Chapter 31: The Locket’s Final Move

While the entire region descended into a frenzy of greed and terror, the epicenter of the storm remained suffocatingly cold.

Two hundred meters beneath the fractured bedrock of the deep forest, inside the ancient circular chamber of obsidian stone, the black jade locket spun with ferocious, blinding speed.

The air inside the chamber was no longer truly gaseous. It had been compressed into a dense, howling vortex of liquid spiritual energy, tearing into the stone floor with the force of high-pressure industrial jets.

At the heart of the storm hovered Shadow One.

The two-and-a-half-meter armored behemoth hung motionless in the air, held in place by bands of pitch-black gravitational force radiating from the spinning locket.

Under the horrifying, bottomless suction, the Commander’s dark plate armor had become completely translucent. The violet flames behind its visor had shrunk to microscopic, dying embers.

The ninety-seven integrated soldiers within its core had already been drained to the absolute brink of structural dissipation. Their scale-mail forms trembled like fragile paper figures caught in a hurricane.

Any ordinary martial construct, even one crafted by a high-ranking Martial Grandmaster, would have shattered into meaningless dust within the first three breaths of such a catastrophic drain.

Yet Shadow One did not shatter.

Thirty kilometers away, in the quiet darkness of Sterling Manor, Lucian’s physical body was arched backward at a terrifying angle.

Blood trickled from his nostrils and ran down his jaw.

Yet his eyes remained wide open, burning with an unyielding, pitch-black defiance.

’You want to swallow me?!’ Lucian roared silently within the depths of his Sea of Consciousness. ’Then let’s see if you have the stomach for an infinite void!’

His innate talent, Lord of Shadows, was pushed to its absolute limit.

Behind Lucian’s physical body, the shadows of the bedroom rose like an endless abyssal wall. Even as the jade locket ripped tens of thousands of energy units from the Commander every second, Lucian’s dark dantian core continued to function as an inexhaustible conduit.

The obsidian Spiritual Seed, refined through an absurd 1,080 Heavenly Cycles, spun with a deafening metallic screech. It anchored the Commander’s soul tether across the vast distance, refusing to let the connection break.

Four minutes.

Four minutes and thirty seconds.

Outside, the forest canopy released a long, shuddering groan.

Ancient ironwood trees, some reaching a hundred meters into the sky, began to wither. Their needles turned brittle and brown before snapping away into the howling wind.

The ambient spiritual mist had been completely stripped from the atmosphere, leaving behind a cold, lifeless vacuum. Along the ridgeline, the very earth began to crack and collapse.

The locket had devoured the accumulated energy of an entire mountain range, along with hundreds of tons of concentrated shadow essence supplied by Lucian’s unyielding core.

Then, at the stroke of the fifth minute—

The spinning stone suddenly stopped.

CLANG!

A sound like an iron gate slamming shut across the void echoed directly through Lucian’s soul.

The sky-piercing purple vortex collapsed in an instant. The raging clouds burst outward in a colossal, silent shockwave that swept the northern sky completely clear, revealing a cold, lifeless moon.

The suction had stopped.

Deep within the dark chamber, the black jade pendant hovered motionless in the sudden silence.

Its surface was no longer cold and lifeless. Every microscopic constellation etched across it now blazed with a brilliant, iridescent silver-black radiance.

Then—

The pendant slowly began to descend.

But before it could touch the stone dais, something changed.

The invisible connection between the pendant and Shadow One suddenly tightened.

Lucian felt it immediately.

The sensation was no longer the violent, mindless suction from before. The locket had stopped draining his energy. Instead, its presence seemed to press against the very edge of his consciousness, probing the soul sea that connected him to the Commander.

A cold shock of clarity pierced through the lingering agony.

A trap.

This wasn’t a dormant treasure waiting for a fated successor.

It was a calculated, ancient mechanism, a dry sponge left behind by a prehistoric cultivator, deliberately waiting for a spark of pure, unblemished spiritual energy to awaken its dormant functions.

And Lucian had unknowingly provided exactly what it needed.

Because his awareness was completely focused on resisting the soul-rending drain, he remained oblivious to the chaos unfolding across Silverwood City. He had no idea that the sky thirty kilometers away had transformed into a cosmic vortex, that military sirens were screaming through the night, or that greedy clan retinues were racing toward the mountains like starving wolves.

To Lucian, the entire universe had narrowed down to the agonizing connection between his soul and the underground grotto.

The locket had gorged itself on the concentrated spiritual energy of the entire Thousand Mountain Forest. It had also drained Lucian’s dark-attribute foundation to its absolute limit.

Then, as if satisfied at last, it made its final move.

The braided dark-sinew cord around its neck suddenly tightened.

Snap!

The cord broke apart and dissolved into fine gray ash.

Freed from its restraint, the black jade locket shot upward and came to a complete stop exactly three feet above the elevated stone dais.

The chaotic, ravenous suction stopped instantly.

Before Shadow One could collapse to his knees, the locket began to revolve.

The silver constellation dots embedded within its translucent jade core flared with incandescent brilliance. Piercing beams of silver-black light erupted from the stone, shooting downward like high-energy cutting lasers.

Sssss—!

The smooth obsidian flagstones hissed violently as the beams struck.

The light didn’t shatter the stone.

Instead, it carved into the bedrock with surgical, terrifying precision. Deep geometric trenches formed beneath the beams, smoking with pale spatial vapor.

Intricate talismanic scripts spread outward in concentric circles. They were vastly older and more complex than any federal array formula Lucian had ever seen.

One glyph connected to another.

Then another.

Within moments, the countless lines and symbols had formed a massive, interlocking circle nearly forty paces wide, encompassing the ancient manual, the mound of ash, and Shadow One’s cracked armored frame.

Lucian’s gaze sharpened.

It was an ancient, primordial Space Displacement Formation.

A cross-realm Teleportation Array.

The moment the final talismanic stroke connected back to the central node beneath the floating locket, every rune across the formation erupted with blinding, celestial radiance.