A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 6542

The void passage slowly closed.

In Terrandya Crown City, Osric, chairman of the Abyssal Exchange, stood at a distance and watched that smear of crimson on the horizon.

He knew Jared had gone to the Eighteenth Firmament.

And by now, the entire Seventeenth Firmament had already become Jared's territory.

Jared hadn't touched him.

Osric didn't know whether that was because Jared didn't dare—or because he simply couldn't be bothered.

But one thing was certain: Osric could not let the Aureate Codex, the inheritance of the Aureate Way, slip away just like that.

It was far too valuable.

He immediately used the Abyssal Exchange's cross-firmament Communications Array to contact Cedric.

The Abyssal Exchange's cross-firmament Communications Array was an ancient relic of immense value.

Every activation burned through several hundred supreme spirit stones, so unless there was no other choice, it was never used lightly.

Cedric, chairman of the Abyssal Exchange in the Eighteenth Firmament, was Osric's brother.

Cedric's face appeared inside the Communications Array.

Osric relayed every detail about Jared without leaving out a single word.

At the end, he added, "This boy carries the Aureate Codex, the supreme inheritance of the Aureate Way that vanished for tens of thousands of years. If we can seize it, the Abyssal Exchange's standing across the heavens will rise again. Brother, you must stop him in the Eighteenth Firmament. Whatever it costs."

After hearing him out, Cedric fell silent for a moment.

His fingers tapped lightly against the armrest of his chair.

Then he smiled.

Not the easy, practiced smile of a merchant, but the look of a hunter who had just spotted prey.

"The Aureate Codex? The supreme inheritance of the Aureate Way, lost for tens of thousands of years?"

He let out a low chuckle. "Interesting. A kid in the True Immortal Realm carrying something that precious, and he still dares enter the Eighteenth Firmament with only one companion. Don't worry, brother. I know exactly what to do."

When the transmission ended, Cedric rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the Void Pavilion, looking down over the land of the Eighteenth Firmament below.

The cloud-sea rolled underfoot.

From 10 thousand meters in the air, the nine golden towers of the Ember God Palace and the floating sacred dais of the Hall of Radiance looked like two flames of different colors, burning across the vast earth.

"Jared."

He said the name once, softly, as if savoring a delicacy that had not yet been served.

"He carries the Aureate Codex, and chaotic force too. Those idiots in the Ember God Palace and the Hall of Radiance only know how to kill. They don't even understand that you strip a man clean before you kill him.

What a waste."

He turned and instructed his confidant behind him, "Spread the order. I want every scrap of intelligence dispatch on Jared watched closely. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, I want to know before anyone else."

His confidant hesitated. "Chairman, are we supposed to... capture him?"

"Capture?"

Cedric shook his head. "No. We're going to help him.

Help him gain a foothold. Help him fight the Ember God Palace and the Hall of Radiance. Help him become one of the great powers of the Eighteenth Firmament."

He paused, and his smile deepened into something harder to read.

"When he's trampled every enemy beneath his feet, when he's overflowing with gratitude to us and not guarding against a thing—that will be the perfect moment to make our move."

---

Behind them, the void passage slowly closed, and the last trace of light from the Seventeenth Firmament was swallowed by the spatial fissures.

Jared and Gwendolyn were swept forward by the force of space, their figures shooting through layer after layer of spatial barriers at a speed beyond imagination.

Around them, light and shadow twisted without end.

One moment it looked like a brilliant river of stars, the next like dark currents in an abyss, and then it shattered into countless broken scenes.

Those scenes were fragments of worlds the spatial passage brushed past along the way.

Some were all green mountains and clear water. Some were mountains of corpses and seas of blood.

Some were nothing but a dead, silent starry sky.

Gwendolyn's hand clamped tight around Jared's arm. This wasn't her first time entering the void passage, but this time was different.

There was no fixed exit. Morgana wasn't waiting on the other side to open the way for them. They were forcing their way into an unknown world by chasing the fleeing Envoy's fading spatial trail.

It hadn't erased their shape.

One dark-gold skeleton still held a battle stance, both arms raised high. The weapon it had once gripped had already crumbled to dust, but its fighting spirit seemed frozen inside the bones themselves.

Above them, the sky was a deep violet, darker than the sky of the Seventeenth Firmament.

Three suns hung high overhead—one brilliant gold, one silver-white, one blood red.

Their light braided together and washed the wasteland in colors that were beautiful at first glance and deeply wrong the longer she looked.

The air held spiritual essence several times denser than the Seventeenth Firmament's, but something savage was mixed into it,

the leftover killing intent of countless powerful adepts who had slaughtered one another here over tens of thousands of years, until it had fused completely with the spiritual essence.

"This place..." Gwendolyn looked around, shock flashing through her eyes. "What happened here?"

"An ancient battlefield."

Jared's spirit sense was already spreading outward. Chaotic force rolled away from him in invisible ripples, covering several thousand miles.

"It was massive, and the people who fought here were terrifyingly strong. Every one of these skeletons belonged to someone who was at least in the Golden Immortal Realm while they were alive."

His spirit sense kept reaching deeper into the wasteland, probing the farthest depths until it caught several presences so ancient they barely felt like living things at all.

Those auras flickered in and out, like great whales rising now and then from the deep sea. Every time one surfaced, the laws of space gave a faint shudder.

They were the remnant souls of powerful figures who had fallen here tens of thousands of years ago. Now they had fused with the spatial fissures of the wasteland, suspended somewhere between life and death.

They did not attack.

They did not dissipate.

They simply slept on, age after age, in this forgotten land.

"No immediate threat."

Jared withdrew his spirit sense. "But their presence destabilizes the laws of space here. If we fight in this place, we can't tear space open carelessly. A spatial fissure could set off a chain reaction and wake something that should stay asleep."

Gwendolyn nodded and fixed his warning firmly in her mind.

"Let's move. We need to find a place to settle in first."

With that, Jared started forward. Gwendolyn followed close behind.