A group of five armored people entered the cavernous room. One of them wore imposing red metal armor from head to toe, and as soon as he entered, he immediately pointed at Aaron.

"What did you criminals do to the young maiden you kidnaped?!" he shouted.

Behind the five, a sixth person appeared. He wore black metal armor with inlaid green gems that shone and exuded Nature Energy. The man was a Five Star Naturamancer, and his helmet was open, revealing the familiar face of Logan Seccos.

"Brother, no!" shouted Lana with pain in her voice when she saw him.

"Shut up, whore!" replied Logan angrily. "You betrayed your own brother for a criminal scum, and now you think you can say something to me?!

"I told you that the goddess ordered me to follow him—"

A hand on her shoulder made her stop talking. She turned her face to see the Patriarch looking at Logan with a serious expression.

"Please, no," she whispered.

Aaron shook his head softly, denying her request for mercy. The last time Aaron had seen Logan, he banished him from his presence. Now Logan was breaching the decree.

The man was to be killed on sight.

Logan wasn't a real danger to Aaron at the moment, but this was a world of cultivators and magical wonders. It was always possible that those who held deep resentments would find a way to get rid of their target in the future. Aaron knew very well that he wasn't invulnerable, and he hadn't reached the top of his home universe by taking unnecessary risks.

He had learned the hard way not to go against his self-imposed rules. Four of the five people he had forgiven for bearing arms against him had come back for revenge. Two of those had been mortals during their first offense and, ironically, they had been the ones to almost kill him when they returned as ridiculously powerful Immortals.

His rules were a mix of the ruthlessness he had learned during the Everwar and the rules of the original Ironblood Clan that had adopted him.

Any time an offender challenged him upfront, he would warn them about the folly and consequence of their actions. For instance, he had done so for the Royal Guards in the summoning room and to the scum who had tried to kidnap him after his first cultivation session. He hadn't given this privilege to the people who had ambushed the Fire Wolves in the forest.

If they kept to that line of action, the original Ironblood Clan rules still gave them some ways out. Aaron, however, judged them guilty and enacted punishment at once.

Death was the usual punishment, at least for those in front of him. If they were ready for him, they usually felt good about their chances and wouldn't stand down. He had learned to kill them swiftly instead of waste time in pointless arguments.

Then there was the possibility of tribute. Anyone could offer tribute preemptively too, and he would either accept it or not. He only accepted it if he needed the tribute for his goals, and when he believed the offender would not attack him again. He seldom asked for it, but if the request itself served a goal, he would do so. Such was the case with him asking the Guardian Sword clan for tens of thousands of gold coins, which he had done to showcase both his overbearingness and willingness to negotiate to the people in the Clans Arena.

Lastly, he could banish the offender forever. That was the softest punishment and was reserved for those he didn't want to kill for tactical reasons.

With Logan, the issue was that after killing him, Aaron would need to pay close attention to Lana and become even more cautious about the possibility of betrayal of those around him than normal. The most likely end of the whole situation was that he would have to take her life as well.

That was terrible on an emotional level too. He liked to consider his rules somewhat fair, but how could he blame a sister for betraying him after he killed her brother in front of her? Killing her wouldn't be easy, not even for him.

It would make him feel too much like the instigator of the Everwar.

Alas, what had to be done, had to be done. He had made tougher decisions in his life than this.

"Alys, prepare for battle," ordered Aaron.

He didn't attack immediately though. Something was off.

Logan had shown himself to be a man blinded by pride, governed by his feelings of dislike for Aaron. That explained his presence here. However, that didn't explain where the other five well-armed and relatively strong people had come from.

Their presence indicated a calculating mind and a greater plot than mere personal revenge. And the speed with which Logan had recovered from the terror of being subjected to Aaron's death aura, as he had been the last time they met, almost proved there was an external influence at play here.

"Battle?!" Logan laughed. "Are you stupid?" He opened his arms, gesturing to himself and his group. "Nevermind that, I know you are."

