On the Path of Eternal Strength.

Dawn did not arrive as a relief, but as a veiled sentence. The clarity that crossed the clinic's windows did not carry the warmth of the sun, but the coldness of a gray dust suspended in the air, as if the day had not been born for the living, but to bear witness to a body struggling against the invisible border of death.

Valentina lay motionless, small, reduced to the weight of her bones and the fragility of a sigh. But that stillness was no longer the stillness of collapse: beneath her pale skin ran red and black waves that slowly faded, like embers dying out after a fire. The blood of Sebastián and that of Virka had fulfilled their hidden task, draining poison, closing the perforation in her lung, dragging with brutality every remnant of misery that malnutrition had left in her entrails. Now the inner glow weakened, not from failure, but because the process had come to an end.

Helena remained upright beside the stretcher, her posture rigid like a wall that admitted no cracks. Selena, at her side, did not blink, her sentinel eyes capturing every detail, every minimal contraction of the girl's body. What they saw was not just the healing of a mortal wound: before them, the sunken skin smoothed, the lips regained a faint color, the child's muscles tightened with a health they had never known. Valentina was not transforming into someone different, but into what she had never had the chance to be: a five-year-old girl in the fullness that nature had denied her.

—How is this possible…? —murmured Helena, her voice barely broken, though her expression remained stern.

—The blood did not only heal the wound —added Selena, with an inquisitive glint in her gaze—. It is as if the time of deprivation had been erased.

It was Narka who broke the prolonged silence. His voice, deep and measured, seemed to resonate more from the earth than from his throat.

—Do not be mistaken —he said, with the calm of one speaking of a truth that admits no debate—. The girl has not changed in what she is. What runs through her veins invents nothing new, nor does it turn her into another. What it does, in this state, is force the body to return to its healthiest form, expelling what corrupted it, returning it to its natural balance.

His golden eyes settled on both women, heavy as mountains.

—Malnutrition was erased because it never should have existed in her flesh. Her bones remember how they should have grown, her skin remembers the strength it never received. The blood only forced those memories to be fulfilled. Nothing more.

There was a brief silence, dense as a wall. Helena frowned, perceiving the omission.

—Then… there are no hidden risks? —she asked, with an edge of suspicion.

Narka slowly closed his eyes, as if weighing his words before giving them.

—Sebastián's blood… can alter even the root of a being, down to its very genetics —he answered at last—. But that only happens at higher levels, far beyond what you have seen today. This is not the case. And I will not speak of it now.

Helena and Selena exchanged a brief look. There were more secrets in that boy and in his red-eyed companion than either of them could imagine, but they would not get more answers.

The room remained in expectant silence. Valentina's breathing, slow and regular, became the only perceptible sound. Virka stayed beside her, sitting in silence, her hand suspended inches from the girl's forehead, as if she feared breaking her by mere touch. Her crimson eyes never left the small face, and in them burned a different tension: not the ferocity of the beast, but that of someone who longed to protect the fragile with absolute zeal.

Sebastián stood at the back of the room, still, leaning against the wall. His eyes —the dark whirlwinds in his red irises— remained open, fixed on the girl, although his mind already looked beyond the place.

Then he felt it.

At first it was barely a hum in the air, an imperceptible tremor that not even the walls could contain. Then, a spiritual stench, like the breath of a rotten corpse seeping through every crack. It was not the presence of the sick city, nor the usual shadows: it was a precise, known vibration. The Profane.

Sebastián straightened his back slowly, without uttering a word. Virka lifted her head immediately, her eyes searching his with a spark of instinct. Helena frowned, perceiving too late what was already upon them.

It was Narka who confirmed it gravely:

—The poison that ran through her veins left a mark. A trail. And that mark draws it.

The tension became palpable. The dawn, which had brought a faint calm, shattered like glass under an invisible hammer.

Sebastián took a step forward. His voice, at last, cut the silence.

—Virka, you stay with her. She must open her eyes and the first thing she sees must be your face. —He turned to Narka, with a hard flash in his gaze—. You make sure they understand what is necessary.

Helena, rigid, asked what everyone feared.

—What is approaching?

Sebastián held her gaze with the firmness of a rock.

—The same one who tried to kill her. This time, I will finish him.

The air grew dense. Valentina's breathing remained calm, unaware that the dawn marking her rebirth was also the prelude to another battle.

The clinic's hallways, lit by cold lights, grew narrower with each step Sebastián took. It was not a change in the walls, but in the invisible pressure that began to emanate from his body: the killing intent began to flow from him like a silent poison, at first barely a murmur, a hidden blade sliding among the shadows. The nurses and assistants who happened to cross paths with him in the distance felt a sudden chill, as if their bones had remembered the fragility of being alive; they averted their eyes without understanding why.

Sebastián advanced with the same expression as always, hard, marked by the determination that defined his face. Nothing in his features revealed what emanated from within him, and yet the atmosphere around him warped as if reality itself resisted his mere presence. With every meter covered, the intent grew denser, until the entire clinic seemed to hold its air under a strange weight.

When he pushed the doors open and stepped outside, the early morning greeted him laden with that invisible pressure. Outside, the guards waited, stationed at the entrance. In another time they would have held his gaze firmly, but now, the moment they saw him appear, an involuntary tremor ran through them. It was not because of what they saw, but because of what they felt: Sebastián's killing intent struck them like an invisible hammer, anchoring itself in their bones. It was the undeniable certainty that this man was no man, but something made to kill.

Sebastián did not stop for even a second to explain what they already understood in silence. He barely glanced at them, his expression no different than it always was, and pronounced a single order, dry, undeniable:

—Inside.

The weight of that word was enough. They needed nothing more. They obeyed immediately, moving back inside with a mix of relief and fear, as if fleeing from his back was the only way to breathe. They knew that what they had seen, that upright silhouette under the dim light, was the figure of a monster that should not exist, yet walked among them as part of their reality.

