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The convention hall's blood domain had thickened.
Two hours of active engagement had fed it. Every spatial technique Lu fired cost mana the domain's passive drain caught before it could recover. The floor was knee-deep in corrupted blood, the ghost shapes in the walls more solid than they had been, the ambient fear-pressure heavier on every breath.
Lu was running on seventy percent.
He knew it precisely: seventy percent of peak Legendary output, the deficit growing at roughly two percent per ten minutes inside Malachar's domain. The math was straightforward and its conclusion was clear.
The Overlord, standing across thirty meters of ruined hall floor with the staff in one hand and the other extended from a Soul Chain cast that Lu had just severed, was neither tired nor drained. He was older than the city, and fatigue had no meaning for something that had outlived every context it had ever been born into.
The soul core, Lu thought. Somewhere in that body. If I can find it, I can end this.
The staff came forward. Lu moved the space between them, compressing the ten meters to twenty, buying himself a fraction of a second more reaction time. The Blood Spear that came behind the staff hit the spatial compression and slowed, and he stepped clear of the arc.
Malachar adjusted.
The Wailing Legion erupted from the blood on the floor, not the walls this time: hundreds of ghost soldiers rising from the corrupted blood itself, bodies formed from the fluid, shapes that had solidity they should not have had in a domain this active. Lu deployed Spatial Prison around the nearest cluster. The ghosts dissolved inside it, their connection to the blood domain severed.
Malachar swept his hand and the blood surged. Lu went up on a Void Walk, ceiling-space, emerging fifteen meters ahead.
He was running the Nine Heavens Spatial Kingdom at fractional output to conserve mana. Full deployment would drain him in minutes inside this domain.
Find the core, he thought. Everything else is delay.
The problem was that the Overlord's mana structure was vast and complex, every centimeter of his body saturated with centuries of accumulated cultivation. The soul core was in there somewhere, but finding it was like searching for a specific grain of sand by color in a beach at night.
Malachar closed the distance faster than Lu expected.
The Phantom Form activated mid-stride, the Overlord becoming partially incorporeal, and Lu's two preemptive Space Blades passed through him. The corporeal hand that materialized at the last moment struck Lu in the chest with the staff, driving him backward into the ruined remains of the convention hall's north wall.
The impact was substantial. Lu felt two ribs give on the left side, the spatial reinforcement he had deployed not quite fast enough. He caught himself against the wall and pushed off it before the follow-up came.
Two ribs, he catalogued. Still functional.
He deployed Spatial Compression around Malachar's legs.
The Overlord's movement slowed. The blood domain pushed back against the compression, the two laws fighting for authority over the same space, and Lu poured more output into maintaining it. Malachar moved through it at reduced speed, each step costing more effort than the last, but still moving.
The Soul Chains came from three directions simultaneously.
Lu severed two with Space Blades and let the third lock his right arm. The arm went slow, the Law pathways in it dulling, his spatial sense on that side dropping. He compressed the space inside his own arm and the chain fractured, the cost of it running up his shoulder in a spike of pain.
That trick is getting expensive, he noted.
He needed the core. He needed it in the next several minutes or the attrition would decide the fight without him.
He sent four Space Blades at Malachar's ribcage simultaneously, each one targeting a different depth, looking for an anomaly in the density response.
Malachar redirected two with the staff, took one on the shoulder, and let one pass through via Phantom Form.
The shoulder blade showed a response pattern slightly off from the surrounding mana density.
There, Lu thought.
He was already assembling the Void Severance when Malachar moved.
The Overlord closed ten meters in a single step, Phantom Form dropping to full corporeality, and the staff came at Lu's chest at an angle that the Spatial Domain could not redirect in time. The tip touched Lu's sternum, and the mana behind it compressed into a single point of Blood Law pressure.
The rib on the left that had already cracked gave completely.
Lu felt the tip of the staff beginning to push through.
Move, he thought, very clearly. Right now.
He fired Void Walk at close range to buy the centimeter he needed, and the staff tip caught him across the side instead of center, tearing rather than piercing. He came out of the Walk fifteen meters back, his left hand pressed against his side.
"Thou art good," Malachar said. "But thou art diminishing."
He was right. Lu could feel the blood domain pulling now, not at the edges but centrally, the drain accelerating as the domain fed on the mana his injuries were leaking.
The Overlord raised the staff.
The strike came at Lu's exposed left side with everything Malachar had built up, the final vector in a sequence that had been engineering this exact position for the past six exchanges, and Lu saw it and knew he was too slow to fully redirect it, and he was already deploying what he had left to minimize the damage.
Vrzzzzzzzzz.
The sound arrived from behind Malachar. The Overlord stopped.
Lu had not done it. Something had entered from outside both domains, traveling through the blood without triggering spatial sensors, using a movement logic that belonged to neither Law.
The chainsaw had entered through Malachar's sternum from behind.
CPR materialized in the space between Malachar's shoulder blades, the chainsaw-head running at full speed, the blade already embedded eight centimeters into the bone structure of the Overlord's chest cavity. The blood domain's physical manifestation had given it something solid, and CPR cut it.
Malachar turned.
His hand came back and found nothing. CPR had disengaged and dropped, the chainsaw retracting, already circling at low altitude through the blood on the floor. The Overlord looked at the wound in his sternum.
The Scarlet Regeneration activated. The wound began to close, then stopped.
The flesh at the wound's edge held still. The blood around it ignored the signal. The regeneration stalled at the boundary.
"What."
Ren's voice arrived from somewhere in the red mist, pleasant and clear.
