Chapter 1409: A Tragic Suicide; They’d All Said!

Phei had no idea whether Marcus would resist the Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark the way Kyle once had and force him to fight for in the Soul Realm, although if he were being completely fair, he doubted Marcus possessed anywhere near Kyle’s ability to stand against the manifestation of the Cosmic Dragon Face Manifestation.

Kyle had resisted because there had still been something stubborn inside him, some ancient pride buried beneath his mortal existence that refused to lower its head even when the Cosmic Dragon Face descended upon his Soul Realm.

That pride had turned the invasion into an actual contest of wills.

Marcus was different.

Phei had lived inside the bastard’s nightmares for too long already, haunting thoughts Marcus would never admit aloud and becoming the shape waiting behind every mistake he feared might finally catch up with him.

Marcus feared Phei far beneath the surface where arrogance and family prestige could pretend to matter, and fear rooted that deeply had a habit of becoming extraordinarily persuasive once something truly monstrous entered the soul to increase that fear 1000 folds if not more.

That should have made the coming conquest easier, and Phei did not want it easier.

Marcus had that Selene and murdered her afterward, and somehow even that had not been enough for the bastards involved. They had arranged the aftermath carefully, smothering truth beneath money, influence and rehearsed grief until the dead girl herself became the easiest person to blame:

The media thanks to the Prestons under orders had colored Selene as fragile young woman overwhelmed by school life and everyone believed she was some troubled girl who could not withstand pressure.

A tragic suicide; they’d all said!.

People had mourned Selene while swallowing the lie prepared for them, whispering about how weak-willed she must have been to kill herself, disgrace they’d said... and treating what happened as though the real tragedy had been her inability to survive instead of the crime that had been committed against her.

Marcus had not merely stolen her life—

He had stood beneath the shelter of his family while her dignity and self-respect and her very memory was dragged through filth, allowing everyone who loved her to hear strangers discuss the dead as though she had somehow failed the world by dying beneath what was done to her.

Selene’s father had been swallowed by the same web of filth and he’d been killed trying to uncover what had happened to his daughter, and her mother had been left bedridden for life until Phei intervened.

One crime had spread outward until an entire family lay ruined around it, all because one girl had become inconvenient evidence of what kind of men Marcus and the others truly were.

They had possessed enough power to turn truth into something negotiable, enough wealth to make consequences disappear and enough arrogance to believe the dead would remain quiet forever.

Becoming Phei’s Progenitor Slave would purchase Marcus nothing.

It would not purchase forgiveness, and it certainly would not purchase mercy.

Phei had never intended to kill him and call justice finished.

The instant his consciousness crossed into Marcus’s Soul Realm, however, even Phei had to admit the bastard’s inner world was almost offensively magnificent.

Gold stretched beneath him forever.

It was not ordinary gold, nor some spiritual imitation of sunlight shaped by a cultivator with an inflated sense of grandeur.

A sea of deep golden Essence occupied the Soul Realm from horizon to horizon, an immeasurable luminous expanse so vast that Phei’s perception needed several breaths simply to accept what he was looking at.

The flowing ocean seemed large enough to drown continents and forget they had ever existed, yet unlike mortal waters whose surfaces betrayed every breeze and current, this sea moved with a profound, ancient slowness.

Only when Phei looked deeper did he begin to see the colossal rivers moving beneath the Essence sea’s surface; layer upon layer of World Essence slid through one another with such patience that centuries would have seemed hurried beside them.

The depth was profoundly unable to fathom!

Phei lowered his gaze and looked through the luminous gold-essence, sending his perception farther and farther downward. Golden World Essence gradually became darker, denser and heavier until distance itself seemed swallowed by the sheer quantity beneath him. His senses descended through depths that should have contained mountain ranges, entire nations and oceans of their own, yet no bottom appeared.

The World Essence did not simply spread across Marcus’s Soul Realm. It descended into it like the roots of creation buried beneath a world, continuing beyond the reach of Phei’s perception until even True Void Sense eventually reached a depth it could no longer meaningfully measure.

He himself stood upon the golden surface without sinking, his long white hair drifting behind him while he stared across a place that looked less like the Soul Realm of a monster and more like the first morning of some holy creation.

