BLAAAAM! BOOOOOM!

A catastrophic detonation shook the realm, its thunderous echo rolling across the horizon without pause. The sheer kinetic shockwave shuddered through the earth beneath the four figures gathered beneath the shade of an ancient tree.

The serene breeze and emerald landscape surrounding them turned suddenly oppressive as a wave of intense heat washed over the basin. A violent gale whipped through the leaves, the atmospheric pressure of the distant blast forcing the four seated cultivators to center their focus. It was an earth-shattering clash—though occurring miles away, the energetic collision caused the entire sector to tremble.

"That is a duel between monstrous parameters!" Marie remarked to Jonas, turning her gaze toward the two female members of the Sky Squad. Ever since the double victory over the reanimated thralls of Saint Yonan and Saint Ganada, the four had remained in deep conversation.

Alicia rose to her feet, her eyes fixed on the eastern horizon. "It is a clash between two peerless grandmasters. Who else has Aji transferred into the Mirror World?"

Since defeating the dark husks of their respective grandfathers, both Barsha and Alicia had found this pocket dimension profoundly mysterious. The terrain scarred by their catastrophic battle—fractured hills, cratered plains, and scorched earth—had systematically restored itself, returning to pristine condition as if the violent clash had never occurred.

How did Aji come to master the mechanics of such a realm?

It was the Mirror World—an inverted realm that remained completely immune to permanent destruction so long as the physical earth endured. Any environmental damage sustained during high-tier training or mortal combat naturally inverted back to its original state.

Like a heavenly sanctuary, shattered forests rewoven their roots, and pulverized mountains reconstituted their peaks. Crucially, Aji possessed sole spatial access to open portals into this domain. Neither Barsha nor Alicia—despite Alicia’s advanced spatial spellcasting—could generate a portal to exit back to the physical plane.

They were bound to this realm, reliant on Aji to unseal an exit gateway or return to retrieve them.

"We move now!" Barsha declared. She looked back at the couple who had been sharing stories of the martial world with them.

Barsha and Alicia were well aware that Jonas and Marie had once served as supreme warlords within the dark army. Yet the two had long abandoned the dark path, refusing to use their parameters for tyranny or slaughter. They had found love—a pure, absolute bond that had completely reshaped their perception of peace and harmony.

It was an authentic, sacred love. Perhaps if all mortals discovered such profound devotion within their hearts, conflict across the five continents would evaporate, replaced by mutual respect and compassion.

During their long conversation, Jonas and Marie had revealed the truth behind Aji’s mysterious movements. Alicia realized that on the night Aji had returned to camp late, bearing subtle internal injuries, he had been engaging these two supreme warlords in secret combat. Aji had bested them both and transferred them into this sanctuary.

Rather than harboring resentment, Jonas and Marie felt a deep gratitude toward Aji for removing them from the endless bloodsport of the physical world. Here, in this pristine, self-restoring paradise, they could remain together for eternity, free from worldly conflict.

It was the perfect haven for Jonas and Marie to spend the remainder of their lives, undisturbed by the wars of mortals.

Barsha surged forward first, her movement velocity blurring her frame as Jonas, Marie, and Alicia fell in behind her. They tracked the direction of the distant energetic detonations. Though miles away, Barsha picked up a distinct, deeply familiar internal signature radiating from the epicenter.

Is that Aji’s aura?

If those parameters belonged to Aji, it meant he was executing yet another hidden maneuver. Barsha couldn't help but feel that Aji kept countless secrets from his comrades in the Sky Squad. Beyond their shared mandate to stop Lord Demon Shura from subjugating the realm, he seemed to walk a solitary path guided by an overarching purpose only he understood.

Aji... why do you insist on bearing everything alone? Do you not trust us to stand beside you?

Yet everything that had unfolded thus far had followed his precise directives. As Alicia had revealed during their earlier conversation, Aji had personally instructed her on how to neutralize her grandfather's reanimated thrall, providing the exact key to exploit Yonan's five-second casting recovery window. Similarly, Aji had provided Barsha with the precise strategic counter to overcome Ganada's temporal domain.

Barsha reflected on how intimately Aji understood the absolute disciplines and hidden structural flaws of both Saint Yonan and Saint Ganada. If Aji had merely studied historical archives, whose confidential scrolls had he accessed? How could an unknown youth possess such granular, flawless knowledge regarding the peak disciplines of two legendary saints who had perished twenty years ago?

There was zero doubt: Aji held a profound, direct connection to the Three Legends. Yet what was the true nature of that bond? Was the rumor true—was Aji the direct disciple of all three saints? But if so, when could he possibly have trained under them?

Questions pierced Barsha’s mind like sharp needles, making her head throb with the sheer impossibility of Aji's secrets. He hid his true origin behind an impenetrable veil.

