Warlord Kraven of the Blood-Axe Cohort remained standing by the cursed black-iron table. He reached down and violently wrenched his spiked gauntlet free from the metal surface, the grinding sound of tearing iron echoing through the petrified bone-trees.
The surrounding slaughter-captains had already dispersed into the gloom, none of them willing to speak of the profound humiliation they had just endured at the hands of the Sect Master’s heir.
Only Quartermaster Jin remained. He knelt near a bubbling fountain of hot blood, his entire body trembling so violently that his heavily warded robes rustled against the stone.
"Warlord Kraven," Jin whimpered, his face slick with cold, terrified sweat. "The Supreme One’s wrath is absolute. How could you provoke him with such blunt insolence?"
Kraven turned his massive, scarred head, glaring at the supplier with unadulterated disgust. "Do not attempt to weave your pathetic illusions around me, Jin. I interrogated the boy solely to balance the blood-ledger between our houses. You explicitly asked me to test the depths of his flesh-mending arrogance."
Jin swallowed hard, frantically looking around the empty garden as if shadow-assassins were already closing in.
"I merely sought to understand his methodologies for the Vanguard’s benefit!"
"You sought to chain a sleeping calamity," Kraven rumbled, his voice dripping with pure disdain. "My debt to you is severed. The Young Master’s aura is a lightless abyss, and his silence promises a slaughter beyond your meager comprehension. If you ever contact my pavilion again, I will personally feed your soul to my hounds."
Without another word, Kraven turned and marched into the shadows. Quartermaster Jin was left entirely alone, kneeling in the acidic dirt. He clutched his chest, his uncultivated heart hammering a frantic, doomed rhythm. He had tried to manipulate the apex predator, and now he was absolutely certain he would not survive to see the next blood-moon.
Miles away, sealed within the absolute, warded isolation of his own command tent, Sunny slumped against his spine-throne.
He was experiencing a catastrophic migraine. The sheer, physical toll of locking his facial muscles into a mask of terrifying, aristocratic malice for hours on end was agonizing. His civilian mind was completely frayed. He explicitly desired nothing more than to curl into a lightless corner, wrap himself in a heavy cloak, and sleep for a century.
Suddenly, the communication jade slip bound to his sash flared with a pulsating, sickly crimson light.
Sunny stared at the vibrating artifact with profound exhaustion. He explicitly knew it was Quartermaster Jin. He considered tossing the jade into the fire pit, but survival in the Demonic Path dictated that ignoring a scheming subordinate was a tactical error.
With a heavy internal sigh, Sunny channeled a microscopic sliver of dark Qi into the rune.
"Supreme One! I beg your absolute forgiveness!" Jin’s voice instantly spilled into the pavilion, thick with desperate, weeping terror. "The insolence of those warlords was an unforeseen tragedy! I swear upon my rotting meridians, I had no knowledge they would dare question your divine arts! Please, do not refine my flesh!"
Sunny maintained a posture of perfect, statuesque stillness. Internally, he was too mentally drained to even process the man’s pathetic, sniveling lies.
"..." Sunny offered absolute, freezing silence.
"Supreme One, I am your most loyal hound! I will personally execute the thralls who prepared the banquet! I will triple your monthly tribute!" Jin’s voice escalated into a frantic, hyperventilating shriek. The longer the Young Master refused to speak, the more Jin’s mortal dread amplified. He explicitly believed Sunny was silently calculating the precise angle to sever his limbs.
Sunny abruptly severed the flow of dark Qi, cutting the spiritual transmission dead.
On the other end of the connection, Quartermaster Jin stared at his darkened jade slip. The sudden, dead silence echoed in his ears like an executioner’s bell. He 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, your psychological torment techniques are truly supreme!] The System girl’s bubbly voice echoed directly in his consciousness.
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 possessed the terrifying capacity to read human auras.
During the confrontation at the Obsidian Lotus Pavilion, the System had passively logged the spiritual status of his interrogators. Sunny pulled up the archived data frame.
[Target: Quartermaster Jin]
[Condition: Healthy (Secretly Amused; Manipulative intent detected)]
[Target: Warlord Kraven]
[Condition: Healthy (Experiencing severe guilt and profound fear)]
Sunny stared at the floating blue text, a wave of cold disgust washing over him. Quartermaster Jin was not a victim; the man was a deeply manipulative parasite. Jin had explicitly orchestrated the hostile interrogation, likely cashing in favors to force the warlords to test Sunny’s boundaries while Jin pretended to be a loyal, frightened shield.
The Demonic Sect was an utterly exhausting labyrinth of treachery. Sunny explicitly realized that there was no such thing as loyalty here, only varying degrees of lethal manipulation. The fact that he constantly had to play four-dimensional chess just to take a nap was infuriating.
To distract himself from his impending doom, Sunny activated the central blood-scrying 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 strategic intelligence.
The illusion shifted to depict a horrifying scene within the eastern breeding pits. The disembodied voice of a sect chronicler echoed through the room.
"Catastrophic failure within the Flaying Halls! The newly synthesized ’Marrow-Boiling Elixir,’ intended to forcefully catalyze fiend ascension without the use of spirit stones, 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 pure 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 into bubbling sludge.
Sunny focused his gaze on the illusion. The System immediately provided a diagnostic overlay.
[Status: Terminal Decay (Irreversible Core Collapse)]
Sunny shuddered. The sect’s native flesh-mending techniques were explicitly barbaric and highly flawed. It was a miracle anyone survived long enough to reach the high ranks.
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 in his throat. A Tier 5 Sovereign.
He explicitly knew that a Sovereign-tier entity could annihilate the entire Vanguard staging camp with a single, casual breath. The fact that a youth his own age commanded such a world-ending horror filled Sunny with a profound, crushing sense of inadequacy. His Tier 4 Ghoul Ape and Scorpion, which he had previously considered ultimate trump cards, were merely insects compared to the true apex predators of the Heavenly Demon Sect.
He needed to accelerate his fusion timetable immediately. He could not afford to rest.
Sunny stood up, his dark robes flowing around him, and approached the heavy obsidian table serving as his alchemy altar. It was time to prepare the Iron-Forged Ghoul Ape for its next minor refinement.
He drew a cursed bone-pestle and began systematically crushing a black, Elite-grade necrotic core. The Ape, standing rigidly in the darkest corner of the pavilion, immediately fixed its glowing green eye sockets upon Sunny’s hands. It did not roar or thrash. It simply stood as still as a tombstone, though the necrotic flames within its skull blazed with a desperate, ravenous hunger.
It explicitly understood that without its master’s verbal command, taking even a single step toward the altar would result in absolute punishment.
Sunny ground the dark core into a fine, sparkling dust, carefully pouring the volatile powder into a bronze basin filled with boiling blood-nectar.
Before he could command the Ape to consume the mixture, 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, ensuring his posture was perfectly imposing, and mentally commanded the wards to disengage. The heavy doors slowly ground open, revealing the swirling ash-fog outside.
Standing in the courtyard was the young female acolyte, Lin.
She was visibly trembling, clutching the edges of her uniform so tightly her knuckles were white. Behind her hovered two other junior disciples from the poison vats, their faces pale with sheer, unadulterated terror.
They explicitly looked as though they were marching to their own executions.
Lin immediately dropped to her knees, pressing her forehead against the cold stone. She was too terrified to even look at Sunny’s demonic visage, her breath hitching in shallow, panicked gasps.
"S-Supreme One..." she wept, her voice barely a whisper against the howling wind.
"I have returned... to offer my life... if you require it for the refinement."