Li Yu opened his eyes and he was back in the dimly lit room of the inn at Grim Spire. The heavy silence of the room pressed against him. It was a stark contrast to the thundering heartbeat in his chest.

  He had done it. He had groveled, he had begged and Khaos had agreed to intervene.

  Li Yu didn't waste a single second. He pushed himself off the meditation mat and canceled the defensive arrays layered over the door. He stepped out into the chaotic air of Grim Spire. Li Yu kept his aura suppressed and was weaving through the dense crowds with practiced ease.

  It took him twenty minutes to find Vespera.

  Deep in the labyrinthine alleys of the information brokers' district, Vespera was standing outside a rusted iron door. She was handing a heavy pouch of high grade spirit stones to a hunchbacked and four-eyed demon.

  In return, she received a tightly rolled parchment. It was a map of the siege camp's patrol routes. She had no idea if it was true or not but it was better than nothing. She had nothing to lose at this point. Her expression was hard and her eyes entirely devoid of light. She was a person walking toward her own grave.

  Li Yu stepped out of the shadows and grabbed her wrist just as she turned to leave. Vespera reacted instantly but she froze when she saw his face. "Li Yu? What are you doing out here? I told you I was going alone."

  "Plans have changed," Li Yu said. "We are leaving the city. Right now."

  Vespera frowned and ripped her arm from his grip. She had heard enough of him trying to convince her to stop. "I am leaving the city. You are staying here. I just got a map. I know where the vanguard is stationed. If I can slip past the—"

  "You aren't slipping past anything," Li Yu interrupted and stepped closer so the passing demons wouldn't overhear. "I have a solution. We don't need to gather remnants. We don't need to mount a suicide charge. I just need you to come with me to a location outside the city and we wait."

  Vespera stared at him as if he had lost his mind. "Wait? For what? A miracle?"

  "For the solution to your problem." Li Yu said.

  "Li Yu, stop talking in riddles!" Vespera hissed and her composure fracturing. "What kind of 'solution' could you possibly have?"

  "I called in a favor," Li Yu said simply. "From someone who said that it would be handled. They wouldn’t say that if it couldn’t be done. Trust me, Vespera. I wouldn’t lie to you like this when it comes to your family."

  Vespera looked into his eyes. She saw no deception, only absolute certainty. The logic in her brain screamed that this was impossible but the exhaustion in her soul desperately wanted to believe him.

  She let out a shuddering breath and nodded slowly. "Fine. Where are we going?"

  "West," Li Yu said while glancing at the sky. "To the desolate mountain range over there. We wait there until the dust settles."

  As the two of them took to the sky and headed there.

  The moment Li Yu had severed his connection to the inner world to go find Vespera, Khaos took action himself. The colossal crab form dissolved and he took his human form. VoidClaw.

  Khaos raised his hand and sliced his fingers casually through the empty air. The fabric of space didn't just open; it submitted. A rift tore open and revealed a grey and lifeless tunnel. Khaos stepped through.

  In a matter of moments, he materialized on a floating platform of metal. The dimension was silent and utterly severed from the laws of karma and divination. There were great lengths and a great price was paid to create such a place.

  Soon after Khaos came, eleven figures appeared before him. They came quickly having sensed his presence.

  At the front was Gongsun Lian, the 'Black Lotus'. She wore the same armor and looked exactly the same as when Khaos last saw her. Behind her stood her ten main generals. Five men and five women. They radiated a disciplined, lethal silence that could only be forged over centuries of training, fighting and killing.

  All eleven figures dropped to their knees. The movement was fluid, perfectly synchronized and filled with respect. Not only respect for VoidClaw as a person, it was the secondary title that he carried that had its true weight with them, Li Yu’s Guardian.

  "Lord VoidClaw," Gongsun Lian spoke up for her team. Her voice was steady and respectful. Her head remained bowed.

  "Rise, Lian," Khaos commanded.

  Lian stood up and her dark eyes flashing with an intense eagerness. "You have returned, my Lord. Has the time come? Does the Young Master require his blade?"

  "He does require such a thing but only temporarily. Consider this your first task for him. It is still too early for you to remain by his side though." Khaos said. "He has managed to tangle himself in a few things that are outside of his current abilities. There is a coalition of what are the apex beings in the realm he currently is in. They call themselves Demon Lords and Beast Kings. They are holding a hostage he wishes to free. He wants the problem solved and he currently does not have the ability to do it himself."

  Lian’s aura spiked. A terrifying pressure surged outward and cracked the platform beneath her boots. A cruel but beautiful smile graced her lips. "To inconvenience the Young Master is a crime that can only be washed away in total annihilation. Tell us where they are, Lord VoidClaw. I will erase this Demon Realm from the cosmos."