"Do not let doubt cloud your mind, Barsha," Alicia said softly, accelerating her flight until she hovered alongside her captain. Barsha had been so deeply immersed in her thoughts that she hadn't noticed Alicia drawing parallel, with Jonas and Marie maintaining a steady pace behind them.

Alicia looked at Barsha with an earnest, reassuring expression. "Aji is a good man. He harbors zero malice toward the martial world. Through every crisis, he has protected everyone in his own quiet way."

Barsha offered a subtle nod, absorbing her words.

Alicia had long analyzed the quiet ripple effect Aji created across the realm. During the trials at Dompai, it was Aji who had shattered the Heart Dragon celestial artifact—not Gayatri. Alicia knew with absolute certainty that Gayatri's parameters at the time could never have achieved such structural destruction.

Then came the campaign against the corrupt Golden Crane Academy, where Aji had personally intervened to free Alicia from an arranged political marriage with Sengturi, the academy's leader. Together, they had exposed the Golden Crane's covert conspiracy with the dark army to mass-produce armaments for Mondu infiltrators. Aji had anticipated the entire plot from the beginning, engineering the armaments investigation specifically to drag the dark army's shadow network into the light.

Everything had originated from a private council between Warrior Jiro and Aji to expose the Mondu logistics chain. Every major victory achieved by the alliance—the global purge of Mondu infiltrators across the academies, the clash in the Tulisma Forest, and the neutralization of the Five Gates—had been meticulously orchestrated by Aji's invisible hand.

Then Alicia recalled the most profound event: the crisis surrounding the Moon Blossom celestial artifact.

When the martial alliance had turned on itself, with rival grandmasters slaughtering one another in a frantic bid to claim the Moon Blossom, the entire orthodox world had fallen under the artifact's hypnotic aura of madness.

Suddenly, Commander Dasatama had announced that he had destroyed the Moon Blossom to halt the senseless slaughter. Bowing to his absolute authority, the sects had stood down, restoring peace.

Yet before the artifact was destroyed, a mysterious energetic pulse had briefly suspended the consciousness of every cultivator on the field, freezing time itself. Alicia clearly recalled losing her sensory awareness for a fraction of a second. She remained convinced that a god-like entity had deployed an absolute domain to freeze the battlefield and shatter the celestial artifact.

It hadn't been Dasatama. Alicia knew that even a grandmaster of Dasatama's caliber lacked the parameters to destroy a celestial artifact of that origin. She had always wondered: Who possessed the god-like strength to shatter a celestial artifact?

The answer had finally clicked during the hellish conditioning conducted by Warrior Jiro. On the final day of their two-month training, Jiro had instructed the Sky Squad and Aaman to sit in a closed circle and assimilate the surrounding ambient energy.

In that moment, Alicia had realized the truth behind Aji’s month-long absence. While the squad had assumed he was training in isolation, Aji had spent over thirty days single-handedly purifying the corrupted core of the Moon Blossom artifact—transferring its cleansed, unrefined celestial energy directly into the internal pathways of the Sky Squad, Aaman, and Warrior Jiro!

Aji had risked his own physical vessel to purify a celestial artifact. For an ordinary cultivator—even someone as powerful as Dasatama—attempting to filter such volatile, corrupted parameters was equivalent to absolute suicide, capable of disintegrating internal organs in a single breath.

How divine were his parameters, how unyielding his core, to endure the purification of a celestial artifact without being destroyed?

The mystery of Aji's true identity weighed heavily on Alicia's mind. She recognized that Barsha was grappling with the exact same questions—neither of them could make sense of the young warrior who walked among them.

Closing the distance, the source of the energetic shockwaves came into view five kilometers ahead. Accelerating their internal parameters, the four figures flew across the sky like streaks of lightning, determined not to arrive too late.

As they drew near, clear silhouettes materialized through the settling dust. Ten massive, five-meter-tall demonized dreadnoughts—each equipped with eight metallic, spider-like limbs extending from their spines—were pinned in place by a wide-area kinetic domain that paralyzed their movements.

At the center of the field, a single figure moved at sound-shattering velocity, brandishing twin long daggers with absolute precision. Moving like an ethereal streak of light, he sliced through the massive frames of the demonized dreadnoughts, shattering their physical vessels and decapitating all ten identical heads in a single, fluid pass!

BLAAAAM! CLANG! TRANG!

The warrior executing the high-speed decimation was... Aaman! He was systematically obliterating the demonized clones.

Observing the falling dreadnoughts, Jonas and Marie instantly recognized the true identity of the defeated monster. It was Warlord Draudo, fully unsealed in his ultimate Demon Transformation.

What on earth just happened here?!