The doors closed behind them, and Sebastián was left alone. He did not move. He stood in front of the clinic, motionless, as if time itself had stopped around him. His face did not change: it remained the same, bearing the unshakable mark of determination. But his killing intent did not cease to grow. It expanded with every breath, with every heartbeat, spreading into the empty streets like an invisible tide that soaked the air with a single destiny: to kill.

The silence of dawn became unbearable. Then, after long minutes of stillness, Sebastián spoke. He did not raise his voice or change his tone; he only let his words become a blade:

—How much longer are you going to keep hiding, trash?

From the nearby shadows, a hoarse and viscous laugh replied. The Profane emerged from its lair slowly, dragging with it a stench that did not belong to this world. Its voice was a growl that tore through the air:

—I was not hiding. I was building hunger… to devour everyone inside. Starting with you. You're just a bigger prey, not a threat.

The mockery spread like poison, but Sebastián did not respond. There was no retort, no gesture. Only silence, and in that silence, the awakening of his Qi. It was a dull, brutal pulse that needed no words.

The world shattered.

The Veil opened like a crack in the fabric of reality. The clinic, the street, the very air were absorbed into a distorted reflection. The ground fractured into black crystals that returned dead images of the city; the clinic was left behind as an unrecognizable shadow; the lights multiplied into broken flashes. Everything became echo, everything became shattered mirror.

Sebastián and the Profane stood face to face in that broken dimension. The Profane, inside the Veil, revealed its most atrocious form, resonating with the rottenness of the place. Sebastián, in contrast, did not change: his expression was the same, determination intact. But now, in the heart of the Veil, his killing intent was an absolute blade, a sentence suspended in the air.

The Veil closed there, with both of them facing each other in the world's broken mirror, the inevitable battle about to begin.

The silence inside the clinic was not an empty silence: it was a charged, tense silence, crossed by held breaths and the wait for a heartbeat that had yet to awaken. Valentina lay on the stretcher, her small body sustained between machines that whispered with dim lights. For Virka, however, none of that mattered. She saw no tubes or screens, only the silhouette of the girl. Her red eyes were fixed on her as if they were claws that could not let go, with a silent, fierce devotion of a mother who is not yet a mother, but already claims what is hers. She treated her like a strange treasure, and in that gaze was hidden the promise of a wild love and of an incalculable violence if anyone dared to touch her.

Narka, at her side, remained in apparent calm. But he was the first to feel it: a slight tremor in the invisible, like a bell struck deep in another dimension. His golden, ancient eyes blinked slowly. He did not speak immediately; he always waited for silence to breathe before interrupting it. But Virka felt it too: her skin, her animal instinct, recognized the crack in the air. The Veil had opened outside.

Helena perceived it only in the change of atmosphere: the air seemed denser, heavier, as if a mantle had descended over the walls. Selena turned her head, her cold eyes searching for an answer, and it was she who broke the thread of tension:

—What just happened?

Narka answered without fixing his gaze on any particular point, as if he were observing beyond the walls. His voice was deep, melancholic, the echo of one who had seen too many things to be surprised:

—The Veil… has been activated.

Helena barely furrowed her brow, pragmatic, not allowing uncertainty to translate into fear.

—Why do you feel it, and we do not?

—Because you are still human —said Narka, measured—. We belong, in one way or another, to the supernatural. And when the Veil opens, we feel it. That place exists to contain what is unnameable, so that the normal world does not fracture under its weight. It is a boundary: what happens inside does not touch what is outside.

Helena narrowed her eyes, calculating, processing the words like pieces on a board.

—Then… was that the same place where Sebastián healed me?

Narka nodded, slowly, as if confirming a truth that had always been there.

—Yes. To heal you, Sebastián used a power that does not belong to this ordinary world. He isolated it in the Veil, where the supernatural can overflow without others perceiving it.

Helena intervened, her voice cold as steel.

—So, all supernatural power is retained in that space. If that's the case… who else can do something like that?

For a moment, silence returned. Narka closed his eyes, as if searching for words among ruins. Then he spoke:

—I am not entirely sure. But I remember something. Long ago, when you were raising the mansion, Virka and I saw a being that appeared out of nowhere and vanished the same way. It was not a Profane, it was not a specter. Its way of breaking in and leaving… was similar to the opening of the Veil.

Helena looked at him with clear, intense eyes.

—Do you know what that being seeks? Or how to locate it?

—No —Narka replied, firm in his reserve—. But, from what we have been able to deduce from its actions, that being maintains a certain order. Not a human or moral order, but the balance between the supernatural and the normal. It watches so that the two shores do not collapse upon one another.

Selena, with a cold and measured voice, asked the question that neither of the two could refrain from asking:

—And what about us? Helena and I have been involved with Sebastián, with you, with Virka. We've already touched that world. Where do we stand?

Narka looked at her directly for the first time. His golden eyes carried no judgment, but they bore the weight of the inevitable.

—Precisely because of that. Little by little you have ceased to be entirely human. You stand at the threshold: intermediate beings, caught between the normal and the supernatural. And I do not know what that guardian of order will do with you if one day it turns its gaze on your existence.

The words fell like stones into a bottomless lake. Helena and Selena did not show fear, but the ice of comprehension pierced the room. Helena was the one who spoke, with that hardness that was her own:

—And if it turns out to be an enemy?

Narka closed his eyes for an instant, like one contemplating an unpleasant vision.

—If it were… we would already be dead. All of us. Not even Sebastián or Virka could resist. That being did not interfere before, nor has it now. That means, for now, we are not enemies to it.

The room fell into silence. Only the pulse of the machines and Valentina's steady breathing could be heard. But in the minds of Helena and Selena, something broke: they understood that this world was not what it seemed, that even beyond Sebastián, beyond Virka, beyond Narka himself, there were beings still more monstrous, guardians of an incomprehensible order.

