Chapter 1316. Allow Me to Read Your Soul Aloud Like a Grocery List

Chapter 1316: 1316. Allow Me to Read Your Soul Aloud Like a Grocery List

The impending violence mattered; the raw, primal need to crush the lightning beneath his heel burned in Rex’s veins, but he felt a flicker of something else.

Not guilt, but curiosity.

Evelyn had earned more than just a death blow; she had earned an explanation. And if he was being brutally honest with his own twisted nature, he wanted to see how she would react when she realized she had been transparent all along.

He wanted to see the moment her certainty curdled into horror.

Rex closed his eyes. He drew in a slow, measured breath, tasting the copper and ozone.

When he opened them again, he didn’t just see the garden; he saw the truth.

He awakened Soul Manipulation and Divine Perception simultaneously, forcing them to intertwine.

The world around him suffered a violent transformation. The physical reality of the garden—the scorched grass, the broken marble, and the bleeding bodies dimmed into a grey, ghostly haze.

The garden became a stage of shadows, and Evelyn Astralight became the only thing that mattered.

She was no longer just a girl; she was a lantern, a brilliant, tightly wrapped constellation of light burning with an impossibly complex internal architecture. Her essence spiraled and coiled in colors that didn’t exist in the mortal spectrum.

Rex looked at her not as a warrior looks at an opponent, but as a scholar looks at an ancient, forbidden manuscript left open on a table.

"I can see it now," he said.

His voice was terrifyingly relaxed, almost conversational, as if they were sharing tea rather than preparing for mutual annihilation. "You really thought you were invisible, didn’t you!?"

Evelyn’s stance didn’t waver, but her eyes narrowed into slits of blue fire. The muscle in her jaw pulled taut, a visible tremor of restrained fury beneath her skin.

"Helena tried to scan you and found nothing but empty air," Rex continued, his gaze tracing the luminous pathways of her spirit. "The Apostles came up empty..."

"Even I couldn’t read you in the corridor... You played your part perfectly."

He began to walk. He moved in a slow, deliberate half circle around her, his hands loose at his sides, his gait casual.

There was no hurry in his movements, no tension in his shoulders. He sounded like a professor who had been handed an unexpectedly brilliant thesis and was savoring every syllable of its analysis.

"The seal you’re using... it’s clever, I’ll give you that."

"But it’s incomplete," Rex said, his eyes tracking the pulsing core of her being. "It only covers the system layer, the digital ghost that interacts with this world’s mechanics."

"It doesn’t reach the soul register."

"And that..." He paused, his smile widening with cruel satisfaction, "...that is where I am looking."

As he circled, the violet and red spirals of his own authority lashed at the air behind him like agitated vipers.

"Let’s see what’s beneath the surface, shall we?" Rex mused. "The Tempest Vanguard System... Hero class... Swift subtype..."

"Three evolutionary stages."

Evelyn’s breathing became shallow. The lightning around her hands began to spark more erratically, reacting to the violation of her privacy.

"The first stage is Swift Step," Rex said, his voice dropping to a purr. "That’s what you used on me in the garden—a burst of velocity that should have liquefied your own organs."

"Speed well beyond anything a human frame should survive."

"The second stage is Conduction." He gestured vaguely toward her flickering limbs. "Which transforms the raw kinetic energy of your motion into lightning."

"That’s why every strike you land carries the fury of a storm behind it."

He stopped walking, standing directly opposite her, his eyes boring into the center of her glowing soul.

"But the third stage..." Rex’s voice turned cold, almost reverent. "The third stage is still sealed."

"It’s buried deep beneath the layers of your consciousness, coiled like a sleeping dragon."

"It’s making your soul register pulse in a way I have never witnessed in all my existence..."

"Something is waiting in there, Evelyn."

"Something ancient, something hungry... and it hasn’t woken up yet."

Evelyn took half a step backward, her boots grinding against the scorched earth.

For the first time since the fight began, the icy certainty in her eyes flickered with something else: the dawning realization that she was not the predator in this garden.

"There’s a veil over all of it," Rex continued, his voice carrying the smug, almost giddy pleasure of a man who had finally snapped the last piece of a complex puzzle into place. "The Veil of Anonymity."

"A masterpiece of defensive programming... It stops detection systems cold, blinds ordinary divine scans, and creates a perfect pocket of nothingness in the world’s perception."

"That’s how you hid from everyone, Evelyn... You weren’t just invisible; you were nonexistent."

He tilted his head, studying the way her soul light flickered with increasing agitation. "But the design flaw—the beautiful, delicious flaw—is how it grows."

Evelyn’s breathing had become ragged, her chest heaving as the lightning around her hands began to arc violently, snapping at the air like angry serpents.

"It feeds on conviction," Rex mused, stepping closer, deliberately invading her space despite the lethal energy crackling between them. "It feeds on your desperate, bleeding will to protect the people you’ve chosen!"

"You’re at your most potent when you’re fighting for someone, and right now, you’re fighting for Elliot!"

"But there’s something else feeding it, too... Something darker!"

"Something that has been gorging itself on you for the last few hours!"

His eyes locked onto hers, cruel and knowing. "Hatred!"

"Pure, unadulterated hatred for me!"

"A Hero system that has twisted itself into fuel for revenge!"

"You’ve turned your very salvation into a weapon of vengeance." A small, mocking smile touched his lips. "I’ll admit, Evelyn... I find that irony delicious."

Evelyn’s eyes went wide. The pupils dilated until they nearly swallowed the iris.

The secret she had guarded like a holy relic—the one she had kept hidden from everyone except for a single, whispered confession to Helena behind locked doors—had just been dissected, laid bare, and recited like a grocery list in the middle of a ruined garden.

Her entire identity, her deepest wound, was being mocked by the monster who had inflicted it.

"How do you know about the system?!" she whispered, her voice cracking, barely audible over the distant rumble of thunder. "How could you possibly know..."

"Because I carry one too."

The words hit her harder than any physical blow. Rex didn’t wait for her reaction.

With a slow, deliberate motion, he pushed back his left sleeve.

On the inside of his wrist, beneath the tanned, muscular skin, a violet sigil began to pulse. It didn’t just glow; it burned with an inner light that seemed to draw the very shadows toward it.

The Mark of Lust Authority throbbed like a living coal, casting eerie purple shadows across his forearm. He held it out between them, a declaration of war written in divine ink.

"I’m a reincarnator, Evelyn... Just like you, remember...?" His voice was flat now, stripped of its mockery, replaced by something colder and infinitely more ancient. "I died in another world, laughing in the dark, hoping to be tortured in hell, but... only to wake up here with a Desire Authority System burned into my consciousness!"

"Since that first morning, I haven’t stopped moving..."

"Every smile I gave you, every hand I shook, every meal we shared—it was all the system and my own choices working in perfect, deadly harmony!"

Evelyn stared at the mark, her entire body trembling.

The cognitive dissonance was visible in her expression—the horror of realizing that the man who had sat at her table, who had smiled warmly over her shoulder at family gatherings, and who had trained alongside Elliot like a brother, was the same predator who had orchestrated this massacre.

The betrayal wasn’t just in his actions; it was in his very existence.

Rex saw the realization dawning behind her eyes. He saw the moment her trust in reality finally shattered.

"Secrets are only worth something as long as the people who know them can still tell them," Rex said, his smile curdling into something glacial and unforgiving.

The violet and red spirals around him flared to life, casting him in a hellish light that made him look like a demon rising from the depths. "You’ll keep mine, Evelyn..."

"Whether you’re breathing or rotting."