The void was exactly as he had left it.
A dark, featureless space that he had never bothered to decorate, because decoration was for people who confused their cultivation space with a personality.
What it contained was the only thing it needed to contain: the statues.
Nine of them, arranged in a loose arc across the empty floor.
Each one a cultivator whose soul he had carefully extracted, refined, and installed into a housing of compressed spiritual energy. Each one a reserve of power he could draw on in the right circumstances, or sacrifice in the worst ones.
Nine was good, but ten was better. There had been ten not long ago.
Unfortunately, the tenth had gone because of Chen Ruo. A peak Stellar Realm cultivator burned in a half-second so he could survive. It was a painful expenditure, a necessary one, the kind of cost that kept the books honest.
He walked the circle with his hands behind his back, reviewing each statue in turn.
Seven of the nine were Stellar Realm cultivators. The remaining two were early Elemental Realm, acquired as Qi Condensation cultivators, he had considered disposing of them once his collection improved, but something about waste had always struck him as philosophically offensive. You used what you had.
He reached the ninth statue and stopped.
The Masked One’s eyes moved over the statue of Ke Jun, and his eyes widened at what he sensed.
The aura coming from his most precious possession was mortal.
A flat, empty spiritual signature of a person with no cultivation whatsoever, the kind of aura that produced no pressure and no resonance and no sense of anything behind it except the bare biological fact of continued existence.
How could this be?
He had spent considerable resources, time, and energy on Ke Jun.
He had rebuilt him from the absolute zero of Qi Condensation that he had found him in all the way to Stellar Realm.
It had taken months, and it had required patience he would not have extended to most people.
The Masked One had done it because Ke Jun was not most people. Ke Jun knew things about the Civilization Realm that did not exist in any text he had ever found. Ke Jun was, in the language he actually thought in rather than the language he used with other people, an investment with extraordinary projected returns.
What he had hoped would one day be a bonified Civilisation Realm slave that served only him.
The Masked One’s eyes narrowed, he needed to find out what had happened.
He crossed the obsidian plain to the statue and pressed his palm flat against it.
The information arrived as the residue of events.
Ke Jun's inner world had been in a state of significant decay. He had known that. A Civilization Realm inner world without its cultivator actively maintaining it was not a stable environment. He had planned to address it. The three Realm Stabilizing Trees embedded in that world were something he needed for his breakthrough to Civilisation Realm, and he was going to take forcefully using the technique he had learned from Ke Jun.
But now they were gone.
Someone had entered Ke Jun's inner world and destroyed them.
He pressed harder on the statue, reading further.
The more he read, the worse it became.
The trees were gone, the world was destroyed, and whoever had done this had then taken the additional step of extracting Ke Jun's soul and removing it.
His jaw tightened.
Someone had taken Ke Jun's soul into their own inner world, which meant they believed that doing so would protect him. Which meant they had a plan for him. Which meant Ke Jun, his investment, was currently sitting in someone else's space being used for someone else's purposes.
The Masked One did not share his treasures. But before he acted, he paused for a second as a thought came to him.
That someone capable of destroying a Civilization Realm inner world, extracting a bound soul, and transporting it elsewhere without triggering any of the alerts he had placed on Ke Jun was probably at a level that he should treat carefully. But he quickly dismissed the thought.
The cultivators of this world were exceptional at building things. Inner worlds, cultivation bases, formation arrays. They poured their entire philosophical tradition into creation, into growth, into the outward expression of internal power. What they were not, as a rule, was good at attacking souls. The attack traditions of this world were physically oriented. Spiritual attacks existed but were considered supplementary. A genuine soul specialist was extraordinarily rare here, and he had never encountered one.
This meant that even if the person who had taken Ke Jun was operating at the Civilization Realm, which was most likely if not certain, they would still be vulnerable in the one area where he was not. His connection to the soul would give him a path into their inner world. And once he was in their inner world, he would do what he did.
With that decision made, he closed his eyes inside the void and traced the connection.