  "Do not destroy the realm," Khaos warned and was rolling his eyes. He had finally met someone that seemed to be even more merciless than he was. Or perhaps someone without much of a brain.

  "Li Yu is currently sitting on it. Are you going to get him killed? I need precision, Lian. There are five specific targets. Three Demon Lords and two Beast Kings. You are to eliminate them, secure the hostage known as the Night Queen and loot everything of value. Leave nothing behind. Go to this realm and get the information needed to accomplish the task. I trust that you can do that simple matter."

  Lian nodded as Khaos transmitted to her the location of the Demonic realm that Li Yu was currently on. "Consider it done. I shall depart immediately."

  "Wait, General!"

  The voice rang out from behind her. One of the male generals, a towering mountain of a man named Po, remained on one knee. "Please, General Lian. Allow us to accompany you."

  Lian frowned as she was glancing back. "This is a simple extermination. I do not need the ten of you to step on insects."

  "We know, General," a female general added. Her voice was trembling slightly from fear. "But... this is the Young Master's first request. We have trained in the shadows for generations. We simply wish to be a part of this. We wish to lay the spoils at his feet ourselves."

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  Khaos looked at the ten kneeling warriors for a bit.

  "Let them come," Khaos decided with a dismissive wave. "But remember your orders. You are repaying a favor to me. Do not make a spectacle of yourselves in front of the boy. If you overwhelm him with your fanaticism... Be professional."

  "Yes, Lord VoidClaw!" The ten generals roared in unison and leapt to their feet. Their killing intent soared into the sky. The rest of the legions here were wondering what was going on that their generals were so pumped up.

  Khaos ripped open another rift and disappeared. The others did not follow him through. They went to gather a few things. They were told not to give Li Yu anything from their own personal stash. Only the loot obtained during their annihilation of his enemies.

  However, the eleven couldn’t help themselves, Lian especially. They all thought of things they wished they had as they were breaking to Divine Transformation or items they wished they had after learning of it. They brought a few of those items together, hoping to get them past Khaos’s watching gaze when they delivered the loot to Li Yu later.

  Lian then did the same thing as Khaos. Not with the same ease as Khaos but she did it nonetheless. She tore open a portal directly into the Demon Realm.

  Away from where Li Yu and Vespera were hiding, the siege camp surrounding the Night Queen’s was a fortress of despair. Tens of thousands of elite demons manned the walls while the sky was choked by three interlocking layers of Grand Defensive Arrays.

  Inside the central obsidian palace, the demon lord known as Malakor sat on a throne of bone. He was laughing as he discussed the impending collapse of the Night Queen's stasis amber.

  "It won’t be long now. A few months is nothing at all to me. Soon, her soul will be mine to consume." Malakor boasted to his lieutenants. The Demon Lords and Beast King had planned to return back together at the time the amber would lose its power. They would then split her body and soul amongst themselves.

  Malakor never got to finish his wine. The sky didn't just suddenly break; it fell.

  There was no warning and no gathering storm. The three layers of Grand Defensive Arrays, capable of withstanding Demon Lords, simply disintegrated. They vanished as if the Dao had wiped a smudge off a mirror. The magical backlash instantly vaporized thousands of the demons manning the outer walls.

  Malakor bolted from his throne and rushed to the balcony as it happened. Above the courtyard the void tore open and it was bleeding crimson light. From that light, eleven figures descended.

  At the lead was a woman in black dragon scale armor. Her presence was so suffocatingly dense that the elite guards in the courtyard fell to their knees and were vomiting blood purely from the pressure she emitted.

  "Who dares to attack me?! Do you not know that we have an alliance of five powers?!" Malakor screamed. He was quickly expanding into his true, towering demonic form. Fire erupted from his scales as he summoned his halberd. "I am Lord Malakor! You dare intrude upon—"

  Gongsun Lian didn't even draw her sword. She floated down and her boots touched the blood stained tiles.

  "Quiet," she whispered.

  She raised a pale hand and made a casual pinching motion. The spatial laws of the realm bent to her will. The space around the massive Demon Lord solidified instantly. Malakor froze mid stride. His fire was snuffed out. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe and couldn't even push his divine sense outward. Paralyzing terror gripped his ancient heart.

  "Crush," Lian ordered softly.

  Malakor immediately imploded. There was no blood and no explosion though. Lian’s technique was agonizingly precise. She compressed his physical form, his centuries of cultivation and his very soul in a fraction of a second. In the blink of an eye, one of the towering apex predators was reduced to a flawless, fist-sized crimson crystal.

  Lian caught the crystal as it dropped. "Passable purity," she noted. "The Young Master can use this." She tossed it to General Po.

