Commander Vile, whose spiked gauntlet was still embedded in the curse table, finally exhaled a breath of volatile dark Qi. The surrounding veteran slaughter-captains exchanged uneasy, shadowed glances. They were seasoned murderers, yet they had just been entirely cowed by the sheer, apathetic arrogance of a youth.
As the warlords dispersed to their respective encampments to process this political failure, Quartermaster Jin remained kneeling near the acidic lake. He was practically vibrating with terror.
Commander Vile paused before descending the bone-wrought stairs. He cast a look of profound disgust toward the groveling supplier.
"You orchestrated this farce, Jin," Vile stated, his voice grinding like tectonic plates. "You offered my pavilion three unblemished Paladin cores to forcefully interrogate the Young Master’s flesh-mending theories. You explicitly requested that I ignite his temper so you could gauge the true depth of his malice."
Quartermaster Jin flinched, his sweaty face paling further. He attempted to construct a groveling excuse, but Vile cut him off with a sharp wave of his heavily armored hand.
"Do not attempt to entangle me further in your suicidal machinations. I engaged him merely to settle my debt to you. That debt is now void. The Young Master’s dark aura is an abyssal void, and I refuse to test a sleeping calamity ever again. Do not contact my pavilion."
With that, Commander Vile vanished into the gloom, entirely unwilling to associate with a man who had foolishly attempted to manipulate the Sect Master’s heir. Jin was left completely alone by the bubbling acid, his mind racing as he calculated his rapidly diminishing lifespan.
Miles away, within the heavily warded isolation of his own pavilion, Sunny collapsed onto his spine-throne.
He was profoundly exhausted. His entire skeletal structure ached from the sheer, sustained tension of keeping his muscles rigidly locked in a posture of supreme demonic arrogance. He explicitly desired nothing more than to curl into a lightless corner and sleep until the orthodox crusade ended.
Suddenly, the communication jade slip bound to his sash began to vibrate with a frantic, pulsing crimson light.
Sunny stared at the glowing stone, heavily dreading the inevitable political nightmare waiting on the other end. He considered hurling the artifact into the fire pit to ignore it, but his survival instincts dictated that ignoring a threat rarely neutralized it. With a massive internal sigh, he channeled a sliver of dark Qi into the jade.
Quartermaster Jin’s voice immediately spilled into the pavilion, thick with desperate, weeping terror. "Supreme One! I beg your absolute forgiveness! The disrespect shown by Commander Vile was an unforeseen tragedy! I swear upon my rotting soul, I had no knowledge they would dare to question your divine methodologies! Please, do not refine my flesh!"
Sunny maintained a posture of absolute stillness. Internally, he was too mentally fatigued to even process the man’s sniveling excuses.
"..." Sunny offered absolute, freezing silence. He simply let the dead air stretch across the magical connection.
"Supreme One, I am your most loyal hound! I will double your monthly tribute! I will personally execute anyone who speaks ill of your Scorpion!" Jin’s voice escalated into a frantic shriek, his mortal dread amplifying exponentially with every second the Young Master refused to speak.
Sunny abruptly severed the flow of dark Qi, cutting the transmission dead.
On the other end of the connection, Quartermaster Jin stared at his darkened jade slip. The busy signal of the dead array echoed in his ears. He explicitly interpreted this abrupt disconnection as a definitive death sentence. Jin collapsed onto the floor, utterly convinced that shadow-assassins were already en route to harvest his organs.
Back in his pavilion, Sunny rubbed his throbbing temples.
[Ding! Host, you are truly a master of psychological torment!] The System girl’s bubbly voice echoed in his mind.
Sunny explicitly realized something profound as the System’s blue text hovered in his vision. The interface did not merely analyze the biological composition of demonic fiends; it also possessed the terrifying capacity to read human auras.
During the confrontation on the terrace, the System had passively logged the spiritual status of his interrogators. Sunny pulled up the archived data frame.
