Outworld Liberators-Chapter 191: Turn on the Lights
The participants moved frantic in the dark, chased by a clock they could not see and a fog that swallowed distance.
By the remaning ninth hour, desperation made people creative.
Some started singing, not for courage but for position, so others could hear them and not step on them.
Some copied the way skeletons moved, stiff and clacking, hoping the dead might mistake them for kin.
Some made animal sounds, barking and yelping into the black, trying to scare off what they could not fight.
Most stopped pretending they were lone heroes.
They grouped up in hundreds, and it was almost surprising how harmonious it looked from above.
Not kindness. Not unity. Just math. They already knew the prime names.
The son of a high merchant. The son of a cultivator. The ones with backing, with resources, with a reason to be kept alive.
What’s more, people were promised benefits, a few spirit stones, connections, even backing.
People clustered around those names the way cold hands reached for a fire.
That felt more realistic to most, since some had joined only to try their luck.
Those who could not agree on a leader fought. Blades came out. Stones swung. Bones broke.
They kept killing until bodies stopped twitching and nothing more came out of them.
As the action ensued, two dark horses had climbed the ranks where no one expected.
One was Raj. The asura youth of twelve that the ghosts had saved from the bottom of the auction houses.
You could say Radeon had planted him in this tournament, in his own quiet way.
Radeon walked in a black robe with white hair that drew eyes like a flare in the dark.
People noticed him without meaning to.
Raj approached Radeon like he had rehearsed it in his head a hundred times.
"Sir. My father told me that if I want something, I just need to follow my intuition and talk to the strongest man."
Radeon did not react beyond a slight tilt of the eyes. He let the boy speak.
"Why’d you say that?"
"Senior. You may not believe this, but when I saw you the first time, when you were spying on us caged men, I felt like you ruled everything that existed."
Radeon watched him a long beat, expression empty, inviting the truth to keep walking out.
"My father accidentally dropped me in the north when we visited the Ossuary eight years ago," Raj said. "I just want to go home."
"Join the tournament," Radeon had told him back then. "Play around here for now. Earn your keep. It is quite far."
Raj had nodded as if home was only a few streets away. It was not.
Asura lands lay on an entirely different continent, Marchlast Constantine, a place where asura lived by tradition and violence so old it had become law.
They were not simply men with horns and stories. They were demigods shaped like people until they decided not to be.
They grew arms, legs, heads. A newborn asura could walk within hours. Speak within days. Then start fighting other children in a month.
A teen asura without cultivation could go toe to toe with a gilded core realm.
Radeon watched Raj perform now with a measured calm. He had bound the boy with prohibitions on sight, hearing, and touch.
Restraints stacked on restraints. If Raj had been allowed his full nature, he could have taken half the arena in half a day.
Heaven was fair in its own cruel math. Asura needed a hundred years to conceive a child.
Some tried every day for decades, worked eighteen hours a day to build life, and still nothing came.
That was why asura were few. Power paid its price in silence and empty cradles.
The other surprise was Raxutus.
Son of Calixtus, emperor of Craftsworth, of Guilds Peak. The name sounded like iron. The man of twenty-nine was not.
No aptitude for cultivation. No talent for body path either. Pimples. Fat. Unkempt beard. Unwashed hair.
Eyes a little dull, but with a stubborn fighting spark still caught in them like a coal that refused to die.
He had worked hard anyway, telling himself that one day he would still cultivate.
His father urged him to marry. Raxutus refused, insisting he would bloom later, insisting time would forgive him.
He was given business to run and still he clung to the same dream. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦
Then he saw the woman he had once been promised, happy with someone else.
That was when the wasted years finally hit him.
When news spread that God Eldric would build a school, Raxutus did not hesitate. He came at once.
He had even prepared a speech in his head, the kind of desperate vow a man made when he had nothing left to bargain with.
If he had to become half undead to cultivate, so be it.
His father’s bloodline could have opened doors. Calixtus had ties to the strongest sect in the world, Divine Jade Court, an inner elder by rank.
But he preferred blacksmithing and array creation to sect politics and never pulled those strings.
The Court was far anyway. A spirit boat trip could take five years.
Going there and back was a decade, with dangers in between that did not care about surnames.
So when Eldric opened an opportunity closer than a lifetime away.
"Everyone, hear me. These are the final three hours. The lights will now be lit."
"A hundred beams of light shall mark your exits."
"If you do not depart by one of them, flag or no, you will be disqualified."
"Be careful of the light."
Small motes of light appeared at once, like fireflies in the dark.
People reached for them as they drifted down.
The first few who touched them learned the lesson too late.
The motes burst into blinding light the moment skin met glow.
Shouts rang out across the arena, frantic and startled, like nobody had heard Eldric at all.
Those who caught the warning in his tone ducked and covered their eyes, but even they staggered as the light poured through their lids and seemed to pass through flesh.
It did no damage. It was simply too bright to endure.
Tabulae caught the meaning at once. She had been born an academic genius, the kind that heard the rule behind the rule.
She was not the only one.
The snatching phase of the tournament had begun.
