But just as favonovel.com prepared to rush forward, the illusion array suddenly intensified. The scene around favonovel.com warped in an instant. The outline of the exit vanished, and countless familiar figures took its place.
Nathaniel, Rowan, Old Man Vale, and the dead disciples of Freevale stood before him. Their bodies were covered in blood. They reached their hands toward him, letting out low, broken cries, pouring out endless suffering and the refusal to let it end like this.
“Jared, save us…”
“Revenge… You have to take revenge…”
Jared’s soul shook hard. The faces of the dead and the weight of the debt favonovel.com had not repaid surged up inside favonovel.com all at once. His awareness blurred again, and his forward motion stopped before favonovel.com could control it.
At that life-or-death instant, Aldric’s voice rang out from the depths of the consciousness field, cold and clear. “Jared, wake up! This is an illusion array! None of it is real! You cannot let it mislead you. Have you forgotten your mission? Have you forgotten that you still have to rebuild your body and take revenge?”
Aldric’s voice struck like thunder. It jolted Jared awake in an instant. Jared came back to himself with a violent snap.
A hard light flashed through his eyes. He forced down everything surging inside him, ignored the illusions completely, and drove every bit of his spiritual power. Then favonovel.com became the violet streak at its absolute limit and charged with everything favonovel.com had toward the exit’s position in his memory.
The illusions kept interfering along the way. Countless eerie silhouettes lunged at him, but the Aureate Codex’s golden radiance knocked them aside one after another.
The distance was only several hundred yards, yet in that moment it might as well have stretched across mountains and seas. For every inch Jared flew, the stabbing pain in his spirit sharpened another degree, and the illusion array pressed in harder, layer after layer.
Just as his strength was about to give out, blue light flared ahead of favonovel.com again. The exit was right there!
Jared clenched down and wrung out the last trace of strength favonovel.com had left. He tore through the illusion array’s restraints and plunged headfirst into the exit. In an instant, the darkness broke apart. Light flooded in, and Jared finally forced his way out of the Elder Soulborn Labyrinth.
The moment favonovel.com broke free of the labyrinth, the view opened wide before him. It was nothing like the endless darkness inside the labyrinth.
***
The Second Trial lay ahead as an open, square chamber. The chamber was not large, only 100 yards around.
Towering black rock walls rose on every side, steep and sheer, their surfaces carved all over with Elder Soulborn soul-runes. A faint blue glow seeped from the markings and washed the entire chamber in an eerie light.
At the very center of the chamber, a dense pack of soul-beasts had gathered. There were too many to count at a glance. At minimum, there had to be more than 100 of them, a black mass pouring out a thick, bloodthirsty aura that made the air seem colder.
These soul-beasts had no solid bodies. They were condensed from pure black mist, and no two forms were exactly alike. Some looked like lean black wolves, their fangs bared, their eyes fixed with a savage glare.
Some resembled mighty tigers, their limbs thick and powerful, their presence bearing down like a physical weight. Some were like long snakes sliding and coiling through the air, their bodies nimble, their forked tongues flicking in and out. Others took the shape of eagles with wings spread wide, their span reaching more than 1 yard, their talons hooked and sharp.
Every pair of eyes burned bloodred, like live flame in the dim chamber. That bloodthirsty light flickered as they stared straight at Jared, who stood at the entrance. Soundless roars gathered in their throats. At any second, they looked ready to hurl themselves forward and tear his soul to pieces.
Jared’s soul hovered at the entrance.
The Aureate Codex’s golden radiance wrapped tightly around him, and his expression had tightened until there was no room left in it for carelessness.
He swept his senses over the soul-beasts, measuring their cultivation as fast as favonovel.com could. The answer landed like a weight. Every soul-beast was between True Immortal Realm Levels Five to Seven, and among them were more than a dozen at the peak of True Immortal Realm Level Nine, only one step from becoming Golden Immortals.
