The central altar in the middle of the plaza began to glow with a dark, violet light.

Amanda and the cloaked leaders of the Enders stood around the stone structure, their hands raised as they muttered strange, mechanical incantations that caused the surrounding gray mist to swirl violently.

The vanguard officers continued their brutal work, using their heavy blades to push the struggling disciples closer to the ritual circle.

Then, the largest cloaked figure reached inside his heavy dark robes and pulled out the Enders’ true trump card.

It was a large, jagged crystal that pulsed with a sickening, translucent purple glow.

The moment the artifact was exposed to the open air, the ambient temperature in the plaza plummeted below freezing.

The stone tiles cracked under the sudden frost, and the gray mist was instantly sucked toward the center of the mineral.

"The Soul Crystal," Amanda whispered, her wide eyes reflecting the purple luminescence of the rock.

Her voice was filled with an intense, manic worship. "Finally. The catalyst is here."

The Soul Crystal possessed a single, horrifying function: it could forcefully absorb any loose or active souls into its internal structure.

Because every single disciple, instructor, and city guard inside this Supreme Beast Academy simulation was a constructed illusion made entirely from condensed soul data, the presence of the Soul Crystal rendered the entire academy completely useless.

"What’s happening..." a student cried out.

"Why is it feels like I am forgetting something. I am what? Me...I..."

"I am scared...."

"Mother....."

As the crystal flared with power, thousands of invisible, glowing threads erupted from its center, latching onto every single writhing student in the plaza.

The disciples did not even have the strength to scream. The moment the purple threads touched their chests, their glowing soul cores were violently ripped out of their physical vessels.

The empty shells of meat collapsed into gray ash, while their core essences flew directly into the jagged crystal, causing its purple glow to grow increasingly dense and blinding.

Kenji watched this display from the edge of the pavilion, his mind instantly freezing.

For the first time across his multiple loops of survival, a massive wave of absolute confusion washed over his brain stems.

How could a Soul Crystal appear inside a Spire Event?

According to the absolute laws of the Spire, the presence of such a high-tier artifact within a foundational trial was completely akin to cheating.

It broke the primary balance of the system. No challenger, no matter how wealthy or prominent their family was in the real world, was permitted to bring any physical items, weapons, or external artifacts across the spatial threshold into a Spire Event.

No. Even if they wanted, they couldn’t. It’s the absolute law of a Spire, and the Crusade.

Everyone entered as a blank slate, relying strictly on their baseline traits and the assets provided by the specific script.

That meant this Soul Crystal must have been obtained through some other highly irregular method.

But Kenji knew the Spire’s core programming would never intentionally show partiality or favoritism by birthing such a high-level treasure inside a Spire Event.

The system was a rigid, mathematical entity. It did not hand out cheat codes to random factions like the Enders.

So, if the real world didn’t send it, and the Spire didn’t create it, how did they get their hands on a Soul Crystal?

What was it? What was the missing variable that he had failed to calculate?

A terrible, suffocating premonition suddenly appeared in the deepest corner of Kenji’s mind.

The feeling was so intense that it made his physical heart skip a violent beat, disrupting his perfect sixty-beats-per-minute rhythm.

His hazel eyes snapped across the bloody plaza, locking directly onto Amanda’s laughing figure.

As he stared at her crimson robes, a fundamental question that he had somehow completely overlooked for an entire year suddenly exploded into his conscious thoughts.

Why did someone without a single combat trait get allowed inside the Spire Event?

No, that was wrong.

How could someone who possessed absolutely no baseline trait manage to physically appear inside a Spire Event in the first place?

The Spire was a lethal, hyper-selective proving ground. It strictly filtered out ordinary humans, only pulling in individuals who possessed distinct traits that could anchor their egos within the simulation.

Amanda had no trait, just like his current vessel.

Yet, she was here, casually commanding vanguard officers and playing with a cosmic artifact.

