The hundred-meter Flesh Titan did not hesitate.
It snatched up the ice spear it had made from Fay's failed attack, poured qi into its arm, and hurled it back. The weapon tore through the air with a booming roar.
Jenkii reacted in time to brace. Fay moved faster.
Though her qi had not yet fully recovered, she dove straight down in front of Jenkii and threw up her arms, buckler raised, teeth clenched hard enough to ache.
Ice crashed into steel. The impact blasted Fay backward, driving both women into the ground, though Jenkii managed to soften part of the force behind her.
Even so, they were pinned for a breath beneath the violence of it.
Then the ice shattered apart completely.
"Fay, I'm not that weak. Why the hell would you do that?" Jenkii snapped.
Fay did not answer at once. She whipped her arm out and drew back the scattered strands of underworld fire.
Only then did Jenkii understand. She remembered what those flames had done before, back when Fay used them against the five-headed chimeric clown.
Radeon had told her often enough that injuries to the soul were the hardest of all to recover from, and that only a rare few knew how to treat them properly.
Fay knew some cures, yes, but the attack she had prepared here was not meant to wound lightly. She had shaped it to cripple even a true Gilded Core cultivator.
If Jenkii had parried that spear herself, the ice casing would have burst on contact and the underworld fire inside would have swallowed her whole.
There was no time to dwell on it. No time for thanks, and none at all for regret. The hundred-meter titan had marked the two of them as a threat.
With no hesitation at all, it tore a crude stone pillar from the ground, a jagged mass of rock so large it looked more like a broken tower than a weapon, then charged.
Every step of its advance kicked up violent gusts. Its intent was plain. It meant to crush Fay and Jenkii between the city wall and that monstrous pillar and flatten them into meat paste.
Then something struck first.
From another stretch of the wall, a rod no thicker than a pinky shot through the air. In the chaos and dimness, the Flesh Titan barely saw it. The thing drove straight through its scraped-open face and buried itself in the brain behind it.
At once, the titan's right arm went stiff. The hand clutching the stone pillar locked in place, refusing to obey.
Then the dark rod moved again.
Needle-thin branches burst from it inside the titan's skull, shooting through the brain in every direction like roots forcing their way through rotten earth.
The giant did not even try to endure it. With a brutal motion, it ripped its own head free and bolted back toward the forest.
A moment later, the black rod dissolved and streamed back into droplets.
"You two alright?" Jackson called as he arrived.
His gaze swept over Fay and Jenkii in quick inspection, then he took out a pair of blood pills and tossed them over. Neither woman stood on pride. They took them at once.
Nearby, the headless hundred-meter titan made a wet, gurgling sound. Without a throat, that was all it could manage.
Then the other Flesh Titans began to move.
They were not retreating in disorder. They were gathering. One by one, they collected the shredded flesh of their fallen kin, scooping up chunks, dragging limbs, carrying away everything they could salvage.
One even recovered the torn head the giant had ripped off itself.
These creatures had not always been called Flesh Titans.
When the first humans discovered the Ghost Realm, they had given them another name.
"Flesh Gods," Fay spoke as she watched them withdraw, her expression grim.
"I read about them in my master's study. These Flesh Titans are as clever as the most talented humans. They can plan, adapt, and act without hesitation. They do not fear tearing apart their own flesh, and they do not truly die so long as even one strand of muscle fiber remains."
Jenkii and Jackson both listened without argument. There was no room for doubting her now, not after what they had just seen.
"But I absorbed their qi earlier," Jenkii said. "Shouldn't that have meant they were dead already?"
Jenkii frowned. She knew her Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts could only draw qi from the dead.
"These creatures are paradoxes by nature," Fay said. "They are living and dead at the same time."
She pointed at one of the Flesh Titans Jenkii had battered into what should have been ruin.
The thing had been broken into so many pieces it should never have risen again, yet now it dragged itself forward in a grotesque mockery of life.
Chunks of flesh wriggled together. Its ruined head pressed against the ground and pushed like a foot.
The creature felt their eyes on it, paused, then turned enough to stick out its rear and slap its own cheeks in a sharp, mocking rhythm.
Even that absurd display from so ruthless a creature eased the tension for a fleeting moment, while the raid on the smallest tower neared its end.
