Out on the driveway, Joshua and the council elders were just getting ready to move.
They stood tall, completely confident that their legendary cloaking spell was keeping them totally invisible and silent as they prepared to rush the house.
Before they could even take a single step forward, the heavy wooden front door swung wide open.
Lucy stepped out onto the porch first.
Right behind her came Aleksander, moving with a calm, lazy grace, with Lexi walking confidently by his side.
Joshua froze.
The elders stopped dead in their tracks.
Aleksander didn’t even blink.
He looked straight through the supposedly impenetrable magical barrier, making direct, dead-on eye contact with the leader of the Gemini Coven.
The silence stretched for a split second before Aleksander shook his head, a disappointed, mocking smirk on his face.
“Joshua, Joshua,” Aleksander called out, his voice casually cutting right through the cool night air.
“You really need to keep the noise down out here. With how much of a racket you’re all making, even the neighbors next door are going to complain.”
Behind him, Lucy and Lexi both clamped their mouths shut, trying desperately to keep straight faces.
But they couldn’t hold it in.
A second later, both women burst into bright, genuine laughter.
It was the ultimate insult.
The Gemini Coven prided themselves on having the absolute best cloaking magic in the entire world.
It was their signature, their greatest weapon.
And Aleksander had just casually swatted it away, calling it “noisy” like they were a bunch of clumsy teenagers sneaking out of a house.
The humiliation on the driveway was instant and heavy.
The cloaking spell practically fizzled out of existence.
The elders turned bright red with embarrassment and outrage, realizing they hadn’t been hidden at all—he had been listening to them the entire time.
Joshua’s face completely fell, his forced, arrogant confidence shattering into pieces as he stared at the young man who had just made his entire coven look like a complete joke.
The embarrassment was too much for one of the older council members.
His face turned bright red with rage, and he aggressively stepped forward, pointing a shaking finger at Aleksander.
He started screaming, cursing Aleksander out and ranting about how he was humiliating a centuries-old legacy.
“You think you can disrespect us?” the elder spat out.
“We will gather the other covens! We will vote to strip you of your title! You won’t be the Avatar of Nature by the time we’re done with you!”
Aleksander didn’t look angry.
He didn’t even look annoyed.
He just lazily raised a single finger to his lips and made a simple “shh” motion.
Instantly, the elder’s voice completely vanished.
The man kept yelling, his face turning purple with effort, but absolutely no sound came out of his mouth.
It was as if someone had just hit the mute button on his existence.
“Quiet,” Aleksander said smoothly, not breaking eye contact.
“Don’t you see I am talking with your superior here.”
Joshua glared at him, his dark eyes filled with absolute venom.
Aleksander just smirked, casually spreading his arms open.
“What? Do you want to try some spells, too? Go ahead. Get it out of your system.”
Joshua didn’t hesitate.
He and the remaining council members immediately focused their magic, their eyes narrowing as they threw a synchronized Aneurysm spell directly at Aleksander. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
It was a brutal, classic witch attack designed to boil the blood and burst the blood vessels inside a person’s brain.
It should have dropped him to his knees in blinding agony.
But absolutely nothing happened.
Aleksander just stood there on the porch, smiling at them like a patient adult watching toddlers throw a tantrum.
The magic washed over him without leaving a single scratch.
He didn’t even blink.
Standing behind their father, Luke, Liv, and Jo stared in pure, unfiltered shock.
For their entire lives, they had been terrified of their father and the council’s power.
Seeing the strongest witches they knew throw their combined attack at a man who just smiled through it completely shattered their understanding of the world.
Aleksander let out a soft sigh, dropping his arms.
“You guys have a major misunderstanding here,” Aleksander explained, his voice calm and conversational, though it echoed loudly in the quiet night.
“The witches and covens weren’t the ones who gave me the title of Avatar of Nature. It wasn’t a vote. It isn’t some empty political rank that you can just take away when your feelings get hurt.”
He looked around the driveway, his dark eyes gleaming with an ancient, dangerous light.
“I’ll show you exactly what it means. But if I’m going to do a demonstration, I should really show all the Gemini who are sitting around waiting for your news.”
Before anyone could react, Aleksander raised his hand and simply snapped his fingers.
The world didn’t distort this time; it just instantly shifted.
Lexi, Lucy, Aleksander, and the entire Gemini group vanished from the driveway in a blink.
A fraction of a second later, they appeared completely out of thin air in the middle of a massive, grand hall.
It was the Gemini Coven’s Founding building, a heavily warded stronghold where dozens of coven members had gathered to anxiously await Joshua’s return.
The gathered witches gasped, scrambling backward in panic as their leaders, along with Aleksander, Lucy, and a vampire, suddenly materialized right in the center of the room.
All around the grand hall, the startled Gemini witches quickly recovered from their shock.
