Aaron might have trouble analyzing powerful skills made with that world's nine energies, but Divine Energy? Seeing a Divine skill coming his way was like seeing a long-lost lover running to embrace him with warm, soft arms.

It was a homing skill that would invade his soul, identify and measure his essences, and "silently speak" that data together with some extra words. He found the last part strange at first, but then he remembered the Heavenly Skills that were activated by saying or thinking certain things. The skill wanted to use a Heavenly Skill he didn't know and send a list of his essences to the Cage.

The homing component was an issue for him because it was not targeting his aura but his essences.

Auras were the ethereal externalization of souls. They were easy to analyze and record, hence the aura signature he had signed when he joined the Mercenary Guild. Changing oneself's aura required precise control but was possible, something Aaron had done freely.

Essences were the unique characteristics of souls, the most intimate fingerprint of a being. Part of them was perceived as instinct. Plants had plant instincts, animals had animal instincts, and so on. Each species also had similar instincts to each other, like birds who knew when and where to fly to during summer or winter, even if they were born and raised in captivity. Likewise, each species' souls had similarities.

It's not to say someone's essences were limited to their instincts. Essences were also about what a soul was. Much like humans had mapped their DNA, souls had something similar. You could know the original living being a soul had been created for by reading it. You could also know the original max lifespan of that being. You could even tell if that being was mortal, cultivator, or core being at birth.

When one cultivated and thus nurtured themselves with energy, those limits were suppressed, but never removed. One of the most common punishments for cultivators who had done a lot of evil but weren't especially hated by the punishers was to "reset" their souls slowly, letting them feel themselves growing weak and mortal again. Aaron had both sentenced people to that and felt it himself. It was despairing.

The set of each individual's essences was unique. He had compared the entire set of exactly one trillion humans once — half from the same planet, half from all over the known universe — and found not a single one equal to each other. So much for twin souls.

That uniqueness made it so there was no better way to identify or track someone. If you could do it, of course. A few essences, especially those linked to instincts, could be found on the outer layer of the soul, but most of them required energy to invade the soul and read them from the inside.

The incoming skill had detected some of Aaron's essences from a distance to then come at him, but even then, it hadn't been able to properly measure them. It only knew which outer essences he had, now exactly how they affected him. He had the instinct to eat, for instance, but it wasn't equally powerful to every human. Measuring could only be done from the inside. The outer essences were unique only for every hundred thousand people or so.

Copying and transferring essences were easy, even Logan had done those things to Lana and himself, but the targeted soul never changed. Moreover, the soul rejected those essences in a strange way: it attacked both added essences and the mind and heart. It wasn't much different from how the body acted with autoimmune diseases. It was worse when the essences came from souls of different species. That's the reason Logan's personality had seemingly changed from adding essences to his soul.

Changing or removing a soul's original essences was impossible though. Not even Absolute Energy had allowed him to do that. That, more than anything, was the evidence Lana had wanted of a soul's supposedly sacredness. Individually unique, impossible to destroy, and unchanging; nothing else was like that in the universe.

Unfortunately, that meant Aaron had no way to fool the homing component of the incoming skill. It was locked on him and that was the end of it.

The skill's speed was another issue. Even if he activated his absolute limit, the skill would reach him before he could move a few dozen steps.

As for resisting it? It was a Divine skill. Maybe he might have been able to do something to it if he had access to Spiritual Energy — a lot of it — or a Sage level formation. He had neither. The diluted energies of that world could do nothing at all against it.

So Aaron couldn't dodge the incoming skill, couldn't outrun it, and couldn't resist its might. Trying to block it was also pointless, the skill would just go through anything to reach him. It was a perfect attack on all accounts.

There was only one thing he could do: kill himself.

No one knew where souls went to after someone died, and no one could track it. That meant the skill would also be unable to. The process wasn't usually instantaneous, but he could make it so.

But first, he had to make some preparations to come back to life. "Be right back," he said quickly and used a few skills.

Qi Healing Arts: Delayed Resurrection!

Even something as simple as CPR from Earth had only a little less than fifty percent chance of getting people resuscitated after a cardiac arrest. When you did it with Qi, it became a surefire way of coming back to life.

The skill had to be completely disconnected from him though, else it would stop working after he died. That was simple to achieve.

Qi Research Arts: Instant Heart Freezing!

His heart stopped. Since Qi could only be used inside the body, that was only usually done for research purposes. He obviously didn't die merely after stopping his heart, he was a cultivator. He could live for days like that. But he only needed it for an instant for his purposes.

Arcane Soul Arts: Heart-Spirit Severing!

