The worldview of the four disciples stretched until it hurt. Doubt crept into the cracks.

For a moment, Radeon could feel it, their hearts turning fragile, close to shattering under the weight of what they were seeing.

He chuckled, not kind, not cruel, just steadying.

"Look at it this way. You and I are still here. Still thinking. Still breathing."

He pointed at the screen where people died, bodies turning to paste and crimson fog.

"Those people aren't so lucky."

The four disciples watched, their hands still clenched, but this time their eyes saw something else.

The masked men avoided the untainted when they could.

Their eyes kept drifting to a single point. Radeon tapped one of the physical body cultivators shown on the linen screens.

"Put yourselves in this man's shoes," Radeon said. "You think he's just sick fuck? You think he liked killing the innocent?"

He needed to drive it in. The last thing he needed was naivety in his peers.

"C39. Tune in. Let's hear what he's been murmuring."

The sound came at once. The disciple's voice carried shame and weight, and something else that fought inside him.

"I have sinned with my hands, and my soul bears blood-guilt."

"I am a murderer, unworthy of any second life or mercy I have not earned."

"To whoever rules the underworld. Have mercy on me, a sinner."

He chanted it, over and over. Radeon turned it up until the pavilion rang with it.

"If you think they wanted this work, say it." Radeon's gaze stayed on the four disciples.

The talk died out. Radeon's attention returned to the central screen, the one locked on the Aberrant.

The hulking men, all at Nascent Embryo stage, contained the Aberrant from every side.

Raw physical prowess met practiced skill. Fists and shins moved in tight, organized patterns.

They took three or four arms at once, forcing the Aberrant's reach into a tighter space.

Each man deflected the strikes the creature hurled from its many limbs.

The Aberrant could throw out a variety of attacks, but there wasn't much strength behind them.

Most of the men it absorbed were low cultivation. Breath Tempering, Cornerstone Setting at most.

It tried to wrench its bulk away. Another squad stepped in and hammered its titanic body back into place.

What's more, the Aberrant could feel its mass being shaved down from within as each blow shattered muscle and ruined tissue.

Self-preservation surged through it. Its mind spun, searching for a way out.

Then it saw them, tens of thousands who had taken its essence in the form of Vision Crystals.

Light beamed from its eyes. Those who had consumed Vision Crystals in any form froze.

Then they turned and ran back toward the Aberrant, as if answering a call from their saint.

When the hulking men rushed in to pummel it again, the Aberrant chose a brutal answer.

It jumped aside, discarded a great amount of its own flesh, and charged straight into the clustered returners.

Its appendages squeezed and bodies turned to gore. The dead flesh squirmed inward. More arms grew from it.

The discarded chunks moved on their own, trying to rejoin. The hulking men pursued, pummeling most of it into pulp before it could fully merge.

The monster changed again. It was no longer a worm with hands.

It became a sphere of misplaced arms and legs, a ball of limbs layered wrong, its compound eyes hidden deep within its flesh hide.

And inside that ugliness sat a cold intelligence. It had begun to learn the concept of martial arts. Not perfectly, but enough.

It started to parry by tightening its flesh at the instant of impact.

The physical body cultivators could still damage it, but each minute made it harder. The longer it lasted, the more it understood.

With that knowledge it moved with increasing agility, dodging and leaping, and whenever it found an opening, it assimilated more users of Vision Crystals.

The Aberrant's energy was not infinite. It burned through its internal reserves at an alarming rate.

With heightened awareness, it made a decision that was almost human.

It charged for the foot of the mountain. It needed out.

As it ran, it snatched men marked with its essence, feeding as it fled.

It grew at an ugly pace. From a reduced bulk of a little over a hundred meters, it swelled back to three hundred. Then four hundred.

Outside the Energy Prohibition Array, cultivators could still mobilize qi, so Jekyll flew down into position.

He conjured heavy water droplets that slammed into the monster. Each impact shaved off tons of flesh.

The Aberrant dodged some of them with eerie speed. But Jekyll was an all-in man. He let himself bottom out of qi.

A hesitation. A small pause, as the Aberrant caught the wild grin of a madman beneath the mask.

For the rest of the exterminators, it was a huge window.

