Standing in the middle of the area, Leon smiled.

The poisonous gas moved around him in slow rolling waves, thick and green, filling every corner of the dried pond without gaps. It didn’t rush. It didn’t need to. It was thorough in the way only something designed to kill everything in a fixed space could be.

The flesh of those it touched didn’t simply stop working.

It rotted. Visibly, quickly, the process moving fast enough that you could watch it happen if you chose to look. Paralysis first, then the rest following behind it at its own pace.

The poison didn’t discriminate.

Disciples of the five element school dropped the same as the commoners from Fire Village. The transcendent being that had been sitting comfortably on a rock above all of this with his staff and his white hair was now a corpse on the ground like everyone else.

Such was the scheming of a being that had once carried the title emperor.

He had built this place knowing exactly what kind of people would eventually come looking for it. He had known they would use other people as shields. He had accounted for that and planned past it.

Leon appreciated the thoroughness.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"First things first."

He walked forward into the mist without hurrying, moving through it the way someone moves through light fog on an early morning. Unbothered. Unhurried.

He started dragging bodies.

Where he found a disciple of the five elements school he went through what they were carrying first, taking whatever had value and setting it aside before adding the body to the pile he was building. Where he found a commoner from the village he just grabbed an arm or a leg and pulled them over without stopping.

It was methodical work.

About thirty minutes in he had built something that looked like a small hill, bodies stacked with the rough efficiency of someone who had done unpleasant necessary things enough times to stop thinking about the unpleasant part.

He grabbed the transcendent by the leg last and dragged him across the floor of the dried pond to the base of the statue.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Outside the mist, nothing could get through.

The five element school’s people were still up there trying to work out how to enter, probing the edges of the poison cloud with techniques that weren’t making much progress.

Inside it, Leon was having a field day.

Not because he was immune to poison.

That wasn’t it.

The truth was that back in Fire Village, Leon’s real body was still seated cross legged on the floor of his house, eyes closed, following everything his other body was experiencing through the sliver of consciousness that linked them.

This body wasn’t human.

It wasn’t truly made of flesh in the way that flesh understood itself. The poison had something to work on but not enough. It was like watching a fire try to burn wet stone. The gas churned around him and found nothing worth taking.

To this body it was just an obnoxious cloud.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"Hmm." Leon smiled, settling cross legged in the thick smoke beside the mountain of bodies. "Time for a long awaited return."

He flicked his hand.

A small flame ignited in his palm, and with it came a trace of something older and more specific threading into the air around him.

"Fu Shu."

The death energy sitting in the corpses around him began to move.

It churned first, stirring slowly inside the bodies like something waking up, then it pulled free and began flowing toward a single point in the air in front of Leon where something was taking shape.

A gate.

Massive, even in its half formed state. The outline of Badur’s Gates pushing through from wherever it had been sealed since Leon lost access to it.

He had wanted to reopen it for a long time.

Arian was in there. Ember was in there. Every treasure he had accumulated across his conquests, everything he had taken and stored before the gate closed, all of it was locked inside waiting.

It was still one of his most powerful tools and he had been walking around without it for too long.

The death energy kept coming, wave after wave of it pulled from the pile of bodies and fed into the gate’s outline, each pulse pushing it a little further open, the edges of it becoming more solid and more real with every passing minute.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Outside and above.

"That vicious beast!!"

A group of elders hung in the sky over the poisonous mist, looking down at what the cloud was sitting on top of. They couldn’t see through it but they didn’t need to. They had counted who went in.

The old hydra immortal had always been a troublemaker. Scheming, violent, indifferent to the cost his scheming imposed on others. Setting a trap was completely within his character. But this level of lethality, triggered all at once with no warning and no exit, had caught even people who should have known better.

Two hundred disciples.

Three transcendent beings dead.

One magic king who had made it out but was now sitting somewhere nearby with a rapid infection burning through him that no one was optimistic about.

For a giant like the five elements school, that number was not a minor inconvenience. That was a genuine wound.

"His account of the matter indicates that someone down there triggered it deliberately. There is a chance, third headmaster...."

A transcendent elder standing to the side kept his voice low and measured as he explained what the surviving magic king had managed to report before his condition worsened.

Someone inside had walked to the statue.

Someone had broken it on purpose.

Which meant this wasn’t just a trap sprung by accident. It meant coordination. It meant whoever was down there had known what the statue would do and had done it anyway.

