"Rrrrroar…"
The guttural cry of rage wasn't one voice but a dozen — the sound of the blood shadows as they surged toward Daniel.
They moved like streaks of crimson lightning, weaving into a lethal wave. Any other fighter would have panicked at the sight.
But Daniel only smiled amusedly.
"They're just echoes," he muttered, stepping once to the left.
In that single step, his body flickered and blurred — reappearing hundreds of meters away, untouched.
"This 'world' is broken. It can't hold me for long."
Daniel's golden eyes shifted, fixing on the deepest point of this scarlet realm.
There.
Beyond the endless mist, buried at the heart of this pocket dimension, he could sense it — the malignant consciousness sealed within the cauldron's core.
In the outside world, Daniel never dared to reveal his full strength. Not with Heimdall's gaze possibly tracking him from Asgard. Not with Odin's silent judgment.
And certainly not with the Hand monitoring every move.
This ancient cauldron was their trump card — the one weapon that had allowed them to stand against Kunlun for centuries. They would never ignore this fight. Somewhere, in the shadows, their eyes were watching.
Daniel knew their style.
The Hand didn't face opponents head-on. They waited, patiently, striking when their enemy was weakest.
And this cauldron was a prison.
The Hand didn't fully control the ancient evil trapped here. In fact, over the years, the roles had nearly reversed: the evil will had begun controlling them.
If the cauldron's internal seals ever fully eroded, that thing would be free.
Daniel's jaw tightened. He didn't fully understand the magic matrix Kunlun had used to build this prison, but patterns spoke for themselves. Seals left traces. Weaknesses left scars. And this small world was rotting from within.
Unlike the outside world — where the laws of space were unyielding and absolute — here, everything was unstable. Daniel could flicker through the air, teleporting with ease, dodging the crimson shades with effortless steps.
The shadows came in waves, their faces blurred yet disturbingly human.
Male. Female. Tall. Thin. Fat.
All of them, Daniel realized, were the consumed souls of those who had once fallen to this cauldron.
Daniel pressed deeper, skirting the collapsing edges of this warped dimension, pushing toward its heart.
Each step drew him closer to the true evil will lurking in the shadows.
And Daniel was no stranger to wills. His own was forged in in ice. Fifty years of brutal survival in Jotunheim had carved his spirit into something unshakable, like a diamond sharpened by suffering.
The crimson mist thickened, wrapping around him like a living shroud. Through it, the ruins of a hall emerged — scarred stone pillars, shattered walls, remnants of battles fought long before his time.
The blood shadows attacked again, rushing him in a frenzy.
But Daniel barely moved. He slipped through space itself, vanishing and reappearing ahead of them, as if their existence was nothing but a minor inconvenience.
The evil consciousness felt him coming.
The mist trembled with anticipation. Daniel's mind brushed against its alien presence — sharp, venomous, hungry. It was gathering its strength for a direct assault, the kind that wasn't made of claws or blood, but raw mental force.
Daniel grinned and said, "Good. Let's see who breaks first."
The deeper he went, the quieter the ruins became.
Then, he saw them.
Ancient murals etched along the passage walls — scenes from Eastern myths.
Pangu splitting the sky. Nuwa molding humanity from clay. Gonggong ramming into Buzhou Mountain. Dayu taming the floods.
The sight unsettled Daniel.
"Are these just stories? Or… was it all real?"
But if Pangu and Nuwa truly existed, how could the Greek and Norse pantheons also stand?
The thought gnawed at him.
Then, instinct flared.
'This isn't real.'
With a sharp motion, Daniel unleashed a crackling arc of thunder. It shot into the murals, burning through them like fire through paper.
In an instant, the walls dissolved.
What remained was a bare, ancient hall.
A cold ripple ran through Daniel. He hadn't even realized he'd been caught in an illusion.
"Impressive," he muttered, grip tightening on his wand. "But not good enough."
The hall stretched out in silence.
At its center stood a stone platform.
Atop it, suspended and spinning slowly, was a crystalline blood sphere — pulsing like a living heart.
But it wasn't alone.
An ancient sword, nearly five feet long, stood inverted, its blade driven through the blood sphere's core. The sword gleamed silver, but its spine bore a deep, blood-red groove, as if it had been drinking the orb's essence.
Daniel's breath caught.
"That sword… it's not part of this place."
He could feel it. The weapon didn't belong to the cauldron or the evil consciousness — it was a seal, a foreign relic meant to hold the corruption in check.
But the seal was weakening.
Even now, the blood orb pulsed harder, its essence bleeding into the sword. In a few years, the evil inside might fully awaken.
Suddenly, Daniel's instincts screamed.
He turned sharply, but the passage was gone.
The entrance he'd come from had dissolved into nothingness.
Now, there was only this hall — its walls crawling with thin, moving red veins, like the cauldron's blood was alive and watching.
"No way out, huh?" Daniel muttered. "Fine. I wasn't planning to run."
He planted his wand into the ground.
The scarab gem at its tip flared to life, releasing a brilliant golden radiance.
The crimson mist recoiled, but only for a moment.
Then, with a furious hiss, it surged forward, compressing the light, forcing it back.
For a brief instant, Daniel saw the truth.
The walls and floors were scarred with ancient battle marks — sword gouges, axe strikes, even bare-handed fist imprints. Countless warriors had fought here to contain this evil… but there were no bones. No remains.
The evil had consumed them all.
Daniel's jaw clenched and shouted, "I won't join them!"
Thunder burst from his body, filling the hall, pushing the blood mist back.
Then, without warning, a brilliant white bolt of lightning shot from Daniel's hand, aimed not at the mist, but directly at the ancient sword.
The entire hall trembled.
The evil core screamed.
—
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