imitation of exhausted, desperate relief.
Shen's head snapped down. His rusted-iron eyes widened in sheer disbelief. "You... how are you here?"
Dver crawled forward, his dirty fingernails clawing at the stone. "I... I heard! The rumors in the barracks! They said you sent your personal Enforcers to Ash-Ridge to... to bring my parents for a visit!" Dver looked up, his eyes wide, watery, and filled with a nauseatingly fake hope. "Are they here yet, Senior? I haven't seen them in two years! Did the Enforcers find them? Is my mother okay?"
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Shen's face drained of color, shifting to a sickly, pale shade of grey. He looked at the boy—this weak, shivering piece of trash kneeling in the mud—and then back toward the dark expanse of the forest. His three best Enforcers. His armored terror-horses. All gone. And here was the target, alive and smiling through his tears, excitedly asking about the very people Shen had explicitly ordered murdered.
"They... they haven't returned," Shen stammered, his voice entirely stripped of its usual, iron-clad authority.
"Oh." Dver's face fell into a flawless mask of tragic disappointment. He let out a shaky sigh. "Maybe the forest was too dangerous? I heard there are monsters in the deep woods... I pray nothing happened to them. They were such brave men, the Enforcers."
Dver stood up slowly, wiping his eyes with a dirty sleeve. "I'll wait in my shack, Senior! Please tell me the moment they arrive! I bought tea with my last spirit stone to welcome them!"
As Dver turned and limped away, Shen felt a cold, jagged shiver crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the mountain air. He stared at the boy's retreating back, a seed of genuine, primal terror taking root in his gut. Who is this boy? What did my men run into out there?
The moment Dver stepped inside his shack and barred the heavy wooden door, the pathetic act vanished.
He collapsed into the center of the room. He couldn't hold the dam any longer. The stolen energy was screaming to be released.
"Now," Dver gasped.
He stopped suppressing the Void.
BOOM.
An invisible shockwave erupted from his flesh, blowing a century of dust from the floorboards and violently splintering the wooden walls of the shack. The black, abyssal Qi surged through his meridians like molten lead.
The 7th Level of Qi Condensation... shattered in seconds. The 8th Level... bypassed instantly. The 9th Level...
Dver's body arched off the floor, his eyes turning entirely black as the Asura's Iron-Blood Mantra engaged to save his life. The stolen lifeforce forced his mortal blood to boil, searing the weakness out of his veins. His bones clicked and ground against each other in a sickening symphony, fusing into a physical structure denser than forged spirit-iron to contain the sheer mass of the Void.
In the center of the Outer Sect, a pillar of dark, crushing pressure spiked invisibly into the sky, muffled from the Elders' senses only by the Sect's grand defensive array.
But high above, on the pristine floating bridge of the Inner Sect, a woman stopped mid-step.
The Saintess, Lyra, turned her head. Her eyes, clear and cold as mountain springs, narrowed as she looked down toward the sprawling slums. She didn't see the shack, but her flawless soul felt it—a sudden, violent vacuum in the spiritual air. Like something ancient had just opened its jaws in the dark and swallowed the light.
The silence in the shack didn't last.
Dver had barely finished stabilizing his new, 9th-Level Qi Condensation core when his door didn't just open—it exploded into shrapnel.
Two high-ranking Enforcers, their faces hidden behind demonic iron masks, stormed into the cramped space. They didn't speak. They didn't read an arrest warrant. One of them lashed out with a heavy manacle made of black, Qi-suppressing iron, brutally pinning Dver to the floor.
Dver didn't fight back. He instantly collapsed into his usual, pathetic heap, shielding his head with his arms. "P-please! I didn't do anything! The air just got heavy, I swear!"
"Shut up, trash," the lead Enforcer growled, his voice muffled by the iron mask. He grabbed Dver by the scruff of his neck, hoisting him into the air like a stray dog. "Deacon Shen reported a forbidden energy spike from this hut. You're coming to the Inner Gate. If you've been using demonic pills to fake a breakthrough, we're going to peel the skin off your back."
Dver let himself be dragged through the mud of the Outer Sect. Thousands of disciples watched, whispering and mocking as the "lucky survivor" was hauled away.
Inside his mind, the Void God snarled. "Let me snap their wrists, Dver. They touch us with such filth."
Wait, Dver commanded silently. They are carrying us exactly where we need to go. Why walk when you can be carried past the guards?
Dver wasn't taken to a cell. He was thrown face-first into the dirt of the Blood-Pit Arena—a massive, circular stone theater carved directly into the bedrock of the Inner Mountain.
The air here was thick with the scent of old copper and ozone. High above, on the sprawling obsidian balconies, sat the Inner Court disciples—the elite, the beautiful, and the cruel. They looked down at the fifty "candidates" gathered in the pit like they were watching venomous insects trapped in a jar.
Deacon Shen stood on a raised platform overlooking the pit, his eyes burning with a mix of utter fury and lingering dread as he stared at Dver.
Beside him sat a woman draped in silks so white they seemed to generate their own moonlight.
The Saintess, Lyra. She didn't look at the other forty-nine disciples. Her gaze was fixed entirely on Dver, her chin resting gracefully on a pale, elegant hand.
"The rules are simple," Shen shouted, his voice echoing off the obsidian walls. "The Inner Court has no room for cowards, and we do not accept flukes. You fifty claim to have reached the 9th Level of Qi Condensation. Only five of you will leave this pit as Inner Disciples. The rest of you will remain here as fertilizer for the mountain."
The elite crowd above roared with cruel laughter.
"The trial is the Labyrinth of the Flayed," Shen continued, a sadistic smirk returning to his face. "These tunnels are the ancient, dried-up iron veins beneath the arena. Millions of mortal slaves died excavating them, and their resentful ghosts still haunt the dark. In ten seconds, the floor will drop. You will be in the pitch black. Kill each other. Harvest the jade tokens from your peers. The first five to reach the surface with ten tokens each... survive."
The other forty-nine disciples immediately began drawing cheap swords and daggers, their auras flaring with murderous intent as they eyed the people standing next to them.
Dver, however, remained slumped in the dirt, his bottom lip trembling as he stared at the stone floor. He looked exactly like a lamb in a slaughterhouse.
"Wait," a melodic, crystal-clear voice rang out.
The arena went completely silent. The Saintess, Lyra, stood up. She walked to the edge of the obsidian balcony, looking down into the pit.
"That one," she said, pointing a slender, flawless finger directly at Dver. "The one who looks like he's about to faint. I want him to carry a Scent-Cloud Censer."
The crowd gasped.
A Scent-Cloud Censer was a ritual tool that emitted a thick, pungent purple smoke that could be smelled through solid rock for miles. In a pitch-black labyrinth where stealth meant survival, it was an absolute death sentence. It turned the carrier into a glowing beacon for every killer in the tunnels.
"He seems so... fragile," Lyra said, her voice dripping with a terrifying, artificial sweetness. "I want to see if his luck holds out when everyone in the dark knows exactly where he is."
Dver looked up at her, his eyes wide and perfectly 'terrified.' But deep in his soul, beneath the fractured aura, he felt a spark of genuine interest.
She wasn't just suspicious; she was trying to force his hand. She wanted to see the monster.
"A convergence,"the Void God resonated, its ancient voice devoid of anything but hunger. "She is drawing every sacrifice in the dark directly to our altar."
A guard tossed a heavy, smoking bronze burner at Dver's feet. Dver picked it up with shaking hands, the thick purple smoke instantly swirling around his grey robes.
"Go," Shen barked.
The floor beneath them vanished.