He Who Fights with Monsters

1. Inside what looks like an abandoned hotel, Jason finds his essence abilities disabled and instead establishes a Spirit Domain imprinted with his aura. He kills living anomalies for Stable Genesis Cores, expanding his domain across a city, forest, farmland and a dead-world cyborg territory. His sword becomes soulbound, and with his amulet and cloud flask forms the Regalia of the Dark Hegemon, and a Dark Orb unseals Shade.
2. Three gold-rank Chinese Network members and Gerling enter the zone and help him kill anomalies. Tran tries to take over with an unstable core and becomes a vampiric anomaly, and Jason has to use his diamond True Sunlight item to kill him. When Jason expels the others, Guo takes unstable cores out and is transformed into an anemone-like kaiju.
3. Shako, the Builder's prime vessel, appears as the zone finishes and kills Jason, who revives as a star phoenix. Dawn then forces concessions: the Builder supplies the designs for a bridge artifact back to Pallimustus, will only attack Jason with people of Jason's rank there, and may revoke his fundamental-realm access once his task is done. The dome falls, revealing a cloud town, and Earth is permanently raised to iron rank on average.
4. A second aberrant zone forms in Saint-Étienne after Jason and Farrah steal a magically enhanced nuclear bomb in Germany with the help of Travis Noble. Jason fights through it with Mr North, the vampire Elizabeth, the necromancer Todd Halverson and Gerling's team, beating a nightmare hag. The rune spider Noreth sets off the bomb, killing Gerling and himself, while Elizabeth escapes into the real world.
5. Six months later, Jason's domains are the last bastion of humanity in France, Anna Tilden is the UN Liaison to the Asano Clan, and the EOA has largely fallen apart. Jason leaves his grandmother Yumi in charge of the clan. On Pallimustus, Jason's friends have scattered into new lives: Gary retires and drinks until Rufus talks him back to blacksmithing, Clive escapes the Magic Society, and the team reaches silver rank.

Jason and Farrah set up a huge ritual circle with standing stones in a football field in an abandoned Australian outback town, to open the bridge back to Pallimustus. After a final day with his family, all of his friends and relatives besides Farrah have decided to stay on Earth. On Pallimustus, Dawn produces Jason's soulbound sword in front of his old friends and tells Gary that its owner did die, but coming back from the dead is kind of his thing.

Not verified: no rank data for the end of this volume in our cache.