Ja Fiat stood before the freshly cleansed mass grave, fists clenched so tightly that she was drawing blood. She had gone through a lot of trouble to prepare this area. The risks she had taken were beginning to pay off. The demon energy that was collecting had continued to accumulate and would have culminated in enough energy to have ensured she advanced two Realms if she was careful in siphoning that energy.

Granted, those realms would have been powered by demonic energies and came with a cost. She would never be able to advance her Cultivation Realm once she began, but that was better than her current state. She had advanced the farthest she could reach on her own, stuck in the Qi Gathering Realm for over a century.

She had finally admitted that her talents for Cultivation were limited, and the Qi Gathering Realm was as far as she would go without embracing Cultist’s techniques.

Ja Fiat had used every advantage she had gained over the years to trap Lord Chon in a miasma of drug-induced indifference. To do that and still remain hidden and unknown had been easy. Her efforts had paid off until the Four Element Sect had been established, and that damn Patriarch had loosened Jai Myche like an arrow from her quiver directly at Xiwang and the Lord.

She had thought herself lucky, thankful that she had never made herself a part of Lord Chon’s council or inner circle. She was a nobody as far as the people of Xiwang were concerned, and that anonymity allowed her to finagle her way into becoming a member of the Baroness’s staff.

It was the perfect position to keep an eye on the inner workings as the Baroness claimed her Fief and established her rule. Unfortunately, it had taken time to be trusted enough to earn even the lowliest of staff positions. Councilor Gwen and Cultivator Zui were too good at their jobs for Ja Fiat to circumvent the strict standards they implemented when hiring servants and staff.

Ja Fiat had only been able to hide her cultivation and real identity because of a powerful talisman that she had looted. A chance encounter with the body of a Cultist she came across because of luck. She had stumbled across the body because she had been forced to flee for her life from the pride of Panthera that was hunting her. A Panthera pride led by a tier-four Matriarch.

The black coloring of the giant cats made their ability to hide within the forest’s shadows deadly. If it hadn’t been for falling into a pit in the ground, a pit that opened into a cave system shielded from detection, the beasts would have had her for lunch.

She was a Qi Gathering Realm Cultivator, but she had never managed to master flight.

That cave system had been protected by a series of arrays that had kept it hidden, protecting the final resting place of the Cultivator that had used the spot to perform a demonic ritual. The man had failed, but the spatial device, talismans, and artifacts he had amassed during his life had survived.

The knowledge of demonic cultivation, martial techniques, and esoteric knowledge had been a bounty of wealth that Ja Fiat had claimed with fevered greed.

One of those trinkets had been the artifact that allowed Ja to appear to any who looked, even someone as powerful as an Immortal Realm Cultivator as a non-cultivator. And Ja Fiat had used that protection to worm her way into her current position.

She had considered trying to join Jai Myche’s House or Dojo. She had, after all, reached Qi Gathering, and House Myche seemed desperate for members. Even offering a Cultivation technique that might have allowed her to break through the bottleneck she found herself at. She would have taken that chance if she had been able to abandon her path.

Following the path of one of the demonic techniques would see Ja Fiat free of her current bottleneck, but it had been a path she had been loath to take. She would need to sacrifice any chance for further advancement. That mass grave and the accumulated demonic energies would have seen her reach the perfected stage of the Nihility Realm.

She would never be able to advance past the realm, but the power and influence she would gain as a Nihility Realm Cultivator would be formidable. Only one in a hundred-thousand Cultivators managed to reach that stage, and with the artifacts she had looted, she would be able to hide the demonic energies she was cultivating.

Ja Fiat sent a tendril of energy coursing across the ground before her. She knew it was futile, she had already tested and probed this grave a dozen times, but she couldn’t help herself from trying one last time. Looking for even the smallest tendril of demonic energy. Years of planning, the cost involved, the secrecy required, all for nothing because of the Heavenly luck of Jai Myche.

And Ja Fiat had to admit to herself that the young Elf did have the Heaven’s own luck. She stumbled into opportunity after opportunity, receiving the riches, resources, and advantages that only one blessed by the Heavens might find.

Her probe into the field of lush and healthy Golden Lodoicea returned the same results as the past dozen. The demonic energy was contained and slowly being purified and siphoned off. The souls of the dead that had been trapped, suffering the pain of demonic influence, were being freed. And the method that contained those energies was seamless. There was nowhere weak enough for her to bypass the protections.

No matter where she probed, how she pushed, or the amount of energy she channeled, she could not connect with the ritual she had forged to open a demonic rift. Each attempt to wrest back control was a wasted effort. The energy was out of reach, and the runes and arrays she had meticulously crafted or purchased had been destroyed.

There was nothing for her here, nothing that she could salvage. It was time to accept that and move on.

The sound of two children arguing in the adjacent field was loud enough to gain her attention. As she watched the children, a gleam of an idea began to form. Baroness Jai Myche had destroyed her plans and had cleansed the energies she needed to blast through her bottleneck, but there was more than one way to gain the energy she needed.

The cultist manuals she had found in the spatial device of that long-lost Cultivator also contained a ritual, one that used the sacrifice of children instead of demonic energy. Ja Fiat had never considered utilizing that ritual. She admitted to herself that for all the evil she was willing to inflict, the sacrifice of children had been a step too far.

Until now.

Jai Myche had ruined her plans. It seemed only fair to use the brother and sister she loved so much to break through her bottleneck and ascend to the Nihility Realm.

Why should she be forced to suffer, to live a life of ignominy, hiding behind talismans and artifacts to protect herself because she wasn't powerful enough to fight those hypocrites that would see her destroyed because of the techniques she employed?

There wasn't a Cultivator alive that had reached the Nihility Realm without making choices that straddled the line between 'good' and 'evil.’ Evil was subjective, and Ja Fiat was willing to acknowledge that. And embrace the evil that had been a step too far until now.