Chapter 139
What kind of taboo is this?
It didn’t merely exceed her understanding of martial cultivation, it walked past it without slowing down.
She was frightened, plainly, straightforwardly frightened.
Because every law and rule and piece of common sense she’d spent her life learning stopped applying in this man’s presence, measured honestly, one Soren was a more terrifying proposition than the entire Heavenly Demon Alliance.
Can a normal cultivator drag souls across dimensions?
Can a normal person recall an Immemorial Spirit Ancestor who’s been dry bones for a million years?
This operated on a level that had nothing to do with Exalted Continent, nothing to do with the Azure Spirit World at all.
The demonstration cost him nothing and took her psychological defenses apart.
Do the Ancient Evil Gods we’re bleeding ourselves dry to awaken even have abilities like this?
And if they don’t, what are we waking them up for? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get on our knees and worship this one as a god?
Before this, with the Earth Demon Ancestor and the Heaven Demon Ancestor anchoring the Alliance, she’d kept a clear-eyed view of the distance between herself and the Ancestor Realm, massive, yes, intimidating, but it had always been something to run at.
Looking at Soren, she couldn’t construct a version of her life where cultivating hard enough closed the gap.
Set aside what separated an Upper-Tier Demon Emperor from a Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor, even standing in the same realm as him one day, a fight would still be a slaughter in one direction.
"Hiss~"
"What is this? Where is this?"
"I distinctly remember my soul had already..."
Cecilia was still smiling bitterly at herself when the ancient voice started filling the chamber. Confused and shocked, exactly like the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor had been.
Then its attention found Soren.
Nine crimson soul heads lowered from the ceiling, and nine sets of glowing eyes fixed on him from nine different angles.
"A Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor?"
"Hiss~"
All nine tongues flicked at once.
The hiss set off a violent spatial resonance.
In the empty air between beast soul and Soren, space tore, jagged fractures opened, well over ten thousand of them.
"Was it you, little demon boy, who dragged this old master’s soul to this place?"
"What kind of blasphemous technique is that?"
"When this old master walked the earth I ruled it unopposed for tens of thousands of years, and I never once heard of such a thing existing under heaven!"
"Boy, give this old master a satisfactory explanation right now or I will not spare you, I’ll tear you and that girl into shreds."
The threat snapped Cecilia out of her paralysis.
She was scared, no hiding it.
An Immemorial Nine-Headed Serpent’s soul was overwhelming, without a body at all, that soul pressure alone put it at no less than a genuine Middle-Tier Ancestor, and the odds were good it was stronger than her uncle.
The part about tearing Soren to shreds, though, was almost certainly comedy.
Soren looked up at the nine heads with a calm that was its own kind of unsettling.
The next second.
The slavery imprint branded into the core of the serpent’s blood soul ignited into Ancestor Fire at his command and roasted the ancient soul from the inside.
The Nine-Headed Serpent shrieked, several hundred meters of soul shadow curled into a ball and thrashed in midair as the fire ate through it.
The whole thing took one thought, he never lifted a finger.
Then he looked at it thrashing and decided the arrogant remnant needed a lesson it could feel.
Soren threw a plain punch at empty air.
Fist wind wrapped in demonic might blew through the void and slammed into one of the nine writhing heads.
The largest, central blood head burst into scattered soul mist under raw physical force.
He reached across the space and closed his fingers.
The whole soul shadow froze rigid in the air.
It felt like invisible hands had grabbed the thing and started bending it out of shape.
In ten seconds, several hundred meters of proud Immemorial beast soul had been knotted into itself twenty times over.
Soren folded his arms, leapt up, and landed lightly on one of the remaining eight heads.
He stomped down.
The soul went out of the air and into the floor, driven deep enough into the shattered stone to leave an outline.
He ground his boot into the top of its head, twisting back and forth, and his voice came out flat.
"You’re a wisp of dead beast soul I pulled back out of the void."
"Where exactly did you find the nerve to forget who the master is here?"
The Spirit soul shrieked a few more times.
For all that it had reached the Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor realm in life, without a body it didn’t have a tenth of Soren’s strength.
It submitted because there was nothing else available.
It produced a long string of flattery and hoped that would cover the recklessness.
Soren wasn’t finished with it.
He activated the Hell Path Demonic Form.
The serpent soul had independent consciousness, and anything with consciousness could be dragged into a hellish illusion and put through the wringer.
As master of that illusion, Soren set the flow of time inside it, one day outside could run over a thousand years within.
Under that kind of torment, most Ancestor Realm powerhouses didn’t survive a few subjective years intact, ten was considered remarkable.
So even the Nine-Headed Serpent, an Upper-Tier in life, only managed a little over a dozen before it came apart.
With Soren controlling the flow, that dozen plus years cost roughly one incense stick in the real world.
Its soul form began to collapse.
The soul flames guttering across it grew thin as a candle in a draft.
Soren started to suspect that if he left it in there much longer he’d be pulling out an idiot.
He snapped his fingers.
The serpent’s consciousness came back to reality, it lay there flattened for a good while before the soul fire across its frame relit.
"This one begs the Demon Ancestor for mercy!"
The beast soul pressed itself to the floor, its eight remaining heads went flat against the stone as it slid slowly toward him in a posture that left no room for interpretation.
Soren patted one of the heads.