“Got you.”
The calm voice seemed to sound right beside the ear, like humanity’s verdict on a buzzing mosquito flying around at two in the morning.
In the next instant, that large hand seized the illusory neck of the Shadow Demon Zyra as if grabbing a helpless chick, squeezing it tightly.
“No! That’s impossible! This is the Shadow Plane! How could you possibly touch me—”
Zyra let out a shrill scream.
She even suspected she was dreaming.
A nightmare?
But if it was a dream, it was far too insane!
“Come back.”
Jon exerted force with his arm, muscles bulging, and suddenly yanked backward.
The world spun.
Zyra only felt herself being forcibly dragged out of the Shadow Realm by an irresistible monstrous force, pulled through a spatial rift like a rag doll, and slammed heavily onto the ground of reality.
Just that single fall alone made Shadow Demon Zyra feel as if half her life had been lost.
She struggled to raise her head, and her mind went numb.
Not only were the formation patterns of the demon-ascension ritual completely shattered, even the originally sealed space that should have been like a prison had been forcibly blasted open by the hero, connecting it to the outside world.
The ritual had been physically interrupted.
Damn that hero!
In the vast chaos of Shadow Demon Zyra’s mind, there was only one absurd and ridiculous thought at this moment: the Demon King Riya fought this thing for **one round???**
And even escaped from his hands???
Before: Demon King Riya is really trash, getting killed by the human hero in three rounds.
Now: Demon King Riya actually held out for a full three rounds?
At this moment, the second phantom of the Demon God that had been watching from the sky, the “Eternal Night Nether King,” suddenly moved.
It raised its hand, and one finger within the phantom gradually became solid.
Suddenly—
A beam of pitch-black light, darker than the abyss itself, shot down from the demon moon, striking precisely onto the Demon Ascender mark on Jon’s left wrist.
A bone-chilling pain surged in.
Jon lowered his head to look, only to see the mark on his wrist growing into a complex imprint shaped like a shadow ghost head, radiating a heart-palpitating aura.
The strange power invading his body seemed to have increased.
Although he didn’t feel any obvious discomfort, Jon instinctively felt repulsed and didn’t like it.
He even wanted to dig that “mark” off directly.
But just at that moment, the shattered space finally stabilized.
The surrounding “night” had already begun peeling away like broken eggshells, revealing the star-filled night sky of the main world.
“The path is open. Hurry and escape.”
Jon turned his head and reminded the surviving nobles behind him, who had already collapsed to the ground in fright, their expressions dazed.
The nobles woke as if from a dream.
One by one they scrambled and crawled, fleeing through the gap blasted open by Jon, rushing to escape this nightmare place.
The Nagas trapped here silently nodded to him and also left through the opening.
Jon stepped forward and, like lifting a black cat, picked up the half-dead Shadow Demon Zyra—who had already curled into a ball like a chocolate daifuku.
She was trembling and withdrawn.
“Although I don’t know what use it has… forget it, I’ll bring it along for now, so it won’t go out and harm others,” he muttered.
Before leaving, Jon paused his steps and turned to look deep into the banquet hall.
The old woman collapsed on the ground, whose life force had long dried up, was Zyra’s abandoned human original body.
At this moment she was full of despair and dullness.
Tears flowed from her cloudy old eyes as she stared at the “herself” being carried in Jon’s hand.
Her lips trembled, but she could not make a single sound.
For the sake of eternity, she had abandoned her human identity and abandoned her body.
Yet in the end she was abandoned by her own shadow, abandoned by the gods, leaving only an empty shell about to decay, swaying like a candle in the wind.
Jon gazed silently, finding her both ridiculous and somewhat pitiful.
*Tap.*
He took out a spare long-acting healing potion from his armor and placed it by the old woman’s feet.
This potion also had pain-relieving and anesthetic effects, so its auxiliary ingredients contained sugar and alcohol, barely counting as a “farewell drink.”
This was the last mercy he could grant this cold-blooded duchess.
Seeing the potion and recognizing its name, the old woman trembled as she reached for it, but stopped just before touching the bottle’s mouth.
As if resisting—resisting death, resisting acknowledgement, resisting the outcome of this total failure.
But in the end, she accepted her fate.
