Samsara Paradise: Dream Weaver of Connections.

Mond leaned against the tree trunk, wanting to say something, but before he could speak, he was interrupted by a violent cough, and a metallic taste rose in his throat.

He spat out blood onto the snow with a "pui" sound, and the dark red liquid spread across the white snow.

Gemini's body had turned completely grayish-white, with a thin layer of keratin covering the surface of its skin, the texture of which resembled a dried-up riverbed, and cracks spreading from its fingers to its wrist.

The power of sacrifice is eroding his body, turning him from a living person into something that exists between life and death.

His goal was clear—Mond.

This idiot demon is the easiest target to catch on the field.

Hugh still has the ability to fight. Although his black flames have dimmed considerably, as long as he has a breath left, those flames can continue to burn.

Mondl is different; he's already exhausted and on his last legs.

The effects of the berserk potion have completely worn off, and Mondstadt is no longer much of a threat.

The older brother's judgment was tactically sound, but he overlooked two issues.

First, although Mondstadt was broken, his will did not collapse. The amount of destructive power that a fearless demon can unleash before death cannot be measured by simple data.

Secondly, Hugh is not the kind of fool who would sit idly by and watch his allies be defeated one by one. He has no personal relationship with Mond, but at this point in time, it is advantageous for him to be alive.

Hugh stood less than two steps to Mondstadt's side, ensuring he had enough time to react when the next attack came.

The older twin stood there, looking at the two of them, realizing that his time was running out.

He looked at Hugh, then at Mond, and the expression on that face, which no longer looked quite human, twisted for a moment.

He was calculating how much longer he could hold on.

He couldn't let his brother's revenge go unavenged; his brother was his only family member in the world, the only person he had ever cared about since childhood.

They were born together, grew up together, entered the Death Paradise together, and survived countless life-and-death trials together.

Now my brother is dead, dead on this unfamiliar snowfield.

The older brother, Gemini, grinned, his right hand pressed against his chest, on his heart.

The moment Mond saw that movement, his pupils contracted to the size of pinpoints.

At the same time as he pushed Hugh away, Mond leaped backward, flying backward like a cannonball.

The older brother's chest exploded.

He had already implanted an antimatter bomb in his heart.

The bomb was very small, only the size of a peanut, but it contained enough energy to completely obliterate everything within a radius of 500 meters.

The activation method for an antimatter bomb is simple: it detonates automatically the instant the heart stops beating.

The younger brother didn't activate the bomb before he died, not because he couldn't, but because his older brother still had a chance to escape.

The Geminis maintained their mobility during the pursuit in the frigid land. Although the younger brother was seriously injured, the older brother was still able to fight, and they still had a chance to leave this snowfield alive.

So the younger brother gave up the idea of ​​activating the bomb, chose to remain silent, and chose to let his older brother live on in his place.

But my brother didn't have that chance.

He had no escape route, no trump card, and no backup.

The power of the sacrifice is devouring his body, turning him from a living person into a walking corpse.

He can launch one more attack before his energy runs out, and whether the attack succeeds or fails, the result will be the same.

So he chose another way.

A method that requires absolutely no skill.

The moment that peanut-sized sphere was activated at the location of his heart, it collapsed from its volume into a singularity, which devoured everything of the Gemini brother, and then expanded outward.

Hugh only realized what Gemini was going to do a few seconds before the explosion.

He had witnessed many ways to die, having sifted through countless battle records in the archives of Arcane Eternal Star. Some were beheaded with a single blow, some were blasted to pieces by spells, some were slowly eroded by poison, and some were devoured by creatures they had summoned.

But this was the first time he had ever encountered something like modifying his own heart into a bomb.

He had heard before the competition that people who come out of amusement parks are not quite right in the head, but hearing about it and experiencing it firsthand are two different things.

The moment the twins' chest exploded, Hugh's body reacted.

Elemental power surged wildly within him, squeezing out the nearly depleted energy from every corner of his body—from bone marrow, muscle fibers, blood vessel walls, and even cell nuclei—he plundered every place that could provide energy.

The activation of spatial spells requires a stable output of elemental energy, but all he could offer at this moment was a frantic, almost self-destructive overdraft.

Hugh's body vanished from the spot just before the explosion reached his location.

The spatial spell was successfully activated at the last second, and his figure was forcibly dragged into the dimensional rift.

In those fractions of a second when he entered the dimensional rift, he felt a wave of heat chasing after him from behind, brushing against his back. The temperature was so high that his robe began to curl and char the moment it touched him, and his skin on his back burned.

