The Soul Garden was quiet and vast around him.

Winston didn’t split his awareness this time. Whatever he was about to attempt needed his full concentration with no divided attention or monitoring the physical world through a partial connection.

Zelda and Freya were handling that side. He trusted them with it and went completely inward.

His reasoning was straightforward. Outside the gate, powerful people were waiting.

The First Entry had turned into a disaster by any objective measure, and the daughter of a demigod had been trapped inside it for three days.

Winston would have been surprised if all three demigods weren’t standing at that gate right now. That kind of situation pulled that kind of response.

And demigods could see things that normal class holders couldn’t.

’A monster equivalent to an Exalted class holder saw through my trait. A demigod would do the same.’

Winston wasn’t opposed to showing strength. The world around class holders rewarded power openly, being strong made things easier in nearly every context.

But a primordial trait was a different category of attention entirely.

The Blood Emperor had repeated its desire to extract the trait multiple times even in a weakened state.

That pattern was a clear signal: a trait could be taken. If something at that level wanted it badly enough to keep bringing it up while dying, what would something stronger do with full capability and no restrictions?

Winston had no interest in finding out. Not yet. Not until he understood what a primordial trait actually was and what it meant for him.

He needed to hide it before walking out of that gate.

And he knew exactly how.

Winston moved through the Soul Garden, passing the shrubs planted along the stone floor, each one a soul harvested over the past three days.

The beacon zone had blocked Mastery and spell gains, but it hadn’t touched the soul intake. Every monster he had killed inside the pagoda and the surrounding cavern had been planted here automatically.

The Garden was significantly fuller than when he’d first entered.

He walked the rows slowly, reading the intensity of each soul as he passed.

Then he stopped.

One soul stood differently from every other one in the Garden. The red leaves weren’t the same faded ember as the kobolds or even the twin guardians.

It was contained and dense, like something compressed down to its most essential form.

The Blood Emperor.

’Bingo.’

Winston settled cross-legged in front of the Blood Emperor’s soul and exhaled slowly.

’Hope this works.’

『IGNITE』

The soul erupted in a brilliant red flame, it was dense and intense in a way that none of the other souls in the Garden had matched.

Winston felt his Realization respond immediately, the first burn pushing his Mastery up by twenty-five percent.

He didn’t stop there. He burned eight more souls in quick succession, the combined boost climbing to two hundred and twenty-five percent, Mastery surging to 325.

The slot capacity ticked upward with it, unlocking additional lotuses; he burned one immediately, pushing the total to two hundred and fifty percent.

The power increase hit fast and hard. Winston let out a short breath through his teeth and held the surge steady.

Then he sat with what he had just confirmed.

’All souls are equal before the emperor.’

It was the realization that had been forming at the edges of his awareness since the first kobold.

A Level 3 kobold and a Level 140 guardian — the most powerful creature he had ever faced — had produced identical boosts when burned.

The soul of a creature that had stood at Rank Four gave him the same twenty-five percent as the weakest monster in the Tier One forest.

’So what’s the point of power if death makes everything equal in the end?’

He turned it over for a moment, then let it go. The answer wasn’t complicated.

Power granted longevity, it pushed death further back, gave the holder more time and more options.

But eventually, everything ended up in the same place. Winston filed the philosophical weight of that away and refocused on what he had actually come here to do.

Because something else had happened when the burn triggered.

He could feel it, fragments, broken and scattered, floating at the edge of his awareness.

These were not his own thoughts but the Blood Emperor’s.

It’s experiences, compressed and partial, bleeding through the soul connection the moment the burn activated.

He had noticed faint versions of this with other monsters but had dismissed it, their intelligence was too low to produce anything coherent.

The Blood Emperor was different.

’If I channel all the energy into the Blood Emperor’s soul, the fragments might stabilize.’

The risk was obvious. Channeling that much concentrated soul energy through one source and trying to absorb the result meant risking the memories overwriting his own.

Winston had a brief moment of acknowledging how dangerous that was.

Then he did it anyway.

He redirected the embers of the nine burning souls directly into the Blood Emperor’s soul.

The moment they made contact, his head snapped back.

Memories hit like a wave breaking over him; a child born alongside a dozen others into war, brutal training from something that felt like the first days of conscious thought, battle after battle compressed into impressions rather than scenes, a deep ingrained hatred for an enemy Winston couldn’t identify, an enemy whose name the memories couldn’t seem to hold onto.

The rush accelerated. It felt like becoming someone else.

Then the safeguard triggered.

Something inside him began filtering and deleting. The memories that had started taking root were pulled back before they could fully settle, the process happening faster than Winston could consciously direct it.

The flood slowed. Then stopped entirely.

Winston’s back hit the Soul Garden floor.

He lay there with his breathing coming in ragged pulls, eyes staring upward at nothing.

Soul Burn had already deactivated, the Garden quiet around him, his vision blank for a long moment — genuinely blank, not thinking, just existing — before the light came back into his eyes and his chest settled into a normal rhythm.

A small smile found its way onto his face.