Chapter 29: The Locket That Drained the Forest

The moment his gauntlet lifted the locket from the dust, the pendant stirred.

Hum—

A frigid, piercing light flashed from the microscopic constellation engravings. It wasn’t warm, nor was it blinding. It was a cold, absolute gleam that seemed to cut straight into the soul.

The jade was impossibly cold.

Even through the thick armor of the Shadow Commander’s gauntlet, a frost-like numbness crept into Lucian’s fingers. The stellar patterns across its surface flickered rhythmically, pulsing like the faint, long-dormant heartbeat of something that had finally remembered how to beat.

Lucian held the pendant at arm’s length, his violet eye-flames narrowing thoughtfully.

Who was this ancient cultivator?

Why had he buried himself thousands of feet beneath the Thousand Mountain Forest, sealed behind an energy-dampening field and forgotten array runes?

More importantly, what exactly was this pendant?

An ordinary cultivator in his position might have immediately dripped blood onto the relic to bind it, or poured their spiritual energy into the stone in an attempt to unlock its spatial storage.

Lucian, however, didn’t have an ounce of reckless curiosity in him.

Growing up in the slums had taught him one lesson early: the fastest way to die was to touch something you didn’t fully understand.

And the modern education system’s compendiums on ancient ruins had drilled another terrifying concept into every high schooler’s head—

Soul Possession.

Ancient supreme cultivators who died carrying deep grudges were known to preserve fragments of their souls within their personal treasures.

The moment an unsuspecting junior channeled their vital essence into such an item, the dormant remnant soul could strike. It would race through the victim’s meridians, devour their consciousness, and seize control of their mortal body.

Lucian had no intention of offering his mind on a silver platter.

"I won’t use my own body. And I won’t risk the Commander’s core either," Lucian decided immediately.

With a flick of his wrist, darkness gathered beside the dais.

A standard humanoid Shadow Soldier emerged from the gloom, its dark scale mail clinking softly as it stood at attention.

The soldier was merely an expendable manifestation of the Shadow Legion. Even if an ancient remnant soul latched onto it or attempted to place a demonic curse upon it, Lucian could sever their connection instantly.

The soldier would disappear, leaving his true soul back at Sterling Manor completely unharmed.

"Take the locket," Lucian commanded.

The Shadow Soldier stepped forward and wrapped its gauntleted fingers around the cold black jade.

"Channel a single sliver of dark spiritual energy into it. Test its reaction."

The soldier obeyed without hesitation.

A tiny, needle-thin thread of dark-attribute spiritual energy seeped from its index finger and sank directly into the central constellation node of the locket.

For half a second, nothing happened.

Then, the world changed.

BZZZZZT!

The quiet chamber suddenly erupted with a harsh, unnatural hum.

The cold black jade didn’t merely absorb the sliver of energy.

It awakened.

Like an ancient, starving leviathan breaking through a frozen ocean, the locket’s constellation runes suddenly flared with an ominous, abyssal violet radiance.

Before the soldier could pull its hand away, a terrifying gravitational force erupted from the center of the locket.

CRACK!

That single sliver of spiritual energy transformed into a roaring torrent.

The soldier’s entire arm was violently pulled against the stone, its gauntlet locked to the locket as though it had been welded in place. No matter how much force it exerted, it couldn’t move even a millimeter.

Lucian’s violet eye-flames flickered.

Under his horrified gaze, the Shadow Soldier’s three tons of internal strength, refined spiritual essence, and even its physical structure began collapsing.

The dark scale mail liquefied.

Its limbs stretched unnaturally.

And within three breaths, the entire humanoid soldier was sucked into the locket like water disappearing down an open drain.

"Sever the link!" Lucian roared inwardly, desperately attempting to cut the telepathic tether.

It was already too late.

The locket wasn’t satisfied with a single soldier.

It had tasted the primordial frequency of the Lord of Shadows.

SWOOSH!

The empty space between the locket and Shadow One—the body Lucian was currently controlling—suddenly seemed to freeze.

An invisible, metaphysical hook pierced straight through the Commander’s chest, latching onto the telepathic thread that stretched across thirty kilometers of space.

BANG!

Back at Sterling Manor, Lucian’s physical body arched violently off the meditation cushion.

The veins along his neck bulged as a terrifying, bottomless force tore into his dantian, sucking away his energy with savage intensity.

Inside his Soul Sea, the obsidian Spiritual Seed began spinning in reverse.

Clouds of compressed dark energy poured from it at an alarming rate.

Thirty kilometers away, deep within the subterranean chamber, that energy erupted from Shadow One’s palms.

It surged into the black jade locket like a raging waterfall of darkness.

The locket rose into the air on its own, spinning violently as its hunger escalated from a mere trickle into a catastrophic siphon.

It wasn’t just feeding on Lucian anymore.

BOOM!

The array runes etched into the chamber walls shattered, their ancient amber glow extinguished in an instant.

The suction tore through the cavern ceiling.

It bypassed layer after layer of basalt, bored through two hundred meters of solid bedrock, and finally erupted from the mountainside like an invisible vortex reaching toward the sky.

A massive funnel of dark-purple wind, thousands of meters wide, formed above the depths of the Thousand Mountain Forest.

The air for tens of miles around seemed to scream.

Ambient Spiritual Energy was ripped from everywhere—the ancient trees, the mineral veins buried deep within the earth, and even the lingering natural aura permeating the entire mountain range.

Rivers of iridescent mist were torn from the valleys and dragged violently into the sky. They spiraled upward before plunging back down through cracks and fissures in the earth, funneled toward a single destination.

The thumb-sized black jade locket.

The entire Thousand Mountain Forest had become nothing more than a feeding trough.