Eklavya stood on the riverbed like a man already half-dead.

  His breathing was ragged, his limbs heavy as stone, and every pulse of his heart sent pain rippling through his battered body. His ki reserves were nearly empty, his muscles torn and screaming in protest, his vision dimming at the edges. He had reached the absolute limit of what a five-star practitioner warrior with a Supreme Body could endure. There was nothing left to calculate, nothing left to plan.

  He had given up. And perhaps that was why it happened.

  Just as the thousand-legged centipede surged forward, its massive shadow swallowing him whole, its mandibles opening wide to tear him apart and end everything in a single, merciless instant, something deep inside Eklavya shifted—not in his core or channels, not in his soul, but far deeper than both.

  His muscle memory awakened. There was no thought, no conscious decision, no warning. His body simply moved on its own.

  In a blur so sudden that even Eklavya himself could not comprehend it, he twisted aside, his feet sliding across the riverbed with perfect balance, narrowly evading the centipede’s fatal strike. The beast’s mandibles smashed into the stone where he had been standing, pulverising solid rock as if it were brittle clay, sending shockwaves through the water and fragments of stone exploding outward in every direction.

  Eklavya staggered, but he did not fall.

  His eyes were wide, unfocused, burning with something that was not fear and not reason. His chest rose and fell violently as something ancient and ugly clawed its way up from within him, tearing through restraint and sanity alike. Words burst from his mouth before he could stop them, raw and venomous, carrying the weight of hatred buried so deep that even he had forgotten it existed.

  “I won’t die today,” he said, his voice hoarse, trembling, yet filled with a terrifying certainty. “I haven’t taken my revenge yet. I won’t die before killing those bastards.”

  The centipede halted for a fraction of a second.

  Even the beast—a high-tier creature that had devoured cultivators stronger than Eklavya without hesitation—hesitated. It sensed something unnatural, something wrong. The speed Eklavya had just displayed did not belong to a man on the brink of death. It was precise. Controlled and trained.

  Inside the ring, Magha was stunned.

  He had seen Eklavya push beyond his limits before, had witnessed his stubborn will and reckless courage time and again, but this was different. This movement had not been forced through pain or fueled by desperation. It had been instinctive, polished, as if Eklavya’s body remembered something his mind did not.

  ‘He never fails to surprise me,’ Magha thought grimly. ‘But those words… revenge? What kind of past would carve something like this into a man’s muscles?’

  The centipede did not remain idle for long.

  With a shrill screech, it lunged again, its massive body surging forward as thousands of legs churned the riverbed, propelling it at terrifying speed. Water exploded outward as it charged, its presence overwhelming, crushing.

  Eklavya moved.

  Again, his body reacted before his thoughts could catch up. His figure blurred, vanishing from the centipede’s sight for an instant before reappearing above it, landing hard atop its armoured back. The beast roared and thrashed violently, its body twisting and rolling as it tried to throw him off.

  Eklavya’s balance faltered, but his hands moved on their own, fingers digging into the gaps between the beast’s scales with desperate strength. Without hesitation, he raised his sword and drove it down with all the power he had left.

  The blade shattered.

  The sound was sharp and final, metal splintering against the centipede’s impenetrable scales. The beast screeched, not in pain, but in fury, accelerating violently as it flung its body side to side. Eklavya lost his footing, his grip torn loose as he was hurled through the water and smashed into the riverbed with bone-rattling force.

  “Shit,” he spat, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.

  The centipede did not give him time to recover.

  Magha restrained himself from speaking. Questions could wait. Explanations could wait. Survival came first.

  As Eklavya threw aside the broken hilt of his sword, a new weight appeared in his hand—a golden spear, its shaft gleaming faintly even in the murky water, its blade sharp and radiant with restrained power. Eklavya did not question it. Somewhere deep inside, he knew Magha had intervened, and he accepted it without hesitation.

  His body shifted again, adopting a spear stance so refined and natural that it terrified even him.

  He was no longer in control. Not of his body. Not one of his thoughts.

  Eklavya launched himself forward as the centipede condensed blue ki between its mandibles, the energy swirling violently, compressing into a destructive beam. Before he could close the distance, the beast unleashed it, the blue beam ripping through the water toward him with devastating force.

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  Eklavya’s spear moved.

  The rings of chakra flared around his arm as he intercepted the beam head-on. The spear split the attack cleanly, the blue energy parting around him like water around a blade. Magha watched in disbelief. A high three-tier beast’s attack—split as if it were nothing.

  But he could see the cost.

  Eklavya’s face was flushed deep red, veins bulging across his neck and arms, his body trembling violently as he forced out power it was never meant to contain. This was a strength beyond the Supreme Body’s limit, drawn not from cultivation, but from something far more dangerous.

  With a roar that sounded more like madness than defiance, Eklavya forced himself forward.

  “HAAAAAAAAA! I won’t die!”

  He leapt, soaring over the centipede’s head, and drove the spear down between its mandibles. The beast shrieked in agony as blood burst forth—thick red mixed with viscous purple fluid—splattering across the riverbed.