Physical body path cultivators hurled themselves in and punched the beast back toward the Energy Prohibition Array, forcing it into the zone where it couldn't fully mobilize its spiritual energy.

The Aberrant was punched again and again. Each impact was controlled, meant not to puncture but to drive it.

They pushed its large surface up the mountain once again.

Not to be outdone, the Aberrant answered by charging back into the Vision Crystal consumers.

From far away, watchers thought the masked men were winning. Those who knew better saw the truth.

They had let it exist too long. It had been eating more than meat. It had been assimilating memories, wits, identities.

Tricks rose in it like bubbles in rot. Its consciousness grew faster than its flesh.

Seeing its large body back at the peak where it began, its huge body formed bubbles and started to sizzle. Seven colored smoke billowed from it in thick clouds.

The hulking men clapped their hands and drove the smoke away from the crowd, blowing it in a safer direction.

Jekyll caught it from outside. A water whirlpool formed and gathered the drifting color.

Another cultivator raised a tornado and helped suck the smoke in. As the flesh turned gray, the last of the smoke fizzled out.

A woman froze the tornado. It became seven colored ice.

A large amount of raw, pure Vision Crystals dropped free, gathered in a glittering pile.

The hulking men stepped back from the flesh as the mass fully deflated.

In the middle stood the aberration, smaller now, but not weaker.

Its flesh rippled and compressed into a tighter shape.

Fifteen meters tall. Ten arms. Six legs. A head dotted with twelve eyes looking in twelve directions.

The diviners read its level, and the numbers would not stop rising.

Before, it had only been peak Nascent Embryo. Now it climbed.

Spirit Transfiguration early stage.

Spirit Transfiguration middle stage.

Spirit Transfiguration late stage.

The hulking men pummeled the unmoving creature, but their blows did nothing.

It felt like denting steel. Fire and ice gathered as other cultivators tried to crack whatever new carapace or skin it had grown.

Jekyll knew it all too well. His voice boomed.

"Don't let it take second form!"

Small dark bullets whizzed in. They deformed on contact, like soft tin striking forged steel, but a lingering black clung to each of its eyes.

Those eyes bubbled and oozed. The Aberrant felt contamination pressing in through them, halting its physical transformation.

It tried to regenerate them again and again, but only more pus squirted out.

The masked men snapped their heads toward the direction the bullets came from, but behind them was only the fogged slope of Cairnlight Barterhold.

Jekyll felt it had to be Eldric's doing, yet he still could not be certain.

The monster, standing like an unmoving tree, suddenly moved. It seized one of the hulking men and spat a mass of Vision Crystals.

It happened too fast. The man was covered, crystal biting into flesh, invading deep.

A huge maw split open along the creature's body and swallowed him in a single gulp.

The pre evolved Aberrant morphed again. It gained the chiseled features of the man it had taken, and it moved faster, more deliberate.

The creature punched downhill. The air trembled, and a massive shockwave traveled almost in a blink.

The men guarding the runic pillar reacted fast. Qi barriers surged from their internal energy, layered without hesitation.

Thirty men threw themselves in front of the pillar, covering it without holding back.

The shockwave hit. The runic pillar held. The men did not.

Blood ran from eyes, noses, mouths, other orifices as their bodies took the force.

Others rushed in and dragged them away, limp and shaking, their line between life and death left unanswered.

Earth barriers rose around each pillar.

Elemental cultivators formed steel ice and hard armor over the physical body cultivators from afar.

Despite the death of one of their own, the hulking men did not back down.

The Aberrant spat at one of the armored men, but it slid right off.

With sharper instinct after eating a body cultivator, it adjusted its tactics.

Quills grew in its massive arms. Vision Crystals rained down by the tens of thousands, and its targets shifted to the common folk.

Water barriers, earth barriers, and bullets of different elements countered most of it, but a few hundred still slipped through.

When the crystals struck people, strength surged into them while their bodies twisted into partial shapes of the Aberrant.

These hybrids of man and Aberrant rushed in all directions. Not to battle, but to hunt people.

Then they began biting. From the bitten, weaker hybrids sprang up within seconds of contact.

With fifty thousand still on the peak, the Aberrant planned to make them an army of its own.

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