Then the dimensional rift swallowed him up.

Mond doesn't have the spatial teleportation ability of Hugh, but he has something Hugh doesn't—his understanding of the contractors in the Paradise faction.

The Demon Race and the Paradise of Reincarnation had dealt with each other for many years. He had heard about the performance of those contractors on the battlefield since he was a child, and he understood the nature of the Paradise from the admonitions of the clan elders and the casual conversations of the veterans.

Although the contractors of Death Paradise and Reincarnation Paradise are from different paradises, they share a common trait on the battlefield—as long as they have a breath left, they will not let themselves die in vain.

Mondstadt was already on guard against this move when the twin brother's younger brother self-destructed.

It wasn't because he predicted the existence of antimatter bombs, but because he knew these guys from the amusement park would definitely cause trouble before they died.

So at the moment the explosion occurred, he used the last bit of strength in his body to run away from the center of the explosion.

After running several hundred meters, the shockwave caught up with him.

When that force hit his back, he felt as if his internal organs were being squeezed against the front wall of his chest cavity. His heart stopped beating for a moment, and the air in his lungs was squeezed out of his throat as a short, muffled groan.

His body flew forward like a kicked pebble, tumbling several times on the ground before finally coming to a stop by crashing into a protruding rock.

The sharp edges of the rock pressed against his side, causing his lumbar spine to crack with a sickening sound. He lay on the snow, panting heavily.

He survived.

When Hugh fell out of the dimensional rift, his body was completely exhausted.

His legs buckled the moment he landed, his knees slamming into the snow with a dull thud. He fell forward, his forehead hitting the snow. The cold snowflakes stuck to his forehead melted from his body heat, and the melted snow trickled down his nose.

He lay on the snow, scratching at the snow with his fingers, his nails digging into the gaps between the snowflakes, trying to prop himself up, but his arms trembled a few times and went limp, and he fell back onto the snow.

He was still conscious, but his body was completely out of control, like a machine that had been de-wound, with every muscle on strike and every bone protesting.

His back was burning with pain. The back of his robe had been burned by the high temperature, leaving an irregular hole. The fabric around the hole was charred and curled, revealing dark red skin underneath. There were tiny blisters on the skin, which were formed by the rapid freezing of the burns caused by the aftershocks of the explosion in the low temperature environment.

He looked down at his hands, where an icy blue light began to spread upwards from his fingertips, passing through his wrists and extending to his forearms.

He knew what this meant; the elemental forces were beginning to spiral out of control. Three days after the Abyss Hole was sealed, Lin Yi was still inside the temple.

He spent those three days in an extremely simple manner.

Sleep, eat, stroll in the temple, and occasionally sit on the steps at the entrance to look at the distant snowfield.

Occasionally, some blurry black shadows can be seen moving across the snowfield. These are the Frost Guards on patrol. They crawl out from underground, circle around the temple, and then sink back underground after confirming that there are no intruders.

Lin Yi's right arm has recovered from its alien form to human form over the past three days, but the recovery process has not been smooth.

On the first night, my arm was swollen and thicker than usual. A lot of fluid had accumulated under the pitted scar tissue on the surface of my skin, making my arm feel heavy as if it were filled with lead.

The swelling in my arm subsided the next day, but the scar tissue on the surface of my skin began to peel off, revealing the new, tender red skin underneath.

The newly formed skin was as thin as paper; it would break at the slightest touch, and beads of blood would roll on its surface.

He wrapped his entire arm in bandages.

By the third day, the scar tissue had mostly fallen off. When the bandage was removed, the new skin was much thicker than the day before, and the color had changed from light red to light pink. Although it was still different from the normal skin color of my left arm, at least it wouldn't break at the slightest touch anymore.

He pulled down the sleeves of his robe, covering his light pink right arm.

Xue explored almost every corner of the temple over the past three days.

She would float to the wall and stare at the ice sprite cores for a long time, bringing her face so close that her nose almost touched the surface of the cores.

Occasionally, she would reach out and gently touch the surface of the core.

But those responses became weaker and shorter, and some core responses stopped altogether.

Lin Yi noticed, but said nothing.

The consciousness at the core is dissipating; this is an irreversible process.

The wind of the frigid land howled outside the temple, seeping in through the cracks in the door, carrying snowflakes that rustled against the walls.

Over the course of those three days, the rest of the Arctic region was engulfed in chaos.

Su Xiao encountered the Night Witch the very next day.

