I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 866: [Ember-Weaver]

It opened its faceless jaw, unleashing a roaring breath of white ash so hot it turned the surrounding air into a suffocating vacuum and melted the stalactites thirty meters above.

Jack didn’t evade.

[Astrape’s Shadow]

A massive arrow of dark lightning manifested before his right shoulder, wrapped in predatory, seeking shadows. Jack released it with a flick of his intent.

The corrupted lightning bolt shot straight down the throat of the roaring ash breath.

The dark mana didn’t just pierce; it adapted mid-flight, splitting into twelve independent tendrils of black electricity that tore through the interior of the Behemoth’s reconstructed body, anchoring themselves to the elemental currents and ripping the molten core apart from within.

The Behemoth’s upper half exploded in an outward burst of black lightning and shattered slag.

Yet, as the torso collapsed into powdery gray snow, Jack watched closely.

Nothing.

No beast core. No system prompt. No heart of any kind fell from the shattered chest.

When Jack blew apart monsters in the Spire, when he harvested the souls of high-tier entities, there was always an anchor.

A vessel holding the consciousness and the mana reserve together. But this colossal avatar was empty. It was nothing more than atmospheric soot being puppeted by a remote frequency.

‘It’s a husk,’ Jack realized. A hollow projection. Baelok has been fighting a shadow for twenty years.

The severed legs of the titan dissolved into smoke, riding the thermal updrafts to reconstitute yet again.

“You’re wasting my time,” Jack spat.

He didn’t wait for it to reform.

[Red Web]

Jack slammed his right palm onto the obsidian floor. A massive, blood-red spiderweb of dense mana erupted from his hand, spanning fifty meters across the caldera floor.

The moment the reconstructing ash began to solidify back into limbs, the red strands caught the particulate.

The crimson web tightened with crushing, continuous damage, slowing the creature’s reconstitution by forty percent and locking its newly formed legs into place.

The Behemoth roared, thrashing against the crimson filaments, its molten slag veins hissing as the web continuously seared its form every single second.

Jack didn’t look at its thrashing head. His gaze tracked downward.

He looked at the base of the magma lake, beneath the basalt shelf where the red web was anchored.

Rising from a deep, vertical fracture in the earth was a continuous, rhythmic pulsation of thermal mana.

A faint, persistent thread fed the ash construct from miles below the volcanic crust.

The Behemoth tore three of its arms free from the web, raising a massive jagged boulder from the magma lake to crush Jack where he stood.

[Dark Nova: Ruin Pulse]

Jack didn’t look up. He released the Kaiser bloodline payload.

A pitch-black sphere of condensed, absolute ruin formed at his fingertips. At his silent command, the sphere imploded, then erupted outward in an earth-shattering wave of pure, disintegrating dark mana.

The black shockwave swallowed the Behemoth whole.

The boulder was atomized. The four arms were erased. The entire forty-span construct was wiped from existence in a fraction of a second, the destructive blast scouring the basalt clean and leaving a crater twenty paces wide in the center of the caldera.

The ash would reform. Jack knew that. It would take thirty seconds for the particulate to pull itself back together from the ceiling.

That was twenty-five seconds more than he needed.

Jack didn’t stay to watch the soot gather. He turned toward the deep, vertical fissure splitting the center of the crater.

The yawning maw plunged straight into the planet’s lower mantle.

He leaped into the abyss.

Gravity took him down. The air whistled past his ears, turning impossibly hot, hot enough to melt lead. Jack adjusted his descent with [Gravity Flux: Reverse], slowing his terminal velocity to a steady, controlled drift until his boots touched the bottom of the deep fault.

Here, miles beneath the caldera, the environment was utterly silent.

There was no roaring magma, no boiling acid. Only an immense, vaulted chamber of ancient, calcified black stone, lit by veins of dormant, crystalline gold running through the bedrock.

And in the center of the chamber, curled upon a bed of petrified magma, was the true entity.

It was small.

Scarcely the size of a dire-wolf. Its body was encased in a dense, diamond-hard shell of black basalt chitin, its curved tail wrapped tightly around its flanks. From its nostrils puffed rhythmic, slow plumes of coarse gray soot.

It was an Ember-Weaver. A primordial elemental catalyst that had slept in this fault for millennia, projecting its immense ash avatar upward to act as a territorial guardian while its true body rested in absolute safety.

Above the fault line, the distant roar of the reforming Behemoth echoed down the shaft. The colossus had realized its master was in danger.

Jack didn’t hesitate for a second.

[Active Skill: Demonhand]

Jack’s right arm twisted violently, his flesh swelling and tearing as it transformed into a colossal, obsidian-scaled demonic claw dripping with magma from his fingertips.

The wicked talons, each as long as a short sword, pulsed with a terrifying aura.

This was new to Jack. As he continued to develop and continued to eat more Demonic Essence, his body changed into a demon.

The small beast’s eyes snapped open. Two burning embers shuddered when it looked into Jack’s eyes.

It opened its jaws to release a high-pitched psychic shriek, attempting to disperse its true body into ash.

[Antimagic Nullification]

Jack’s demonic hand was instantly coated in a deep layer of nullifying dark mana.

He closed the distance in a single, earth-shattering stride. His monstrous claw clamped down around the Ember-Weaver’s skull, the nullification mana instantly shutting down its elemental core and preventing the beast from dissolving into soot.

The creature thrashed frantically, its sharp chitin legs clawing against Jack’s scaled forearm, but Jack’s grip was an unbreakable vice.

“Twenty years of Baelok’s torment,” Jack whispered, his heterochromic eyes cold as a grave. “Ended in thirty seconds.”

Jack squeezed its head until a shrill sound erupted from the beast.

POP!

The diamond-hard basalt chitin shattered beneath the demon claw’s crushing weight.

With a final, jagged heave, Jack ripped his talons through the beast’s chest, tearing out its true heart.

A fist-sized, crystalline orb of compressed, pulsing crimson and black elemental energy that burned with pure, undying heat.

Above, the echoing roar of the reforming Ash-Behemoth abruptly died.

The massive avatar, thirty spans high in the upper caldera, did not disperse into a storm. Without the living catalyst to hold the frequency, the immense plates of ash and molten slag collapsed into dead, cold soot, raining harmlessly down into the magma pools like black snow.

The silence that followed was jarring.

Jack’s right hand shifted back to normal, his flesh reknitting as the demonic scales receded, leaving his pale skin unmarked. He wiped a smear of black elemental fluid from its core, holding the heavy, pulsing heart of the Behemoth in his palm.

The quest was done. The pariah’s price was paid.

Jack turned to find the ascent, and something caused him to pause.

The death of the Ember-Weaver had destabilized the localized mana field in the cavern.

The calcified magma shelf at the back of the chamber had begun to crack, massive slabs of ancient basalt peeling away from the rock face like dry bark from a dead tree.

Behind the collapsed rock, a hidden archway stood revealed.

It was a colossal gateway carved from an unknown, iridescent white stone that rejected the surrounding volcanic soot.

And from the darkness beyond the threshold, Jack felt something that made the silver streaks in his soul meridians ignite with blinding, violent heat.

It was not the cold of death, nor the fire of the earth.

It was the unmistakable, divine resonance from the depths of that lightless vault; two ancient, burning golden eyes snapped open in the dark.