Now that the enemies within the city had been rendered immobile, he contacted the red-eyed great elder via sound transference talisman and ordered her to call off those outside, who were seconds away from breaking his barrier and were putting a tremendous strain on his spiritual energy reserves. Hearing her pervasive voice penetrating through the chaotic din, Jason let out a subconscious sigh of relief. No matter how strong he’d become, there was no way that his arrayment could last against the combined attacks of several thousand people for more than half an hour, even if it was one of the best in Nia’s history and despite the fact that he was constantly supplying it.
Wait outside the city. I’ll be done in a couple of hours. Injecting spiritual energy into his arrayment, he altered the barrier’s composition and it abruptly ceased to exist. Centring his gaze on the area of dark sky where the elder hovered unseen above the city, he fought off a subconscious frown. What happened next with the disciples in this war band would all depend on her acting skills along with whether or not she was able to properly convince them to do as he’d instructed.
The city was now deathly silent, as if its terrified inhabitants were too frightened to risk making so much as a peep lest they alert those outside to their specific hiding spots. Looking up and down the cobbled streets—which had been in fairly good condition prior to the attack—he strode past several emaciated corpses on his way into the nearest house. Once inside, he calmly strode over to a disciple that was frozen in place with his hand inside of the chest of a middle-aged man’s shrivelled body, a dazed woman attempting to collect herself in the corner of the room where she had clearly been struck unconscious minutes earlier.
Looking around the room as if in search of something, she abruptly froze up as she recognized the clothes on the emaciated corpse of her husband, which was sagging into the immobile arm of his killer.
“H—Harold!”
Jason stabbed his hand into the disciple’s back, refining all of the blood within his body in a handful of seconds. While he allowed the killer’s corpse to fall to the ground with a light thud, he caught the dead homeowner, strode into the next room and then gently laid him down atop a thick rug of unknown fur.
“I’m sorry,” said Jason, glancing at the woman with pity.
Lost in an episode of shock and despair, the woman ignored him as she crawled across the hardwood floor with frantic hands. Once at her husband’s side, she ran her shaking fingers over his pale, shrivelled face and devolved into heart-torn sobs.
Jason left without another word, stopping to retrieve the spatial bag of the dead disciple—which he tossed into the grief-filled room that he’d just walked out of—before he walked out into the deserted streets with fresh anger in his steps.
Heading into the next house, he simply covered the four disciples inside with spiritual energy and ferried them outside. He did the same with every one of their comrades, hurrying up and down each street and entering any home that housed the distinctive auras of those from the sect. By the time he was finished, he had gathered well over a thousand people and trapped them within a huge mass of spiritual energy that he then directed to the central plaza where it hovered about ten metres above the ground like a huge net that had caught plenty of fish. The sight reminded him of the memories that he’d inherited from the Soul Meld of when Actius and all of the Neomen from Nia had first encountered the Six Celestial Shadows immediately after their arrival on Venara. Although Jason hadn’t experienced it firsthand, he would never forget the sight of the chained woman and her compatriots immobilizing millions of people and trapping them midair before simultaneously refining all of them with their advanced mastery of the Blood Burning Heart Technique.
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At least this time it’s justified.
Murder, rape, torture—Jason had seen all sorts of atrocities over the past couple of hours, enough to convince him to give special treatment to the particularly evil members of the sect.
Ignoring all of the curses and brainless threats that were pouring down from the mass of captured disciples, he took a deep breath and drew out a silencing arrayment to mute all sound within the boundary of its influence. After muffling all of the angry shouts, he then cast another arrayment around the entire city, one which would prevent those outside from hearing any sounds from within. Once this was done, he covered himself in spiritual energy and flew about three hundred metres above the ground. Infusing his voice with inner essence, he spoke in as convincing a tone as possible as his words were projected all throughout his immediate vicinity.
“People of Calmer! I’ve taken care of the disciples within the city, but before I go I’d like to leave a few gifts for you.” Settling a merciless gaze upon those that he had gathered and knowing that they could hear every word that left his lips, he said, “If you’ve suffered at the hands of these scumbags, come to your city’s central plaza. I’ll be crippling the cultivations of about a hundred of the disciples that I’ve captured, specifically the ones that have made you suffer the most.” Seeing fear slip onto the faces of his captives, he maintained eye contact with the group. “What you do to them is up to you, but if I were you I’d take my time killing them. Don’t be afraid to get creative!”
Spotting the individuals that had been the focus of the worst scenes that he’d walked in on within the city, he separated them from the main mass of disciples and then arranged them in two long lines. Without showing any change to his expression, he dropped down to the cobbled stones below before walking up and down these lines and ruthlessly stabbing an index finger into each of their dantians. While intangible in nature, their dantians still began to leak energy as soon as the area that housed them was damaged to a certain extent, a process that was further fueled when he disrupted their inner essence channels with a bit of his own energy.
“You can’t leave us like this,” cried one of the men, who continued to look at Jason with a betrayed expression. “Aren’t we of the same sect? How can you leave us in the hands of these mongrels?”
“He’s right!” yelled a girl at his side, her face stained with indignant tears. “You’re one of us. Why turn your back on the sect for a bunch of lessers? It’s we who’ve been fighting side by side all this time, we who’ve survived all this together. Leaving us here like this is…it’s inhumane!”
“Inhumane is killing babies and toddlers, like you were doing when I found you. Humane… Don’t you dare throw that word around.”
Jason sensed dozens of citizens carefully emerging from their homes, many closing in on the plaza with slow, careful steps. Noting this, he turned his back on the hundred people that he’d rendered completely defenseless, none of which were arrayment practitioners and thus were now as weak as Jason had been when he’d first woken up within that little shack in Redfox Village after the Interspatial Migration. Strengthening his hold on the mass of disciples above him, he leapt high up into the air only to land atop the back of one of his summoned serpents in a fluid, graceful motion. To the dismay of the frightened disciples that he’d left behind, the rest of the mindless creatures gathered at the centre of the plaza and began to circle around them. After completing a few menacing laps, they all dissipated into nothingness at the exact same moment, at which point the hesitant townsfolk began to creep closer, the ones that had braved the outside to see if his words were true once all of the destructive sounds had ceased.
As he willed the remaining serpent to fly out of the city from the side opposite the great elder and those that she commanded, he focused his sixth sense on the young woman that had just spoken out. With a thought, a human-sized mass of energy detached from his body and flashed across the space between them only to envelope her entire being. Her robes were melted away in an instant as if she had just been engulfed in an acidic mist, as was her spatial bag along with any other sets of clothing that she might have possessed. Suddenly naked in the midst of a hundred of her martial siblings, she did her best to cover herself with her arms and hands. Wearing nothing but an enraged expression, her face turned red as the eyes of those around her were drawn to her sensitive areas on instinct.