The Man’s Decree – Chapter 5448

Keeping low behind Onneas' radiant wake, the party advanced, step by punishing step, into the palace's wounded heart.

Every pace forward meant enduring another lash of Soul Devouring Threads and another breath of corrosive miasma. Progress felt like wading upstream through broken glass.

The floor was littered with cultivators' corpses, faces drained of color, eyes frozen wide, lips still twisted in silent terror.

Their spirits had been stolen clean away by the Soul Devourer. Their bodies were nothing but discarded shells.

Artemis stared at the fallen, her chest heaving with powerless fury. Once, as Celestia's royal physician, every heartbeat she saved had mattered. Now she could only watch as all those cultivators lay butchered by Demonic Cultivators.