Corpses of zombies in every shape and size lay strewn across the floors below, from the common undead on the lower levels to the stronger jiangshi that had forced them back again and again.
Now they stood on the tenth floor.
Here, eleven Zombie Guardians had made their last stand.
The final one among them was a four-armed guardian, larger than the rest and still thrashing despite the wounds already carved into it.
Martin came in fast, blood claws flashing as he tore open the weakened chest plate.
The others had been waiting for that instant. The moment the gap opened, spells already prepared came crashing down in a ruthless storm.
When the four-armed creature finally collapsed, the hall fell still, and a cache revealed itself at the center of the chamber, unfolding from the floor as though the tower itself had only been waiting for silence.
Martin bent, hoisted the whole thing up, and turned back toward the stairs.
"Let's go. The other inheritance towers need support."
A few of the men clearly wanted to open the cache right there, but Martin did not so much as glance at it, and the way he kept walking made them swallow the thought.
None of them wished to be the one to slow the push.
Martin carried it straight to Lifara.
"Miss, this is only a small part of my dowry," Martin said with a grin.
Lifara did not indulge him. She opened the cache on the spot and began sorting through its contents with calm precision, using the monocle Oswin had lent her.
The thing could only give a vague read on elemental alignment and little else.
The Life Bane Contract might judge worth, but it could not name every object within.
Expecting a contract to do everything for you was like asking a scrap of paper to become your grandfather.
Inside were three manuals and seventy pills.
Useful, yes. Impressive, perhaps.
But against the needs of more than four thousand combatants, it was still little enough to feel mean.
Lifara lifted her eyes just in time to see the completed ten-floor tower beginning to turn to dust. The structure crumbled in on itself without sound, fading away until only a miniature copy remained where it had stood.
Cultivators stepped up and tried to pull it loose. It did not move.
"Leave it," Lifara said at once. "This may be part of the Secret Realm's mechanics. Or are you waiting for it to turn into a monster before you start being careful? Do not touch strange things so casually."
The cultivators gave awkward smiles after that, clearly realizing they had not thought far enough ahead.
Lifara wasted no more words on it. She turned to Martin's group and healed them as they prepared to move again, this time toward the fifty-floor tower.
Inside, the tower was nothing like stone or ruin.
Its walls unfolded into a vivid geometric maze of interlocking rectangular frames and jutting blocks, bright blues, pinks, yellows, greens, and purples stacked over one another and stretched so far ahead that the corridors seemed to run into madness.
Every turn led into another clash of color. Every angle looked wrong from the one before it.
Walking through it felt less like entering a tower and more like being swallowed by some three-dimensional puzzle built to confuse the eye and unsettle the mind.
The current team had only reached the fourth level.
The enemies there were chimeric centipedes, if such things could still be called centipedes. Their long bodies crawled and writhed through the maze, but from their sides sprouted human arms, chicken legs, and crocodile limbs in grotesque mismatches, all of them attached to a massive head shaped like a crazed man.
The thing's face grinned too wide and laughed even wider, and its skull was so hard it looked like it had been forged to rival a cultivator's armament.
As it skittered through the colored corridors, each mismatched limb lashed out with a different element.
Fire burst from one arm. Frost cracked from a leg. Wind screamed from another. Worse still, its body kept changing color to match the shifting patterns of the maze, making it harder to track whenever it slipped around a turn.
"Alright, those down to half your qi, pull back and meditate," Martin commanded.
The men began to withdraw one after another, grim-faced and breathing hard, each waiting for another cultivator to step in and take his place before fully leaving the line.
Martin dropped from above and joined the pursuit himself.
At once, he saw the problem. The others were keeping too much distance, chasing the creature with caution when what they needed was pressure.
Every time they hesitated, the chimeric thing gained another turn of the maze, another patch of color to vanish into.
Martin drove blood qi into his legs and shot forward.
The burst of speed closed the gap at once. The creature's long, grotesque body twisted ahead of him, its human arms and mismatched legs scrambling over the bright frames of the maze.
Then it turned just enough for its rear to face him, as though it found the whole chase amusing.
"Cultist Martin, don't!"
The warning came too late. A noxious green spray burst from the creature and hit him full on.
Martin reacted on instinct. He burned through most of his blood qi in an instant, pulling it over himself as armor. The corrosive mist struck the red shell and made it hiss and sizzle at once.