Peace lived here with insulting abundance.

Purity saturated everything.

The Essence carried a serenity so complete that Phei almost laughed at the cruelty of the contrast. Marcus Heavenchild had spent years violating lives, destroying people and burying the evidence beneath wealth and power, yet the deepest being of his existence; his Soul Realm resembled a heaven untouched by human ugliness.

Golden mist drifted lazily over the endless World Essence sea.

Light moved through the sky without any visible sun. The air itself carried a sacred clarity, every breath of the place rich enough that ordinary cultivators might have wept merely from being allowed to exist inside it.

Phei crouched and lowered one hand.

His fingertips touched the surface.

World Essence!

His eyes narrowed.

This was not something resembling World Essence he knew of, and it was not some diluted descendant carrying a fraction of its qualities. Am even deeper and more purer fundamental that the World Essence Phei had absorbed when Sienna refined the remains of the Great Immortal God flowed beneath his fingers now; the difference in quantity was so obscene deeper that comparison almost became meaningless.

The difference was like comparing a god to a mortal human!

What had once existed as something precious enough to rebuild flesh, meridians, marrow and cultivation now stretched before him as an entire ocean.

Worse, it was purer.

The Essence beneath him carried a clarity beyond anything Phei had absorbed directly. Ordinary Mana suddenly seemed almost dirty by comparison, burdened by the countless lesser qualities it gathered while passing through bodies, environments, techniques and worlds. This World Essence felt closer to something before contamination, a fundamental strength that had not yet been forced into any one element, bloodline or path.

Essence before the world had dirtied it.

Essence so pristine that pure sounded insultingly small. Consecrated came closer.

’Immaculate perhaps.’

It carried the quiet perfection of something standing close enough to Creation’s first breath that corruption had barely learned how to exist around it.

Almost incorruptible.

Almost.

Phei’s mouth curved faintly.

"There you are."

He understood immediately what Marcus could eventually become if this sleeping foundation ever awakened properly. A cultivator carrying a Soul Realm of this scale and an ocean of World Essence behind every technique would become horrifying during any prolonged battle. Most powerful cultivators eventually faced exhaustion because even monstrous reserves remained reserves. Every attack consumed something. Every defense drew from somewhere.

Battles between higher existences could become wars of attrition precisely because neither side possessed infinite strength even if they lasted two years just fighting.

Marcus, once capable of freely accessing this endless sea, might grow into the kind of enemy for whom exhaustion became somebody else’s problem.

Fortunately for Phei, reserves mattered considerably less when the person who owned them was no longer the only one giving commands.

He lifted one hand.

The golden sea trembled.

The reaction spread outward so quickly that the entire visible horizon seemed to shiver. Colossal currents shifted beneath Phei’s feet, and the once-serene World Essence rolled against his will as though Marcus’s Soul Realm had suddenly awakened to the realization that an intruder was standing upon its foundation and issuing commands.

Phei pressed his will downward.

The resistance intensified for less than a heartbeat.

Then it bent.

A roar rose beneath him as the ocean erupted.

A spiraling column of World Essence exploded hundreds of meters into the air and wrapped around Phei’s raised arm, golden radiance twisting with enough force that the surrounding sky distorted beneath the concentration.

Layer after layer compressed around his fingers until liquid brilliance hardened into shape, forming articulated plates over each knuckle before climbing across his palm, wrist and forearm.

A gauntlet emerged.

It did not look forged. Nothing had hammered it into being and no furnace had ever touched it. The armor seemed born directly from the sea, every golden plate fitting into the next with impossible precision while streams of World Essence continued moving beneath the surface as though the construct remained alive.

Phei raised his other hand.

The Soul Realm answered more violently.

Another column tore from the sea and became a second gauntlet before additional waves surged upward around his body. Golden Essence wrapped across his shoulders, chest and back, plates forming over his legs and waist while enormous layered sections locked around him with deep resonant booms. The manifested armor continued expanding after covering him completely, swelling outward and upward as more of the ocean answered his will.

Phei grew!

***

"INSOLENCE!!!!"

The voice erupted from everywhere at once.