Chapter 1896 - 1895 - Gauntlet

Annabelle had acquired only a single word to her Dao title. She had been the Illusion Goddess for a very long time but when she ascended to the Eternal Realm, she became the Eternal Illusion Goddess.

It might seem small but it made a qualitative leap in her powers. Her illusions had always been able to fool higher realm cultivators but they were still just projections. They were not real.

At the peak of her power at the Divine Realm, they had felt so real that other cultivators would be tricked into believing the light and water was a plant or a volcano. They seemed that real.

Lower realm cultivators stood no chance against her.

Now, however, illusion and reality are blurred. She could project true illusions. What she could imagine, became reality!

It was not about falling into her illusions, she could make real things! With objects or terrain, she had no equal but people were different. She had to really know them to make something so real it became solid.

There was no one she knew better than her family. Lind knew something the Bastard did not. Despite being so real, they had no souls. They had no vitality to trigger any trap the Fiend had set up.

Those illusions would breeze through and be able to exhaust all false paths until they found him. Annabelle would then know the way!

She would also know roughly what to expect. The knowledge would not spare them but being prepared was far preferable than continuing being whittled down probing ahead!

Once she caught the Bastard with her clones, she saw the truth of what waited for them.

"Lind, we need to move but–" He held up his hand, his eyes already grim.

"We will deal with it as we can. MOVE!" She swallowed her words as she understood. There was no retreat. He knew there were traps and people were going to die. He would carry that weight and he transmitted the truth as they moved.

She and Qing kept close and they practically broke the sound barrier as they moved. She had the map relayed to them all and it was getting updated with all the traps she had confirmed.

No one died but some were injured. Eternal Realm power was much harder to recover from compared to the Divine Fiends they had faced before. It took hundreds of them to hurt them enough to absorb their lifeforce.

The traps facing them now were more typical of impeding a target to allow something or someone to come later to inflict more lethal attacks.

The handful of thralls sent to them showed the Bastard had limits to his tricks but she he was angry. Further, she knew Lanbao really was there as a soul.

She did not tell Lind as he was already prepared but it was the other person that she struggled with. She could not be real. Lind had confirmed he could not manifest a living being so the same rule should apply in the Eternal Realm, right?

The thralls were one thing as they had been taken by the Bastard. They had been ripped from their bodies and made into puppets. She wept at the faces of those legends she knew of had been reduced to playthings.

They had gotten two layers inward when she touched Lind's sleeve. He nodded as he understood her warning.

"Everyone, going forward is a path of danger unlike any before. It is not traps but to actually advance, we have to risk our lives like it was an Inheritance trial." His words made them all solemn.

The fact he was warning them made them consult the maps she had made for them all. Annabelle's clones had not suffered much because they could ignore many of the restrictions. They were not recognized as truly alive.

What was inside the next hall was not as simple as tests to prove worthiness but true risky choices. Gravity was shredded for the most part, for instance, between ledges. The ledges themselves were also not stable and set to collapse into whirlpools of violent energies ready to rip apart souls.

Some Fiend Qi was present but it was mostly manipulation of natural forces at the level that was a threat to Eternal Realm cultivators.

She had no other name for it other than a gauntlet. It was designed to push them to their limits and fall into death by catching them off guard. What she did not understand was why it was not more lethal.

Why give them a chance to advance?

[It is nastier than you think, Annabelle.] Lind's voice was suddenly in her head. He looked grim as they turned the corner and she really saw it with her own eyes and senses. The clones had let her experience it in a way but she realized it was not as visceral as actually being there.

She also understood why it was set up the way it was. The Bastard could have made a 100% lethal passage but that would mean his enemies would opt for making their own way through or worse, simply try to cause a fatal imbalance in energies that such a passage would offer.

The Eternal Realm energies were not something to take lightly and just because someone made it, does not mean they can control it when it was made to go out of balance. The holds fell apart because the cultivator was the anchor to it all.

If the Bastard had created a 100% lethal passage, that kind of energy could be made to tilt against him. The entire structure could be ripped apart if someone was willing to die with the Bastard.

Such a scenario was hardly unlikely. Many had tried to kill him with themselves at the same time. By making a passage that could be traversed with various energies made it nearly impossible to destabilize.

Someone would have to have such a wide range of Daos, Laws, and Mysteries as to be impossible to be a single person but the price was that it could be traversed. It could be bridged if someone was willing to risk their life.

For them, however, there was no way they all could get through it. It was the whole purpose of the gauntlet. They might get a handful through but no more. The ledges would collapse and whether they would regenerate was unknown.

Both she and Lind doubted it. The whole point was to get Lind to the Bastard. He could not hold back and let others die to blaze a way through.

Still, she also doubted he would play by the Bastard's rules. He smiled wide and turned to Shoti and Chu. She was confused until her Sisters smiled wide back.

Shoti conjured her whips and created a domain that Chu enhanced with black and emerald flames. The orb of whips then danced in the gauntlet but instead of destruction, she saw the ledges reinforced!

Her azure and golden eyes were dinner plate wide. Since when could they do that?!

The 2 warriors were famous for combining their skills to make devastating attacks. All of her family to some extent could help each other enhance their powers, but she had never seen 2 warriors create something like that!

Rather than use force to rip apart, they made it so that the ledges would not break no matter what. She could see traps trigger to shatter against any attempt to change their makeup, but the emerald harmonic Qi in Chu's flames consumed those disruptive forces and made it their own!

Shoti's whips gathered up that energy and used it to make even stronger bonds! Annabelle had never seen anything like it in her life!

"You used Weapon Arts to make a support array?" She spoke aloud before she realized and the group were just as floored as her.

Lind laughed.

"Power is the only thing he understands. He broke the rules because it never occurred to him to do anything else. He broke the world because it would not conform to his point of view. He cannot imagine. He never could." Annabelle did not entirely understand but she knew Lind was more like the man she loved than ever before.

The battle weary dragon was what the legends now spoke of but the bright and unrelentingly curious man was who she had fallen for. His eyes glowed as he looked at the distorted air ahead and looked at Qing of all people.

Her Sister seemed to ponder before a gentle aura floated outward. Annabelle was about to call out when she froze. The gravity ripped to shreds everything but under the gentle aura of Qing, it began to reveal a pattern!

Of course! She knew souls and life force better than anyone and a trap meant to sap that away would have a hidden pattern waiting to trigger! Just as Shoti and Chu used the trap meant to scatter the ledges, Qing was able to use that pattern to harness the gravity forces at play!

Gravity was not the highest foundational power of existence, souls were! Qing was not powerful like a warrior but she could pick apart the scars no one could see and heal what no elixir or pill could reach.

She saw the things few could truly grasp and the Bastard was a toddler compared to her in controlling those energies outside of absorption and ripping them away.

"MOVE!" Lind's voice snapped them all out of their shock and the entire 900+ force walked down the incredibly dangerous gauntlet.

Lind called on others as each challenge or obstacle loomed. While they had to let the pathway close behind them, the sheer numbers were just walking through it!

She almost wanted to laugh hysterically! The various ways the Bastard tried to winnow or separate them for his own feeding had been getting increasingly insidious but Lind had found a second wind!

With the preview she gave him, he had formulated ideas and quickly overcame it all. She knew, however, the next step was the main complex.

Lind had to know. She had to tell him what she had seen but he turned to her as if reading her mind. His eyes were full of life and he seemed to understand something.

Whatever the Bastard was going to throw at them, he would face it. He would make the choice that would break many but he would make it because the nightmare had to end. The Bastard had kept all existence on a knife edge.

It was time for it to end.