  Eklavya tore the spear free and drove it down again, and again, each strike savage, merciless, until the centipede’s head split open and its massive body collapsed, convulsing violently before crashing lifelessly onto the riverbed.

  “I said… I won’t die today.”

  The beast lay still.

  Eklavya rolled free from its bisected corpse, lying amid blood and broken stone as he stared upward toward the distant river surface, his chest heaving, his eyes empty—and burning.

  ….

  The silence that followed was heavier than the battle itself.

  Eklavya lay on the cold riverbed, his body submerged, his chest rising and falling unevenly as the echoes of his own roar still rang faintly inside his skull, refusing to fade. The image replayed again and again in his mind—the moment when death had been inevitable, when the centipede’s shadow had swallowed him whole, and yet, instead of surrender, something inside him had snapped awake and seized control with brutal certainty.

  He remembered the way his body had moved without permission, the way his voice had torn itself free from his throat like the cry of a wounded beast, not pleading, not bargaining, but demanding existence itself as if the world owed it to him.

  The strangest part was not the power.

  It was the feeling.

  That raw, burning sensation that had surged through his chest—rage mixed with grief, hatred tangled with desperation, and beneath it all, a sharp, unfamiliar certainty that he had not yet completed something essential. Revenge.

  The word itself felt foreign and yet terrifyingly intimate, like a scar he had forgotten but his body remembered too well. He did not know whom he hated, did not know why, and yet in that instant, the desire to survive had not come from hope or ambition but from the absolute refusal to die before settling an unseen debt.

  ‘What just happened to me?’ He wondered, staring blankly upward as faint light filtered through the river above.

  His first instinct was to assign responsibility elsewhere.

  Still lying on the ground, too exhausted to even sit up properly, he turned his attention inward and spoke toward the ring, his voice low and cautious, carrying a faint tremor he did not bother to hide. “Hey, Magha… did you do that?”

  There was a pause.

  Then Magha answered, his tone sharp with lingering shock, though edged with something almost defensive. “Oh, that? I didn’t do it. And even if I had, do you really think I’d act like a mad being roaring about revenge and pretending afterwards that I had nothing to do with it?”

  The words struck harder than any blow.

  Eklavya swallowed.

  Fear crept into him—not the kind that tightens the chest before death, not the kind that comes from facing an enemy too strong to defeat, but a quieter, more corrosive fear that settled deep into his bones. He had accepted death earlier without resistance, but now, lying alive among the corpse of a beast far stronger than him, he realised that what frightened him was not dying.

  It was becoming that.

  That version of himself—wild-eyed, uncontrollable, driven by something ancient and violent, something that had no place in the careful structure he had built around his identity. A man who fought because he chose to was one thing; a man whose body could override his will and act on buried hatred was another entirely.

  Slowly, painfully, Eklavya pushed himself into a seated position and looked down at the spear still clenched in his hand. The golden shaft was faintly warm, its surface unmarred despite the battle it had just endured. His grip tightened unconsciously.

  Magha’s voice followed, quieter now, more measured. “That spear… it was forged by God Emperor Avas himself.”

  Eklavya’s eyes widened slightly.

  Magha continued, “It is a high God-tier weapon.”

  For a moment, even his fear was drowned beneath shock. Weapons were ranked clearly—Mortal, Spirit, King, Emperor, Earth, and God—each divided further into low and high tiers. A high God-tier weapon was something legends barely whispered about, let alone something a cultivator at his level should ever touch, much less wield.

  Yet confusion lingered in Magha’s voice. “And still… it doesn’t make sense. You deflected the full-force attack of a high third-tier beast.

  This weapon responds to willpower, yes—but it cannot exceed what it can endure. Unless your willpower, in that moment, surpassed even what a God-tier weapon could safely channel.”

  Eklavya stiffened.

  That realisation unsettled him more than any injury.

  A weapon growing stronger with the user’s will was one thing. But hearing that his will—his desperation—had grown so violent, so overwhelming, that even such a weapon struggled to contain it made his skin crawl. That power had not come from cultivation, technique, or enlightenment. It had come from something raw and unresolved, something buried deep enough to evade memory but strong enough to bend reality when cornered.

  Magha’s voice sharpened. “Tell me exactly what happened. Only then can I help you. If you want help at all.”

  Eklavya exhaled slowly as the chakra rings around his arms finally faded, the strength leaving his body all at once. He forced himself upright, every movement deliberate, as if afraid sudden motion might awaken that other presence again.

  “I lost control,” he said quietly. “Right before I was about to be eaten. My body moved on its own. And… I remember what I said.” His jaw tightened. “I feel embarrassed thinking about it now.”

  Magha chuckled. “If you were truly embarrassed, you wouldn’t say those words with such a straight face.”

  Eklavya did not reply.

  The embarrassment was real, but so was the truth beneath it—that some part of him had meant every word. And that realisation disturbed him more than he cared to admit.

  After a long silence, Eklavya turned his gaze toward the half-split corpse of the centipede, then beyond it, toward the uneven stone wall it had been guarding so fiercely.

  “Let’s see,” he said quietly, “what this beast was watching over.”

  And without another word, he began to move forward.