Chapter 1093 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 5
Chapter 1093: Chapter 1093 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Deals - 5
They were truly trapped.
It wasn’t a dramatic exaggeration; it was the cold, suffocating reality of their situation.
The spatial jump had violently rejected them, slamming them back into the exact same dead-end cavern. At the top of the stairs, the monstrous artifact continued its relentless, grinding descent, absorbing every frantic attack they threw at it.
Worse still was Sirius. Stripped of a good portion of his mana he had burned to assist with the failed jump, his internal defenses had shattered. Without that stability threshold to push back the invasion, the purple rot was visibly accelerating, crawling up his neck and sinking deeper into his reconstructed flesh with every passing second.
And echoing through the pulsing, corrupted meat slathered across the walls, Selthia’s laughter continued to ring out, sharp, triumphant, and maddening.
Ren slowly pushed himself off the stone floor.
A thick line of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth down to his chin. It was the undeniable, physical toll of a body that pushed leagues beyond its absolute limit, a biological warning that his neurons were beginning to hemorrhage from the sheer strain.
He ignored it... He didn’t even bother to wipe it away.
Deep within his chest, a spark ignited. His mana core began to emit a low, thrumming golden light.
"Enough!" Ren roared. His voice wasn’t a shout, but it carried a heavy, lethal edge that cut straight through the howling wind. "Stop it!"
"Why should I listen to you?" Selthia’s tone remained light, dripping with the breezy amusement of a predator holding all the cards. "You certainly didn’t listen to me when I politely asked to negotiate!"
"Because I can’t trust that you’ll actually let us walk away, even if I do make a deal with you!"
In response, the golden light in Ren’s chest flared brighter. It bled through his skin, casting stark, long shadows against the cavern walls.
Selthia perceived the shift instantly. The playful amusement in her voice didn’t completely vanish, but the temperature of it dropped drastically. It acquired the sharp, defensive edge of a creature that suddenly found itself cornered by something it deeply preferred to avoid.
"Don’t you threaten me again with that disgusting, foul light!" she hissed.
The memory of their last encounter, when that exact same light had violently purged her, was clearly still fresh. To mask her unease, she lashed out. She violently increased the input of the corruption.
Sirius convulsed.
His back arched off the ground, his fingers digging uselessly into the solid stone until his nails cracked. He didn’t scream, he was too proud, too disciplined for that, but a ragged, agonizing groan tore through his gritted teeth. It was the sound of an iron-willed soldier physically breaking under a torture his body simply could not contain in silence.
But the torrential wave of purple energy that Sirius was desperately trying to reject... Ren absorbed it with zero resistance.
He inhaled the dark miasma voraciously. He abandoned the careful, meticulous purification techniques he had used before. Instead, he violently ripped the corruption straight from the air, dragging it into his own system and forcefully, aggressively refined it.
He used the toxic energy as raw, volatile fuel, feeding it directly into his core to make it burn even brighter.
The golden light radiating from his chest became blinding. It illuminated the entire seventh chamber in a brilliant, searing halo. It was pulsing at a dangerous frequency, teetering right on the edge of fully awakening his smallest, yet undeniably most terrifying, ally.
It was a suicidal tactic... Burning unfiltered corruption to supercharge his core guaranteed massive internal damage. It risked crippling his future potential permanently.
But looking at the situation and at Sirius writhing on the floor, Ren knew there was no other choice.
"If this is the game we are going to play," Ren said. His eyes were dead, his voice dropping to a terrifying, absolute calm... The voice of a man who has moved entirely past warnings and straight into consequences. "I can take your energy and reverse it all the way to the source. And this time, I’m not just going to expel you. I will make absolutely sure you suffer ten times worse than you did last time."
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the stairwell.
"Y-you don’t care about the man twisting in agony right behind you?" Selthia challenged, though her voice betrayed a subtle tremor.
Ren didn’t turn around. He didn’t even cast a glance over his shoulder.
"That man isn’t just anyone," Ren said, his burning eyes locked dead ahead on the pulsing meat of the tunnel. "He will just have to endure it with sheer willpower while I deal with you... And he can."
The pause that followed was fundamentally different from the ones before.
It was longer. The texture of the silence had shifted. It was no longer the silence of a predator waiting for its prey to bleed out; it was the frantic, calculating silence of a creature realizing it had stepped on a landmine.
"A-alright... Fine." Selthia’s voice had lost its playful cadence entirely. "J-just... don’t force your annoying little friend to come out and interrupt us!"
The invisible pressure vanished.
The violet pulse of corruption was instantly severed. On the stairs, the massive, blackened artifacts ceased their grinding descent. They froze completely, locking into place like deactivated statues.
Behind Ren, Sirius let out a long, ragged exhale. It was the desperate sound of lungs finally pulling in clean oxygen after suffocating for an eternity. His breathing rapidly leveled out, his elite biological system immediately fighting to stabilize the rhythm the corruption had stolen from him.
Seeing the threat halt, Ren finally allowed himself to breathe. He canceled the howling wind and willed the blinding golden light in his chest to dim back down to a dull ache.
He ran a rapid, internal inventory of his core.
Sirius’s massive influx of mana during the failed jump had kept Ren from hitting absolute zero, but just barely. Between that and the volatile corruption he had just force-fed himself, he was sitting at exactly fifteen percent capacity.
It was the absolute dregs... It was the precise threshold a tamer reaches when they have bled out everything they have to give, yet stubbornly refuse to collapse.
"I wasn’t lying, you know," Selthia said. Her voice crept back through the cavern, slowly regaining a fraction of its usual, conversational lilt. "I-I mean it. If you are willing to negotiate, I will open the path and let you walk away... B-but this is the first and final offer!"