It took about half a day before Arthur alerted Mike and Leo to be on standby.
Leo sat in his room, phone propped against a stack of textbooks he'd never had time to read. The text from Arthur came through as a single word: READY.
He climbed into his pod. The gel cushioned around him. The neural interface hummed to life.
Minutes stretched. Leo focused on his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. He visualized the terrain. The coffin thirty yards from the waterline. His position behind the rock cluster to the east. Mike in the depression to the northeast. Arthur circling above.
Five minutes. That was his window. Five minutes of Third Person Perspective against a Nascent Soul cultivator.
The second alert hit.
Leo logged in.
The world materialized around him in fragments. Lake shore. Black water. Kevin's coffin.
Zhou Yangmei stood over the coffin, her head tilted, her expression curious and sad. She wore the same cream-colored robes Kevin had described. Her hair was loose. She looked young. She looked kind.
She looked like someone who genuinely wanted to help.
Leo activated Third Person Perspective.
His consciousness ejected from his skull and expanded outward in a sphere of pure divine sense. The world became geometry. His body became a game piece on a three-dimensional board. Zhou Yangmei became another piece. The coffin. The rocks. The lake. The depression where Mike was already rising. Arthur descending from above.
Four points. Four directions. One target.
The La Ferrari Eclipse ignited beneath his feet. T4 formations flared crimson and gold. Heat bloomed from the acceleration formations.
Zhou Yangmei's head began to turn toward him.
Leo willed his piece forward.
The distance collapsed. Forty yards became thirty became twenty became ten became nothing. From outside his body, Leo watched himself become a streak of crimson light.
His physical form experienced the velocity as brutal physics, wind tearing at his robes, pressure crushing his chest, organs straining against the g-forces of horizontal acceleration.
His mind remained outside. Calculating. Adjusting.
Zhou Yangmei's eyes widened. Her hand rose, fingers beginning to form a seal.
Too slow.
Leo hit her at three hundred feet per second.
The impact generated a shockwave that flattened the grass in a perfect circle.
Zhou Yangmei's torso converted from solid matter to expanding vapor. Her head became a red mist. Her heart became nothing.
Her lower half toppled backward. Her legs kicked once, then stilled.
Arthur descended from above, his own Eclipse blazing gold. His spear was already extended, the Tier Three weapon humming with killing intent. He struck the falling remains with brutal efficiency, the spear mashing through what was left of the lower body.
Mike had reached the western flak cannon. Kevin was already climbing from the coffin, sprinting toward the eastern emplacement. Their hands found the firing mechanisms with practiced precision.
"Confirming kill," Arthur said. His voice was flat. Professional.
Then Leo felt the heartbeat.
It came from below. From the black water of the lake.
Thump.
The sound bypassed his ears entirely. It resonated against his ribcage like a fist striking a drum. His own heart stuttered. Missed a beat. Then synchronized with the rhythm rising from the depths.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Contact," Mike reported. His voice was strained. "Something's in the lake."
Leo maintained Third Person Perspective. His divine sense swept the area, searching for the source of that terrible pulse. The lake sat in his perception like a wound in reality, absorbing his awareness without reflecting anything back.
There.
Where Zhou Yangmei had died, the ash of her remains was moving. The fragments were drawing inward toward a central point with deliberate purpose. Particles of matter that should have scattered to the wind were instead flowing together, condensing, rebuilding.
And at that central point, a sphere of divine sense was blossoming outward.
Nascent Soul divine sense.
The pressure of it hit Leo like a wave. His own sphere of awareness compressed, contracted, struggled against the weight of something vastly more profound. The geometry of his perception warped. The clean lines of his tactical awareness bent around the emerging presence.
"Plan B!" Leo screamed.
"Cannons ready," Mike reported.
"Cannons ready," Kevin echoed.
"Hold for domain manifestation," Arthur ordered. "We need to see what we're dealing with."
The ash finished condensing.
