Radeon understood better than anyone what made these wraiths and ghosts valuable. Not devouring. Evolution.

That was why eldritch things always targeted them. A ghost could change. It could adapt. It could be rewritten.

What's more, if he was right, what stood before him now was not a loose pack of hungry denizens.

It was an organized elite, shaped to guard a specific tomb and to endure those who tried to lay claim to what they were not welcome to.

He did not delay. He ran his devouring art and drew at the mountain's causal luck, increasing their success exponentially.

He forced it into his hands. At the same time he gathered the other current in the air, ominous and illusory, misfortune thick as oil.

Fortune in one palm. Misfortune in the other. He infused fortune into himself and into the ghosts, binding their fate to his method.

Then he moved. His blade pierced Calyx's head shallowly, the cut wide.

Radeon walked the circle as he carved, careful, deliberate, flaying only skin and skull.

He did not cut deep. He did not ruin what he needed intact. When the incision met itself, he lifted.

The top of the skull opened like a lid. Inside, the brain pulsed. Black veins webbed through it like a smoker's lung.

It looked almost normal until you looked at it right. Radeon's Myridion Seersight saw what men could not.

Runes from the void crawled through the tissue. Markings. Instructions. A craft meant to tilt this creature toward eldritch chimera.

Radeon looked into Calyx's eyes. The Preta was aware. Fully aware.

It had been sacrificing memories to contain the thing growing inside it, paying with its own past to keep the foreign seed from blooming into the future.

Radeon turned and swept his gaze over the gathered ghosts.

"Add a memory-sacrifice clause to the seal," he said. "If you don't know the script, start the swap body parts. Now."

The flesh mound he was in stirred at once. Pieces exchanged. An eye given. A tendon traded. A rib offered.

Knowledge moved through flesh faster than through words.

Radeon began inserting needles, one after another.

Needles bit into the brain and pinned a crisscross lattice into the meat, a containment web.

Under his sight, the void runes strained against it, pressing back like worms under skin.

At the center of it all was the true problem, the only thing in that brain untouched by his threads.

The eldritch seed.

"Ready," he said. "When I give the signal, we crack Calyx open."

The ghosts went still. Serious now. Dirty and aged hands reached out, grim.

"Three."

Radeon held the rhythm.

"Two."

The air tightened.

"One."

They tore. Flesh ripped. Limbs came free. Hundreds of parts flung outward in a heartbeat, hurled far to keep the body from reforming.

The Preta's torso crunched outward like fried pork skin. Radeon hurled the huge gathered ball of misfortune and slammed it into the exposed seed.

"Seal. Now," Radeon roared.

Ghostly chains whipped through the air, one after another, snapping taut.

Radeon wove their sealing arts together as they cast, binding technique to technique.

His skin prickled. Intuition. Something in him warned it would not be enough.

"Channel your ghost energy into me."

A thousand throats hissed. A thousand veins answered. Energy poured.

Radeon switched his body to the Bridled Voracity Physique and let it saturate, let it drink.

The flood rushed through him. His second body's cultivation rose like a tide.

Breath Tempering, early stage. Middle stage. Late stage. Peak.

Radeon reached into memory and chose an art without hesitation.

Revered Cosmic Devouring Revenant. His pale ghost body turned black.

Tentacles sprouted across his visage. Then small mouths opened along those tentacles, teeth forming like growths.

He began to gulp energy faster. The ghosts stared. For the first time, fear ran through them.

They felt a suppression of race, a pressure in their marrow, as if Radeon was the origin of all ghosts and they were only echoes.

Some wanted to kneel. Some wanted to flee. None dared.

Radeon did not look at their faces. He drank what they gave.

Cornerstone Setting, early stage. Middle stage. Late stage. Peak.

The sky answered. A tribulation began to congregate fast. Clouds thickened above the peak, black and heavy.

Radeon's physique swelled from two meters to three in a rush, his pathways driving toward extreme saturation, swollen enough that one wrong pinch could make bodies burst.

He did not stop. He grew and grew. Five meters. Eight meters. Ten meters.

Radeon sent a command through them, sharp as a lash.

"Get to the edge of the tribulation. Now."

The larger wraiths carried the smaller ghosts and dashed in a few breaths, spreading out, dragging their fear of him with them.

Radeon stayed. He looked up at the gathering thunder and began to curse, voice rough with contempt.

"Heaven, you're incompetent. You hand me gifts and dodge the price. If you're really equal, drop the thunder. No pauses. Collect this very life that i have."

Thunder saturated the sky, quick and eager. Radeon stood beneath it.

A creature over twelve meters tall now, all tentacles and mouths, black against the storm.

Beneath him, anchored to his soul and bound in chains and seals, the eldritch seed trembled.

Heaven gathered the thunder as if guilt had caught in its gears. The clouds tightened. The charge sharpened. Then it descended without patience.

The first bolt struck. Radeon's many small mouths gritted. His awareness stretched to the extreme, skimming the edge of pain while his mind hunted what he wanted most.

Raw Dao. Punishment. He caught the strike and drove what he could into his own frame, tempering the ghost body with force.

The rest he pushed outward through the ghostly seal.

The second thunder descended fast. This time the Dao of punishment came clearer.

Radeon seized it and infused it into the ghostly chains. He did it forcibly. The seals screamed under the change.

Ghostly chains wove into large shackles. The bindings darkened and thickened, their links etched with the power of the Heavenly Dao.

A third bolt came. By then Radeon had already deflated toward ten meters, excess mass burned away by the earlier strikes.

Thunder hunted weakness. His tentacles blistered. Boils swelled across them under the extreme heat, then split and ran.

Large shackles grew tangible, no longer mere illusion. Ghosts watched from afar with wide eyes, their minds bent toward reverence as the chains took shape.

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