Lord Lewis' gruesome pieces trembled on the ground and tainted it with blood, but a white glow covered them and tried to shield them from incoming threats.
Heaven and Earth raged to get past Night, Duanlong, and Shafu, but they didn't have many options. Piercing the storms was easy, but their light had to go through the entire battlefield to reach the surface, and the three companions were covering non-crowded areas on purpose. The rulers didn't have a clear path, and their whiteness never managed to shine on Lord Lewis.
Interest filled Noah while he studied the bloody glowing pieces. Lord Lewis' centers of power were no more after the last attacks, but his law still thrived. It had lost power, but it existed.
Noah struggled to understand how a law could survive in that state. He had learnt a lot about rank 9 cultivators throughout his life, and he could inspect the expert right under him. However, his mind still failed to realize how someone could live when it was technically dead.
His eyes quickly swept the battlefield. King Elbas and the others had already taken care of their opponents, but the rest of the fights were still ongoing.
The four upper tier dragons were fighting against the woman in the solid stage while part of the swarm supported her. That battle appeared relatively even, and Noah couldn't understand much about the abilities deployed by those entities.
There seemed to be a membrane that obscured his senses around the peak existences in the ninth rank. Those entities didn't create any shield to fend off inspections, but that structure had formed anyway.
Noah soon connected the intensity of the energy released in that area to the membrane. The dragons, cultivators, and swarm were releasing a lot of power during their exchanges, which inevitably created instabilities in the fabric of space and filled the area with dense laws.
The area had naturally transformed into a separate space that featured only energy belonging to existences near the peak of the ninth rank. Noah didn't feel surprised that his eyes and consciousness couldn't reach its insides.
The other rank 9 dragons were fighting the swarm while the remaining cultivators managed the flying cockroaches and made sure that they deployed correct battle formations. It felt strange to see experts giving orders to magical beasts at a higher level, but everything made sense when Noah considered the nature of those creatures.
Moreover, the flying cockroaches weren't simple magical beasts. They radiated Heaven and Earth's aura, which almost made Noah believe them to be closer to organic puppets than actual living beings.
His eyes fell back on Lord Lewis at that point. The expert was trying his best to muster enough energy and stabilize his body, but Noah didn't miss even the slightest change in his glow.
Lord Lewis didn't have fuel anymore according to Noah's inspection. His dantian was in pieces, and the same went for his mental sphere and body. Yet, his white radiance continued to intensify and bring his bloody fragments back together.
'How does he even work?' Noah wondered as he crouched and filled the area with his dark matter.
Noah knew that he had been rather lucky. Lord Lewis had developed a technique to counter the internal attacks of the Shadow Domain, but he had remained unaware of Noah's presence on the battlefield until after the teleport.
Lord Lewis could only counter what his abilities allowed him to do since Heaven and Earth didn't provide any additional item. Noah had been able to use his companions and techniques rather freely even after the expansion of the domain. He would have probably failed to seize that victory otherwise.
The event revealed that Heaven and Earth lacked complete control of the areas inside the chaotic laws, and Noah could immediately create a few hypotheses concerning that topic. Yet, he didn't want to waste time with such an exciting opportunity at hand.
'He can clearly generate energy from nothing,' Noah quickly concluded after a thorough inspection of the bloody pieces and the environment.
Lord Lewis' pieces weren't absorbing energy from the environment and weren't burning their fabric to generate their glow. Their power came from something that Noah couldn't see nor sense, which hinted at the realm that every existence wanted to reach.
'Is his power unlimited?' Noah wondered before disregarding that idea.
Lord Lewis appeared able to generate energy from nothing, but the pace was quite poor. Noah didn't know if the expert could do better when his centers of power were in one piece, but he guessed that the process would remain slow.
After all, the expert didn't make use of that ability during the battle. Lord Lewis had preferred to transform the environment into his power instead of generating more fuel on his own. The issue could depend on the unique law that Heaven and Earth had given him, but it could also show how Lord Lewis was still bad at that skill.
It felt hard to contain those rank 9 materials inside the dark world. A sense of weakness even filled Noah as his ambition dispersed. Heaven and Earth had lost track of the expert after the dark world expanded, so Noah preferred to avoid worsening his drawbacks.
The dark world expanded toward the storms on its own while making part of its dark matter copy the features of Noah's flames. Waves of energy quickly flew toward his figure and helped suppress the drawbacks, but he barely noticed those events.
Duanlong and Shafu entered the dark world to help with the absorption, and Night returned inside the separate space since its duty was over. Noah's condition quickly stabilized as the black hole took care of sending the absorbed energy toward key spots inside his body, but he didn't pay attention to that process. He fed the Demonic Deduction technique with his bloodlust, and violent thoughts filled his mind. Yet, they couldn't teach him much about the expert's power.
The Demonic Deduction technique only reached obvious conclusions. Noah wanted to see if he could use his innate tendency to destruction to learn more about the expert, but his approach failed. His mind couldn't find the source of Lord Lewis' power, so it only created different plans that involved his iconic abilities.
'Do I really have to risk reassembling him?' Noah sighed in his mind before structures with the shape of mechanical arms came out of the fabric of the dark world and started tinkering with the expert.
The workshop quickly assembled Lord Lewis' head while making sure to remove every connection with the rest of his body. The other pieces stopped moving after a tremor ran through the face floating among the darkness. It seemed that the rebuilt part had become the center of his existence, which turned the rest of the pieces useless.
The dark world quickly absorbed the pieces while Noah watched Lord Lewis opening his eyes and giving voice to loud curses after realizing the situation he was in.
"Free me, you monster!" Lord Lewis shouted. "What are you even planning on doing with me?"
"I'm just looking for answers," Noah replied in an aloof tone. "I want to see the exact difference in our nature before killing you. Try to stay still."
Noah sat on the black surface of the dark world and started his inspection. Painful cries and pleads often came out of his position, but no one outside the technique could hear them.