  The entire siege camp was dead silent.

  "Generals," Lian commanded. "Clear the area. Take all their belongings and take their cores after killing. Locate the vault. Take everything there as well."

  "Yes, General!"

  The ten warriors blurred into motion. It wasn’t a battle at all. It was a harvest. They swept through the elite guards and were selectively crushing the commanders to extract their cores. The sheer shockwaves of their movements knocked the rest of the army into mist.

  Within minutes, Lian was standing before the massive metal doors of the underground vault. She waved her sleeve and the doors were ripped off their hinges. Inside were mountains of spirit stones, rare metals, herbs and demonic artifacts piled high.

  "Loot it all," Lian ordered her generals as they swept the wealth into their spatial rings. Looting the vault went quickly.

  After leaving the vault, they located the chunk of glowing Amber. It was being kept inside several arrays that were destroyed instantly. Inside, a woman with silver hair was suspended in stasis but her face frozen in defiance.

  Lian stepped forward and placed her palm on the amber.

  Crack.

  The amber shattered into glowing dust. The thing that three Demon Lords and two Beast Kings couldn’t break. The legendary artifact that had saved the Night Queen was nothing more than fragile glass in front of Lian.

  The Night Queen fell forward and hit the cold stone floor. She looked up but her vision was slightly blurred. Only after blinking a few times did her vision improve.

  "Who..." the Night Queen rasped as she was bracing for death. "Are you... another one of the scum that have joined forces with those Demon Lords?"

  "Hardly," Lian said coolly. "Your daughter, Vaspera, has found a powerful benefactor. Consider this a favor from him. Do not ask any further questions."

  Before the Night Queen could process the words, Lian tapped two fingers against her forehead. The Queen slumped into instant and deep unconsciousness.

  "General Po, carry her," Lian ordered. "If she gets a single bruise, I will use your soul to forge a new boot."

  "Understood, General!"

  Lian checked around to make sure there weren’t any loose ends. "Four targets remain. Let us be swift. The Young Master awaits."

  The rest of the afternoon was a massacre that fundamentally decapitated about one third of the power of the Demon Realm.

  The Spider Queen was holding a war council in her subterranean web fortress. Gongsun Lian didn't even descend. She unleashed her "Thousand Lotus Bloom" domain from the sky. Black spectral lotuses materialized in the cavern and released a storm of sword qi that shredded what was thought to be impregnable webbing and the Demon Lord’s legendary armor instantly. She was crystallized, her generals harvested and her vast treasury of poisons swept clean.

  The Rotting Bone Lord was extinguished by a single palm strike from a female general and his core extracted. The same thing happened to his troops and vaults.

  Then came the Beast Kings.

  The Gale Ape, a monstrosity the size of a mountain, tried to crush them with a club made of metal. General Po simply stepped forward and punched the Beast King in the chest. The blow shattered every bone in its body.

  The Sky Rending Condor attempted to flee. Lian pointed her black blade and a beam of concentrated dark energy severed the bird's head perfectly. The Beast Kings' massive carcasses were rapidly processed for hides, bones and their ancient cores. Their lairs were stripped down to the bedrock.

  Standing on the ruined peak of the Condor's mountain, Gongsun Lian looked at the setting sun. The sky was bleeding purple and orange. Five apex entities in this world were erased in a single afternoon. All because of a command from a boy they didn’t even know existed. The power vacuum and landscape of this realm would be changed forever from this one single event.

  Behind her, the ten generals stood at attention. Their spatial rings were now loaded with the accumulated wealth of five empires. General Po held the peacefully sleeping Night Queen.

  Lian took a deep breath. The violence had settled her nerves but a new anxiety bubbled up. It was time. She summoned a floating mirror of water and was adjusting her crimson cloak and ensuring her hair was perfectly in place. She turned to her generals and her eyes sharp.

  "Clean yourselves," Lian ordered. "Use your purification talismans. We are the Young Master's personal guard. We will not present ourselves to him smelling of demon blood. Appearance is paramount. Nothing can be out of order!"

  Spiritual light washed over the ten generals as they cleansed their armor until it shone like glass.

  "Remember Lord VoidClaw's warning," Lian told them in a quiet but intense voice. "Do not overwhelm him. We are officially here to repay a favor to Khaos. Do not grovel. Do not call him Young Master out loud. Be professional. Today, we lay the foundation for his ascension."

  "Yes, General!"

  Lian dismissed the water mirror. "Let us go. We must not keep him waiting."

  With a deafening boom, the eleven figures shot across the sky. They were heading toward the jagged western peaks to finally meet their lord for the first time. The one they were destined to follow.