A heart appeared.
It hung in the air where Zhou Yangmei's chest had been. Crystalline blue. The color of deep water where sunlight dies. The size of a human fist.
Beautiful. Impossibly beautiful.
Looking at it felt like being loved.
The remaining ash began to orbit the heart. Faster. Faster. A vortex of matter drawn toward that crystalline core.
Flesh formed from nothing. Bone materialized from grief. Skin stretched over muscle that had no right to exist.
But the body that formed was not Zhou Yangmei.
The woman who materialized was tall and slender. Her robes belonged to a dynasty that had fallen eight centuries ago. Flowing silks in colors that no longer had names, patterns that depicted extinct flowers and forgotten constellations. Her hair hung past her waist in a perfect black fall, each strand moving independently as if stirred by currents that existed only for her.
Her face was exquisite. High cheekbones. Delicate features. A mouth that had once smiled at a boy catching fish in morning light. Eyes that held the weight of a millennium.
Those eyes were empty. Someone had carved out everything that made a person a person and left only the shape behind.
A name forced itself into Leo's mind.
Lord Luo Mingxia.
It arrived without sound. Without language. She made herself known.
Lord Luo Mingxia opened her mouth.
The domain manifested.
Water erupted from nothing. Black water, the same color as the lake, expanding from Mingxia's position in a sphere of absolute authority. The liquid reality swelled outward, filling the air, creating a bubble of her world that extended one hundred yards in every direction.
Arthur's briefing flashed through Leo's mind. One hundred yards. At least it wasn't the full three hundred of a Nascent Soul. The Profundity was weakened. Incomplete. But still deadly.
Leo was inside the bubble when it formed.
The water hit him like a wall. It filled his nose, his mouth, his lungs. He could not breathe. He could not see. He could only feel the pressure crushing him from every direction and the terrible, terrible longing that saturated every molecule.
She loved someone.
The visions slammed into his consciousness.
A boy catching fish in morning light. A girl laughing behind a fan of lotus leaves. A kiss in shadows. A father's cold face as he pushed the boy under the water and held him there until the bubbling stopped.
She walked into the lake to be with him forever.
She just wanted to find him. She just wanted to go home.
The grief was a physical force. It pressed against Leo's mind, trying to drown his consciousness in eight centuries of accumulated sorrow. His chest burned. His vision was going dark at the edges. The water was in his lungs and the longing was in his thoughts and he was drowning in both.
He reactivated Third Person Perspective.
He was outside his body. He was a piece on a board. Pieces did not drown. Pieces did not feel. Pieces moved.
Leo willed his piece toward the domain's edge.
His Eclipse screamed as the acceleration formations shot him through the water domain.
Steam exploded, filling the trailing vacuum. The domain tried to hold him. The longing clawed at his consciousness.
He pierced through the boundary and emerged into open air.
Leo gasped. Water poured from his mouth. His lungs burned with each breath. His heart was still synchronized with that terrible rhythm from the depths, fighting to break free of the imposed pattern.
Three minutes forty-two seconds remaining.
Arthur had emerged from the opposite side of the domain. His face was pale beneath the water dripping from his hair, his spear trailing steam.
"Nascent Soul," Arthur confirmed. His voice was hoarse.
"But weakened. Domain radius is a third of what it should be. The body is Tier Three at best. Only the heart is Tier Four."
Mike opened fire.
The western flak cannon erupted in a cascade of destruction. Spiritual projectiles the size of a fist screamed toward Mingxia's position, each shell leaving a trail of displaced air, each one carrying enough force to level a building. The timing formations activated as they crossed the domain boundary, self-detonation sequences primed.
Mingxia's heart pulsed.
Tentacles exploded from her chest.
They were somewhere between flesh and water. Semi-solid appendages of concentrated longing, each one as thick as a tree trunk, each one moving with Nascent Soul speed.
The tentacles whipped outward from her body intercepting the incoming flak rounds.