In a normal situation, he would be correct in assuming that his power surpassed that of Aaron's group. The man in red armor with violet gems — nothing less than a Greater Mystic artifact — was a Four Star Qi Manipulator, while the remaining four people, two of whom were women, wore ordinary armor and were all Three Star Vitamancers. Logan himself was a Two Star Qi Manipulator and a Five Star Naturamancer wearing black metal armor with embedded green gems that released Natural Energy.

Moreover, the two of the Vitamancer were energetically connected to Logan and the other two to the man in red armor. A nasty trick for those unaware of it.

On the other side, Aaron's clan comprised only himself, a Three Star Qi Manipulator; Alys, a Four Star Shaper; and Lana, a Three Star Devout.

"But even if they weren't here," continued Logan, "even if I weren't so well equipped, I still would be enough to deal with you. With a snap of my fingers, I can fill this cave—"

"Brother!" interrupted Lana. "You promised the goddess—"

"I told you to shut up!" he interrupted her back with a shout. "I serve a new Order now. An Order that understands the needs of a Confluencer like me and has promised me much more than the pathetic status and limited power of a Two Star Paladin. An Order that gave me a subordinate at the Four Star level even in a trashy kingdom like this!"

Aaron nodded to himself. As he had guessed, there was something bigger going on. With that confirmation, he focused on his energy sensitivity, trying to notice any trace of energy outside the cave.

He found nothing, but that was dangerous in itself. If there were anyone out there, they were either skilled enough or powerful enough to hide from his sensitivity, or both. The worst thing was that Aaron was still weakened by the usage of his absolute limit in the battle with the Mouth-Man. Although he could probably deal with Logan easily by surprising him and exploiting his arrogance, someone stronger than the former Paladin would be a problem.

He decided on a simple tactic to minimize the risks of offending a powerful hidden figure. The first two moves would be probe attacks and if nothing happened, he would take Logan's life. He started pulling more Qi from his dantian to fill his exhausted body and soul more quickly, even if it would make him weaker for even longer after the fight. His body needed rest, not overextension.

For now though, he would make use of Logan's love for the sound of his voice against him, both to gain a little more time to strengthen himself and to make the enemies drop their guard. Fortunately, the fool had given him a great opportunity for that, as usual.

"Alys," said Aaron, "he called himself Confluencer. Is that a class? What does it do?"

She was already focusing on the battle that was likely to come and didn't take her eyes off the newcomers to answer.

"Confluencer is a support class for Herbalists, Patriarch. Their skills are about mixing the essence of different plants to create new species more suited to the purpose of the Herbalist. But I never saw a Five Star Confluencer before."

"Support class!" Logan exclaimed, laughed dismissively, and turned to Lana. "Whore, tell them the truth. This Rogue disgusts me, but he is a Herald of Light. As much as your goddess let me down, she is powerful, and the High Lords asked me to avoid spilling his blood if possible."

Lana clearly didn't know what to say or do to convince her brother, and the way he called her didn't help. It hurt her deeply and made it hard to think.

"Open your mouth, whore!" he insisted.

Tears fell from Lana's eyes. Aaron said nothing; Logan was already scheduled to die, there was no reason to waste words threatening him. Rather, for now, the more Logan disregarded Aaron, the better. Lana swallowed and took a deep breath before talking.

"Patriarch, two years ago, Logan became the youngest Five Star Naturamancer in the history of the Empire, the tenth youngest cultivator overall to reach the Five Star level if we exclude the Imperial Family."

Logan filled his chest with pride and smiled arrogantly.

"Confluencers are considered merely a support class and are not very well documented at higher levels," she continued. "He had already discovered new skills at the Four Star level and started experimenting with his new power after leveling up again. A few months later, there was an accident—"

The Confluencer interrupted, yelling, "I said it was not an accident! I evolved! I reached a new level of existence! Human, animal, and plant in perfect harmony!"

