Kiaria felt himself slipping – not into sleep but into an unmoored nothing where faces and voices drifted like pages torn from a book. He tried to hold them; names and shapes blurred to mist on his tongue. The world narrowed to the small, fierce ache of breath. He wanted to answer someone, anything: a hand, a name, a single steady voice to tell him it was all right. Instead there was only the great hush of being pulled apart.
Around him the tribulation held like iron. The green beam still lanced down, the weight of the heavens pressing his ribs together; invisible chains wrapped his limbs and drew him toward a depth where light thinned to a rumor. In the boat above, people panicked – then quieted into frantic prayer. "Patron! Patron!" the hunters chanted, a ragged chorus trying to hold life to a thread.
Chief Azriel moved through them like a stern wind. "Hold hope," he roared, voice cracking but firm. "Remember Ye Cain's fall – the Patron does not die while hope's flame still burns. Shout his name until your throats fail. Keep him tethered to us!"
They shouted. The calls rose and fell like waves against the hull, but none reached the place Kiaria's spirit sank toward. His spiritual body struggled against the pull; chains pulled, sank, tugged. The spiritual sea around him was the clear, pure light blue of a quiet. But the deeper he fell, the less of that blue remained. Above him, where the Blood Moon should have been, the white light reflection of spiritual sea that once watched over his spirit faded into shadow; the chains swallowed the sky.
In the gulf of that sea, his senses thinned. He heard distant screams layered over one another – the pitch of battlefield cries, the keening of mothers, the small sharp wailing of children. They tore at him, a grinding chorus meant to break resolve. He could not tell whether those voices belonged to the world or to the relic's trap. Panic flared; he tried to claw back, to breathe, to reach for the living warmth of Diala's voice, but the chains tightened and the blue receded as if swallowed by the dark.
Diala's whisper found him then, faint and fragile: "Kia… Kiaria… hold on. Don't–" Her mouth moved at the edge of consciousness; her lips formed his name and the sound traveled like a rope. Exhaustion took her; she collapsed. Princess Lainsa moved to carry her away, then pressed a quick dissolving pill into her palm and closed the chamber door.
For a time there was nothing but the pull and the voices. The Primordial Spirit watched with impassive calm; the Dragon Emperors' faces were stone, old grief and old fury etched into their features. When the Azure Dragon finally spoke, it was as though a mountain sighed. "We cannot reach him with force alone. Senior, will you?"
Primordial spirit ignored his words like nothing heard.
Then a voice answered Kiaria from the deep – not thunder, not dragon, but a cadence that settled into him like a dropped coin into a well. It came without visible form, close as breath and far as a distant bell. "Child," it said. "Are you tired? You are not meant to be here, for now. If you die, she too… Do you choose to rest, or to rise?"
"What happened to her? Tell me…, tell me…" Kiaria's fear surged, surrendered limbs moved again.
"So that's it." The voice placed a single white spark on Kiaria's forehead. It burned like a star and did not scorch. Flame spread, not angry but intense and purifying; monochrome misty-white coiled through his veins and touched the chains with increased heat. The grip loosened a fraction. The spark did not free him entirely – it could not. "This is as far as I may help," the voice murmured. "The rest belongs to your will."
Kiaria clung to the echo. "Who are you?" he asked into the dark.
"Ye Cain," the reply came, thin as memory and sharp as a shard. "This is the Life and Death Domain. Awaken your senses. Surrender, and you die."
Words. Enough. Not explanation. Not mercy. The spark did what it could; Kiaria gathered what remained of himself and obeyed the strange command. If the sixth had been insight, then here he would test the edges of the other senses. He closed his spiritual eyes and folded the world in. One by one, he sealed away sight, then hearing, then smell and taste and touch – not to dull but to focus them like a lens. The colors died. Sound turned to a flat hum. Touch narrowed to the point where only the iron of the chains kept meaning. He sank deeper, shutting more doors until nothing remained but the bare white heat of determination.
When nothing left to close existed, the sea changed. Kiaria's spiritual body melted into the light-blue water as if he were oil poured into sky. The spiritual sea and molten spiritual body failed marge, whirlpool formed in spiritual sea created rift. Kiaria's spiritual body reshaped and trespassed into the rift. In that spiral a glass surfaced – at once mirror and trap – wide as his own body, smooth as a lake at dawn. He approached it without the clutter of senses and touched.