Detonations rippled through the domain. Each shell burst in a sphere, the power of the self detonation of a Tier Three weapon, sending shrapnel in every direction.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The tentacles absorbed the impacts, their semi-liquid nature dispersing the kinetic force. Pieces of them sheared away, dissolving into mist before reforming.
Kevin opened fire with the eastern cannon.
The overlapping fields of fire created a storm of destruction. Shells screamed in from two angles, their detonation patterns staggered to prevent the tentacles from adapting.
The the domain became a hell of explosions, steam, and shrapnel, of burning water and dying light.
Leo moved.
Third Person Perspective turned combat into pure geometry.
He existed outside his body. His Eclipse was a point on a three-dimensional grid. Mingxia was another point. The tentacles were obstacles to route around. The domain boundary was the enemy territory to infiltrate.
He began his approach from the south, building horizontal velocity over a run of sixty yards. The Eclipse's acceleration formations howled. Heat bloomed from the formations.
His speed climbed past two hundred feet per second. Past two fifty. Past three hundred.
He hit the domain boundary like a bullet hitting water.
The resistance was immediate and immense. The liquid medium tried to slow him, tried to stop him, tried to drown him. The longing clawed at his consciousness, visions of the drowned boy flickering at the edges of his perception.
Leo held his breath. Perceived his trajectory from outside his body. Saw the heart looming in his path, tentacles rising to intercept, but moving too slowly to catch something traveling at terminal velocity.
He threw himself like a rock to the right.
A tentacle swept through the space he would have occupied. His body experienced the near-miss as a pressure wave, water displaced by the appendage's passage buffeting him sideways. His mind registered the obstacle and dismissed it.
He struck Mingxia's left side.
The Eclipse's blade carved through flesh that was more water than meat. A fist-sized hole appeared where her ribs should have been. Black water wept from the wound instead of blood, sending her spinning.
A tentacle swept toward where he would be.
Leo willed his piece to a new position. His body experienced the instant change as brutal g-forces, his organs pressing against his spine.
But his mind remained outside, calculating, adjusting.
Leo exited from the domain's right edge. Gasped for air. Repositioned. Began building velocity again.
Three minutes two seconds.
Mingxia screamed.
The sound was not human. It was the sound of eight hundred years of grief compressed into a single moment of fury.
The tentacles abandoned their defensive pattern. They lunged toward Leo with killing intent.
But Leo was already moving. He burst from the domain's far edge, trailing steam and fire, his Eclipse shrieking as it dumped velocity in a controlled horizontal arc.
Behind him, Arthur struck.
Although Arthur's cultivation had regressed from his former Gold Core glory. His spear was a Tier Three Gold Core treasure. He had been circling the domain at maximum velocity, building momentum, waiting for the opening.
Arthur hit Mingxia's defenseless back like a meteor.
The spear pierced her back and emerged from her chest. Her body crumpled around the impact, bending in ways that living flesh could not bend.
The tentacles whipped around to face this new threat.
Arthur detonated the spear.
The explosion threw Arthur backward. His clothing ignited. His skin blistered. But Mingxia's form was shredded by the blast, her torso becoming ribbons of dissolving matter.
The domain contracted.
The sphere of black water shrank from one hundred yards to fifty. The pressure inside intensified, but the area of effect diminished. Mingxia ejected Leo and Arthur from her domain, the boundary pushing outward and expelling everything that was not her.
Leo tumbled through the air. Righted himself. Repositioned.
Two minutes eight seconds.
Mingxia's body was dissolving.
The flesh that Leo and Arthur had destroyed was no longer regenerating. Instead, it was flowing inward, toward the crystalline heart at her center. Her limbs were thinning. Her face was becoming gaunt.
She was consuming herself.
The flak cannons continued their barrage. Mike and Kevin poured fire into the shrinking domain. Spiritual projectiles punched through the boundary and detonated against the tentacles and the heart itself. Steam filled the air. The lake trembled.
