Chapter 1404: Phei’s New Enormous Domain!

Phei left Eleanor behind as she continued toward the lounge she had apparently been heading for before walking straight into him, although when he glanced back one last time, he caught a small smile lingering on her face that he could not quite understand. It had not looked like the ordinary embarrassed smile of someone replaying an awkward encounter in her head either.

There had been something warmer beneath it, almost private, as though Eleanor had just walked away from a conversation carrying a joke Phei had somehow participated in without ever being told the punchline.

That bothered him more than he wanted to admit because Phei had always trusted his memory.

He remembered faces, conversations and tiny details people usually discarded, and after everything his soul and cultivation had gone through, forgetting something as specific as a beautiful woman crashing into his back inside Sovereign Tower should have been extremely unlikely.

Yet no matter how many times he searched his memory, there was nothing.

No Eleanor WitchBourne, no awkward collision and no memory of standing beside Maya while accusing some woman of pretending to bump into him because she was a fan.

He’d just assumed the whole Sovereign Tower thing and since she didn’t disagree he’d taken that.

Maya would probably remember.

Unfortunately, asking her required admitting that Phei wanted to spend valuable time investigating some old hallway collision instead of doing something significantly more enjoyable with his woman, and he was not certain his priorities had deteriorated that badly yet.

He could always ask later.

What refused to leave him alone was something considerably harder to dismiss, because how the fuck had he failed to sense Eleanor?

That part made no sense whatsoever, especially when he could sense her perfectly now. Eleanor had entered the lounge and settled somewhere within Infinity Chaos, and her presence rested comfortably inside the enormous web of awareness surrounding him alongside more than a thousand other people.

If he wanted, Phei could distinguish her heartbeat from the others, feel the tiny movements of her body whenever she shifted position, sense the warmth carried through her blood and even notice the nearly nonexistent Mana brushing against her mortal existence without ever entering it.

She was there now, completely ordinary to his perception, yet several minutes earlier, right before the collision, Eleanor had not existed. She had not been hidden or concealed. True Void Sense had perceived nothing there to conceal in the first place.

’That is way too fucking weird.’

Phei frowned as he continued through the hotel before deciding Eleanor WitchBourne could become tomorrow’s problem.

Tonight had already accumulated enough impossible shit without adding a mysteriously undetectable mortal woman to the pile.

***

Far beyond Infinity Chaos, the night over Hell’s Paradise Island had begun changing.

The cold arrived first so subtly that almost nobody noticed it.

A thin breath of frost touched the tallest windows of Infinity Chaos and spread delicate white veins across glass that had spent years reflecting artificial light with the arrogant confidence convinced nature existed outside and civilization existed within.

The cold cared very little for architecture.

It crawled across balconies, silvered railings, kissed rooftops and slipped down the enormous sides of the hotel until every exposed surface carried a faint crystalline sheen beneath the stars.

Above all of it, the heavens themselves looked wrong without giving ordinary eyes anything obvious enough to accuse. Stars remained where stars belonged, clouds still drifted lazily through the darkness and the moon continued spilling pale light across the island, yet something about the sky had become deeper than before in the last twenty seconds or so, as though darkness itself had quietly gained weight while nobody was watching.

Far beneath that strange sky, the Endless Forest began to whiten.

The ancient woodland normally remained an impossible ocean of green, its vast canopy still stretched farther than anyone could properly comprehend, trees carried enough life that even winter struggled to make the forest look truly dead.

Tonight, frost crept across leaves that should not have known such cold.

Pale crystals gathered along branches and spread down ancient trunks and settled upon the endless greenery until enormous stretches of forest appeared dusted with silver-white powder beneath the moonlight. Streams slowed as ice gathered along their edges, the long river cutting through the island began carrying thin sheets of frost over its dark surface, and the great lake farther inland reflected the stars with unnatural clarity before white crystals started crawling outward from its banks.

Hell’s Paradise Island felt what was coming.

Perhaps not with thought in the way a human understood thought, but the island was no dead chunk of earth floating beneath the sky. Something ancient slept throughout its mountains, forests, rivers and foundations; a vast awareness woven so deeply into the land that ordinary cultivators could walk across it their entire lives without ever realizing the ground beneath them was capable of noticing when something disturbed its balance.

Tonight that awareness had become restless.

The cold intensified, the forest quieted, and yet nobody screamed, nobody ran and most people did not even notice anything had changed.

That was terrifying, wasn’t it?

The Void moved silently through the island:

It had never fully stopped responding to Phei after his return, and now threads of absolute darkness began weaving themselves between Mana and Essence with almost delicate precision.

They slipped beneath mountains, crossed the lake, moved underneath Infinity Chaos and threaded through every invisible river of power flowing beneath the island. Void-Ice Essence followed with equal subtlety, carrying cold without openly releasing it, spreading through the spaces between Essence until every current seemed to breathe frost.

Primordial Blood moved beneath both of them, thinner than mist and impossible for ordinary senses to detect, carried through the island by those same unseen paths until three powers that had no business existing naturally together began covering Hell’s Paradise Island beneath a vast web.

The Void pressed everything downward. Mana grew quieter. Elemental Essences became strangely subdued. Spiritual currents sank closer to the earth as though the heavens above them had suddenly become too heavy, while Void-Ice threaded through them and Primordial Blood moved inside both like something alive.

Darkness thickened until the night became ten times deeper within less than a minute, though anyone staring upward would have struggled to explain exactly when the change occurred. Stars remained visible, but the blackness around them had become so vast that every point of light looked farther away.

Shadows beneath trees stretched until they joined together into enormous pools, while the great lake reflected something closer to an abyss than the sky above it.

The sentient island did not understand what the Young Dragon’s powers were doing, and strangely enough, even the powers themselves seemed less interested in explaining than preparing.

They were welcoming something while simultaneously arranging themselves to reject whatever that something might try to bring with it. Void, Void-Ice and Primordial Blood moved in a delicate, impossible dance, suppressing every other Essence across Hell’s Paradise Island while building something so enormous that no ordinary cultivator could have recognized where it began or ended.

Then space trembled:

High above Hell’s Paradise Island, darkness folded inward and Phei appeared beneath the stars.

The reaction was immediate.

The Void rose toward him from every direction, Void-Ice spiraled upward in pale crystalline currents and Primordial Blood followed in thin crimson threads woven through the darkness. All three powers curled around Phei without violence, brushing over his body, flowing through his long white hair and circling his limbs with the strange intimacy of living things recognizing their source.

For this breathtaking moment, Hell’s Paradise Island looked less like an island beneath him and more like the interior of an enormous Domain belonging to Phei!