The Night Witch neither ran away nor attempted to negotiate.

Su Xiao remained silent. He had no grudges against the Night Witch, and they hadn't even exchanged a single word before.

On this battlefield, grudges need no reason; victory or defeat is everything.

Finally, the story concludes with the Void Tree announcing the Night Witch's departure.

Mondl had very bad luck.

The demon race is known for its regenerative abilities in the void; a severed arm can regenerate in a few days, a penetrating wound can heal in a few hours, and a burn can scab over and fall off in a day.

However, resilience is not the same as combat effectiveness. Newly formed tissues need time to become tough, and regenerated bones need time to regain their strength.

It's a miracle he survived the explosion; expecting him to continue fighting is unrealistic.

When Quan Yu found him, Mond was leaning against a protruding rock, panting.

A small section of new granulation tissue had grown from the severed wound on his left arm, the tender red tissue standing out starkly against the charred scar.

Mond stared at him for a few seconds, then made a decision that was practically nonexistent in the dictionary of demons.

He decided to retreat.

Mond didn't waste any words and simply threw the medal to Quan Yu, his meaning clear: I don't want to fight you anymore, get lost.

Hugh met Waldy on the third day.

Waldy noticed the unusual thing in Hugh's hand, and his smile deepened. He pulled a piece of parchment from his sleeve. The parchment was covered with tiny writing and gleamed with a dim golden luster in the sunlight.

"If we sign it, we won't have to fight."

Hugh looked at the parchment and smiled.

He raised his right hand, and black flames condensed in his palm into a flaming sword nearly a meter long. The edge of the blade twisted in the air, emitting a faint sizzling sound.

"The contract with the demon race means you won't even know how you died after signing it. I'd better be more direct."

The black flame sword thrust forward the instant the words fell, so fast that Waldy only had time to dodge to the side. The tip of the flame sword grazed his waist, leaving a charred mark on his dark robe.

Waldy's expression changed. He knew that Hugh was a spellcaster, but he didn't expect that Hugh's melee combat skills were also quite good.

Elementalization makes Hugh more dangerous than before.

The icy blue light flowed beneath his skin, each pulse making his elemental output even more ferocious. The temperature of the black flames was higher than before, and the snow didn't melt but evaporated the moment the flames touched it. White steam filled the air, obscuring the view.

Waldy leaped back a few steps, waved his right hand in front of him, and a piece of parchment flew out of his sleeve and unfolded in the air.

The tiny characters on the paper lit up at that moment, and golden light surged from the paper, condensing into dozens of hair-thin golden threads in the air. Hugh knew that those threads were the manifestation of the demon's contract; once touched, it meant signing the contract, and the consequences were beyond his ability to bear.

Black flames surged from his body, coalescing into an irregularly shaped shield of fire in front of him.

The golden threads were engulfed by flames the moment they touched the shield, turning into tiny specks of light that dissipated into the air.

Waldy's expression darkened further; his threads were not physical, and ordinary flames could not touch them at all.

But Hugh's black flames are not ordinary flames; they burn not matter but energy.

Without the restraint of the contractual threads, Waldy has few defensive options left.

He took out a small cloth bag from his pocket. The bag was tied with gold thread. He ran his finger across the opening and the gold thread broke. The contents of the bag fell into his palm. It was a palm-sized amulet.

He placed the amulet on his chest, and black light emanated from it, completely enveloping his body.

Hugh's black flames collided with that layer of black light.

The two energies collided in the air without making a sound, without an explosion, without a flash, and without any visual feedback.

They simply devour each other, like two similar colors of paint merging on a palette, indistinguishable from one another.

Waldy's body began to blur under the black light.

He was using the amulet's power to detach himself from this space, entering a state between existence and non-existence.

Hugh didn't give him that chance. Black flames condensed into a short spear in his palm. The temperature of the flames reached its peak at this moment, and the flames at the tip of the spear turned from black to bright orange, like a sun compressed to its extreme.

He threw the short spear, the tip leaving a bright orange trail in the air, which slowly dissipated like a straightened ribbon.

The short spear struck the center of the black light on Voldy's chest, and cracks spread outwards from the point of impact.

A few seconds later, the black light exploded, turning into countless tiny specks of light that dissipated into the air.

Waldy's body lay on the ground, his dark robe riddled with holes from the black flames, revealing charred burn marks on his exposed skin. His eyes were half-open, the pupils gray and unfocused.

Hugh's attack completely incinerated Waldy's soul. (End of Chapter)