Leo came in from the south.
The domain boundary hit him like a physical wall. The water was twice as thick as before, the pressure crushing. His velocity dropped immediately, three hundred feet per second becoming one fifty becoming eighty.
Too slow.
A tentacle came at his chest.
He instantly threw himself back. Every inch a battle against the liquid medium. The tentacle barely missed him.
The maneuver was impossible by normal physics. But with his modified Eclipse and the Third Person Perspective, he did not care about momentum. He just willed his position backwards.
One minute forty-three seconds.
The heart cracked. The domain shrank to forty yards.
Leo reminder himself he did not need to hit, just to threaten. The flak was doing the majority of the damage. His only job was to keep Mingxia from reaching the lake, to pin her into place.
Arthur planted himself between Mingxia and the lake, trying to hide behind a T3 tower shield.
The tentacles struck at him in waves. He deflected and retreated and advanced, using his Eclipse to maintain distance while blocking the heart's escape toward the water.
Leo came in from the left. Strike. Exit.
The heart cracked further. Thirty-five yards.
Mike was currently reloading. His hands moved with practiced efficiency, extracting shells from storage ring and feeding them into the cannon's ammo hopper.
Kevin maintained suppressing fire, firing with one hand, and cooling the barrel with spell arts with his other hand.
One minute twelve seconds.
Leo came in from the right. Strike. Exit.
The domain had contracted to thirty yards. The tentacles moved with frantic desperation now, whipping in patterns that had abandoned strategy for raw survival. They lashed at empty air where Leo had been moments before, overcorrected, tangled with each other in their haste.
Twenty-five yards.
Mike's shells screamed through the compressed space. Leo perceived them from outside his body, saw their trajectories as clean geometric lines intersecting the domain. One shell passed within three feet of his position.
He willed his piece sideways.
The g-forces slammed his organs against his ribcage. The shell detonated behind him, shrapnel peppering the rear of his Eclipse's defense formation. But he was clear. He was through.
Strike. His lifebound flying sword carved another groove across the crystalline surface. Blue light wept from the wound.
Exit. The domain boundary expelled him into open air.
Fifty-four seconds.
The tentacles were thinning. There were fewer of them now, and those that remained moved with jerky, uncoordinated motions. One swept toward a shell, missed entirely, then reversed direction and collided with another tentacle. They tangled. Separated. Flailed.
The heart was running out of matter to burn.
Leo came in from the left.
Kevin's cannon fired. The shell trajectory would intersect Leo's approach in approximately point-four seconds. He perceived the geometry from his position outside his body. Calculated. Adjusted his angle by seven degrees.
The shell screamed past his shoulder. The pressure wave buffeted his Eclipse. He held course.
Strike. The impact drove a crack through the heart's upper surface.
Exit.
Forty-one seconds.
The domain had shrunk to twenty yards. The pressure inside was crushing, the water thick as syrup. Leo's lungs burned before he even entered. He could barely hold his breath long enough to pass through.
He came in from the right.
Two shells converged on the domain from Mike's position. Their trajectories formed an X pattern that would intersect near the heart. Leo's approach would carry him through the intersection point in approximately point-six seconds.
He willed his piece to accelerate.
The Eclipse howled. His vision tunneled. He hit the boundary, pierced through the crystallized grief, and struck the heart a fraction of a second before the shells arrived.
The detonations caught him on the exit.
Shrapnel tore through his trailing robes. Heat washed across his back. His Eclipse's rear formations flickered, struggled, held.
Exit.
Thirty-three seconds.
Fifteen yards now. The tentacles had stopped pretending to coordinate. They thrashed in every direction, striking at shells, at empty air, at each other. One wrapped around a portion of the domain's interior and squeezed, as if trying to compress the space even further.
Leo came in from the left.
The domain was so small now that Kevin's shells were detonating against its outer surface.