The mirror cracked at the contact, not outward but inward: splinters leaping like knives into his skin, dissolving as they entered. They liquefied and merged with him, each shard slipping into the wells of his senses and melting to become something else. Pain came sharp but brief; then a strange stillness, the calm after a tide. Where those shards slipped in, Kiaria felt a new awareness bloom – not a word for it, nothing to pin down. It was a seeing that required no eyes.
He rose then – not by force but by the new balance he felt in his center. The chains had burned enough by the spark that, with his fresh sense, he could braid their ends and let the frayed will-thread slip. He did not scream. The sea pulled no farther; the chains shivered and fell away. He pushed upward, and the spiritual sea's light-blue washed across him like a rising tide until, at last, he broke the surface and reentered the life of flesh.
Back in the physical chamber the beam had not relented. Rain still hissed from the beam, but Kiaria's body – thin, blood-streaked, shaking – drew in a violent breath. The sound that left him was not a triumph but a ragged inhalation, the first claim of air in a long time. Around him, the relic's light flared in sympathy; the monochrome, low-frequency wave that rolled outward vibrated in everyone's bones – a single deep tone that steadied hearts and smoothed frantic breaths. It was not an answering shout but a quiet bell: he was returned.
His recovery was not sudden salvation. Kiaria lay still and began to cultivate in the stuttering shards of energy left to him. The chains had cut deep – spirit and flesh both bled – yet the Life and Death Domain had left its mark: a fuller, purer channel where his will could flow. He drew that brittle tribulation energy inward, folding it into himself instead of letting it crush him. The beam's rain, which once pierced like needles, became harvestable force; he learned to temper it, draw it into the newly formed core of his cultivation.
Above him the Spiritual Spring Embryo pulsed in the orbiting box. It had been watching – patient, like a heart waiting in its cage.
Kiaria felt that pulse, matched it, and guided the fourth tribulation currents directly into the embryo before it strikes. The embryo absorbed like a hungry beast. Spiritual Spring Embryo at the bottle neck for breakthrough.
Fifth tribulation appeared. A massive water palm form with lightening essence. Spiritual Spring Embryo rose upward; with embryo spiritual spring hidden under Infant River also rose. Spiritual Spring took shape of the replica of water palm. Clashed each other.
Spiritual Spring fell like rain, replenishing all life sources.
Small flares of lightening drop remnants from water palm absorbed by Spiritual Spring Embryo. Embryo breakthrough with lightening ability.
The whirlpool that had menaced below the boat quieted; the water stilled and surrendered itself back to the river's slow patience.
When at last the last of the tribulation's storms passed, the relic eased its pressure. The treasure box folded itself gently into Kiaria's palm as if it had always belonged there. The Spiritual Spring Embryo slipped back into the vessel, content. Chief Azriel stood beside the Princess, shoulders sagging with relief and something like reverence.
"He did it," the Chief breathed. "He surpassed the Life and Death challenge. He… he is still with us."
The Princess bent and touched Kiaria's brow as if to anchor him. "Sleep," she whispered to Diala when she returned in worried haste. "He needs rest."
Diala's eyes were wide and raw. She moved to Kiaria and took his hand with a tenderness that steadied him more surely than any artifact. "Kia," she murmured. "You're back. Don't–don't leave me again."
Kiaria's fingers tightened for the briefest moment. His voice was a scraped whisper. "I'm here. I'm… not finished."
They carried him below deck to a quiet room.
When the chamber door closed and sleep gathered like a curtain around Kiaria, the monochrome wave that heralded his return faded into the hull like an echo. In the silence there remained one small change: a low, steady hum in his spirit, the seventh sense thrumming like a tuned string beneath his ribs. It was not yet a nameable power, only a depth, a font of quiet sight that saw through the quicksilver lies of obsession.
Outside, the Infant River flowed on, indifferent and slow beneath a sky that held no easy answers. Inside, those who had watched the Patron's fall and rise kept vigil. They had been given a strange mercy: life returned, a relic acknowledged, a child who now held something terrible and luminous in his hands.