That was enough for Aaron to understand what had happened, but he didn't stop Lana from telling the rest of the story. The goal of all this was still to give him time to strengthen himself and distract the enemy.

The more Logan yelled at Lana, the more her body coiled in emotional pain. But she continued talking, still crying.

"He discovered that until the Four Star level, his power only touched the essence of plants, but at the Five Star level, he could manipulate the essence of animals and even his own essence. He tried to harmonize the human, animal, and plant essences within himself, and insists he succeeded. But he turned aggressive toward everyone around him, given to swings of mood. I had started my training at the Temple of Light a few weeks before he leveled up and after the accident—"

"Evolution!" repeated Logan.

"After that happened, a few days later, the goddess answered my prayers for help in a dream. She told me that if he became her Paladin for five years, she would heal him. It would be a progressive process, and the closer he got to the end of the service, the healthier he would become. He didn't want to accept it, but our parents forced him."

"Fools!" said Logan loudly. "If only—"

Aaron didn't hear the rest. The man in red was focused on Lana, totally absorbed in the story, and Aaron took the opportunity to make his first probe attack.

Qi Martial Arts: Elusive Steps!

He moved forward, pain coursing through his body from the intense effort after the battle with the Mouth-Man. Everyone looking at him only saw him disappearing from where he was at and reappearing in front of the man in red. Aaron's dagger was already in his hands, and he stabbed the man's armor three times at random points.

All the gems in the man's armor shone, and Arcane Energy flowed from them to strengthen the attacked places. An instant later, when the armor detected that Aaron's attack had ceased, the energy returned to the gems.

This was exactly what Aaron needed. He couldn't use Qi outside his body to analyze items, and that armor was well built enough that he couldn't feel its magical formations while it was in standby mode. But when the energy flowed through the armor, he could feel its internal formations and found their weak points.

All of this happened so fast that the target was still in the middle of taking a step back while activating the Qi in his body. The idiot hadn't even had Qi already filling his body in preparation for the battle to come, and it cost him precious moments.

Aaron's subsequent strikes hit one gem at two specific points, within a precise interval of a tenth of a second. The gem overloaded, and a chain reaction of the formations caused the armor to suffer a critical failure. It would take three seconds for the formations to come back to life and until then, the armor would be just something ordinary made of metal a little better than steel.

Three seconds was more than enough. Aaron's dagger went through the tiny openings of the man's helmet in quick succession, destroying his eyes and piercing his brain.

He cried out in pain, followed by one of the women. He tried to retreat even faster and moved his arms to protect his face, but Aaron used fast, well-placed punches with his free hand to push the man's arms away, while also advancing to continue his attack. He kept stabbing the man's face, destroying the flesh that kept regenerating.

The woman stopped screaming first, falling to the floor in silence. Soon after, the second Vitamancer connected to the target also screamed and fell to the ground. Finally, the target itself fell.

It had taken a couple of seconds. They were all dead.

"You call me stupid, but I'm not the one who tied the Vital Energy of three people together," said Aaron, both to explain what had happened to his clan, and to provoke Logan. "You wanted the guy in red armor to survive even lethal injuries at the cost of the Vitamancers' lives, but I just needed to kill the same guy multiple times. If I can kill him once, what is to stop me from doing it again? The surprise factor is only useful against inexperienced warriors."

Although the armors of the four Vitamancers appeared to be simple and had no magical formations, this was actually a trap; their material and design were far superior to the magical armor Aaron had attacked. Attacking the Vitamancers would only give the man in red time and freedom to strike back.

Seeing that his probe attack and verbal provocation had not yet revealed the possible hidden enemy, Aaron went ahead with the second probe attack. But this time, he would preserve his energy and delegate it.

"Alys, kill them all," he ordered.

"Yes, Patriarch."

The shaky voice in her reply made it clear how complex her feelings about attacking Logan were.

And yet, she obeyed at once.