The spirit connected body and soul. It started festering instantly after death, but it took a few hours to fully dissipate, and only then did the soul disappear. If he severed that connection without a reason, his soul would be gone for good, forever incapable of going back. He didn't know why, only that that's how it worked. However, his skill told his soul that the cause of death was cardiac arrest, and the soul made only a cursory check before leaving.

It checked. His heart was stopped. It left.

Aaron died.

Bymor had seen plenty of people kill themselves. Failure wasn't brushed off in the Imperial Court, and most people ended their own lives in the courtroom as soon as they were sentenced to harsh punishment. They even had a special cleaning team to deal with the blood timely. Minutes after the deed, the matter was forgotten and the court's schedule moved forward.

He had never seen a man say he would be right back and kill himself though.

It was even more unsightly to actually see him come back.

Bymor smiled. He really, really liked that herald. The man had style.

Jil rolled her eyes at the herald's parlor trick. All Priests went through healing training to some extent, and most of them reached the point of resurrecting someone who hadn't been gone for long. By design, that was also the same time they learned how to use a few healing skills to kill instead.

So, it was common to see Priests kill themselves after having their love confession rejected, only to be healed by a friend later. An especially crafty one had created a self-resurrecting skill once. He had confessed to Jil's friend and, after being rejected and killing himself, claimed the afterlife had denied his entrance because his love was too big to go through the door. Her friend laughed.

Nine months later, her friend had given birth to a fatherless child. The Priest had gotten drunk on the success of the play and became a womanizer. He was about to be expelled from the temple when his skill failed him once. A stupid death for a stupid man.

She almost hoped the herald would die for using a similar skill for no reason too. The only thing preventing her from actually hoping was that she needed his crusade to get his position back, and without him, the crusade would be over before it even started. So instead, she prepared herself to save him if he failed.

When he came back in one peace, Jil at least learned that his new boss wasn't completely useless.

Selna found it strange when Ironblood tripped on himself and started falling, then floated to stop himself. It was even weirder when he just started running in a random direction.

She reckoned she was too weak to understand how the minds of the powerful, much like her people had never understood her plans.

It was terrible to be on the weak side of things though.

Huran watched with cold eyes as the herald fell. She hadn't known what the Divine artifact on her hands would do, but it pleased her to see the odious target die. Darkness had once again triumphed over Light.

She took a teleportation crystal from her ring and crushed it at once. With the deed done, it was time to flee. The Guardian of the Light of the World was a Master Shaper, after all.

A second later, the herald stopped falling.

He had been dropping face-first, but he suddenly stopped in place, supported by some skill. While he was still getting back to his feet, he looked straight at Huran.

She frowned. She had failed, after all. The artifact was defective.

The herald suddenly ran at her, who felt the very surroundings crush her. An Arcane blade materialized in front of her and tried to take her head.

She didn't resist. She only had to leave before the guardian could freeze the space around her. Dying was of no consequence, her brothers in the faith could bring her back.

Indeed, Huran died. But her corpse was blessedly spirited away.

However, dead, she never felt the herald cut her hand off and pull it away.

Aaron arrived at the scene and picked the floating hand. He stored the hand away because it could be used to track the attacker once he reached the Grandmaster level as an Arcanist, then looked at the artifact.

He had been wrong when he saw it from a distance. It looked the size of an apple, but it was bigger, much bigger. The outer metallic layer was only there to build a layer where a spatial formation had been inscribed. The internal space was roughly the size of Alys Tower.

He checked it briefly and found layers upon layers of thin metallic spheres inside one another. They ranged from the size of a fingernail to the size of the city. They were all inscribed, and the craftsmanship was exquisite at first glance. He detected a few issues but didn't stay to investigate. While his mind was inside, his body was vulnerable on the outside. He would analyze it better in a safer place later, he only wanted to make sure there was nothing dangerous in there, and he found nothing.

Back to his body, he used the Heavenly Skill Check Item on it.

[Vowcher]

Quality: Lesser Divine

You don't have the clearance required to check this item's properties.

Aaron frowned.

A quality classification beyond the nine he had heard about wasn't a surprise, as he doubted the gods would be satisfied with a mere Pinnacle Peerless item that was about as strong as a Sage.

That clearance message was a surprise though, and not a pleasant one. That made it clear that being a god was more than about power. What more had they access to that he hadn't? Could they just ask the Cage to kill him? Was that what this artifact was all about?

Aaron didn't know, but he knew a way to find out.

He only had to grow powerful enough to subdue the God of Darkness and beat his secrets out of him.