[Target: Commander Vile]
[Condition: Healthy]
[Target: Quartermaster Jin]
[Condition: Healthy]
Sunny stared at the floating blue text. He explicitly understood the political reality now. Quartermaster Jin was not a victim; the man was deeply manipulative. Jin had explicitly orchestrated the hostile interrogation, likely paying the warlords to test Sunny’s boundaries while Jin pretended to be a loyal shield.
The Demonic Path was utterly exhausting. Sunny explicitly realized that there was no absolute loyalty in this sect, only varying degrees of lethal manipulation.
He dismissed the blue text with a mental wave, entirely sick of the constant, invisible daggers aimed at his back. He explicitly wanted to detach from the sectarian politics and focus strictly on his own survival.
To distract himself from his impending doom, Sunny activated the central blood-projection array embedded in the obsidian floor of his pavilion. The array hummed with dark energy, projecting a hazy, three-dimensional crimson illusion into the air, effectively broadcasting the Vanguard’s latest intelligence reports.
The illusion shifted to depict a horrifying scene in the northern trenches. The disembodied voice of a sect chronicler echoed through the room.
"Catastrophic failure within the Flaying Halls! The newly distributed ’Marrow-Boiling Elixir,’ intended to forcefully catalyze fiend ascension, has resulted in massive biological instability. All Vanguard units are ordered to immediately execute any fiend that has consumed the volatile concoction."
The blood-projection displayed a massive, twenty-foot-long Obsidian Centipede writhing in agony. Its dense, metallic armor was actively melting off its body in thick, sizzling clumps. The beast shrieked, tearing at its own flesh as the unstable alchemy dissolved its internal core.
Sunny focused his gaze on the illusion. The System immediately provided a diagnostic overlay.
[Status: Terminal Decay]
Sunny shuddered. The sect’s native flesh-mending techniques were explicitly barbaric and highly flawed.
The projection rippled and shifted to a new, vastly different scene.
"Triumph upon the Ashen Peaks! The inner sect’s supreme prodigy, Mo Jian, has successfully routed the third Orthodox Paladin battalion! Mo Jian, at merely twenty-one cycles of age, continues to demonstrate absolute battlefield supremacy!"
The crimson light resolved to show a pale, aristocratic youth standing atop a mountain of severed, radiant-armored corpses. His face was a mask of cold boredom. Hovering directly behind him was a colossal, shadow-wreathed monstrosity that resembled a multi-winged serpent. The beast radiated a pressure so profound that even the magical projection seemed to distort around it.
[Monster Name: Abyssal Void-Serpent]
[Monster Level]: Tier 5 (Sovereign)
[Monster Grade]: Perfect
Sunny’s breath hitched. A Tier 5 Sovereign.
He explicitly knew that a Sovereign-tier entity could annihilate the entire Vanguard staging camp with a single breath. The fact that a youth around his own age commanded such a world-ending horror filled Sunny with a profound sense of inadequacy. His Tier 4 Scorpion, which he had previously considered an ultimate trump card, was merely an insect compared to the true apex predators of the Heavenly Demon Sect.
He needed to accelerate his fusion timetable immediately.
Sunny stood up, his dark robes flowing around him, and approached the heavy iron cage in the corner of the room. The Shadow-Ghoul Ape sat perfectly still, its necrotic eye sockets tracking his movements.
Sunny explicitly planned to force the Ape into its next evolution. He possessed the extorted Blood-Lotus Roots and a massive surplus of Corrupted Spirit Stones. It was time to utilize the Supreme Merge System to construct a new, devastating weapon.
Before he could initiate the dark ritual, the perimeter wards of his pavilion flared with a subtle, icy warning. Someone was standing directly outside his heavy obsidian doors.
Sunny’s crimson eyes narrowed. He maintained his villainous aura and mentally commanded the wards to disengage. The heavy doors slowly ground open.
Standing in the ash-choked courtyard was the young, female acolyte, Xue.
She was visibly trembling, clutching the Four-Eared Blood-Sonar Bat tightly to her chest. Behind her hovered two other junior disciples, their faces pale with sheer, unadulterated terror. They explicitly looked as though they were marching to their own executions.
Xue immediately dropped to her knees,too terrified to even look at Sunny’s demonic visage...