He Who Fights with Monsters

1. The Adventure Society suggests that Jason take a secret identity while pretending to leave the universe with Soramir. Jason has Killian Laurent captured by gold-rank adventurers, discovers he has learned the emptiness of revenge, and learns who the Order's portal specialist was.
2. At a royal ball, Jason's friends win three duels against House de Varco, and Jason beats Hector de Varco with a vicious soul attack that Soramir has to stop. Intruders into his cloud palace are trapped, and Jason leaves Arnote with his cloud palace transformed into a ship, accompanied by Rufus, Gary, Estella, Amos Pensinata, Team Storm Shredder and the liaison Vidal Ladiv. He now uses the alias 'John Miller'.
3. In Yaresh, Zara joins Team Storm Shredder as 'Zara Nareen' and Jason eventually lets her travel with the convoy. He cooks at the tavern run by Bellory, and visits an underground fight club. Emir offers the team a job: find the artifact the god Purity made to purge monster-core residue from essence users, which diamond rankers think the messengers want.
4. Jason finds villages taken over by parasitic World-Taker worms; Colin eats the worms and Jason tortures the messenger breeder's soul as a message. Healer explains that Purity sanctioned himself and gives Jason a Genesis Command orb. A garuda named Haliastur appears hunting a naga genesis egg, which turns out to be hidden in the outworlder Zolit Kreen and hatches into a diamond-rank kaiju.
5. In the messengers' attack on Yaresh, Jason projects his aura over the city, revealing himself as a nascent Astral King. Time stops and Raythe, servant of the god of time, protects him, and the diamond messenger Mah Go Schaat is killed. In a duel to the death, Jason sees that Tera Jun Casta's soul is branded by her Astral King and that the 'level cap' is a lie, and he removes her seal.

In the aftermath of the battle, Jason withdraws into his spirit realm to avoid questions from the diamond rankers. The gold-rank messenger Marek Nior Vargas asks for asylum there, Jason removes the soul brands of Marek's messengers, and Marek says he intends to join the Unorthodoxy, a rebellion against the Astral Kings. Marek also reveals that Vesta Carmis Zell is after something produced by a natural array deep underground near Yaresh, where the messengers found a civilization of Smoulder people, and Tera lies comatose in Jason's astral kingdom.

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