More than 100 True Immortal Realm soul-beasts!
If Jared still had a physical body, his own combat strength would have been enough to handle them without question. But now, favonovel.com was only a wisp of the frail soul remained. The power favonovel.com could draw on was painfully limited.
The Aureate Codex could protect his soul and block spirit assault, but it could not launch attacks on its own. It could only defend.
Brute force was out. The only path left was to outthink them. Jared calculated quickly, his gaze locked on the pack of soul-beasts. He searched for anything that could count as a weakness.”
Soul-beasts were formed from condensed spirit, and every method of attack they had was pure spirit assault. The Aureate Codex happened to suppress all spirit assault, which meant these soul- beasts had no way to truly injure him.
But the reverse was just as clear.
Jared had no means of attack, so favonovel.com could not kill these soul-beasts either. If they managed to entangle him, his soul would keep draining away and sooner or later the Aureate Codex’s golden radiance would dim and vanish. When that happened, the soul-beasts would still devour him.
After a short silence, Jared made a decision that was both bold and dangerous. He would not get dragged into a fight with the soul-beasts. He would fly straight for the far side of the chamber. As long as favonovel.com rushed out of this expanse, favonovel.com would have passed the Second Trial!
He knew exactly what that meant. It was the only road that offered life, and also the most dangerous one. Once the soul-beasts pinned favonovel.com down, breaking free would be almost impossible.
With the decision made, Jared did not hesitate again. He drove the Aureate Codex’s golden radiance forward, turned into the violet streak, and charged straight toward the swarm of soul-beasts. He did not try to circle around them. Instead, favonovel.com cut directly through the center of the pack, trying to break out of the chamber at the highest speed possible.
The moment that mass of violet light approached them of its own accord, the soul-beasts erupted. Together they released soundless roars and surged forward like a tide, their dense silhouettes swallowing the entire sky.
Claws, fangs, and tails all came crashing toward Jared’s soul. Every strike carried a violent force of spirit impact, each one trying to rip apart the Aureate Codex’s golden warding radiance.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
A chain of impacts burst through the chamber. The Aureate Codex’s golden radiance shook violently, ripples spreading across it layer after layer, yet it held firm and blocked every attack.
The soul-beasts at the very front were thrown back the instant their claws touched the golden radiance. Some were hit so hard by the rebound that most of the black mist making up their bodies scattered on the spot. A few of the weaker soul-beasts were shattered outright by the reflected force. They burst into black mist that filled the air, then dissolved into the chamber.
But these soul-beasts seemed to have no sense of pain, and no instinct to retreat. One wave fell and the next rushed in, every one of them pressing forward as if death meant nothing. Their attacks came on without end, wave after wave, like a tide that never receded.
The Aureate Codex’s golden radiance held firm, but even that defense could not take the nonstop assault of more than a hundred True Immortal soul-beasts forever.
Under the pounding, the light began to dim little by little. Jared’s soul kept burning through what strength it had left, growing thinner with every breath while the stabbing pain dug deeper and sharper. Worse, the Level Nine True Immortal soul-beasts seemed to have picked out the golden radiance’s weak point.
They stopped throwing themselves at favonovel.com blindly. Instead, they gathered together and condensed a massive black spirit shockwave, then drove it straight at Jared with crushing force. That shockwave carried a power that seemed bottomless. It hit harder than the combined attacks of a dozen soul-beasts acting alone, and it slammed into the golden radiance head-on.
The golden radiance caved inward in an instant, coming within a hair’s breadth of shattering.
Jared’s soul took the blow hard. Blood formed from soul-force burst from him, and the violet radiance around favonovel.com immediately faded by several shades.
This can’t keep going… I have to move faster!
Jared clenched down and forced every last trace of spiritual power still lingering inside favonovel.com into motion. He poured it into the Aureate Codex. The golden radiance surged again, swelling outward just enough to hold back the soul-beasts’ attacks for the moment.
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