The black storm was gone.

  And the heavens once inviolate, once thought to be the final ceiling, stood torn wide open.

  Every living soul within Adamath felt it before they saw it. A pressure that crawled along the spine of reality itself.

  Then the sky peeled back, like damp parchment tearing away from rotted bone, revealing not a realm beyond… but a dark expanse so vast and unknowable it swallowed even imagination.

  From the lowliest mortal to the mightiest regent, all turned their gaze upward.

  The tear stretched across the sky in a jagged, unnatural arc, as though the world’s own skin had been ripped open. It unfurled like silk soaked in ink, revealing a silence so profound it bled into the soul.

  Panic bloomed.

  Fear, raw, unshaped, and primordial seized the hearts of all who still breathed.

  Across the fractured continents of Adamath, cultivators gasped for Ethra and found none. The essence of the world no longer moved with their will.

  It stilled. Not like calm waters—but like prey hiding from a predator.

  The very air had gone still.

  Techniques stuttered.

  Formations failed.

  Auras flickered and collapsed.

  The regents, those titanic figures who had stood above factions and rules, revered as near-divine, floated in the skies like blazing stars of power, visible to the entire plane.

  Their once-confident eyes now scanned the heavens with barely restrained fury and disbelief. The world had watched them ascend.

  But they had not ascended.

  The act of opening the heavens had not brought them into the legendary realm of hegemons.

  It had done nothing, nothing but break the cage Alana had bled to forge, the seal that had held back what was never meant to return.

  And now, the cost of their arrogance had come due.

  The continents began to move.

  Far to the edges of Adamath, cultivators few and scattered watched in dawning horror as the very land shifted.

  Mountain ranges cracked and folded in on themselves. Cities slid into the sea. Entire archipelagos disappeared beneath ravenous waves. The sky, stripped of its stars, dimmed. Colour drained from the horizon.

  And then, it began.

  From the wound above, long, silent tendrils slithered into the world—grey, vast, pulsing with raw tainted power.

  They were erasures.

  Where they passed, the sky paled. Where they reached, the light recoiled. They dragged nothingness in their wake—an emptiness so absolute it corroded even Ethra.

  The regents, so mighty and near-regal just moments before, stood dumbstruck, silent for the first time in millennia. All their grand rituals, all their sacrifices, had not made them hegemons.

  They had made them witnesses.

  The heavens weren’t offering enlightenment or advancement.

  They had been forced open—and now the darkness beyond was seeping in.

  And amidst it all, one figure broke the silence.

  A cackling sound, unhinged and exalted, echoed through the darkening sky. A solitary figure shot upward, flying not away from the madness but toward it. Toward the tendrils. Toward the tear.

  Borus.

  The artificer.

  He who had bowed, schemed, manipulated. He who had sold his loyalties to the highest bidder and danced at the feet of power, now flew with unrestrained glee into the annihilation that had silenced even the regents.

  His laughter split the air like a curse.

  He was insignificant.

  And he was free.

  And he was welcoming the end.

  *********

  Tunde doubled over as the heavens released their full, punishing weight.

  Around him, cultivators collapsed to their knees—Highlords, Lords, even some Masters. Their connection to Ethra frayed like a thread pulled taut to snapping.

  Techniques sputtered. Auras flickered. Only those who’d ascended to the realm of Saint, Paragon or near enough stood their ground, teeth clenched, wills trembling under the pressure.

  Tunde gritted his own teeth, his authority surging instinctively, wrapping around him like a storm-forged shell. Somehow, it pushed back against the celestial oppression, but only barely.

  The earth beneath his feet trembled. No—moved. Plates of land groaned like titanic beasts. Above, the heavens bled black as monstrous tendrils unfurled across the skies like the roots of some forgotten god. They coiled slowly, deliberately, darkening reality itself.

  And then came the feeling.

  That presence. The one he had hoped—prayed—never to feel again.

  He wasn’t the only one who felt it. His companions, those who had stood beside him at the fall of the Ash Flame Sect, blanched in wordless recognition.

  This wasn’t merely power. It was a wound reopening. A nightmare exhaling.

  From the cracked, ruined earth not far from them, a hand burst free—decayed, yet strong. The body followed, clawing its way from the grave like a memory refusing to die.

  Thorne.

  The revenant dragged himself upright, breathing hard through a hollow chest. In one hand, a golden void ring gleamed ominously.

  Behind him stepped a woman Tunde remembered all too well—from Jade Peak, from blood-soaked days better left buried. A master-level revenant, her aura twisted and stained.

  They didn’t speak right away. Thorne didn’t even glance at Tunde—his eyes were on the sky, hollow and grim.

  “Well,” he muttered through cracked lips, voice bone-dry and amused, “that little plan failed.”

  Around them, paragons burned—not with Ethra, but with authority and essence flame. And below Master realm, cultivators simply stood frozen, too terrified to move, too weak to matter.