Virka said nothing. Her gaze remained fixed on Valentina, as if the entire universe had been reduced to that sleeping child. And in that stillness, the tension multiplied: outside, Sebastián had opened the Veil to face the Profane; inside, those who remained understood that the supernatural was not the exception, but the hidden rule that sustained reality.

The Veil remained in silence, as though reality itself were holding its breath before splitting in two. The ground, fractured in lines of black crystal, reflected distorted figures; fragments of the clinic were no more than floating shadows, reminders of a distant world that no longer had a voice there. The air was heavy with a metallic scent, thick, and a faint blue tint seeped through the cracks, a presage of the poison that did not need to show itself to be felt.

In front of Sebastián, the creature no longer pretended to be human. The Profane had unfolded into its true form: black plates covering its skin like a broken exoskeleton, poison seeping from fissures in bluish flashes; long tentacles sprouting from its back, ringed with circles that glowed like marine embers, vibrating with an alien will. Its face retained the echo of the human, but multiplied into liquid eyes and deformed into a mouth fractured in three directions, from which crystal fangs emerged, more like stingers than teeth. The mere presence of that being carried a stable, heavy power, that of a level fourteen in its initial stage. Every fiber of its body radiated that brute force, without the need for effort.

Sebastián did not avert his gaze. His entire body was already charged: the Dao of Force burned in every muscle, the red Qi coursing through his fibers and tightening his flesh to the limit. His bones vibrated like reinforced columns, and each breath condensed energy. The Indomitable Body was stretched to its utmost, ready to endure, ready to strike. With all of this gathered, he had reached the peak of level thirteen: the highest he could sustain constantly. It was not enough to match the monster before him, but it was all he could hold without breaking too soon.

The Veil trembled between them. There was no space for words. Sebastián's intent was pure, cold, directed only to kill; the Profane's, a formless hunger, the desire to devour anything that moved. And in the same instant, both bodies lunged.

Sebastián's step sank the ground beneath his feet, projecting shards of dark crystal backward. His right fist advanced like a human projectile, flesh hardened, imposing force concentrated. The Profane responded with equal brutality, bringing down one of its venom-coated claws. The air shattered in a single roar: fist against claw.

The impact made the entire Veil resound. The ground split into deep fissures, glowing lines spreading like black lightning. The pressure of the clash drove Sebastián's body backward, his muscles straining to the limit to keep from yielding. He could feel his arm burning, the bones bearing the onslaught, while the Profane's claw seemed to multiply the weight of the world into a single point. It was the difference in levels made palpable: Sebastián, even at his peak, resisted against something above him.

In that same instant, the air was tainted. From the cracks in the Profane's flesh spilled an invisible gas, a blue poison that mixed with the pheromones already saturating the environment. Sebastián inhaled it with no choice: his throat closed with a metallic burn, and a cold tingling began to creep through his nerves. It was not simple pain, but something subtler and more cruel: paralysis, the very denial of movement. His muscles began to feel heavy, the stiffness trying to smother the fire of his body.

But the Indomitable Body did not yield. Where the poison sought to seal, Sebastián's flesh rebelled. His fibers contracted, expelling the alien presence, as if his body itself knew to distinguish what belonged to it from what sought to consume it. The Qi of Force, still flowing, reinforced each reaction, pushing the toxin away from vital points, forcing the blood to keep running even as the poison tried to halt it.

The clash remained locked: fist against claw, neither retreating. The Profane pressed with its superior power, its claw gleaming with venom, its tentacles vibrating with insatiable hunger. Sebastián, with his arm hardened, endured, feeling the paralysis gnawing at his muscles from within. The battle was not only against the enemy before him: it was also against the poison that sought to steal his movement, against the very limits of a body driven to its utmost.

The Veil around them quivered with every second the collision lasted, as if reality itself knew that one of the two would have to break first.

The Profane wrenched open its torso in a convulsive spasm. The blue flesh quivered and its ribs split outward like a deranged cage, releasing from its entrails a swarm of black shards. They were fragments of corroded bone, hardened with dark earth and sharpened into improvised blades, all steeped in a blue venom that glowed with a sickly radiance. The barrage erupted with the violence of a cataclysm: dozens of projectiles slicing through the air at more than three hundred kilometers per hour, aimed at Sebastián's throat, his eyes, every exposed joint.

The air shrieked with a chorus of invisible blades. Each bone arrow tore through the gloom of the Veil as though the plane itself were being perforated. The atmosphere, already thick with toxic haze, became a living swarm of death advancing relentlessly toward the lone man who stood firm in that fractured world.

Sebastián braced his legs, set his feet precisely into the fissures of the ground, and hurled himself to the side. The black crystal of the Veil cracked with a dry snap beneath his heels, propelling him into a zigzagging motion. His muscles answered with the brutal coordination of years of discipline and suffering. His entire body surged forward in successive bursts, reaching impossible speeds for any ordinary human: five hundred and ten kilometers per hour in explosive displacements.

But it was not a clean run. The poison was already in his blood, lodged in his system like a malignant guest seeking to claim every tendon. This toxin did not rob him of raw strength, but of finesse. Each leap was as though his joints screeched beneath the edge of an inner blade. Each step sent liquid pain slicing through his knees and elbows. His movements were effective, but not without cost: the cost of fighting venom with every breath.

The shards did not miss entirely. One ripped across the air and opened his cheek, a gash that burned with liquid fire; another grazed his shoulder, tearing the skin superficially, but the venom seeped into the wound like embers. A third struck his leg, leaving a laceration that seared with corrosive agony. Each small wound became a cruel reminder: the venom sought to multiply, to spread like roots in fertile soil, but the Indomitable Body contained it, dividing it into compartments of resistance, rendering it useless to subdue him in an instant.

The Profane did not relent. With a vibrating roar, the ground began to fracture under Sebastián's steps. The black crystal split into deep cracks, and from them sprouted spikes of hardened earth and blue crystal rising upward like spears. It was a field of traps born from nothing, designed to turn evasion into suicide.

