I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 873: Push past your limits, Jack!

The lead Warden’s jaw clenched behind his iron mask, his pride roaring back over his shock. “A beast’s leash does not make you a master! Swarm him! Tear the dragon from his soul!”

The lead Warden charged.

He crossed thirty paces in a single, explosive leap, the basalt shattering beneath his heels as he brought the colossal halberd down in an executioner’s arc, the white-hot spiritual blade screaming as it split the air above Jack’s skull.

Jack didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t blink.

He raised his bare left arm directly into the path of the falling polearm.

The impact sounded like a cathedral bell struck by a battering ram. The concentrated spiritual fire detonated in an outward ring of destructive heat, scorching the stone for twenty meters around them.

Jack didn’t yield an inch.

His bare draconic skin met the edge of the blade. The fire was swallowed instantly by his immunity, and the sheer structural density of his draconic vessel arrested the warrior’s downward momentum dead in the air.

The lead Warden’s burning eyes dilated in absolute horror. “He caught the edge… with his bare arm?!”

“My turn,” Jack whispered.

Jack stepped forward, driving his right fist straight into the center of the warrior’s basalt-plated cuirass.

The impact blew a hole clean through the center of the heavy armor. The shockwave concussed through the warrior’s spiritual back, blasting fragments of iron and calcified bone into the air.

The massive lead Warden folded like a broken hinge, his body hurled backward like a cannonball, skipping violently across the jagged obsidian before crashing three hundred paces away into the base of a basalt pillar, burying him beneath tons of shattered rock.

Silence fell over the plateau, save for the crackling of dying embers.

The remaining four Wardens backed away, their weapons trembling, their eyes fixed on the lone young man standing in the crater.

Jack’s amber, slitted eyes swept over the four survivors.

A cold, vicious smirk touched the corner of his lips. He wasn’t going to drag this out. He wasn’t here to spar. He had an army waiting in the vault above, seven vats of boiling blood to empower.

He reached for the demonic furnace slumbering within his soul.

The skill detonated within his core.

Every single point of Jack’s colossal Magic stat instantly converted into Strength at a ratio of 1 to 1.5. His physical Strength multiplied into cataclysmic heights. His Agility spiked by twenty-five percent. All physical damage doubled.

His entire body restructured in a fraction of a second.

The transformation was insane to watch. Jack didn’t need to manifest a single limb selectively; his entire spiritual vessel expanded, his muscles hardening into corded, obsidian-scaled armor that rejected the light.

From his temples, thick, swept-back horns tore through the air, jagged as volcanic glass. His jaw shifted, fangs lengthening over his lips, while his amber draconic slits blazed with an aura so suffocating that the atmospheric gravity in the caldera warped around him.

The four surviving Wardens couldn’t even speak. Their weapons dipped toward the earth, the sheer terror of an apex abyssal predator freezing their limbs in place.

Jack tilted his horned head, the stone beneath his scaled talons pulverizing into black dust under the sheer, passive weight of his converted strength.

“Let’s see,” Jack’s transformed voice rumbled from deep within his chest, rattling the foundations of the entire realm, “how many pieces I can break you into.”

Jack vanished.

There was no sound of a footstep, no displacement of air. One instant he stood in the crater; the next, the obsidian bedrock where he had been standing cratered downward under several tons of sudden kinetic force.

The swordsman barely had time to widen his eyes before a shadow eclipsed the crimson sky above him.

Jack materialized directly overhead. With his converted Strength and doubled physical damage, he brought a single, scaled fist down like a falling meteor.

The swordsman crossed his twin flaming broadswords in a desperate, instinctual guard.

The reinforced spiritual steel didn’t just bend; it shattered into hundreds of fiery shards. The concussive blow blew straight through the parry, striking the warrior’s armored shoulder. The impact drove the former Warden waist-deep into the solid obsidian, his collarbone splintering with a sickening snap as the shockwave flattened the surrounding dust for thirty paces.

“Monster!” the maul-wielder screamed, his terror overwhelming his discipline.

The third Warden swung his massive, spiked war-maul in a desperate horizontal sweep aimed at Jack’s exposed ribs. The heavy iron head screamed through the air, leaving a trail of pressurized flame.

Jack didn’t even attempt to dodge.

He let the hammer strike him flush in the ribs.

The heavy iron slammed into Jack’s obsidian-scaled flank. A deafening clang echoed across the plateau, but Jack’s transformed body didn’t shift a millimeter. The scales barely showed a white scuff mark, the passive density of his transformed vessel absorbing the blunt trauma completely.

The maul-wielder stared at his weapon, his arms vibrating from the sheer recoil of hitting something denser than mountain bedrock.

“My turn,” Jack rumbled.

He reached out with lightning speed, his talons clamping down over the war-maul’s iron shaft. With a flick of his wrist, Jack ripped the weapon from the warrior’s grip, spun the massive maul effortlessly in his hand, and slammed the butt-end straight into the Warden’s stomach.

The breath exploded from the warrior’s lungs in a spray of spiritual embers. Before he could double over, Jack grabbed the back of the Warden’s iron gorget and drove his face down into his rising knee.

The iron helm caved inward. The warrior collapsed limp to the stone, groaning through shattered teeth.

The remaining two Wardens retreated frantically, their backs hitting the jagged wall of an obsidian bluff. They looked at Jack not as a successor to their mantle, but as an impossible aberration.

“He’s not channeling a beast…” the fourth Warden whispered, his hands trembling as he held a jagged spear. “Soul Wardens graft spirits to their souls to wield their power. But this… this isn’t a graft! He is the demon! His soul core is fundamentally fused with the abyss!”

“No Warden has ever done this,” the fifth stammered, backing away. “To become the monster instead of commanding it… It defies the very laws of the title!”

Jack took a slow step forward, his heavy, scaled talons digging gouges into the stone.

He didn’t care about their broken dogmas. But looking at the two terrified warriors standing against the wall, Jack felt a cold curiosity stir in his chest.

He had pushed his physical limits with Infernal Conversion, but there was another art buried deep within the demonic lineage that he had yet to test in the spiritual plane.

Jack drew a breath, focusing inward on his circulatory pathways.

A primal, animalistic roar tore from Jack’s throat.

A guttural, predatory sound that shook the sulfur clouds above.

His heart violently contracted, pumping high-density demonic mana through his spiritual meridians like pressurized liquid fire. The blood within his vessel surged, answering the call of absolute slaughter.

A system prompt flashed pale across his vision:

[Penalty Active: 1% Maximum Health drained per second.]

In the physical realm, the skill had always felt like an uncontrollable, rabid beast gnawing at the edges of his sanity, threatening to drown his tactical mind in blind rage.