  “Impossible…” Zhu whispered beside Tunde, barely audible.

  Tunde’s floating blades returned to formation behind him, his relic forming in his grip like an extension of his rage. He followed Thorne’s gaze toward the mountain—no, fortress—of the Arcanists, where the regents hovered like cracked stars, burning but directionless.

  And then they came.

  One figure flew past the regents.

  Then another.

  And another.

  Drawn not to the battlefield—but to the tear, to the tendrils clawing their way into Adamath like the feelers of a beast sensing prey.

  Tunde’s vision sharpened. He recognized the first figure and every muscle in his body clenched.

  Borus.

  The artificer’s arms were wide, his face aglow with reverence as he rose toward the abomination tearing through the seal on their world.

  The others—Master cultivators—were strangers. But they hadn’t fought in the battle. They hadn’t bled for this war. Tunde understood what that meant.

  They had been waiting.

  Tunde snapped his attention to the female revenant, his authority flaring with razor precision. She stumbled back, eyes widening. Even a peak Master instinctively recognized the pressure of a paragon. But Tunde wasn’t done. A violet sheen overtook his gaze as he reached out—barely a flick of his fingers.

  The revenant convulsed. Her hands clawed at her neck as blackened veins spread like poison vines.

  Struggling to talk as Thorne stared at her with amusing dancing in his eyes, cupping his ears,

  “What?” he asked, “I can’t hear you well,” he added with a chuckle.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Black blood spilled from her lips as she dropped to her knees, consumed by violet fire.

  “Ah,” Thorne said blandly, watching her body burn to ash.

  “Nasty smell.”

  “You’re free of her hold,” Tunde said coldly.

  Thorne blinked, then gave a slow, almost respectful nod.

  “You knew?”

  “I saw it,” Tunde replied, his voice quiet, Ethra Sight revealing the knot of corrupted authority linking her to Thorne hidden from the naked eye, but not from him.

  “Well then,” Thorne said with a dry chuckle,

  “My thanks. Not that it matters much anymore.”

  Tunde stepped forward; gaze unwavering.

  “We will have our reckoning, Thorne.”

  From behind, his companions joined him—Sera, Elyria, Zhu still scarred but standing, Liu calm and coiled like a blade, Harumi tense, and even Rhyn. They flanked him in perfect silence.

  “But not today,” Tunde finished.

  “Today, I have bigger enemies to kill.”

  Thorne’s grin didn’t fade.

  “Even you, Herald?” he asked Rhyn mildly.

  Rhyn didn’t spare him a glance.

  “If he comes for you… Your fate is sealed.”

  Thorne exhaled.

  “Then I suppose I’m with you. Since not even the regents seem to know what to do.”

  Tunde ignored him.

  A tremor of power rippled through the air.

  “I warned them,” Tunde muttered.

  “To think they ignored it,” Zhu growled.

  “About what?” Harumi asked.

  “The Fleshbinders,” Sera said grimly.

  The name cut through the moment like a blade. A chill passed over the group. Tunde felt the ache in his chest again.

  The empty place where Ifa should have stood—his mentor, his shield, his guide. There was no time to mourn.

  A pulse of authority flared from behind as his void space tore open.

  A blade came for his neck.

  Tunde didn’t move.

  He caught it between two fingers.

  The imbued steel shattered.

  His authority lashed outward, slamming the attacker into the dirt like a ragdoll.

  Miria.

  Or what was once Miria. Her eyes were hollow pools of madness and hate, barely human anymore. Something between puppet and weapon.

  Tunde crouched beside her, gaze heavy with grief.

  “I don’t know what they did to you,” he said softly.

  “But I promise you, I tried. And I’m sorry.”

  His voice was calm, but his aura crackled with restrained power.

  “If there’s a way to bring you back, I’ll find it.”

  His eyes met hers, the weight of his vow filling the space between them.

  “But if you come between me and Borus… I will end you.”

  She shuddered. And nodded.

  He released her. She rose, trembling, and backed away.

  “Go back to your mistress,” he said.

  “I’ll find you when it’s time.”

  Then, without a word more, he turned away. Not just from her—but from the last sliver of what he’d tried to save.

  His eyes turned skyward.

  To the tear.

  To the tendrils.

  To the calamity waiting to devour the world.

  And Tunde, paragon and heir of the Abyssal Walkers, fight for the fate of his world.

  This time though, he wasn’t alone.

  *********

  “What is the meaning of this?” Kaius Talahan snarled, his voice a thunderclap across the broken skies.

  His eyes burned with fury as they fixed upon Yara, Queen of the Arcanists, now surrounded by her remaining sect elders—Paragons in their own right—emerging like ghosts from the concealed folds of their floating island, drawn by the cataclysm unraveling above.

