A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 5992

"Hmph. I knew your hearts were rotten!"

"You barge in with parlor tricks to spy on me? Today you enter and never leave. The Thousand-Bamboo Soul-Locking Array could use fresh blood to season its birth."

Dark mist surged around Luther's frame, ready to lash out.

Jared lifted a hand, palm toward Luther, stilling him.

His own face remained unruffled as he studied the shifting bamboo and the crawling sigils.

A faint shake of his head dismissed their theatrics.

The formation is elegant—wood spirits woven with illusion, confinement, and killing intent.

"Whoever laid it knows wood-based arrays, yet forgot that nature flows, it never forces. Push it too hard and the stream chokes."

He drifted one step ahead.

The sole of his boot landed on the faint junction where several sigils intersected, a spot no broader than a coin.

Jared set his boot onto the pattern. No boom rolled out of the ground, only the faintest snap, brittle and sharp, like a bead of colored glass giving way.

The teal lines beneath him quivered. In the space of a breath they lost their spine, shriveling into dull sand, the way a snake collapses once the staff pinches out its bones.

The frenzied bamboo froze midwhip. Phantom leaves that had roared like a green storm sucked backward, tide reversing, until the grove stood plain and still.

Jared stepped again. The air felt viscous, yet it parted around him as though he were sliding through a curtain of water, and an instant later he was breathing on the opposite edge of the grove.

Lyza was planted beside a thick stalk of purple bamboo, fingers still fixed in a spell sign. Shock clung to her face, as if her mind lagged several heartbeats behind her eyes.

That Thousand-Bamboo Soul-Locking Array—her proud masterpiece, the trap that had once butchered cultivators of the High Immortal Realm—had shattered beneath a single casual step.

She had not even caught how he did it.

While the astonishment still widened her eyes, Jared’s shape flickered and re-coalesced three feet before her.

No crashing aura pressed on her chest, no blinding radiance wrapped his fingers. He simply raised two fingers together—sword-sharp—and aimed for the space between her brows.

At his fingertip the air dimpled inward. A thread of gray chaos pulsed there, swallowing light, exhaling a chill that made even thoughts want to freeze.

The defensive halo around her body looked suddenly flimsy, paper that had wandered into fire. Instinct screamed—if that touch landed, she would not leave a corpse.

Pupils contracted. Blood withdrew from her skin. She had no time to think of dodging, much less raise a guard.

His fingers halted a half-inch from her forehead, immovable, deliberate.

Jared lowered his hand, clasped both behind his back, and regarded her with an undisturbed calm.

"Shall we talk properly now?"

The bamboo glade held its breath.

The killing array and the illusions that had painted the sky were gone, as if childhood nightmares that fled with daylight.

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