The aged Zyra drank the potion in one gulp.
The alcohol was not strong, yet it was more pungent, more bitter, and harder to swallow than any cup of wine she had drunk in her life.
A drunken feeling rose to her heart.
Perhaps it was drowsiness, perhaps sorrow—ultimately they were almost the same.
Ambiguous emotions flooded Zyra’s left chest.
Suddenly she heard Jon ask in puzzled confusion:
“Just to live longer, you fussed with this and that. In the end it all came to nothing. Was it worth it?”
Hearing this, Zyra instead felt relieved.
She smiled faintly. The bottle slipped from her hand and shattered.
“When I was twenty, I also thought I could stay young forever. Death didn’t seem frightening at all.”
Jon fell silent.
For the first time, he suddenly felt fear toward something.
And that thing was **growing old**.
He didn’t want to become old like City Lord Rossi, like Zyra.
“All my life, I’ve been abandoning things.”
Zyra’s cloudy old eyes gradually grew distant, gradually returning to calm.
She curled up, hugging her legs.
“Abandoning love, abandoning ideals, abandoning profit and desire, abandoning ambition, abandoning happiness… now I’ve even abandoned humanity and the past.”
She stared at the shadow of herself in Jon’s hand and showed a smile that was hard to tell whether it was bitter or self-mocking.
“Unexpectedly, after shedding my old form, the first thing I abandoned… was actually myself.”
“Hero.”
“Tell me, has my life really just passed like this?”
“It seems I gained nothing, as if everything ended in emptiness. When I stand before the bed of heaven and earth and suddenly look back, it is still a fog—like when I was young, gazing at death.”
“Do you regret it?” Jon asked.
Zyra was silent.
After a long while without words, she finally struggled to stand up.
Her hunched body once again recovered the dignity and confidence she had when she was still a duchess.
Zyra looked at the hero, the corner of her lips lifting.
“I… do not regret it!”
Jon nodded and prepared to leave.
At that moment Zyra suddenly called out to him.
“Can you give me a bottle of mana recovery potion? I want a more dignified way to die.”
Jon took out the last potion from his potion slot and tossed it to her.
Zyra once again **gulped it down**, drinking it like fine wine, with great satisfaction.
“Hero.”
Wiping her mouth, Zyra glanced at the shadow on the ground.
A flash of hatred passed through her eyes.
She laughed softly.
“Thank you for treating me to this drink, and thank you for listening to this old woman ramble. I’ll give you a small gift—better than nothing.”
Her final shadow magic activated.
The shadows began melting her body.
The drifting shadow traces eventually flowed into a scattered shard of glass, dyeing it into a pitch-black gemstone.
“My shadow and I are connected at the root. I’ve refined my own life into a Shadow-Control Gem. With this gem, punish and enslave her fiercely!”
“It’s what she deserves, hehe~”
Zyra’s voice and her hunched, aging body dissipated into the air together.
On the ground, Shadow Demon Zyra trembled when she heard this.
She popped her head out and stared blankly at the black gem, almost unable to resist grabbing it.
But when she raised her head and glimpsed the hero’s young and resolute face, she let out two miserable laughs and quietly shrank back.
Forget it! As long as I’m alive, it’s good.
Being alive is good.
*Wuwuwu*—her survival instinct couldn’t be stronger.
Jon walked over, picked up the Shadow-Control Gem, and fell into thought.
After a long time, through the earlier mental link he asked Lily:
“Lily, I’m finished here. I’ll be back soon. I… have a gift I want to give you.”
Without waiting for Lily’s reply, he followed the already opened rift passage toward the main world.
The passage was long.
Jon moved extremely fast, arriving outside even before the nobles, catching sight of the long-lost brilliant starry sky.
As soon as he came out, he heard a familiar cry for help by his ear—charming, yet with a hint of exhilaration:
“Friend! Save—my—life—ah—!”
Jon’s eyes sharpened.
Following the sound, he moved instantly beside Lia.
Demonic purple magic formations spread across the giant crater.
Wearing armor, he faced Mavi from afar.
The shadow ghost-head mark on his left wrist emitted a faint glow.
“Hm?”
Mavi looked at Jon curiously, her gaze landing on that mark.
—