  The other regents didn’t answer him.

  Their attention was fixed elsewhere, on the thing clawing its way into reality.

  It dwarfed understanding. A writhing presence that did not belong.

  And drifting around it like dust motes orbiting a black sun were the Fleshbinders, those malformed figures in robes, hovering mid-air and laughing with mouths too wide, speaking in unison like a broken choir. The world groaned beneath their weightless presence.

  Kaius’s lip curled.

  He had once dismissed them—an afterthought, the leftover echo of an obscure Technocracy cell reported by Jaito before his death.

  Some foolish faction, he’d assumed, who had made contact with a force beyond Adamath. A fragment of a threat. No more.

  Now, he realized how blind he’d been.

  “We’ve been tricked,” Yara croaked.

  Her face had paled, and even with her cultivation pulsing beneath her skin, she looked ashen. A woman who had just discovered the fire she fed had always been a maw.

  Kaius let out a bark of bitter laughter. His arm swept forward in one smooth, violent motion—and the air split.

  A slice of raw authority sheared through space itself.

  A paragon of the Arcanists flared with power, a formation blooming around him in defense—only for the technique to sizzle and sputter out in a heartbeat.

  The body collapsed midair, bisected. Both halves dropped from the heavens like broken wings.

  "You promised us Hegemony, Kaius,” Shang, Regent of the Envoys, said coldly.

  His skeletal hand tightened around his relic weapon—a long scythe made of blackened bone, pulsing with the slow, patient rhythm of death.

  “And instead, you've led us to annihilation.”

  Kaius’s gaze flicked toward him, but he said nothing.

  “Face it,” Shuyin spat, her golden authority blazing.

  A divine scale shimmered into view behind her, each side trembling with rising judgment.

  “You betrayed us. Just like you did your son.”

  “We slaughtered half a world to ascend,” Yensu whispered in horror.

  The Wild Warden’s body trembled, branches and vines winding reflexively across her skin like they too recoiled from what loomed above.

  “And now we hand our world to that?”

  A low rumble answered her.

  “Look at them,” a voice said—many voices in one.

  The regents turned upward sharply, eyes locking on the Fleshbinders, now visibly mutating.

  Their skin had grayed, and squirming black veins pulsed beneath their flesh like worms feeding on rotting meat.

  They laughed. Every mouth moved in perfect synchrony.

  “Squabbling like infants. Greed lacing your every word,” they said, pointing ethereal fingers toward Kaius.

  “Tell them, Kaius. Tell them who whispered promises of Hegemony into your ear. Who delivered the scrolls written in lost tongues? Who taught you how to open the seals Alana bled to create? Tell them who demanded the death of your own kind for power.”

  Every eye turned to the Regent of the Talahan clan.

  Kaius said nothing.

  Instead, his fury exploded. His blade, forged in the deepest forges of his authority, awakened fully. A weapon worthy of his rank, bathed in regent Ethra, raged to life.

  His authority took shape behind him—thunderclouds of burning golden malice—before he swung.

  A divine arc of power thundered toward the Fleshbinders, the air shrieking as it was torn apart.

  It wasn’t just a blow—it was punishment, judgment, the wrath of a would be hegemon descending upon the heretics who dared mock him.

  And the Fleshbinders… laughed.

  They raised a single, composite hand.

  And slapped it away.

  Kaius’s technique shattered like glass under a foot. Essence flame and regent authority disintegrated into sparks. The regents froze—one by one—as confusion bloomed into horror.

  “What… just happened?” Zian of the Veilweavers murmured.

  “You were children,” the Fleshbinders replied, their bodies melting together into a single shape.

  “Children playing at locks you did not understand.”

  Then the sky above wept.

  The tendrils in the air surged downward, dragging black lightning behind them. It crackled violently, like the heavens themselves rejected the Fleshbinders’ existence.

  Bolts slammed into them—not to destroy, but to transform. Their bodies erupted in sprays of gore and blood, detonating into foul mist—all but one.

  Borus.

  Still smiling.

  Still standing.

  The artificer arched his back, arms wide, accepting the monstrous communion.

  And the tendrils descended into him.

  It was… wrong.

  Massive coils of flesh matter—the size of mountains, the length of oceans—began to feed directly into his body. Reality twisted.

  The flesh and blood of his fallen allies were absorbed, layer by layer. Every shred of broken power. Every scrap of consumed life.

  The regents moved instantly.

  Kaius’s blade became a sun, swinging with renewed fury.

  Shuyin’s divine scale flared, a golden bow manifested behind her, and an arrow of absolute will took form, trembling with laws.

  Fehan summoned a radiant construct of blue fire and steel—a hammer shaped by a thousand battlefields.

  Yensu bloomed. Her body transformed into a vast sphere of living nature—vines, roots, petals, thorns—every inch of her brimming with sovereign command over life and death.