Even so, some of it slipped through. Some bit into his skin.
The pain was immediate.
His qi stripped away part of the damage, but not enough. Flesh melted. Skin warped and sank. Even bone began to smoke beneath the acid's strength.
Still Martin did not scream. He retreated at once, cold and measured despite the ruin of him.
By the time he reached the others, half his face had been eaten away. The disciples who saw him went pale on the spot.
Martin only waved a hand. The motion made his half-regrown arms flap loose and fall from him.
He bent, picked it up, and looked at it as though it were no more than a dropped glove.
"Small matter," Martin slurred.
Saliva ran from the broken line of his half-melted jaw. The sight of it made more than one disciple fight down the urge to gag.
To Martin, though, this was not the worst he had survived.
Back in the cult, his old master had trained him with a cruelty so deliberate that Martin had once suspected the bald old bastard was amusing himself.
There had been a special acid pool, one his master made him swim through again and again until he was nearly stripped to a skeleton, left with little more than bones and qi meridians intact.
At the time, Martin had thought it pointless torture.
Now, standing there with half his face ruined and his body still upright, he had to admit the old monster might have known something after all.
"You lot go ahead," Martin said, the words ugly in his damaged mouth. "Hunt that thing. I'll go ask if this can still be patched up."
It burned like hell. But he had appearances to keep.
Jekyll had told him before that there was a chance he might earn his Cultivator Title here.
God Eldric was fond of arenas, of spectacle, of men who bled in public and kept moving anyway.
Martin had no intention of wasting that chance by howling like some butchered pig in front of witnesses.
His real fear had nothing to do with pain. It was reputation.
'Act cool. Act nonchalant. Walk like I do not give a damn,' he told himself.
Because if he broke now, if he wailed or rolled on the ground clutching his face, then no title in the realm would matter.
They would remember him as Acid Fart Crybaby. That was clearly not the kind of title Martin wanted.
His mind was already circling for something better. Unrelenting Steelblood. Pain Extinguisher.
Something with weight. Something cool.
He could already picture himself one day boasting to his children and grandchildren, claiming he had once been called Secret Realm Emperor Godking Blood Raider Immortal.
The thought made his ruined face spread into a stupid grin.
Soon Martin came before Lifara.
"Aren't you treating me like a healing station?" Lifara scoffed.
"Sister, I have no such intentions," Martin said.
That much was true. The Sanguine Triumvirate Arts was powerful, but not in every situation. It did poorly against things without vitality, and the blood he had spent in that charge had not been cheap.
Half came from his own body. The other half came from the jar he carried for emergencies. Between the two, he had bled himself thin.
Lifara rose from her seat and looked him over from head to toe.
Then, without warning, she tipped the pumpkin seeds she had been snacking on over his ruined flesh. The seasoning stung the exposed meat badly enough to make Martin twitch.
Lifara flicked her hand. The seeds sprouted at once.
Tiny vines and shoots burst from his melted flesh, drank greedily, then withered almost as soon as they lived, their whole lives spent in a handful of breaths.
Lifara plucked the shriveled growth free and held it up in front of Martin's remaining eye.
"Your fool head only thought acid was acid," she said. "There is meridian-crushing venom mixed into it."
Then she sat back down on her beanie she made out of plants, as if none of this had been urgent in the first place. A furniture she liked on Radeon's pavilion.
She really was that relaxed.
Then she sat back down on the beanie she had woven from plants, as if none of it had been urgent in the first place. It was a piece of furniture she had taken a liking to from Radeon's pavilion.
Radeon had taught her to stay as comfortable as possible during that kind of work.
Surveillance, command, and timing were their own form of combat, and combat demanded peak condition.
Martin looked down at himself.
The stinging had eased. His flesh no longer felt like it was about to slough off his bones.
But his face was still half gone, and strips of skin and muscle were still missing from his arms.
"Uhm... my flesh miss," Martin said, sounding more corpse than man.
Lifara bared her teeth at him.
"Your blood is nearly bottomed out, and your qi is barely holding together. You think healing comes out of my ass?"
Martin shut his mouth.
"Find someone with spare blood and flesh if you want patchwork done," Lifara snapped. "Do not bother me. I'm working."