Sebastián leapt at the precise moment. His torso twisted in the air, his body bending at an impossible angle as the spikes erupted upward, grazing the soles of his feet. At the same time, new shards slashed across the air, whistling centimeters from his face. The battlefield had become a closed swarm: spikes from below, arrows from the front, and an atmosphere saturated with blue haze pressing into every breath.

Not everything could be dodged. His forearms intercepted the inevitable. Qi had concentrated in them like an invisible shield, reinforced by the Dao of Force. When the arrows struck, the clash resounded in his bones like brutal hammer blows. Pain rippled in waves from his elbows to his shoulders, vibrating in his already punished nerves. Each defense was another weight added to his torment. Each impact was a reminder that his body was being wrung to the absolute limit of endurance.

The pressure multiplied. The entire Veil seemed to shatter with each assault. The air vibrated as if the spiritual plane itself could not withstand the clash of forces. And in the midst of that chaos, Sebastián's figure was a dark stain moving with lethal precision, a crimson shadow that resisted without yielding.

Then the Profane lunged again. Its tentacles coiled violently around its arms, fusing the joints into organic lances. It was a grotesque spectacle: muscles that were not its own throbbed upon its bones, and the claws gained the length and density of titanic weapons. The air filled with sharp cracks, as though each corrupted fiber was about to snap. The onslaught was immediate: the claws descended with the weight of judgment, seeking to pierce Sebastián's skull.

He did not retreat. There was no room to retreat. He raised his boxer's guard, elbows pressed to his torso, forearms crossed before his face. His Qi intensified, creating an invisible framework that covered his arms. The Dao of Force wrapped him in a halo that distorted the air, as though space itself resisted touching him. The clash was devastating.

The impact struck him like a mountain falling vertically. His arms did not break, but the blow dragged him mercilessly, plowing the ground like a human blade. Cracks multiplied beneath his back until the mirrored wall of the clinic stopped him with a crash that reverberated through the entire Veil. The echo was a thunder caged within the plane's entrails.

The pain in his arms became unbearable. Every tendon burned like molten iron. Every nerve vibrated like a cable tearing under tension. The venom seized upon the crack of pain and spread faster, seeking to paralyze his elbows. Sebastián clenched his teeth, his breathing turning into a harsh rasp. He did not reject the stab of agony: he absorbed it, turned it into direction, into fury.

The Profane roared again and doubled its offensive. This time it raised both claws, reinforced to madness by the tentacles that tensed like additional muscles, multiplying the pressure. The air whistled with the fall of two grotesque lances, each one charged with the intent to split him in two and extinguish his resistance in a single strike.

Sebastián stepped forward. His feet sank into the ground and every fiber of his body contracted to the limit. He did not think, he did not hesitate: he decided. Qi burned in his arm like a dark sun ready to erupt. The Dao of Force wrapped him like an invisible armor, brutal and immense. The Art of the End of the Body unfolded in its purest form, like a secret contained for too long.

The Absolute Dragon Fist was born from him with a mineral roar that tore the air apart. The crimson dragon erupted from his fist like a living beast: incandescent scales formed of pressure and Qi, jaws open vibrating with violence, a body that seemed to twist in the air with autonomy. It was not an echo, it was not an illusion. It was a creature of pure force, born from pain, from decision, and from restrained fury.

The claws descended in unison. The dragon charged with its full weight. The clash was apocalyptic. The claws shattered with a dry crack, the tentacles unraveled like rotted ropes, and the onslaught tore through the Profane's torso from chest to jaw.

The monster's body exploded in a macabre rain. Its upper half disintegrated into fragments of blue flesh, splintered bone, and liquid venom that poured into the air like a cursed storm. The remains scattered far and wide, breaking apart against the gloom of the Veil. Only the legs and hips remained swaying, a grotesque remnant, before collapsing onto the fractured ground.

The ground of the Veil split into dozens of lines. The air became saturated with the metallic stench of blood and the blue haze vaporized by the impact. The entire plane vibrated with the echo of what had happened, as if it had been wounded by the dragon's violence.

Sebastián remained standing. His arms burned like lit furnaces, his breath was a knife sinking into his lungs, and the poison still coursed through him like a venomous tide. Yet his stance was firm. His red gaze cut through the darkness, motionless, awaiting the inevitable. His killing intent floated in the air like a secondary atmosphere, heavy, suffocating, impossible to ignore.

In the distance, the Profane's fragments began to move. Viscous threads stretched between the shattered pieces. The blue flesh trembled as if breathing, struggling to knit itself together once more. The spirit of the octopus, the corrupted root of its existence, was reclaiming what was its own: regeneration had begun.

The scene was suspended in two planes: Sebastián, torn but unyielding, breathing like a predator that accepts no truce; and in the distance, the sinister promise of a monster that was not yet finished returning.

The silence after the detonation was no relief: it was a held breath. The blue remains of the Profane, scattered like glass entrails across the floor of the Veil, began to stir. At first it was a faint tremor, the pulsation of a dead jellyfish refusing to sink. Then, corrupt life returned to its own carrion.

From every fragment threads were born. They were shining filaments, viscous tendons that stretched and contracted, seeking direction. The cuts of blue flesh expelled fine tentacles like desperate roots; they latched onto the edges of the blackened crystal and dragged forward with a wet sound. The lower half—hips and legs—responded to the call with the same hunger: from its broken bone sprouted gelatinous cords that groped the ground, quivering, then hurled themselves ahead with instinctive precision. It was the will of a body made not to die.

Sebastián watched it with his arms still burning. He felt the weight of the venom tightening around his elbows, the grainy sensation in his tendons when he tried to close his fist. Breathing hurt; it scraped within his chest, but it remained controlled. His red gaze, steady, did not blink as the first tentacles crossed the distance.

