Chapter 1268: The Third Urn
Ethan found himself standing in a small, brightly lit room.
It looked like a cramped corner shop—if someone had tried to run a lab out of it.
Experimental equipment was piled everywhere: on the table, on the floor, shoved along the walls. Glass containers, tubing, and stacks of handwritten notes jammed the narrow space with zero organization.
Then the door was shoved open from the outside—violently.
Bang!
The door slammed into the wall.
A thick-built man walked in.
He wore a black guard uniform, a heavy crate balanced on one shoulder. He didn’t bother setting it down. He just stared coldly at the scientist standing by the instruments.
"You still here?" His voice was pure impatience. "What—waiting for our boss to toss you a handout?"
He jerked his chin at the equipment.
"Just looking at your junk, I can tell it’s trash. Immortality? Stuffing people into some ’consciousness’? You’re a freak."
Still cursing under his breath, the guard turned and left.
The door was slammed shut again, just as roughly.
The little room fell quiet.
The scientist stayed where he was, eyes unfocused.
After a long moment, he slowly turned his head toward the corner.
Two urns sat there.
He stared at them for a long time. Then his body folded in on itself, inch by inch. He sank into a squat on the floor, both hands clawing into his hair until his knuckles went white.
A voice spoke inside the room.
Ethan couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
He couldn’t even tell how far away it was.
But the instant the voice appeared, Ethan’s soul jolted violently.
His body wasn’t being attacked, yet his mind surged with the urge to submit. His knees wanted to bend. His gaze was being dragged down toward the floor.
Only when Lily released her full power did that pressure finally get blocked.
Ethan forced his head back up.
Was that... soul fear?
Or soul control?
The power was too mysterious, too unfamiliar.
He was about to focus and catch what the voice was actually saying—when the little room suddenly warped.
The table, the door the guard had left through, the scientist crouched in the corner, the two urns—everything collapsed inward toward the center like it was being folded into a point.
And Ethan was yanked back into the Inverted Layer.
The bright laboratory snapped back into view.
That nauseating brain was still floating in the same place, but its state had clearly changed.
Beads of sweat had seeped out across its surface.
The liquid ran down the folds and dripped onto the instruments and floor. The brain was still twitching, but it couldn’t keep its earlier steady rhythm anymore—every movement stuttered, uneven and strained.
And in the corner beside it...
Three urns sat neatly lined up.
One more than the scene he’d just seen.
The brain’s twitching kept leaning in that direction, as if it desperately wanted to get closer to those three urns.
Ethan started to walk over, instinctively wanting to help.
The moment he took a step, the brain stopped moving.
Not like it decided to.
More like it—he—had used up everything.
After pushing its consciousness and its calculations too far, it had simply run dry.
Death came with no warning at all.
Ethan stood there for a few seconds before it fully clicked.
This thing had tried to use its own past to influence him—to trap him inside that memory and emotion, soften his resistance, then slip the control in.
It had underestimated Lily.
Suddenly, the central brain began to shake violently.
Every fold contracted at once. The pipes connected all around it snapped taut. Hairline cracks spread across its surface, and thin streaks of blood seeped out from within.
Ethan’s expression changed instantly.
"Oh, hell—no."
He backed up hard.
"You wanna get sentimental, fine—just don’t explode!"
Shouting, Ethan slammed an energy sphere into his own body.
White power spread. His form broke apart into black particles in an instant. He didn’t stay to watch what happened next—he shot straight upward.
The boundary overhead—the one that had turned into a mirror—had already reverted into solid, hard "ground."
But with Lily’s power wrapped around him, it couldn’t stop him anymore.
Black particles pierced through the surface, sliding up along the seam between layers at high speed.
The instant he left the Inverted Layer, the central brain finally reached its limit.
Swollen to the breaking point, the tissue split open from the inside.
A flood of previously contained blood and flesh sprayed outward, smashing into instruments, pipes, and the last remaining fragments of mirror. If Ethan had to describe it...
It looked a lot like someone had completely pulverized a pig’s brain.
Up in the Surface Layer, Seraphine was slowly descending from the air.
The golden halos around her dimmed bit by bit. She no longer needed to keep pouring holy light out to suppress everyone. The negative emotions that had filled the space earlier were gone—completely. Even the darkness covering the cage retreated with them.
Light fell back onto the ground.
And everyone finally saw what was left.
The battlefield had turned into wreckage.
The ground was cratered and uneven, cracks and depressions linked together like a map of how many times it had been smashed apart.
Red fire and bitter ice were the most obvious colors across the ruin.
Large stretches of ground were still burning with the flames Kaelira and Ignara had left behind. On the other side, sheets of ice lay frozen in place—what Elowen had unleashed when she lost control. The two forces were spread everywhere, and along the boundary where they met, white fog kept rising in steady streams.
The group stood in the center of the ruin, staring around in confused silence.
No one wanted to believe this destruction had come from them.
But the memories were still there—clear as day.
Ataneya remembered exactly how her tails had swung at Feylora.
Elowen remembered her frost covering her own allies.
Kaelira remembered the moment her inner flames slipped their leash... and how badly she’d wanted to burn everything nearby to ash.
Those memories were carved into their minds. There was no pretending otherwise.
And this had happened even with Seraphine’s holy light constantly shining on them.
If she hadn’t been there suppressing the negativity—nobody even dared to imagine what the outcome would’ve been.
It was like all the strength in their bodies got drained at once.
One after another, they sank to the ground, eyes hollow as they stared at the ruins.
Ataneya looked the worst.
Every single hair on her twenty-four fox tails was standing on end, all of it stiff and bristling. She tried to draw her tails in, but the raised fur scraped against itself—so prickly that even brushing someone nearby would sting.
Desert Queen Kaelira was in even more of a mess.
Her hair was still on fire.
Violet-red flames flared uncontrollably at her ends—she’d suppress one patch, only for another side to reignite. The leftover rage-fire in her core kept leaking out on its own, making the air around her steadily heat up.