Mo Lingtian closed his eyes and slowly dragged his core from his sea of consciousness to the outside of his body. It was excruciating, searing, and agonizing, but he didn't let out even as much as a whimper. Only his face reflected the torture as it tightened, thick veins popping up all over his physical body as the core violently emerged.
As soon as the core forcefully tore away from his chest, he fell onto one knee. Blackened blood had started seeping from his eyes and the pores of his skin. His chest now bore a deep crater; it looked exactly like a wall that had been hammered through.
The Devil Core, now suspended outside his body, began to spin, emitting a dark green misty glow as it hovered in the air. The surrounding death energy immediately reacted, resonating as it slowly followed the cycling rhythm of the core, swaying the trees and shrubs in its wake.
Mo Lingtian slowly stood up, controlling the spinning core as it flew closer to him until it rested, hovering just above his left palm. Then he opened his right palm and unveiled the Devil Converging Seal. It, too, hung slightly above his flesh.
"Do you think he can do it?" one amongst the triad asked the chief commander as they watched Mo Lingtian extract his core from within the dense gray mist.
"Let's watch and see," she replied, profound anxiety written all over her face.
"This has to be the last time I make this kind of sacrifice for anyone unrelated to my quest," Mo Lingtian said with a heavy sigh, looking down at his core.
Then, with a quick, powerful, domineering, and decisive movement, he crushed his own core. It detonated into pure, raw energy, dispersing across the entire death zone in a violent, earth-shattering explosion.
"It's all or nothing," Mo Lingtian whispered to himself as blood continued to seep from his eyes, his skin, and now his mouth. He slowly lifted the Devil Converging Seal to the sky, watching it expand, growing larger and more imposing the higher it ascended.
His legs gave way, dropping him to his knees at the absolute center of the forest. His hair was frantically scattered, and his physical body looked totally disheveled. Mo Lingtian looked like a broken figurine sculpted from blood.
His breathing became ragged as he stared at the ground, unable to muster the strength to even lift his head to look at the massive Devil Converging Seal above.
Outside the death zone, the waiting cultivators heard the deafening sound of Mo Lingtian's core exploding. This time, it wasn't just sound waves rolling from the fog; a violent, physical force of wind accompanied the blast, knocking several weaker cultivators right out of the sky.
Even Tu Xin and the four Dao Realm practitioners were pushed back a few meters as they fought to resist the dense atmospheric shockwave that blew through.
This went on for several minutes before the violent currents finally subsided. Everyone immediately flew closer to the boundary, now more interested than ever in the supreme treasures they assumed were inside.
"Senior, do you still want to stand by idly? The death zone has never been this active in thousands of years. Not until that boy entered. He might have found a way to survive in there," one of the Dao Realm practitioners said to Tu Xin.
"And if a cultivator at the Vessel Cleansing stage can find a way to survive there, we will certainly be able to survive," another Dao practitioner added, moving closer to Tu Xin as they hovered in the sky.
"Sword, come!" Tu Xin yelled.
His sword immediately shot from his cave, swiftly slicing through the atmosphere with a razor-sharp intent before coming to an abrupt halt right behind him. Its sudden stop created a powerful air current that swept over the cultivators, causing their robes to flutter wildly in resonance.
The blade shimmered with a dense, lethal energy. Merely looking at it made one feel as though a sharp slice was already cutting through their flesh.
"Let's step into the death zone," Tu Xin commanded. The sword hovering behind him slowly drifted to his front, resting its hilt securely in his open palm.
Inside the death zone, several minutes had passed without any reaction. The raw energy that erupted from Mo Lingtian's crushed core continued to float endlessly throughout the forest, seemingly ignoring the Devil Converging Seal entirely. Mo Lingtian had just destroyed his primary advantage in the cultivation world for nothing.
"He couldn't do it after all," the chief commander said with a heavy sigh, immense disappointment flooding her expectations.
Outside, Tu Xin's sword was already approaching the dense barrier of the death zone, preparing to slice open a pathway.
"Wrong. He did it," said one of the triad, observing closely as Mo Lingtian's devil energy finally reached the end of the death zone.
"Conv...erge," Mo Lingtian whispered, still kneeling, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides.
Instantly, a crisp sound like a single drop of water falling into a still pond echoed through the forest. Following that sound was a terrifying, suffocating momentum of gravity. The sheer weight of space itself expanded violently beyond the death zone, reaching meters beyond the mountain and its caves.
Tu Xin, his sword, and all the levitating cultivators were instantly swatted from the sky, slamming straight into the earth as that terrifying gravitational momentum dragged them down. Even the mountain itself began to crack and splinter under the pressure, sending large boulders rolling down to the ground.
The devil energy and the death energy intertwined flawlessly. In a split second, the entire volume of death energy, the gray mist, and the corroding element of the zone were violently sucked into the center of the Devil Converging Seal.
The fully charged seal then dropped straight down, sinking directly into Mo Lingtian's sea of consciousness and instantaneously repairing every flaw, injury, and damage within.
His Demon Core was reconstructed by the influx of pure death energy. The ethereal chains that had previously suspended his Devil Core snapped, shattering into nothingness under the raw power of Yin.
His Devil Core underwent a cosmic reforging. It was no longer just a Devil Core; it now possessed two distinct attributes. One half was a dark, misty green bearing the power of the void, while the other half was dark gray, radiating the pure power of death. This was a dual-attribute core now sitting in his sea of consciousness.
Mo Lingtian's eyes snapped open as the blood seeping out of him retracted seamlessly back into his body. Vitality surged through his arms and knees, and his scattered hair quickly smoothed itself out.
He stood up, sensing the massive shift in momentum and power within his body. His Demon Core was back, and his sea of consciousness had been refurbished to perfection. Only the crater on his chest remained; it couldn't be healed by the death energy.
Looking up, he saw that the mist was rapidly fading from the forest. He could feel he was on the very edge of a massive breakthrough in his devil arts, directly fueled by the Yin energy. He was now half a step into the Dao Realm in the devil arts.
"That's enough! Your gravity spell is about to kill everyone outside," the first commander who had spoken to him said, laughing loudly as he casually dispelled the gravitational pull crushing the mountain range.
"I... I didn't even know..." Mo Lingtian stuttered, genuinely shocked as he tried to understand why he could execute spatial control on such a massive scale.
"You... you are really a monster. You understand the laws of the immortal pathway this early. Who knows what you will pull off when you finally step onto the immortal pathway," the commander said, quickly flying down and firmly grasping Mo Lingtian's shoulders.
Mo Lingtian closed his eyes, peering deeper into his sea of consciousness. There, glowing faintly, he found the law of space. He had somehow learned the fundamental foundations of space control while absorbing the dense death energy.
"Senior, I have mastered the death energy," Mo Lingtian said, turning to face the chief commander. She was hovering in the sky along with the two commanders by her side, while the rest of the sixty-seven commanding generals behind her tightly gripped their spears, swords, and other artifacts and weapons.
"Good. Show me your death domain," she replied, slowly descending to the ground. In unison, all the commanding forces in the air and the death army on the ground gave their salute to her, releasing a powerful torrent of energy as they slightly bowed down.