The dome was gone.The trial finished.But Mark Jennings hadn’t moved.He knelt in silence, face blank, eyes eerily calm. It was the stillness that unnerved even the bravest cultivators watching.Louis didn’t buy it.“Something’s wrong,” Mira murmured.Louis nodded, gaze sharpening. “He’s not done.”Mark lifted his head—too smoothly, too... robotic.Then he smiled. Not the smug kind.The sinister kind.“Do you really think you’ve won?” Mark whispered, voice laced with something inhuman. “That this… trial… means anything?”The world watched as his skin flickered, his aura pulsed unnaturally.Louis’s eyes narrowed.“Move back,” he ordered.Too late.Mark’s spirit split, a blinding pulse shooting toward Louis like a spear of corruption.Soul-Swap Technique.A forbidden art. An escape plan carved from the bones of dead gods.Mark’s essence lunged straight into Louis’s core.He laughed mid-transition. “You spent so long trying to destroy me, you forgot I could become you!”Louis didn’t mov