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Stella was suddenly screaming—there was a blinding flash of light from Lucius, and once it faded, Ashlock saw via a root snaking through a crack in the floor that Hammond was trying to make a rift to escape. Moving on instinct, as there was no time to assess the situation, Ashlock tried to suppress or disrupt the rift with his spatial Qi. But Hammond had far greater dominion over the surrounding spatial Qi than even Ashlock and could supply the rift with his own internal Qi.

"Fuck, I really need to work on increasing my cultivation stage! It doesn't matter how large my Qi reserves are if someone can seize control of my own Qi!" Ashlock cursed as his vision blurred, and he returned to Red Vine Peak. Thankfully, he had prepared countermeasures in advance for a situation like this.

"Khaos, execute the spatial cultivator opening a rift, and do not let any of the Merchants escape," Ashlock commanded his 4th stage Star Core Ent, standing on his mountain peak. He had kept his Ents hidden from White Stone Palace as he didn't want to expose their existence to the Merchants or scare them off, as this was supposed to be a peaceful talk. But sadly, Stella's fears about the ruthlessness of the Merchants had come true.

Khaos acknowledged the order by disconnecting herself from the black root, charging her up with void Qi at great expense to Ashlock's own Qi reserves, and then vanished into the void.

"Where did she go?" Ashlock tried to quickly locate Khaos nearby, but the void Qi made it nearly impossible to detect the Ent with spiritual sense. A property of void Qi that made the Ent an even more terrifying predator and the perfect Ent for assassinating a spatial cultivator. Unable to locate Khaos, Ashlock decided to return his sights to the meeting room and saw the stone wall explode, revealing Khaos.

"How did she cross an entire mountain range in an instant?!" Ashlock had expected Khaos to arrive within a minute, but it had been instantaneous.

Per his orders, the void Ent blurred toward Hammond and ruthlessly cleaved him into pieces like a guillotine without making a sound.

Ashlock had to admit he was surprised at how quickly Hammond was slaughtered. Was it because the spatial cultivator hadn't seen Khaos coming? Ashlock had analyzed the Merchants when they first arrived and had concluded they were all at the peak of the Star Core Realm, far above Khaos and even his own cultivation base. So, how could Khaos kill him in one swipe? Was void Qi really that overpowered?

"I bloody hope it's strong considering how much Qi I spent converting into void Qi for Khaos," Ashlock muttered as he looked at the shredded remains of Hammond that plastered the white walls like some accursed art piece. He hated to admit it, but all he felt from the sight was a deep hunger rather than disgust. He couldn't help but mentally lick his lips. That was the flesh and blood of a cultivator far above him, and it was saturated in spatial Qi like an exotic sauce.

"My cultivation would soar leaps and bounds if only I could get a taste... Wait, what is that," Ashlock concentrated his spiritual sight on the splattered remains surrounding Khaos and noticed something shiny, possibly metallic, within the blood. Perhaps a spatial ring? Using telekinesis to push what was left of Hammond's arm aside, he saw a familiar red maple leaf earring, and everything started to make sense.

Quickly making a tiny portal beside it, he retrieved the earring and returned it to Red Vine Peak for safekeeping while holding back his festering rage.

Stella seldom took the earrings off since he had gifted them to her as a child, which could only mean one thing: Hammond had taken them by force, which must have been the cause of her screams. The Merchants had betrayed their trust, tried to steal Stella's earrings, and hurt her.

"Khaos," Ashlock said through their mental link as he tried to quell his rising rage, "I command you to kill the other two merchants."

Ashlock felt Khaos acknowledge his order but then went silent—like a phone disconnecting.

"What the..." Ashlock tried to look back in the room, but something was blocking him. Confused, he switched his view to be above the palace with {Eye of the Tree God} and was baffled to see a strange black bubble surrounding the entire east wing.

"Did Khaos create this barrier so nobody can escape?" Ashlock wondered as he tried to penetrate the bubble with his spiritual sense to no avail. He could try to destroy the bubble with his overwhelming Qi reserves or have Zeus blast a hole through it with heavenly lightning, but if Khaos made it to stop Nox from sneaking away, he didn't want to allow her to escape.

Time passed, and upon closer inspection of the bubble, Ashlock came to a terrible realization. The shroud over the east wing wasn't made out of void Qi but rather a strange type of energy that he couldn't understand. Therefore, Khaos hadn't been the one to put it up, as she could only utilize the void Qi he had provided her.

However, right as Ashlock was about to cast {Progeny Dominion} to gain control of a nearby offspring and reign all hell on the bubble, it popped and faded away on its own, allowing him to flood the entire room with his presence and see what the hell was going on in there.

To his horror, Diana was dead.

Her smashed-up and broken body was the first thing that greeted him. Black blood soaked her clothes like the bubonic plague, and her once beautiful feathered wings jutted off at odd angles. She was face down with her arms spread out, and in her open and limp palm were black shards of glass that Ashlock didn't recognize.

What the fuck had happened in the few minutes he was locked out by that accursed bubble? Diana and Stella had been joking and laughing about this meeting just a few hours ago? How could she now be an unmoving corpse pummeled into the floor like trash? No, he didn't want to accept it.