He felt it extend outward from the statue's ruins, thin but intact, traveling some distance he could not measure in conventional terms because the geography between inner worlds did not work that way. The connection passed through layers of spiritual space and arrived somewhere on the other end.
The statue's eyes lit blue.
The voice that came out of the Masked One's own throat in the void was the voice he used when he wanted people to understand that they had insulted the wrong person.
“Who dares steal from me?”
As his vision cleared, he expected to see an inner world.
That was what you saw when you traveled a soul connection to its destination. You arrived in the housing, and the housing showed you the world built around it. He had done this before and knew what to expect.
What he found was darkness.
He stood in absolute black and turned slowly, extending his spiritual sense in every direction, looking for the walls of an inner world, for the landscape, for any of the thousand small indicators that told you someone had built something here, but he found nothing.
Then he felt it, there was something looking right at him.
He turned toward it.
The tree emerged from the darkness slowly, which was the wrong word because it didn't move toward him, it simply became visible, as though the darkness itself was retreating. The trunk was vast enough that he could not see the edges of it from where he stood. The roots spread in every direction and disappeared into the black at distances he couldn't estimate. The branches above him went up far enough that they stopped being distinguishable from the dark above them.
He recognized what it was – a Realm Stabilising Tree, and one in prime condition.
This was exactly what Ke Jun had described, the technique would work on this, he could use it right now to take the tree for himself and recoup most of what he had lost when Ke Jun's inner world was destroyed.
Sure, he was still furious about Ke Jun’s soul being stolen and the trees that were gone, but at least this would be something, at least the investment would not be total loss.
He reached for the technique, and then he stopped.
His hands, his spiritual manifestation's hands, had frozen without his permission.
The roots moved.
They came from everywhere at once and from below and from the sides and they moved with a speed that had no relationship to how large they were, they should not have been able to move that fast, nothing that large moved that fast, and before he had processed the first root the second and third and fourth were already there and they were inside his spiritual manifestation and they were pulling.
He was being taken apart, slowly, painfully.
Pure panic moved through him, so, he resorted to his failsafe – the substitution technique.
One soul flared and went dark, but he was still here being torn apart.
What was going on?
The technique should have been enough.
It was always enough. He had survived Chen Ruo's domain with it.
Yet the roots kept pulling.
Another soul went dark, and another, but the roots didn’t stop.
The Masked One was burning through his collection, burning through years of work and investment, and the roots were still there, still working.
Two more.
Five total before the connection finally snapped and he found himself back in the void of his inner world, his spiritual manifestation torn into something barely coherent.
He stood still, waiting to see if the tree would follow him back here.
As confident as the Masked One was in his ability, he didn’t think he could survive it if it did.
Fortunately, a few minutes passed by, and nothing followed from the abyss.
Releasing a sigh of relief, he looked around to assess the damage.
Ke Jun's statue was gone. The physical form had crumbled, which meant the soul was completely severed. That was expected. But what shocked him was what had happened to the other statues.
Five of them were now rubble.
The substitution technique operated on a simple principle: one soul for one survival. He had used it several times over the years and it had always cost exactly one. The encounter with Chen Ruo's domain had cost one. Every prior use had cost one.
This had cost five.
Five Stellar Realm cultivators, destroyed, to extract his spiritual manifestation from a connection that had lasted around four seconds. That told him something about the power of what he had encountered that he was not entirely prepared to accept.
That had definitely not been a Realm Stabilising Tree.
That was something else, something on a different level.
With a shudder, he left his inner world, and opened his physical eyes.
Everything was black.
Sometimes the transition from the void back to the physical world took a moment to resolve.
So, he waited, counting to five, but even after that, it was still black.
He raised his right hand and touched his face. His fingers found his eyes and felt something wet, and when he brought his fingers away from his face and held them in front of himself, he could not see his fingers or the wetness because there was nothing to see them with.
His right hand trembled as he realised what had just happened.
He no longer had any eyes.
The monstrous tree had burned them out.