The Profane did not merely try to reassemble itself: it attacked even as it regenerated. Two filaments lashed out like spears. Sebastián twisted his torso and let the first pass along his jawline; the second he deflected with a forearm hardened by Qi. The vibration ran through his arm in a dry hum. Another pair of tentacles burst out of nowhere, shot from a slab of flesh that seconds before had seemed inert. They carried that same blue glow that burned the skin with mere proximity.

He moved.

Short bursts. Ankle, hip, shoulder—each joint marked the rhythm of a displacement that skirted the impossible, though the venom clipped the edges of his speed. The tips of the tentacles whistled past him like wet arrows. When one brushed his shirt, it left a scorched edge and a metallic stench. Another, thicker, taut like a cable, shot up from the ground and tried to snare his ankle; he crushed it with a stomp, the sole of his foot sinking until he felt a gummy crack and that rancid reek of corrupted sea.

It wasn't enough.

The monster's lower half began birthing tentacles by the dozen. They sprouted in clusters, like fingers grown by mistake from a single wound; some thin, stinger-like; others heavier, with knots of bone at the tips. And from the upper remains—a torn torso, a stray clavicle, a mask of skin clinging to a shard of skull—identical lines crawled across the ground at unnerving speed, seeking.

Sebastián struck those junctions with dry blows. He smashed what he could reach: crushed gelatinous bases, tore root-like strands with his fingers as if ripping cables, stomped knots until they broke. Each destruction opened a breath of one second before another tentacle sprouted right beside it. It wasn't addition—it was multiplication.

The pain in his arms worsened as his forearms served as both shield and hammer. The venom took advantage of every impact to climb a step further along his nerves. He felt it: a cold viscosity creeping inward, and the Indomitable Body splitting it, encasing it by sheer will and breath. He endured, but not without cost.

A tentacle rose like a pole and caught him on the diagonal. He dodged too late. It tore across his side, leaving a line of blood mingled with the blue glow. Another slid from below, silent, and snared his calf. He severed it with a twist that split the ground, but three more replaced the fallen one: two shot for his waist, one for his wrist.

Deception. These weren't isolated thrusts: they were mapping him.

The floor of the Veil opened like a black flower. From that fissure a bundle of tentacles erupted, striking in a fan. Sebastián leapt back, managed to smash four with his fists, but the rest caught him midair. In a sequence of coordinated closures, the creature enveloped him.

They lifted him.

First strips, then cords; from the cords came loops; from the loops, rings. Each ring closed around a segment: waist, chest, thighs, forearms. The pressure rose in waves. The Profane formed, around him, a living capsule, translucent and blue, which darkened as the layers overlapped. Inside, the air smelled of salt and metal. Sebastián felt the air turn into mud that refused to enter his lungs.

They tightened.

The capsule creaked as if it had ribs.

The first sound was his right elbow: a snap of fibers pushed to their limit. Then the left, a tendon's complaint stretched beyond the human. Qi oscillated, trying to distribute itself without waste, thickening at precise points so the compression would not burst an artery or extinguish the diaphragm. Breathing became a saw.

He did not try to break it at first. He measured. Each contraction came in intervals of two exact seconds, with interspersed micro–pulses, like a malignant heart testing how much it could squeeze before grinding him down. With each pulse, the toxin sought to dilute the electrical signal of his muscles.

Sebastián chose on the third beat.

He clenched his jaw and charged his side. Qi poured into his arm, not like a flood, but as a demanding current, aimed to pierce flesh, capsule, sky of the Veil. The Dao of Force answered as always: invisible, imposing density where the world is soft. Every fiber of his right shoulder began to crack with the weight of a small sun.

"Up," he thought. Not for beauty. For vector.

—Art of the End of the Body —his voice came out harsh, buried—. Absolute Dragon Fist.

He needed no space. The dragon was born compressed and, precisely because of that, it was brutal.

A red, incandescent pressure compacted against his fist and exploded upward. The crimson dragon tore through the layers of tentacles as if they were soaked paper, opening tunnels in the blue gel. Scales of impact ripped entire chunks of the prison away; each scale was a blade of compressed air that sliced through lines of force. The capsule tried to react, closing the hole, but the dragon was already out, dragging Sebastián with it in the same vortex.

They ascended vertically.

The roof of the capsule burst, and a rain of blue viscera fell like hail. Sebastián emerged with his arms glued to his torso by the resistance of the gelatin, then tore them open with a pull that sounded inside, not outside. He landed on a slab of crystal and slid a span, regaining balance purely through his ankles. The air of the Veil tasted of iron.

He looked forward.

The Profane was already standing.

The torso had returned. What seconds ago had been a disjointed mass of twitching remains was now a tall figure, human in its falseness, with eyes covered by a liquid veil where the shadow of two pupils floated. The edges of its skin still rippled, as if the surface remembered being ocean, but the frame was sealed. Regeneration had won an impossible race.

The realization was cold, technical, without dramatics. Faster than him. Faster than the Indomitable Body strained to its limits by the toxin. Difference of rank: profaned biology itself dictated the terms of the fight.

The Profane advanced without a sound. Its back split open.

From its spine sprouted six main tentacles, each jointed in sections like an insect, and at the end of each one grew a new claw: not the open talon of before, but insectoid appendages reinforced, shorter, with bony spikes and a shining film over the nails. They were not mere extensions: each tip oozed venom. The smell of rotted sea mingled with ammonia.

It did not wait to close the distance before striking: the tentacles lashed out even as the body advanced. The design was clear—occupy space, saturate Sebastián's front, and strike wherever a gap appeared. The claws buzzed, slicing the air in crossed lines.

Sebastián met the first rush with minimal steps. He dodged inside the attack, not away from it. He let the first claw graze his cheekbone, the second skim his bicep; lowered his clavicle half a centimeter so the third would miss the base of his neck and, seizing that narrow opening, drove his elbow into the root of the fourth tentacle. The claw shattered—and reformed instantly, as if the very blow had been its seed.