"Diana, you aren't dead, right?" Ashlock uttered in disbelief within her mind, "Show me something! Anything! Hey?!"

She remained lifeless.

The mountain trembled as Ashlock's enormous Star Core flared up, and his cursed blood boiled. Seeing Diana's body ruined made him want to scream into the void and smash something.

With his emotions running amock and having nowhere to go other than down into his roots, his offspring embraced his rage in their own way. Their leaves rustled violently to mirror their father, and the usually peaceful and pleasant mountain range of scarlet trees took on an air of wrath. Birds fled to the skies en masse as Ashlock's offspring began to awaken their egos in light of their parent's sorrow. Columns of fire shot into the sky alongside swirling clouds of mist. The area around the trees with spatial Qi rippled and cracked, and the grove filled with Dreamweaver Orchids began displaying illusions of enraged beasts that howled at the setting sun.

Meanwhile, Ashlock wasn't paying attention to the vast impact of his grief, as his entire focus was on Diana. Memories flashed through his mind and only furthered his frustrations. She had grown to become someone special to him, and he had cherished her presence. He knew this was a brutal world with death around every corner; hell, the cold loneliness of death had almost claimed him once before. But this was too soon. Diana still had so much to see and accomplish.

"Please wake up." Ashlock tore his sights away from the sad sight and desperately began flipping through his list of skills and even brought up his production menus to see if he had any way to heal her but came up with nothing. Nothing. There were healing pills, but Diana didn't exactly look in a state to eat any pill he floated over to her.

It had only been a few seconds since the bubble collapsed, but it already felt like hours to Ashlock. His mind was so overwhelmed with so many conflicting emotions that he didn't know what to do and realized he was panicking.

"Calm down. Now is not the time to allow yourself to get distracted." He felt his mind grow cold as he suppressed his reasonable human emotions to the corner of his mind and focused on damage control.

"Titus, retrieve Diana's body for me," Ashlock willed a rift into existence, and the enormous Ent reached down through the conjured portal and carefully raised Diana. Titus then walked across the mountain peak and set Diana down against the tree she always used to cultivate under.

Larry, who had been awaiting orders from Ashlock, crawled over and inspected Diana with his many eyes, "Master, what in the heavens happened to her? May I be of assistance somehow?"

"I don't know. Give me a moment to think." Ashlock replied colder than he intended. "Actually, Larry."

"Yes, Master?" Larry replied gruffly, "Just say the word, and it shall be done. Your wish is my command."

"I noticed in the corner of my vision that Sebastian was fighting one of the Merchants while I was retrieving Diana's body. I don't know the situation over there, but I doubt it's any good if Diana ended up like this even while in her demon form. Can you go and help them while I deal with this? Oh, and protect Stella if you can."

"As the Master commands! I shall reign hell upon thy foes and protect the mistress with my humble life," Larry declared. The halo of ash orbiting his crown of horns began spinning faster, and he started to emit a murderous presence that matched his terrifying form.

"I appreciate it," Ashlock said as he opened a rift for his guardian beast, which the spider promptly crawled through without hesitation.

Once it snapped closed, Kaida fell from the tree's canopy and slithered toward the motionless Diana with evident concern. The enormous Ebonflow Serpent Sovereign had grown considerably since Ashlock had last checked on him and looked capable of swallowing Diana whole.

The snake coiled around the tree's base and Diana's body while his tongue flickered at Diana's cheek, hissing softly and looking at her with his golden eyes.

"Kaida, she got killed by the Merchants," Ashlock told the worried snake, "I know you are still young and likely lack the power, but is there any way you can revive her?"

The snake gave Diana a long look but eventually lowered his head and shook it sadly in an oddly human way.

Ashlock barely managed to reign in his grief at the sight of Kaida and Diana.

Since there was nothing left he could do, Ashlock was about to switch his focus back to the White Stone Palace, as he hadn't had time to check if the others were still alive, when he noticed her finger... twitch. It was subtle, just the tiniest of movement to the point he almost second-guessed himself. But then it happened again.

"Wait, wait, wait. Diana? Are you alive!?" Ashlock couldn't believe it. She didn't appear to be breathing, and her body looked like a bus had run it over. But that was, without a doubt, her moving.

Of course, it could have just been a random muscle spasm. So, to make sure, Ashlock quickly split his trunk to reveal his Demonic Eye and gazed upon Diana. His demonic gaze was narrow, and everything became tinted with a red hue. But this mutation served an essential purpose other than scaring people. He could see the flow of Qi, and to his utter surprise, there was the faintest evidence of Qi circulation in Diana's body.

Upon another second of observation, Ashlock noticed that the abundance of water Qi around Diana had shifted the careful balance of demonic and water Qi within her body. Due to her body being so destroyed, the flow was heavily restricted, but it was there.

"If Qi can flow, her Soul Core can't be shattered! Her soul is still there! It's so dim that it's impossible to make out, but it's still somewhere!" Ashlock quickly entered his inventory and dumped a pile of healing pills next to Kaida.