"Those wounded by CPR can't regenerate."
He appeared at the edge of the ruined hall entrance, white mask in place, hands in his pockets, the red mist trailing from him in threads that joined the broader domain.
"Serves you right," he said, "you ancient ghost bastard."
"You."
Malachar looked at the wound. The sternum was compromised, the mana pathways disrupted. CPR's effect held.
Then Malachar reached up with both hands, found the edges of his own skull, and pulled.
The skull came free. The sound it made was structural, final.
Ren watched this from the hallway entrance.
"What," he said.
The body beneath the skull went still. Then it dissolved: flesh, bone, robes, the sternum wound and its suppressed regeneration included, all of it turning to dust that settled into the blood on the floor. The equipment, staff included, hung in the air for one moment and then was absorbed into the new construction.
The skull hovered.
From it, a new skeleton built itself outward in two seconds: bone emerging from bone, flesh reforming from the blood on the floor, robes assembling, staff reappearing. The sternum formed whole. The Blood Soul Furnace refining and reshaping from materials the domain had ready.
Malachar the Pale Sovereign stood complete and undamaged. New body. Same entity.
"This Lord has done that several times," he said, his voice unchanged. "It requires only a moment."
Ren stared at the spot where the old body had been.
You cheating—
"THAT IS CHEATING," he said.
My CPR. My CPR wound. That was good work. That was strategy. And he just shed his entire body.
Across the hall, Lu was breathing carefully through his side.
He met Ren's eyes across the hall.
Ren pointed at the Abominations emerging from the red mist behind him and made a forward gesture.
"My children," he said. "Make him regret being born."
Eon came through the blood at a run, prayer beads burning on the eleventh rotation. The Mahakala avatar manifested behind him as he moved: twenty meters of blue-black presence in sync with his body, the avatar's arms reaching ahead toward the Overlord's position.
Silas went wide, Cerebral Tendrils threading ahead through the blood toward the staff's mana pathways. Wei Liang stepped out of the mist on the opposite side, third eye open, the memory erasure building in the space around him.
Bone Saw stepped forward from the center.
The axe in his hand still carried the Skeleton King's residue.
Malachar looked at the five Abominations and Lu Changcheng reorienting behind them.
"This Lord is not displeased."
The Blood Domain surged.
The blood on the floor rose in a wave, every pooled surface in the hall lifting simultaneously, the ghost shapes in the walls pressing outward and taking form. Blood Spears condensed from the wave in dozens, the Wailing Legion emerging from the ghost-solid blood, the full domain output behind all of it.
The red mist hit it.
Ren had accelerated the flow the moment the wave rose, the domain pulsing at full extension, the arterial red meeting the blood domain's surge at the midpoint and grinding against it.
The Abominations' healing hit its maximum cycle. Wounds closed in fractions of a second, each impact compensated before the next landed.
The hall became the collision of two domains at full output.
Lu took three Space Blades worth of mana and drove them into the new body's left shoulder, the same vector he had been analyzing before the body replacement. The density response was the same. The core had transferred.
Still there, he thought. Still findable.
Malachar took Bone Saw's first axe-strike across the left shoulder, the obsidian plate adding Mythical output to the blow, and the flesh carved down to the bone. The Scarlet Regeneration began to close it.
Eon's mantra landed at contact range.
The regeneration slowed.
Good, Lu thought, watching the pattern. The mantra interferes with the domain's feedback loop. Keep him occupied.
He circled, looking for the shot.
The Wailing Legion pressed against the Abominations from all sides. Bone Saw took three ghost impacts in sequence, the physical force of fully-manifested blood-ghosts landing against the obsidian armor, each one enough to throw a normal hunter off their feet. He absorbed them and kept moving, the axe already on its second arc. Wei Liang stood in the middle of it with his third eye reading everything, and the memory erasure fired into the Overlord precisely when Malachar was mid-cast.
The Wailing Legion command dropped.
The ghosts lost direction for nine seconds and dispersed from the heat of the red mist.
Silas's Tendrils reached the staff's main mana channel.
The staff cracked at the carved section, the pathway severed, and the Blood Spear that had been condensing in its head collapsed. The blood fell back to the floor.
"Persistent," Malachar said. "All of you."
He reached for the cracked staff, found the break point, and the Blood Domain repaired it in two seconds.
The core was still inside him. Lu had now identified the general region but not the precise location. The new body was identical to the old one, which meant his previous analysis still applied, which meant the core was somewhere in the left upper thoracic structure, above the shoulder Bone Saw had just carved.
He needed one clean shot.
The Overlord regenerated Bone Saw's cut. The regeneration was slower than it had been at the start of the fight: the accumulated disruption from Eon's mantra, the spatial compression still pressing on various joints, the ongoing drain from the mist. His recovery speed was degrading. That was something.
An immortal problem, Lu thought. Inexhaustible but not instant.
He weighed the rate against his own reserves.
If this continues, he degrades first.
Then Malachar used the Blood Sacrifice.
The blood on the floor, all of it, two hours of accumulated domain matter, fed upward into the Overlord simultaneously. The regeneration acceleration was immediate: accumulated disruptions, joint compressions, mantra-slowed recovery, all of it closed in under three seconds. The staff repaired completely. The shoulder sealed to full integrity.
He was at full capacity again.
Lu was at sixty-two percent.
"This Lord could do this for centuries," Malachar said.
Nobody in the hall responded. New ghost-blood flowed in from the walls to replace what the Blood Sacrifice had consumed. The domain continued as it had from the start.
They stood across the ruined hall from each other.