The crystalline boundary flickered between solid and liquid, unable to maintain coherent state.
Leo timed his approach between detonations, slipping through a gap in the barrage.
Strike. Another crack appeared in the heart's structure. The blue light bleeding from its wounds was constant now, a glow that made the water inside the domain luminescent.
Exit.
Twenty-one seconds.
Ten yards.
The pressure was immense. Leo's divine sense strained against the weight of concentrated grief. Third Person Perspective flickered, his consciousness threatening to snap back into his body.
He held.
He came in from above.
Mike and Kevin had synchronized their fire. Shells arrived in alternating patterns, each detonation creating a brief window before the next impact. Leo counted the rhythm. One. Two. Three.
He dove, and blacked out briefly.
The domain boundary parted around him. The water crushed his chest. A tentacle swept toward his position, moving with desperate speed.
He willed his piece to rotate.
The g-forces were savage. His body spun on its axis, the tentacle passing through the space his torso had occupied a fraction of a second earlier.
Strike.
The crack was deep. The blue light that emerged was blinding.
A shell detonated three feet from his position.
The shockwave caught him mid-rotation. His Eclipse tumbled. His trajectory went wild.
He was spinning toward the domain's edge with no control, shells screaming past him, tentacles flailing in his peripheral vision.
He willed his piece to stabilize.
The effort cost him something. He felt it tear loose inside his consciousness, a portion of his divine sense burning away in the attempt to force his body into compliance. His Eclipse righted itself. He pierced through the boundary.
Exit.
Eleven seconds.
Leo's hands were shaking. His divine sense felt thin, stretched, like paper held too close to a flame. Third Person Perspective wavered at the edges of his awareness.
One more pass.
He came in from the right.
The domain was barely five yards across now. The heart hung at its center, cracked and bleeding light, surrounded by the tattered remnants of tentacles that could barely move. The water so compressed that it had become almost solid.
Kevin's shell arrived at the same moment Leo did.
He perceived the geometry. Saw the intersection point. Calculated the timing.
There was no angle that avoided the detonation.
Leo struck anyway.
His lifebound flying sword pierced the heart's surface. The crack widened. Blue light erupted from the wound.
The shell hit.
The detonation caught him at point-blank range. The shockwave slammed into his body with Tier Three force. His Eclipse's defensive formations overloaded, circuits burning out in cascading failure. The impact drove him backward through the domain's edge.
His divine sense shattered.
The Third Person Perspective collapsed. Leo was back in his body, fully present, fully feeling, and his consciousness was on fire. Pain lanced through his skull, white-hot and absolute.
His connection to the Eclipse severed. The flying sword tumbled away beneath him.
Leo fell.
He hit the ground hard. His shoulder took the impact, then his hip, then his head. Stars exploded across his vision. He rolled onto his back, clutching his temples, and stared up at the sky.
The domain hung above him. Five yards of crystallized grief, cracked and failing.
Kevin's cannon fired.
The shell punched through the weakened boundary. Detonated against the heart's surface. The cracks spread.
Mike's cannon fired.
Another shell. Another detonation. The heart's glow intensified, blue light bleeding from a dozen wounds.
Leo watched from the ground. His skull throbbed with each heartbeat. His divine sense was gone, burned away to nothing, leaving only the dull perception of his physical senses. He pulled out a spirit stone, absorbing what he could to recover some Si of divine sense.
Kevin fired again.
The shell struck the heart dead center.
Mingxia screamed.
She just wanted to find him, she just wanted to find him, she just wanted to find him.
The crystalline structure held for one eternal moment. Then the cracks connected. The light became blinding.
The heart shattered.
Fragments of blue crystal rained down across the lakeshore. The domain collapsed, black water splashing to earth in a wave that washed over Leo's prone form. The pressure vanished. The grief faded.
Silence.
Leo lay in the mud, hands clenched around a spirit stone, and breathed.
The heart fell.
