As he saw his daughter hit the ground, the Hermit flew at Arad, finally swinging his swords seriously. This a mere fight anymore, it was something far more serious. "What have you done?!" He shouted, and Arad turned toward him with burning purple eyes as the world itself seemed to break around him.

It was at that moment that the Hermit noticed something that he had never seen before, Arad’s soul. It was terrifying. The Hermit had thought that his soul was already big, as he was an ancient cultivator that had trained for centuries, but his soul couldn’t even compare to Arad’s.

The Hermit’s soul was a burning ember of radiant emerald flames, growing even bigger than his body to be a large sphere of around three meters wide. His daughter was just as powerful as her soul burned dark purple, and was almost two meters wide, making both of them one of the strongest people in this world.

But when the Hermit saw Arad’s soul, the entire world had turned pitch black, and the air felt as solid as steel. He couldn’t see the edges of Arad’s soul, which might’ve stretched infinitely, and what’s more, that density far surpassed the density of the Hermit by several orders of magnitude.

He came here to seek help to save the World Tree, but ended up finding a monster even scarier than the ones gnawing at the elder roots of Yggdrasil. He was certain that he would die here, but such a thing had never scared him.

If he is to die here fighting Arad, he wouldn’t die before maiming him. Even if it killed him, he’ll cripple Arad enough so that the next cultivator coming would be able to finish him.

The Hermit was too focused to notice, but Arad had already sucked him and his injured daughter into his stomach, since he knew the fight could destroy the entire forest, alongside his house. At this moment, they were inside Arad’s small world, in a desolate forest at the edges of a small uninhabited continent.

The Hermit’s body burned with power as he charged at Arad. "Ancient Array: Dance of a thousand divine swords!"

The Hermit’s two swords split into hundreds of blades, and they all rained on Arad, regenerated, and rained again in an unstoppable hail of deadly attacks. Each hit was powerful enough to rip a castle wall open, and with hundreds of them hitting Arad each fraction of a second, the sheer light and heat from that was almost as blinding as the sun.

He could feel his bones shattering, his blood boiling, and his flesh tearing apart. In all of his life, the Hermit had never once pushed himself this much, but for some reason, it felt so good to let his soul out, rampage, and draw as much power as he possibly could.

He was already well past the limit of his power and body, but he had one last thing he could do. He was determined to cripple Arad, even at the cost of his own life, so that was what he was going to do. He was about to burn his very soul whole, and use it as fuel for one last attack, an attack that could even crack the bark of the World Tree.

At that moment, Arad was still standing still with a passive face, enduring the hail of deadly attacks without much trouble. As powerful as they looked, they were nothing to his obsidian scale, and honestly, it felt like just standing in heavy rain.

"Even you won’t survive this unscathed! Last Flash of Life: Divine..." but before the Hermit could finish, in that tiny, incomprehensible fraction of a second, Arad’s void rushed out of his body like a tidal wave of pure destruction.

The rain of swords was swallowed whole, the Hermit’s power cracked, and all of his libs were shattered the moment the wave of void hit him. The last thing he could see was the image of Arad’s draconic face glaring at him with a roar, and it got burned into his mind as the last spec of his consciousness was shattered by a blinding hit of pain and searing agony.

To the Hermit, it all turned black, and he was out. Then almost immediately, he woke up again, this time, lying on the grass in the forest, with his daughter beside him, fully healed. He gasped for air, sat up in panic, and looked at his daughter. She was alive, breathing, and uninjured. Was it all a dream? What was that?

But in the next second, he could hear it. The sound of an axe hitting wood, right behind him, just a few meters away, Arad was there, chopping trees. The Hermit immediately jumped back to his feet, ready to fight, but quickly noticed that his swords were nowhere to be seen.

"Do you want another beating? You aren’t going to order me around." Arad glared back at him. Of course, Arad doesn’t take kindly to people ordering him around, unless it is his wives; they can order him around as much as they want. "Ah, and your swords are just over there beside that chopped tree."

"What did you do? What was that?" The Hermit growled, and Arad looked back at him. "Simple, I beat you and your daughter down. She only took that punch you saw to get knocked out, you, on the other hand, needed quite the beating, so you won’t kill yourself."

As Arad hit the massive tree trunk one time, the tree creaked as he cracked and fell down, hitting the ground hard enough to shake the other trees around it. Arad gave the tree a look and then turned back toward the Hermit, struck his axe on the stump, and cracked his wrists.

"I’ll help you deal with whatever is eating Yggdrasil’s roots, but you won’t be ordering me around." He sat on the ground with his legs crossed, stared at them with a smile, "Do you understand?"

"We understand. First, I never meant to offend you. I would like to apologize for everything my daughter and I did." Hermit’s eyes burned with a dark blue flame. "But I have to ask, how did you heal us? I should’ve died from all that power I forced out, and even if I didn’t die, I would be crippled, and my injuries would take at least five decades to heal. My daughter is better, but no matter how good a healer you are, her teeth would still need years to grow back."

The daughter stared between her old father and Arad, worried as she gently touched her jaw. All of her teeth were back in their place, and even the one that had a cavity was fully fixed. Did they stumble upon some divine healer? But if he was that skilled at healing, then how could he be so powerful in combat?

This was a world of cultivation, and so, it was common knowledge that the more someone invests in one field, the less time they would have to cultivate the other fields. Someone who studies and refines the art of the sword like her father won’t waste time on anything else, and it’s better to focus on that single field.

"As long as your brain is fine, I can heal you back up." Arad pointed at his head, "Both of you had a measure of brain damage. She because of my backhand slap, and you because you overexert your mind using all of that... magic or power, whatever you call it. So I don’t recommend you exert yourself before taking at least a few days to rest."

Arad looked at the sky, lifted a tiny pebble, and threw it. A few seconds later, a large pigeon fell down, dead as the stone had pierced its chest. "I’ll demonstrate."

"A moment, please, Strong One." The Hermit lifted his hand, opened his palm, and then, with a swift swing, he dismembered the pigeon’s corpse into pieces. The head, the wings, the chest, the back, the guts, the thighs, the legs, and the feet. Each one was cut apart and neatly de-feathered and cleaned, as if they were about to cook it.

"I cut and separated all of its meridians. Now, this damage more resembles what my body suffered. It should be impossible to heal, and this bird had already been dead for a while." He stared at Arad, and Arad smiled back as he put his palm over the pigeon’s head.

"I won’t be so sure about that." As Arad spoke, the Hermit saw a wave of divine light burning behind Arad, and when he looked up, he saw a titanic golden statue of a thousand hands and legs, standing taller than the World Tree and framed against a dark, abyssal sky of harrowing depth and malevolence. The daughter couldn’t see that statue; her senses weren’t as sharp as those of her father, so she only paled when she saw her father’s face contort into a horrified, dumbfounded face.

As Arad removed his massive palm, the pigeon was alive beneath it. Its severed body parts were still on the ground; Kali’s divine magic had grown it a whole new body using Arad’s nutrients. Even by the Mortal World’s standards, this level of healing was unheard of, and the only reason Arad could do it was that he was cheating by having direct access to Kali, one of the strongest divines.

As the pigeon flew Arad the Hermit could only stare at it disappearing into the vast sky. "Such divine power, to bring someone from the brink of death."