Repeating the dragon would not be enough. He knew it. The reach of the new claws was unpredictable; the fan they carved before him demanded an attack that not only pierced but cleared a wider path forward.

The memory came as a superimposition of brief images: other eyes—yellow, fangs upon fangs, a striped back under diseased skin—and that sensation of fan-shaped ferocity that could not be contained by a fist, no matter how perfect. The first true Profane he had faced: the tiger-deer. Then he understood the geometry of the enemy—not a spear, but a sweep of death.

In Closed Doors he had designed the response. It was no mystical inspiration; it was cruel anatomy and memory of pain. That week, with the doors sealed, he had repeated, until his hips tore, a line of motion that turned the body into a solid whip without losing base control. He had embedded the mechanics with the Dao of Force, not to compete with the enemy's trajectory, but to impose upon it.

He decided.

The tentacles came again, crossed, shifting heights as if they had learned the rhythm of his breathing. Sebastián loaded his right hip to the limit, pressed the ground with the ball of his left foot, and let his spine become an iron axis. Qi surged along his leg like a column of pressure; the Dao of Force settled in the sole and rose like an invisible tide. His entire right side cracked with an internal sound that was not pain—it was release.

—Art of the End of the Body. —His voice scraped his throat, without a shout—. Unstoppable Tiger Kick.

The release was clean.

His hip detonated forward and the leg executed a lateral kick so precise the air itself had no time to move aside. The projected pressure materialized in the silhouette of a tiger: not smoke nor ornamental aura, but a shockwave with defined claws, with jaws of vibration, and a back of wind-forged blades. The tiger roared without sound—the roar was the air itself breaking—and advanced in a fan, wider than an outstretched arm, deeper than the reach of the new claws.

The first tentacle was sliced in half before it touched him. The second dismembered into three sections that fell like burned insects. The third tried to curl around to his back; the tiger's edge swept it away, ripping the claw as if it were a loose tooth. The other three struck the front of the technique and their tips exploded into splinters, scattering venom that hissed on the floor.

The Profane thrust its torso forward to exploit the gap left behind the sweep. Sebastián followed the line: the kick was not an isolated strike, but a stroke. At contact with the void left behind the claws, he turned his hip one more degree, shifted the tilt of his heel, and the tiger widened by half a span. The wave carved across the blue clavicle and revealed a bone that regenerated as it shattered, a blink of impossible geometry.

Venom sprayed the air in fine glittering motes. His breath burned for a second. The Indomitable Body blocked the immediate infiltration and pushed it toward the surface layer, where it burned like salt on raw flesh, but did not kill.

The Profane mutated mid-motion. Severed tentacles sprouted again like lizard tails; their tips no longer held only claws—clusters of small spikes emerged, shining with a new light, contracting like muscles ready to fire. Its back produced another pair of tentacles, shorter, angled downward, like auxiliary legs seeking traction for a leap. Its chest inhaled—or whatever that motion was—and the skin tightened into hexagonal patterns beneath the surface.

Sebastián did not wait to see the next form. The tiger was still advancing, and in that margin he chose to chain.

His supporting foot bit into the ground. The torso lowered by a millimeter, just enough to reload. The hip, already opened, traced a second arc over the first—not outward, but inward—driving the sweep into a tighter fold, aimed at the center where the Profane's spine had only just fused. The tiger, sensing the geometry's command, did not dissolve: it folded upon itself and drove its claws toward the heart of the figure, as if it knew.

The Profane leapt forward to shorten the distance and nullify the front. Error or desperation. The tiger's sharpest edge caught it on the flank, ripping away a sheet of skin and muscle that revealed, for an instant, the gleam of an organ that was not human. It sealed almost immediately, but not without paying in blood.

The new tentacles fired their spikes. A short, dense rain, aimed at his face. Sebastián tilted his head, closed one eye on reflex, and let the tiger do the sweeping. The wave scattered the spikes in a fan and hurled them back to their source in an inverted cloud. Three struck the Profane's face and melted into its skin as though returning to a nest.

The space opened—barely a step. Enough.

Sebastián entered.

Not beautiful, not elegant: efficient. At half a meter, his knee feinted a thrust that never landed—pure bait to push the defense diagonally—while his heel reclaimed the original line with a third, shorter kick, no projection, the dry soul of the technique. No tiger: direct impact. The sound was dull. The blue ribcage collapsed inward like a wet drum.

The Profane reacted with its spine, not its arms. A tentacle drove into the ground and wrenched it to the right, avoiding the next strike that would have broken its neck's base. Its back understood it needed height: a strange leap, oblique in vector, angling for the flank.

Sebastián dropped his foot and let the Dao of Force do what it promised: impose. The space the Profane sought to enter thickened; its trajectory grew heavy. Not enough to stop it fully, but enough to break the rhythm. The enemy fell half a span early, and the sweep of tentacles that should have come from above fell short.

There he placed his fist.

He did not repeat the dragon; there was no time to summon the beast without opening a gap elsewhere. It was a simple discharge: bone to core, wrist straight, elbow aligned, shoulder accepting the risk. The crack was pure, honest. A thread of venom bit into his knuckle—sharp burn—and forced him to withdraw before the skin absorbed more.

The Profane staggered back a step. The tentacles returned to guard, as though surviving the blow had been part of an immediate lesson. On its false face—that mask where pupils multiplied and shrank—a dark line appeared, like a smile that belonged to no one.

The floor of the Veil, already scored by their battle, vibrated with a new frequency. Beneath the blue haze, across the crystal surface, a pattern of cracks formed that did not answer to blows: they were the plane's own lines of breathing, containing within its flesh the excess of force so the outer world would not feel it.