  And then came Arin.

  The Silent Regent of the Chronomancers, his face unreadable as he extended one hand. Behind him, an ancient hourglass appeared—its sand paused mid-fall. A pulse of temporal power rippled outward.

  The world stopped.

  Just for a breath.

  The grotesque tendrils halted. Borus froze in mid-ascension. The air hung, brittle as glass.

  But only for a second.

  Then time snapped.

  And everything unravelled.

  The technique of time itself—so rarely wielded, so profoundly feared—shattered like cracked crystal under the weight of what Borus had become.

  He laughed.

  It was no longer a sound that belonged in this world. A wet, guttural gurgle, thick with filth and madness. The sound of blood curdling in a throat that was no longer human.

  “Is that how far your mastery of your concept goes?” he asked, his tone soaked in venom, disdain, and a kind of triumphant disgust.

  “You—all of you—have blinded yourselves so completely. Lied to yourselves for so long… you’ve forgotten the truths of what true cultivation is meant to be!”

  His voice carried, warped yet clear, cutting across the broken skies and cracked continents like a plague of words.

  Down below, cultivators shielded their eyes from the harsh light of the techniques still burning overhead.

  The regents, furious and unrelenting, continued to unleash their full might upon him, each technique powered by the deepest roots of their authority and their ever-burning essence flames.

  And still it wasn't enough.

  From every direction now came more power.

  Not just from the regents—but from all who remained.

  Paragons lit the air like stars set ablaze, saints cloaked themselves in techniques born of countless concepts, and even master realm cultivators who had managed to survive the ruin of the battlefield rose shakily into the air.

  They arrived in silence, one after the other, gathering in the skies above Adamath like a dying world's final breath of defiance. They no longer fought for sect, for cult, for clan.

  They fought because there was no one else left to fight.

  Skyvessels, broken and burning, limped into position behind them—those that hadn’t been completely annihilated by the collapse of continents and the implosion of mountains.

  Below them, the terrain heaved. The crust of Adamath split wider still, as if the plane itself was trying to peel away from the horror above.

  Ancient lands that had never known war now trembled, reshaped by a chaos that was not natural but invasive—not internal, but cosmic.

  And above it all, Borus—the thing that had been Borus—stretched out his arms.

  The tentacles continued to pour into him. And still the cultivators attacked. Blades of essence fire, arrows woven from tempered spirits, time-bending techniques and condensed authorities all slammed into the abomination without pause.

  And still—it laughed.

  Shrieks tore free from its lips, too jagged, too monstrous to have once belonged to a human throat.

  The sound echoed with layers of other voices—wrong voices—twisting the air itself with their weight.

  Even hardened master cultivators clutched their ears and screamed as blood poured down their necks.

  Whole areas of cultivators reeled backward, authorities shattering under the pressure of that laughter alone.

  Then came Queen Yara’s voice, echoing like a bell in the dark.

  “Cultivators of Adamath,” she called, her tone no longer that of a ruler, but of a penitent soul.

  “If we survive this day… there will be a reckoning for what we’ve done.”

  Her voice trembled with grief—but not weakness.

  “But until then… we must drive this madness from our world. Please,” she said, and then she became light.

  A burst of blinding blue radiance exploded from her form, and a brilliant sphere of script and rune engulfed her.

  Rings of golden text—languages older than language—began to spin in perfect counter-rotation around her, a sacred engine of will and technique that no one had seen in thousands of years.

  The ancient core of arcanist knowledge, made manifest.

  The storm of attacks cleared.

  And what remained in the aftermath—hovering in the skies where their combined power had struck—was worse than what they had hoped to destroy.

  A massive fleshy sphere, the size of a moon, floated where Borus had stood.

  It pulsed.

  A slow, wet, rhythmic throb that matched no heartbeat known to life. The sound echoed across the plane, louder with every pulse, until the very rhythm of the planet—the tremors, the fractures, the shaking of mountains—matched it.

  Confusion spread like fog across the thousands gathered in the skies.

  Paragons and masters alike, enemies and allies, all stared with bated breath. Even the regents, exhausted and breathless, looked upon the thing with disbelief.

  They had poured enough power to rend reality itself—what was this?

  Then the sphere shuddered.

  And opened.

  The surface split open like a blister, and from its walls came them.

  Human-shaped… at first glance.

  But there was no humanity within.

  Tiny humanoid figures crawled from the surface of the fleshy moon, each one formed of grey sinew and blackened veins. They had no eyes. Their limbs ended in curved, black talons—twisted blades where hands should be. And their faces were smooth, blank expanses of flesh. They were wordless.

  But the presence they emanated spoke volumes.

  Each of them radiated the pressure of a paragon.

  Hundreds of them.

  And with a shriek that split the silence like a spear, they launched themselves downward, diving toward the last cultivators of Adamath.