Beneath his uniform, Ayla instantly felt the sudden, violent surge of anxiety radiating from his body.

The sudden shift in his emotional trajectory completely surprised her.

She had been bound to Kenji through multiple loops, and she had watched him face absolute horrors without a single ripple of panic.

He had remained perfectly calm and stoic even when the colossal, molten orange eyes of the Emotion Weaver attempted to manipulate his core consciousness inside the void.

He was supposed to be unyielding.

Realizing that something was fundamentally wrong with her mate, Ayla did not waste any time.

Her translucent blue mass instantly shifted, utilizing her Shadow Cat Transformation to melt into the darkness of his clothes.

The next millisecond, she appeared directly on his right shoulder in her sleek, black-furred feline form.

She lowered her head and gently licked the side of his pale cheek, her dark golden eyes blinking at him in deep confusion and concern.

"What is it, Kenji?" she purred softly, her long, black tail coiling tightly around his neck to offer her raw warmth. "Why is your heart beating so fast? Do you want me to destroy that purple rock right now?"

If anyone didn’t find anything amiss, that’s Ayla. Because what she felt after the appearance of the Soul crystal was hunger.

Kenji felt the soft fur of her cat form against his skin, and his physical body visibly calmed down.

The intense shaking in his hands stopped, but the deep, underlying panic inside his mind did not disappear at all. It grew heavier.

"Ayla," Kenji whispered silently through their private mental channel, his voice sounding completely hollow.

"I feel like there is some kind of bigger trap operating right now. A trap that is not just hidden inside this Spire Event, but something stretching outside the spire itself."

He looked at the cloaked figures around the central altar.

"I should have doubted the situation from the very first day. I should have asked questions when I noticed that almost ninty nine percent of the external challengers who entered this timeline with us suddenly turned into Enders or vanished without a trace.

But I didn’t.

It was like my mind instinctively did not bother to think about any wrongness or strangeness in their behavior.

Every time my logic started to question their existence, my brain simply skipped the thought and focused on hunting beasts instead."

That realization absolutely terrified him.

The most frightening part of this situation was not the Soul Crystal or Amanda’s betrayal. It was his own involuntary actions.

The fact that his highly analytical, clinical mind had been systematically ignoring the blatant strangeness of the environment for an entire year was what made him panic. This was completely artificial.

Someone or something had placed a high-level cognitive filter over his thought processes, forcing him to act like a standard protagonist who blindly followed the rails of a pre-written script.

Even his ancient bone fragment, which had successfully anchored his ego against cosmic entities and protected his soul line across loops of absolute agony, had failed to find anything wrong with the Enders’ presence.

It had remained completely silent, letting him walk straight into this three-hour harvest countdown without raising a single alarm.

No... it was even worse than that.

Kenji turned his head slightly, looking into Ayla’s dark golden eyes.

Even Ayla, who possessed the legendary Emotion Weaver trait, had not felt anything wrong at all.

She had spent an entire year editing the emotional frequencies of the students and tracking the invisible strings of the campus, yet she had completely failed to notice that Amanda was a traiteless female who shouldn’t exist inside the Spire’s architecture.

Her legendary sensory skills had been completely blinded by the same invisible filter.

What the hell were the Enders planning? Who was truly pulling the strings from behind the heavy curtains of this war?

"They are compiling the core data very fast," Ayla’s mental voice cut through his panic, her cat form stiffening as she looked at the central altar.

Her Bloodnet trait began to vibrate wildly, sensing that the purple energy from the Soul Crystal was starting to merge with the primary foundational lines of the academy itself.

"Kenji, the invisible wall that blocked me in the inner rings of the forest... it is moving. The script is opening up."

"What!" Kenji exclaimed. What did she meant by the border of the Spire Event moving?

Moving to where?

The jagged Soul Crystal was now floating directly above the altar, having successfully absorbed the essences of everyone in the academy.

The academy had fallen.

That meant....

The Spire Event....was conquered by the Enders.