Dozens of hands raised into the air, eyes focusing as they prepared to throw every spell they had at the intruders.
Joshua’s heart completely dropped into his stomach.
All the color drained from his face, leaving him deathly pale as cold sweat broke out across his forehead.
He frantically threw his hands out, desperately gesturing for everyone in the room to stand down.
He finally realized he had bitten off way more than he could chew.
The sheer power required to instantly teleport dozens of people across the state without a single chanted word was god-like.
He knew with absolute certainty that his life, and the life of everyone in the room, was entirely in Aleksander’s hands now.
If his people attacked, the Gemini Coven would be wiped out in seconds.
Seeing the witches reluctantly lower their hands, Aleksander stepped forward.
He spread his arms slightly, leaning into the theatrics of the moment.
”Well, now that we have an audience,” Aleksander announced, his voice carrying clearly across the tense, silent hall.
“I remember telling your daughter, Jo, the reality about Siphoners and the Merge. You called them abominations, but they were actually messengers of Nature. They were a direct warning from the earth to stop your barbaric tradition. A warning you didn’t understand, and never even tried to.”
The witches in the crowd exchanged angry, confused looks.
Aleksander just hummed, looking around at the sea of disbelieving faces.
”It seems everyone here believes I am making this up,” Aleksander continued smoothly.
“You all really believe that the witch covens got together one day and decided to give me the title of Avatar of Nature, like it was some kind of political award.”
A cold, dangerous smile spread across his face.
“So, I will just have to show you.”
Aleksander held both of his hands out in front of him.
With a slow, deliberate motion, he clenched his fingers into tight fists.
A sudden, terrifying stillness fell over the entire building.
Every single Gemini witch in the room gasped at the exact same time.
The warm, comforting hum of the earth, a feeling they had lived with since the day they were born, completely vanished.
Panic erupted as they desperately tried to reach for their magic, holding their hands out and chanting, but absolutely nothing happened.
The connection was severed.
Aleksander hadn’t just blocked their spells; he had reached into Nature and completely shut off their access to magic, leaving them as powerless as regular humans.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Aleksander spoke up, his voice echoing loudly in the sudden, dead silence of the hall.
He looked around at the panicked faces with a cold, dramatic flair.
“You are completely unable to connect to Nature. You can’t do even the simplest spell.”
He took a slow step forward, looking down at the council members who had threatened him just minutes ago.
“As you can see, my title isn’t empty. And you idiotic, arrogant witches certainly didn’t give it to me. It was bestowed by Nature itself.”
Standing off to the side, Luke, Liv, and Jo stared at him in complete, absolute awe.
They were witnessing the literal, breathing embodiment of the earth’s power, and the reality of it was staggering.
The weight of their mistake finally crashed down on the Gemini Coven.
Their arrogance vanished in an instant.
Joshua Parker’s knees hit the stone floor with a heavy thud.
The council elders quickly followed, dropping to the ground, and within seconds, the entire coven was kneeling before Aleksander, desperately begging and pleading for forgiveness.
Aleksander just looked down at them, his expression completely devoid of pity, and slowly shook his head.
“You reap what you sow,” Aleksander answered, his voice ringing with absolute finality.
“This is your punishment. From this day forward, you will never be able to cast a spell again. You will never feel the earth’s connection. And neither will your descendants. The Gemini Coven’s magic ends tonight.”
A wave of absolute horror swept through the kneeling crowd.
Witches began to weep.
Joshua frantically tried to speak, stammering out desperate apologies and begging Aleksander to reconsider, to punish only the elders and spare the rest.
Aleksander completely ignored him.
His dark eyes scanned the weeping crowd until they landed on Jo, Luke, and Liv.
He could feel their emotions—they hadn’t been a part of this ambush.
They understood the gravity of their coven’s sins, and they were genuinely repentant.
“Quiet,” Aleksander commanded, snapping the room back to silence.
He pointed at the three siblings.
“I will give the magic back to Jo, Luke, and Liv. They have learned their lesson. But the rest of you are done.”
With a flick of his wrist, Jo, Luke, and Liv gasped as the warm, familiar hum of magic rushed back into their veins.
Joshua slumped heavily to the floor.
All the fight left him.
He knew, deep down, that this was the absolute best they were going to get.
The coven’s power was gone, but his children’s magic would survive.
“But in return,” Aleksander added, his tone shifting into a sharp, unyielding command.
“I want the Ascendants. Specifically, the ones for the Prison Worlds linked to Kai and the other Siphoners you locked away.”
Joshua looked up.
He knew instantly that this wasn’t a choice, a trade, or a negotiation.
It was a direct order from a god.
Without a single word of protest, the broken leader of the Gemini Coven scrambled to his feet and hurried out of the hall to fetch the two magical artifacts.