However, whilst the apocalyptic chaos was ensuing at the surface, deep within the subterranean expanse of the Sword Graveyard, the air was a thick, toxic slurry of vaporized rock and violent Wood Qi.
The catastrophic detonation of the Sentient Emerald Core had pulverized the central altar, instantly atomizing the surrounding obsidian pillars and collapsing the cavern's ceiling.
From beneath a mountain of scorched debris, a hand clawed its way to the surface.
The flesh was carbonized, peeling away from cracked, glowing bones.
The Envoy of the Oman House dragged his ruined body out of the rubble. His lungs wheezed, expelling ash and coagulated blood.
His original vessel; a meticulously cultivated body designed to withstand the volatile energies of the upper echelons—was completely compromised.
His meridians were shredded. His spiritual foundation was leaking heavy Qi like a punctured lung.
If he remained in this shell for another hour, his soul would dissipate into the ambient chaos.
"The anomaly..." the Envoy rasped, his voice a hideous, grating sound of grinding stones.
He looked toward the epicenter of the blast, where the seven-year-old abomination had descended into; there was nothing left but a smoldering, glassed-over crater.
He could be said to have successfully executed the Oman House's mandate, but it had cost him everything, including the Elixir he had been thinking of snatching from the Withered Hand's grasps.
Now, he needed a new vessel, and very urgently.
Dragging his broken legs, the Envoy crawled out of the graveyard's main chamber, following the fractured stone tunnels back toward the surface of the Ignis Tribe's estate.
However, he didn't make it far before finding what he was looking for.
The Matron of the Ignis Tribe was still kneeling outside the smithy.
The sheer, unfathomable shockwave of the Emerald Core's detonation, combined with her experience with Soren's imposing inevitability, and the sheer apocalypse ensuing around her had left her psyche completely shattered.
She was rocking back and forth, her hands clawing mindlessly at her own scalp, muttering incoherent prayers to tribal totems that had long been reduced to dust.
The Envoy, unbothered by the apocalypse and simultaneously naive to the mechanics behind it looked at the Matron with utter disgust.
A primitive.
A weak link.
But she was also a means to an end.
So he forced himself upright, leaning heavily against the cavern wall as he extended a charred, trembling hand and gripped the Matron by the throat, hoisting her off the ground.
She didn't fight back; her eyes were vacant, staring through him into the abyss of her own broken mind.
"Good... Your mind is already an empty room," the Envoy hissed, forcing a sliver of his remaining, corrupted Qi directly into her mind. "Let me reconfigure the locks."
The Matron's body convulsed violently. Her vacant eyes rolling back, as it was filled with a sickly, bruised greenish light.
By the time she blinked, the madness in her eyes was gone, replaced by a terrifying, absolute emptiness.
She was now dead in all but biology; a mere puppet dancing on the Envoy's spiritual strings.
"Mother?"
The Envoy turned his head, and exiting the smithy flanked by the shifting shadows of the collapsing chaos around them, was Kaelen; the First Heir of the Ignis Tribe, and the Matron's favorite.
Relatively untouched by a large margin, he still retained the vibrancy of a boy in his early teens.
His body, still pristine, and muscles still humming with tempered arrogant, unrefined latent energy of a premium Ignis bloodline, the Envoy's carbonized lips couldn't help but stretch into a grotesque, bloody smile.
'A pristine canvas,' He salivated. 'Untainted by cultivation. The perfect biological harbor.'
"Mother, what is happening? The sky is sundering and the earth is tearing itself apart," Kaelen asked as his focus gradually registered the scene before him.
"Unhand her, outsider." He barked as he stepped forward, his hand resting on the hilt of his trusty sword.
He stared at the Envoy's ruined body with a mixture of revulsion and misplaced authority.
The Envoy however, didn't speak. He simply let go of the Matron.
Then before Kaelen could draw his blade, the Envoy abandoned his physical shell entirely as his soul—a vicious, churning mass of dark green Oman Qi—tore itself out of his carbonized body.
It shrieked as it closed the distance between them in a microsecond, and violently slammed into Kaelen's chest.
Kaelen froze. His eyes went wide with sudden, catastrophic terror as a foreign, infinitely superior consciousness invaded his spiritual center.
The assimilation was not a battle; it was a slaughter.
The Envoy didn't just suppress Kaelen's soul; he unhinged his metaphysical jaw and devoured it.
He ripped through the boy's memories, digested his martial foundations, and violently seized control of the First Heir's nervous system.
Kaelen's body arched backward, a silent scream dying in his throat as the last shreds of his identity were erased.
When the boy finally lowered his head, his eyes were no longer the arrogant, fiery amber of the Ignis Tribe. They were a cold, calculating, toxic emerald-green.
The Envoy flexed Kaelen's hands, feeling the rush of uncorrupted blood and the steady, rhythmic beat of a healthy heart.
It was weak—disgustingly weak compared to his old body—but it was stable.
"Tolerable," the Envoy murmured using Kaelen's vocal cords.
He looked down at his own discarded, carbonized body on the floor. It still contained a dense reservoir of dying Oman Qi.
He couldn't let it go to waste. So, he turned his emerald eyes to the puppet Matron.
"Gather the warriors," the Envoy commanded, his voice carrying the chilling authority of an apex predator wearing a familiar skin.
"Leave the unawakened children. They lack the fuel I require. Bring every able-bodied fighter to the Ancestral Grounds beneath the estate. Bring my old shell as well."