Sebastián breathed carefully. The poison was still there, gnawing at the edges of his nervous system, trying to dull the micro-adjustments. The Indomitable Body kept every muscle segment obedient, but the cost was a sustained burn that never ceased. It didn't matter. The kick had opened a map: a wide front to sweep tentacles, a concentrated edge to wound the core, chaining angles a fist could not cover without wasting distance.

The Profane accepted the lesson and denied it at the same time. Its back stretched and the six tentacular columns pulled in a span… only to split at once into twelve. Less mass per tentacle, more in number, smaller tips, faster, each gleaming with a surgical needle's light. There was no beauty in the evolution: only efficiency. And with its next step, the creature showed why its rank stood one floor above.

The twelve tips came not in a fan but in staggered waves: three high, three low, three mid, three delayed to punish evasion. For every respect of rhythm, a counter-beat. If Sebastián dodged high-low, the middle would find his ribs; if he answered with a lateral sweep, the delayed would spear his gut while his hip was still turning back.

Rhythm against rhythm. The Tiger Kick was not just a wider sweep: it was a violent metronome.

He loaded his hip again.

The first sweep opened. The second narrowed. The third, short, struck dry at the base where those twelve columns clung to the back. And between the second and third, he slid in the pivot he had practiced alone against the memory of the tiger-deer: a fourth movement, barely visible, that did not strike… it commanded.

The twelve tips lost synchrony for one second. It was enough.

The second wave of the technique—the tiger in recoil—swept the high line; the third, dry, punished the low; the elbow cut into the mid because the world does not wait, and because nothing forbids a martial art from being exact and dirty at once. The Profane's back sank a span with a noise like wet wood splitting. The tentacles pulled back rather than waste themselves on empty strikes.

The toxin burned again. Each breath was a renewed pact.

Sebastián set his foot back and let the weight drop for an instant, just enough to tell his body it was not breaking yet. His forearms still lived—alive with painful electricity—and his hip, opened, begged for rest, but the fight did not obey those rules.

The Profane, whole and upright before him, its liquid mask blinking with more pupils than could be counted, prepared what was coming: a low leap, arms extended not to embrace but to pin the world into a single point and crush it.

The Tiger Kick did not end; it began again.

Hip, ground, spine. The tiger roared without voice and reappeared, broader than before, because memory serves when it is used. The Dao of Force, in its craft of making the world dense where it must, thickened the strip where the twelve needles sought to draw their pattern. The first three tentacles struck against a wall they did not see, slowed by a breath, and that breath was enough for the wave to seize their necks and split them in two.

There was no triumph. There never would be.

The Profane persisted. And Sebastián, who had learned that true monsters do not fall to a single idea, persisted as well, holding the invisible line between his pain and the exact form of the strike. The Veil groaned, but it did not open. The fight now had border and map. And that border, for the first time in that stretch of night, was not marked by the overwhelming biology of the enemy, but by the cold decision of a man who makes of the body his law.

What instinct grants after discharging force: he advanced straight at the Profane as if distance itself were an error to be corrected with blows. The Veil—that gray mirror replicating the clinic's corridors, walls, and lamps without the noise of the living—seemed to close in around them both; the air, dense, reeked of rust and of something marine that belonged to no coast.

The Profane, wounded yet whole in its hunger, unraveled the logic of the attack. Tentacles burst across surfaces and from beneath the ground, like black worms boring through and erupting in swarms: short, pointed strikes designed to sever paths of advance. Others whipped above the mirrored pavement, reaching for ankles, ribs, kidneys. Its aberrant anatomy rebuilt itself with every pulse: the monster's back split open fissures and birthed new viscous muscular cords; its skin, lifted in plates, revealed pale tissue that resembled suckers.

Sebastián read the rhythm. There was no poetry in his reading, only biomechanics applied to peril: minimal shifts of shoulders, anticipations of tension at the tentacle bases, a tremor in the ground marking where they would pierce. He dodged most with short diagonal steps, scraping impossible margins; even so, some struck through him. One entered obliquely through his chest and exited behind with a wet screech; another pierced his back beneath the scapula; a third grazed his cheekbone like a stake uninterested in beauty, only in shattering his line of advance. He bled, of course—hot blood painting the mirrored floor—but he did not stop. His Indomitable Body labored: not with the monstrous speed of the enemy, but steadily, soldering fibers, laying down new anchors of strength in torn muscle, keeping the machine in motion.

The Profane shifted tactics. To halt the advance without conceding close quarters, it released a dense cloud, an exhalation of poisonous spores that unfurled like a foul flower before Sebastián's face. It was no theatrical gesture; it was a biological mechanism: tentacles bent at the base, its deformed thorax compressed inner chambers, and a green-blue mist flooded the Veil's corridor, aimed directly at his face.

The effect was immediate. Blood from eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The toxin—an unnatural blend of bullet-ant pheromones and blue-ringed octopus venom—clung to his mucous membranes, invaded cavities, paralyzed in fragments. Sebastián's pupils did not contract: they ignited. He did not retreat. He stepped into the cloud as one who swore never to acknowledge such a wall. Pain became fuel, a red thread running from skull to the soles of his feet. And with the pain, his killing intent grew—not outward, but inward, compacting will into a projectile.

He was one step from lethal distance. He gathered all strength into his legs, loaded hips, obliques, soles: a single impulse, calibrated to break. His whole body became a drawn line. 510 km/h in a burst that ripped through the Veil's air, leaving behind a fold of pressure. The Profane compacted a claw: elongated phalanges, reinforced with tentacles, steeped in venom; a biological battering ram ready to receive and slice. Sebastián charged the Absolute Dragon Fist, reinforced only with his Dao of Force: no strange artifices; muscle, will, and that red Qi condensed in fibers like iron at white heat.

The clash was dry, without metaphor: claw against dragon. The pressure etched the dragon as a column of compressed air, its scales visible in the pattern of impact, its spine breaking the corridor in echo. The claw yielded first: fissures ran across its segments like cracks in hot glass, tentacles shredded into rings, and the dragon drove into the Profane's torso like a stake that does not ask leave. The monster staggered two and a half steps back, its frontal guard broken, leaving a trail of viscous secretion and black blood clinging to the ground.