"Kaida, she's still barely alive, but if she doesn't get healed up within the next few minutes, I fear she will truly pass," Ashlock said in haste, "Feed these pills to her and try to draw out a healing or Qi gathering array with your ink. I will be right back with a better solution, I promise."

Ashlock left Kaida to tend to Diana and returned to the room. There were two ongoing fights. To his relief, Stella seemed alive, but her expression was strange. She stared intently at a dark corner of the room with a calm face and raised sword.

"Stella, I'm here now," Ashlock said within her mind, "Just call out my name if you need any help."

She gave a slight nod but otherwise hardly reacted except for wincing slightly as he quickly withdrew his presence from her mind. He would offer her more help, but the other side of the room was a disaster and needed his immediate attention.

"Elder Margret, what the hell happened to you?!" Ashlock asked in disbelief as he noticed her pitiful state. The usually uptight woman who reminded him of an English noblewoman with how she conducted herself was ragged and even missing her right arm entirely. She was sitting propped up against a wall, cowering behind Larry and Sebastian, wrapped in bloody cloths and looking terrible, with nasty burns covering nearly every inch of exposed skin.

"Oh, you know," Elder Margret chuckled dryly, which caused her face to twist in pain, "I dared to face the sun as nothing more than a candle flame."

That was true. Elder Margret was only in the 8th stage of the Soul Fire Realm and was, therefore, more than an entire Realm of cultivation below Lucius.

"But I wanted to live," Elder Margret smiled sadly, showing a row of bloodied teeth, "How can I see out the young one's training if I'm a cold corpse?"

Ashlock appreciated the strangely optimistic outlook, but he really needed her to leave before she got killed by a stray attack. Finding Khaos in a similarly bad condition but still able to move, he ordered the void Ent to go with Elder Margret through a portal he quickly conjured and then snapped closed while the entire room shuddered from the ongoing battle.

With them out of the way and back at Red Vine Peak, Ashlock could now focus entirely on eliminating these Merchants who dared to beat Diana to within an inch of her life and might still die without urgent healing.

His focus naturally landed on Lucius, a tall, dark-skinned warrior wearing polished metal armor that glowed like a mirror in the sun and wielding two swords that appeared to be made from condensed light as if they had been forged from a star.

Meanwhile, his opponent was an exhausted-looking Sebastian and a very enraged Larry. The giant spider who dominated the room had unleashed a tidal wave of ash spiders that seemed tiny compared to Larry but were far larger and more robust than any spider Ashlock had seen back on Earth.

Lucius howled in pain as one of the hundreds of spiders latched onto his shoulder and ripped off his ear. Before the spider could enjoy its victory snack, a beam of light discharged from the man's glowing armor and pierced a hole straight through its head, liquifying its brain and causing the now headless spider to slide down and join the growing pile of dead.

"Healing Glow!" Lucius shouted as he deflected a floating snake of liquid silver, aiming straight for his throat with his armored arm and struck one of Larry's limbs with his light sword. A warm glow appeared on the left side of his head, and to Ashlock's amazement, his torn-off ear began regrowing.

Larry reeled back with a hiss from the strike but didn't seem to suffer too serious of a wound due to his ashen fur that shimmered as if floating like armor to dampen the blows.

"Kill him!" Ashlock shouted through his mental link with Larry as he saw Lucius's ear fully regrow, "If I can turn Lucius into an Ent, I can use that Healing Glow power on Diana and Elder Margret!"

"Puny human, it seems my master has sentenced you to a swift death," Larry decreed in the ancient tongue as the ashen crown orbiting his horns spun even faster, and Lucius seemed to buckle slightly from the sudden pressure.

"I care not for your pathetic master," Lucius surprisingly answered in the ancient tongue, "I only respect one God, and it shines brighter than any other!"

"O, hear my plea, heavenly sun, and bathe me in your radiant light, for I am your humble vessel on this mortal plane and wish to wield your wrath to strike down these fools that deny your warmth," Lucius roared to the heavens. A second later, the ceiling exploded as a beam of concentrated sunlight from the setting sun illuminated his form. He screamed as the sunlight scorched his skin, burned away his hair, and began to melt his armor.

"What kind of power is this?" Ashlock was in shock as Lucius's Star Core now seemed to be directly linked to the literal sun, providing him with a bottomless energy source.

Lucius eventually stopped screaming in agony and effortlessly stood up to his full height despite Larry's suppression. His eyes were like headlights, and streams of golden light lurked below his charred skin.

He cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, flexed his fingers, and grinned. He then slowly began to walk toward Larry while raising his arm, "Perish before the blinding light, you filthy creature of the night."

"Larry, dodge!" Ashlock yelled as he sensed the absurd amount of light Qi filling the room that was many times more Qi than Ashlock had used to create Khaos with his SS grade skill {Necroflora Sovereign}, all condensing into a single attack on Lucius's palm.

Ashlock realized that he had to stop this attack no matter what. Otherwise, not only was everyone in that room dead, but the entire White Stone Palace would be no more. This simply wasn't the level of power a mere man should wield as it belonged in the realm of the gods.