The Matron bowed stiffly, her movements completely devoid of humanity, as she vanished into the distance to execute the order.
An hour later, the deepest, most sealed cavern beneath the Ignis Tribe estate had been transformed into a slaughterhouse.
Seventy Ignis warriors stood in concentric circles in the pitch-black chamber, their eyes glowing with the same sickly, bruised purple light as the Matron.
They had been completely subjugated, their minds wiped clean by the Matron's pheromones.
In the center of the room, the Envoy—wearing Kaelen's flesh—stood barefoot on a cold stone.
At his feet lay his old, carbonized body, acting as the anchor for the massive, parasitic blood-array he had just carved into the floor using the Matron's own blood.
He was at the absolute bottom of the power strata in this new, unrefined body. He needed to force an evolution.
He needed to bypass years of meticulous cultivation and rip his way back up the hierarchy.
"The heavens reward the ruthless," the Envoy whispered to himself, his emerald eyes burning as he initiated the array.
He raised his hands.
The seventy Ignis warriors didn't scream as the array activated.
They simply began to decompose, melting as the parasitic formation violently extracted their latent bloodlines, their vital energies, and their very life force, converting their physical bodies into agonizing streams of pure, red kinetic fuel.
The Matron, standing at the edge of the circle, suffered the same fate, her flesh dissolving into the crimson vortex without a single sound of protest.
The massive torrent of stolen life force slammed into the Envoy's old, ruined body, using the residual Oman Qi as a refining filter, before surging directly into Kaelen's pristine vessel.
The Envoy threw his head back and roared.
This was not a Natural Awakening. This was a Stimulated Awakening—the most brutal, parasitic form of the Induced Awakening mode.
He was using the cumulative life force of an entire tribe's fighting force to violently pry open Kaelen's meridians and forge a new spiritual foundation.
Kaelen's skin tore and healed in microseconds. His bones cracked, lengthening and hardening under the sheer, unnatural pressure of the stolen Qi.
The ambient energy in the cavern was sucked dry, forming a suffocating vacuum as the Envoy cannibalized an entire generation of the Ignis Tribe to fuel his own resurrection.
When the vortex finally collapsed, the cavern was empty, save for the dust of seventy warriors and a single, ruined Matron.
The Envoy stood in the center, breathing heavily. Kaelen's body was completely transformed.
The boyish softness was gone, replaced by dense, razor-wire musculature.
His aura was no longer that of a tribal heir, but a suffocating, toxic pressure that cracked the stone beneath his feet.
He clenched his fist, feeling the devastating kinetic force rippling through his new, brutally stimulated foundation.
He had stabilized. He was a threat once more.
"The anomaly is dead," the Envoy sneered, looking up toward the ceiling of the cavern, toward the surface.
He was completely unaware that deep within the glassed-over crater he had left behind, the forgotten cornerstone was reforming itself into a capstone.
---
The Tortoise's belly was nothing like the Soren had anticipated.
There were no guts or organs in sight; rather, Soren found himself strolling through caverns adorned with illuminating crystals.
The glow coming of these crystals created a soft mystical ambience that revealed the ancient murals etched into the stomach walls; each one of them a tale of the trials that had come before.
Then after what felt like half an hour, he finally reached a vast hall adorned with mirrors of all shapes and sizes.
"This is the Chamber of Secrets..." The Tortoise's voice, or more precisely, its thoughts reverberated into the area, sending seismic vibration rumbling through the entire cavern.
"Within these mirrors lies the essence of your trial." It revealed.
"Each mirror reflects the depths of your soul; and to claim the Origin Codex, you must look beyond the surface and discover the truths that lie within." It explained as its voice trailed off signifying the start of the trial.
Then with a sense of anticipation and psyche riddled with curiosity, Soren approached the nearest mirror.
With each step, he felt a sense of unease creep over him; his reflection wavering upon the crystal like a mirage in astral currents.
It was almost as if the mirror wanted to unravel the very fibers of his being, dimension of his existence, and even fabric of reality.
"The Mirror of Insight will reveal all the secrets and truths hidden within your soul.
To overcome this trial, you must face your fears and confront the darkest corners of your heart." The Cosmic Vagrant guided.
Hearing this, Soren gazed into the mirror, and in that moment, the surface rippled like the surface of a tranquil pond and then began to swirl with a kaleidoscopic light that stirred the depths of his soul.
Memories from his past flickered across the mirror's surface, each one a fragment of his journey through several lifetimes.
Fleeting glimpses of his past and future intertwined into a movie of overlapping memories.
He saw memories of the battles he had won and lost when he was reincarnated as Beasts.
The friendships he had forged and betrayed when he was an Imperial Scholar.
Even memories of his lives as nothing but plants and trees started to haunt him, revealing his past failures where his judgment had faltered.
Each one of them becoming a testament to the exact type of personality he had, and the core nature of his very being.
Yet amid the chaos of his memories, Soren saw glimpses of an imminent future shrouded in uncertainty.
It was a path fraught with danger and despair.
In there, different sorts of battles were decided in instances shorter that seconds.
Some of the results of he saw created thick clouds of doubts that loomed over his heart.
These cloud of doubts gathered and roiled intensely like they was heralding a storm of absolute destruction.
It kicked up a tempest of fear that threatened to drown Soren's soul in its suffocating embrace.
Soren was forced to question his own abilities; doubting whether he was powerful enough to shape his destiny, oblivious that ambience of his Soul had begun to dim.