There was a reason Winston hadn’t waited for the cooldown slot to refresh before entering the beacon zone.

Beyond the risk of letting more time pass with everyone trapped inside a Tier Three region, the practical math made waiting pointless. One extra slot wasn’t going to change what he needed to do. What he could generate right now was already enough and even if it wasn’t, one more soul wouldn’t fix that either way.

He burned all nine active slots into his Realization without hesitation.

[Mastery: 325] [225%]

A 225% boost. His Mastery climbed to 325, and at the five-point-per-level conversion rate of a first Realization, that placed his current output at the equivalent of a Level 65 monster.

His energy pool refilled accordingly to six thousand five hundred, more than he’d ever held at one time.

And with every twenty Mastery points adding another lotus slot, the Soul Garden had expanded again.

[Slots: 20/21]

[Souls: 799]

Twenty-one usable slots, twenty active with one still on cooldown. Winston pushed one more soul into the Realization immediately.

[Mastery: 350] [250%]

Level 70 equivalent. Then he tried to add another soul to the Realization and felt the wall hit.

The Realization had reached its intake limit. Ten souls was the ceiling for how much it could absorb in a single burn session. Winston had suspected this threshold existed.

Now he knew exactly where it sat.

Ten slots used on the Realization. The Mastery increase had pushed him to 350, which triggered one more slot addition.

[Slots: 21/22]

Twenty-two total, twenty-one active. Eleven remaining slots after the Realization burn. Winston directed two of them outward — one into each spell.

[Black Dragonic Armor — Level 90]

[Black Dragonic Yari — Level 90]

The change was immediate. The armor’s violet runes flared brighter and the Draconic Resolve passive thickened around him like a second skin.

The Yari’s dark vapor deepened, the predatory hum intensifying into something that felt less like a weapon and more like a living threat.

Winston exhaled slowly.

Nine slots still unused. Level 90 spells. Level 70 equivalent output on his Realization. And the beacon was right ahead of him pulling like a steady and inevitable current.

Whatever was guarding it was about to find out exactly what a Legendary class looked like at full output.

❖❖❖❖

The beacon zone opened into a cavern and at its center stood a black pagoda that was massive and tiered, with its upper eaves disappearing into the limestone mist clinging to the ceiling.

The entire structure had been hewn from a single seamless vein of obsidian, polished until the surrounding stalactites reflected in its surface like a dark mirror.

The stone slabs had been fused by something ancient and permanent, and every inch of the exterior was carved with geometric sigils packed with faintly pulsing violet sediment.

It was silent in a way that had weight to it. The kind that came from something that had been waiting for a very long time.

’That’s where the beacon is.’

Winston settled the Black Dragonic Yari across his right shoulder and walked forward.

He didn’t get far before the first panel appeared.

[Blood Demonic Samurai — Level 50]

The first monsters near the beacon were already four levels above what the others had believed was the minimum level for the beacon zone.

Winston noted it, filed it, and kept walking.

There was no version of this where he turned back.

Ten of them materialized from the cavern’s darkness, forms encased in lacquered crimson armor the color of fresh blood, bound together with cords of blackened silk.

Their helmets were open at the mouth, exposing elongated ivory fangs slick with dark ichor.

Each held a long katana with a stillness that wasn’t calm, it was the stillness of something that had stopped needing to breathe.

They locked onto Winston the moment he entered their range.

Whatever discipline a samurai was supposed to carry had been stripped out of them entirely as they rushed in like starving animals, fast, graceless and driven by something older than honor.

Winston didn’t change his pace. He kept walking toward them, Yari still resting on his shoulder.

Rule one of the Astral Heaven. Never rush carelessly. You won’t see the trap until you’re already inside it.

The ground in front of him erupted and a samurai burst upward in a spray of dirt and stone, materializing directly in Winston’s path — a clean ambush from beneath the cavern floor, timed to intercept while the others drew his attention forward.

Its fangs were bared, its katana already mid-swing.

Winston’s hand moved.

The Yari came off his shoulder in a single arc and the dark spearhead drove through the ambushing samurai’s chest before it could complete the strike.

The impact pinned it briefly into the air, then slammed it down into the stone floor.

BOOM!

Winston pulled the blade free, shook the dark ichor from the tip, and stepped forward into the ten that had already closed the distance.

The ten remaining samurai didn’t last long.

Winston moved through them with the efficiency of someone who had already mapped the pattern, their attack timing, the way they committed to swings without recovery plans and the predictable clustering.

The Level 90 Yari did the rest. By the time he stepped over the last body and kept walking, the encounters had barely registered as fights.

The cavern between the entrance and the pagoda wasn’t empty. Level 50 to 59 monsters appeared in irregular clusters along the path, different variants of the same blood-demonic classification, each one more aggressive than the last.

Winston dispatched every group without breaking stride. None of them lasted more than a few exchanges.

At Level 70 equivalent output with spells boosted to 90, the gap was simply too large for anything in that range to bridge.

Then he reached the pagoda.

And something very large was standing in front of the entrance.

[Blood Demonic Gatekeeper — Level 60]

The creature was enormous with a bloated and rotund frame swollen by what looked like centuries of dark infusion and unchecked growth.

Greyed skin stretched tight over layers of cursed mass, barely contained by the rusted remains of a breastplate that had long since given up on its original purpose.

In its thick, clawed hands it gripped a chained mace, it was a heavy iron head stained with a permanent rust-red and the long chain wrapped several times around its forearms.

It saw Winston and swung without preamble.

The mace came across in a wide arc, chain rattling with surprising fluid momentum for something that large.

Winston read the swing and jumped back cleanly.

The spiked head crashed into the cavern floor where he’d been standing, the impact cratering the stone and sending fragments skittering in every direction.

The Gatekeeper hauled the chain back without pause and launched a follow-up immediately, faster than the first, using the rebound momentum to change the angle.

Winston’s grip shifted on the Yari.