The cost for Sebastián was not theatrical: Qi falling to critical. And worse: his Inverted Origin Core began devouring his blood—and with it, the poison—to keep the machinery alive. A savage pain tore through his entrails, as if each blood cell were a coin ripped out with pincers. It did not stop him. He accelerated.

The Profane tried to space itself out—not to flee, but to regenerate beyond the hammer's reach. Miscalculation. Sebastián did not allow it. In its recoil he caught its leg, no hook needed: fingers like bridles. He trapped the limb in a heartbeat and chained another Unstoppable Tiger Kick. His hip loaded to the limit, his trunk fixed a line of iron, and his leg ripped the air with a cleanness that asked for no applause. The tiger roared—not a figure, but the shockwave itself shaped as one—extending claws through Sebastián's leg, clearing its path without barriers. It devastated the Profane's lower half, tearing tendons, grinding bones that were not quite bones, and ripping mass away until a void gaped. Muscular tubes masquerading as arteries snapped like broken ropes.

Among the remnants, gleaming, the magic core: a crystal set in the knee, low and poorly hidden. The same kick struck it along the same line of force. There was a crack that was not sound, but structure breaking. The core burst. The Profane's physical body collapsed like a tent without poles: flesh lost coherence, fell in ribbons, and the architecture that held the aberration dissolved into a formless tide.

From the ruin emerged the essence that had given the horror its name: the malignant octopus. Not water nor ink—spirit. Ethereal tentacles flared with a sickly blue, rings not on flesh but on the idea of flesh, spiritual venom felt more than seen. A faint stench of dead coast and metal. Its power dropped—from an initial level 14 to a peak 13—yet the danger persisted, written in another grammar.

Sebastián could not sustain two Daos. As a level 8 cultivator, his limits could not be erased by ferocity. He extinguished the Dao of Force like cutting flow to an overheated turbine, and lit his Dao of the Void. The red Qi ceased tightening fibers; in its place, an inner stillness, a useful negativity, a center that neither pushed nor resisted, but absorbed.

The first spiritual exchange was thankless. The octopus struck with tentacles that, though spiritual, inflicted real wounds: one pierced his leg along the thigh; another brushed his arm and left a line of cold that hurt without blood; a third fanned toward ribs and throat. Sebastián dodged the vital, permitted the rest. His face bled from eyes, nose, mouth, and ears under the poison, but no strike touched it. He held killing intent not as a blaze but as a weight displacing all that was superfluous. And he prepared the technique of the Void, forged in Closed Doors, when silence was longer than hunger.

—Void, without end! —he cried.

Between them appeared a seven-pointed star, reddish, drawn in the air as though the Veil itself offered its surface for the seal. At its center, a dark vortex: not black, but dark like the backside of a gaze. It did not push—it pulled. The Dao of the Void—second level—opened a focus that began absorbing energies, partial laws, corrupted essence. The vortex seized residual Qi from the mirrored corridor, dragged threads of the octopus's spiritual presence, and at once fed the Inverted Origin Core, which demanded more. When lacking, the Core devoured Sebastián himself: pain sharpened, an inner hook dragging inward.

The struggle during absorption was a slow drag, asking no beauty. The octopus tried to escape: retracted tentacles, shifted angles, struck with tips aimed at arteries or nerves. Sebastián controlled the star with the economy of one who meditates while walking: the vortex pursued essence, caught a tentacle, and began drawing it in. The octopus countered, spearing again through his already wounded leg, grazing his flank, trying to snap his humerus from within with a pressure outside ordinary physics. Sebastián shielded his carotid, protected his solar plexus with short twists, allowed the rest: endured what was necessary, held the technique. None interfered. The Veil bore it without protest, like a chapel without worshippers.

Absorption was not instant. Filaments of the octopus unraveled and rewove, tentacles turned to ropes of blue mist and back to stingers. Each second diminished the enemy and punished Sebastián: more blood on the ground, more venom turned to unwilling fuel by his ravenous Core. But the vortex grew. The star pulsed once, twice, thrice; each beat devoured something.

The octopus screamed—not in sound, but in pure aversion—and the Veil quaked as if stroked from the wrong side.

At a point without adornment, the spiritual form collapsed into the vortex. Tentacles gave way to filaments, filaments to blue mist, mist to energy that found nowhere to remain unless devoured. The Void took it whole. Part of it became red Qi that fed the Inverted Origin Core—harsh relief, like hard bread to the starving. Another part left a deeper mark in Sebastián: not a gift he could articulate, but something within him that had grown stronger, incomprehensible yet real.

The Core loosened its hunger by a degree. The pain remained, but without its former bite. Sebastián set his feet—more precisely, drove them into the ground—and did not fall. The star held its shape for a moment longer, like a signature etched in glass, then contracted and vanished with a pulse that was no sound but the sensation of a door closing at the end of a corridor.

The Veil steadied its fractures. The mirrored corridor returned to the silence of a hospital without bodies: lamps without light, stretchers without weight, walls duplicating nothing. Sebastián remained standing. Tremor under control. Bloodied by venom across face—eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—pierced in leg, arm, and side, breath rasping raw. His red eyes ablaze with the storm he bore for irises. His killing intent faded slowly, like smoke that understands there is no fuel left. He said nothing. He looked at the place where the octopus had vanished and did not blink.

Tense silence. The Profane's body and spirit, annihilated. Something in Sebastián had changed. Not posture, not expression—those are easy armor—but deeper down, where the Inverted Origin Core brushed against will, something had gained weight.

The Veil closed its echo like a curtain falling without an audience. And there it ended: with a man who did not ask forgiveness for still standing, and a world the same, but bent with a new curvature around his name.

_______________

END OF CHAPTER 38

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