It landed on the packed dirt with a sound that was almost gentle. Blue crystal, the color of deep water. Blue. Beautiful. Delicious.
His mouth watered.
Mike landed beside him. Although he fought from afar, maintaining maximum from the flak cannons for all that time was not an easy feat. Sweat dripped down his face. His eyes were locked on the heart.
"Um," Mike said. "Is it just me, or do you guys really, really want to eat it too?"
Arthur touched down on Mike's left. His robes were soaked through with black water. He did not look at Mike. He could not stop looking at the heart.
"Yes," Arthur said. His voice was hoarse.
"I want to eat it."
Leo nodded. His tongue felt thick in his mouth. He could imagine the taste. Cool. Clean. Like drinking from a mountain spring after a lifetime of thirst. He got up.
Kevin stepped between them and the heart.
"Nope," Kevin said. "Not me."
He bent down and picked up the heart with his bare hands. Leo watched him do it. The crystal was the size of a melon now, pulsing faintly with residual spiritual energy. Kevin held it like it was a rock. Just a rock. Nothing special.
"Probably only works once per person," Kevin said. He shrugged.
He pulled out his storage ring and pressed the heart against it. Nothing happened. He tried again. The ring flickered, rejected the heart, and went dark.
"Too Profound I guess," Arthur said. His voice was steadier now.
Kevin grunted. He tucked the heart under his arm like a football.
Leo tore his gaze away from the crystalline prize and looked toward the lake.
The water was moving. The entire surface of the lake was rotating, a whirlpool was slowly forming at the center, black water spiraling inward toward a point that Leo could not see.
Three golden lights rose from the far shore, toward the center of the whirlpool, traveling on a boat.
Shen Tianyi landed without sound, though his breathing was slightly uneven from the rush across the valley. He had watched the battle from a distance. He had seen what these four had done to the Nascent Soul.
His eyes swept across the group with nervous respect before settling on the lake.
"The secret is about to emerge," Shen Tianyi said. "Eight hundred years that lake has held it. Now the Profundity is dead and there is nothing left to guard the secret."
Leo pointed at the heart tucked under Kevin's arm. "That secret?"
Shen Tianyi turned to look at the heart.
His pupils dilated. His mouth salivated. He took one step toward Kevin, then stopped himself. His hands clenched into fists at his sides.
"That," Shen Tianyi said carefully, "is a Demonized heart. Very valuable, and probably safe… I mean safe enough for you desperadoes."
He swallowed. Visibly. "You should hide it. Quickly. I cannot remain near it much longer."
Kevin did not need further encouragement. He mounted his flying sword, tucked the heart more securely under his arm, and launched himself into the sky. Within seconds he was a speck on the horizon, heading toward the mountains.
Leo watched him go. The desperate hunger in his chest faded with distance.
"Better," Shen Tianyi said. He exhaled slowly. They all exhaled with him too.
"Much better. Now. We should see what the Pond Gazing Sect elders are up to. Old foxes like them will not sit idle while the lake reveals its treasure."
Leo nodded. "Agreed. But I need to recover. I'll go borrow the Sect's spiritual veins for a few minutes."
Shen Tianyi nodded. "The three of us will go first. Join us when you are recovered."
Leo turned to Arthur and Mike. They were watching the exchange with the blank expressions of people who could not understand a word being spoken.
Right. Common. They did not speak it.
Leo turned to Shen Tianyi. "My colleagues don’t understand common. I’ll teach you two words of English. 'STOP' means stop. 'KILL' means kill. Got it?”
Shen Tianyi nodded.
Mike added. "What about 'run'?"
Leo laughed, "Just stick to Shen Tianyi like glue. I'll be back in ten minutes."
He leapt in the air with his flying sword and shot toward the Pond Gazing Sect's main compound. Behind him, the whirlpool continued to grow, and the three golden lights on the ancient boat drew ever closer to whatever was below the lake.