The third headmaster floated forward slowly and descended until he was hovering just above the surface of the mist, close enough that his voice would carry through it.

"Hello, friend."

His tone was completely relaxed. The tone of someone who had been the most dangerous person in most rooms for long enough that urgency had stopped feeling necessary.

"I know you’re down there. I’m not certain of the circumstances that brought you here, but the five elements school is willing to let all of this go. Hand over the old beast’s inheritance and all will be forgiven."

The voice wasn’t loud.

It didn’t need to be. It touched every corner of the area the way deep water touches the bottom of everything it fills, reaching all living beings between heaven and earth without effort.

Silence from the mist.

Then.

"Why should I trust you?"

Leon’s voice came up through the poison cloud, easy and unhurried, carrying the slight edge of a smile underneath it.

"Show some sincerity. Why don’t you?"

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Leon kept the death energy moving while he talked, pulling it into the gate at full capacity, every thread of it he could reach from the bodies around him fed continuously into the outline that was becoming more solid by the minute.

He had felt the headmaster’s presence the moment the man descended toward the mist.

Just the edge of it. Just the outer layer of what that power actually was.

It was suffocating.

’Is this what sits above transcendent? Or higher?’

He didn’t let the thought reach his face.

From the outside he looked like someone conducting a negotiation from a comfortable position. Inside he was recalibrating fast, adjusting his read of how dangerous this situation actually was against how dangerous he had assumed it would be when he walked in.

Those were two different numbers.

"I need to speed this up." He muttered it to himself and pushed harder on the gate.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Above, the headmaster’s brow came down slightly.

"Sincerity?" He repeated the word like he was turning it over to check its weight. "What do you mean?"

"You leave." Leon’s voice came back clearly. "Allow some transcendents to stay behind and deal with me. I promise to not only hand over the method, I’ll show them how to make use of it properly."

A long pause from above.

It was an absurd request on its face. Leon was asking the most powerful person present to remove himself from the equation and leave behind people he was implying he could handle. The logic of it only worked if Leon was at or above the transcendent stage himself, which made it less a negotiation and more a delivery of additional casualties.

"Ludicrous." The headmaster’s voice came down with a new edge in it. "You take me for a fool?"

"No." Leon said it without hesitation. "You’re a respectable man. But you don’t expect me to place my life in your hands directly, do you? I can’t kill your transcendents. I’m only in that realm myself. This is the most fair arrangement I can offer."

There was a logic to it that was hard to fully dismiss.

Leon was framing it as mutual sincerity. He was claiming a ceiling on his own power and using that ceiling as the basis for a symmetrical risk. It wasn’t an unreasonable structure for a negotiation between two parties who didn’t trust each other.

What Leon hadn’t mentioned was that he wasn’t even at the transcendent stage yet.

The headmaster didn’t know that.

But he also wasn’t going to hand more of his people into a poisoned pit on the word of whoever was standing at the bottom of it.

He turned slightly to his left and spoke quietly.

Two elders vanished.

Ten minutes passed.

They reappeared.

A steel orb sat in the headmaster’s hands, dense and sealed, its surface catching no light. He held it for a moment, then released it downward into the mist and shifted his hands into a specific sign.

Fuuu.

The orb began drinking the poison.

Fast and indiscriminate, pulling the green gas into itself from every direction at once, the cloud thinning visibly from the outside within the first few minutes. The five element school had thousands of years of history behind it. In that time it had built counters for most things worth countering.

This was one of those.

Thirty minutes later the mist was gone.

Every corpse, every crack in the dried pond floor, every detail of what had happened inside, was now visible to everyone floating above.

Including the mountain of bodies.

And the young man standing beside it with the steel orb sitting comfortably in his hand, turning it over once with a look of mild interest on his face.

"This looks interesting."

He glanced up at the headmaster.

Then took one step forward and disappeared.

"Hm?!!"

The headmaster’s senses went out immediately, sweeping the entire area in every direction at once.

Nothing.

No trace. No residual movement. No direction to follow.

"Master." One of the elders’ voices came sharp and pointed. "That person used death energy. Look!!"

He was pointing at the mountain of bodies.

The headmaster looked at it for a long moment without speaking.

The pile was significantly smaller than the number of people who had gone into that pond.

He stood there and frowned deeply at what remained.

The scene was horrible.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​