The battlefield ceased to look like a battlefield. The war still raged, lightning still hammered the earth, and men still died, but none of those things mattered to the people trapped beneath the golden dome. Reality itself had started to break down.
A cultivator from Morgan's army rushed an injured opponent, driving his blade straight toward the man's throat. It was a guaranteed kill, but the sword vanished into thin air midway through the arc. The attacker stumbled forward from his own momentum. A heartbeat later, that exact same sword reappeared several meters to his right, slicing clean through his own shoulder. Blood sprayed into the dirt, and the man screamed. Nobody laughed or mocked him. Everyone had watched it happen. The weapon had simply bypassed the laws of distance, disappearing and reappearing to mutilate its owner.
Moments later, a spatial distortion claimed a Starborn warrior. He leaped forward to clear a trench, but the physical space beneath him stretched out like rubber. A ten-meter jump instantly ballooned into fifty meters. Panic flashed across his face as he hung in midair, and then reality snapped back together like a rubber band. His body slammed violently into the ground, his bones shattering into fragments from the sudden, condensed impact. The surrounding soldiers scrambled backward in horror, desperate to escape the glitching space.
Above them, the heavenly tribulation crashed through the fractured dome with zero signs of slowing down. The storm had grown increasingly violent, enraged by the stubborn resistance below. A massive lightning strike dropped straight toward Sigil.
The Patriarch stood in the center of the devastation, his black and white flames wrapping around his body as raw celestial plasma tore through his flesh. His condition was visibly deteriorating. No amount of stubborn willpower could hide the fact that his skin was ready to split wide open. His breathing was heavy, and blood leaked constantly from his mouth, yet his boots stayed planted in the dirt.
The clan's burden-sharing network kept carrying a portion of the damage, but the network was beginning to crack. A young Starborn warrior suddenly stiffened, his eyes going wide as the bloodline connection flickered and died for a fraction of a second. Left without a buffer to share the weight, the full force of a tribulation aftershock hit him directly. The young man didn't even have time to scream; his entire body disintegrated into ash instantly.
The nearby Starborns saw it happen. Their faces hardened, filled with a grim understanding. The ancestral network had turned unstable. The invisible bloodline links that once flowed smoothly between clan members were now flickering like dying candles in a gale. One moment they were solid, the next they vanished, only to spark back into existence a moment later. Each brief interruption claimed another life, yet none of the surviving Starborns deactivated their bloodline. Not a single person broke the link. They knew that if they shut down their connection now, Sigil would be forced to bear the weight of the entire heavens entirely alone.
On the western ridge, Orion frowned. It was the first time his expression had changed since the storm began. A bolt of heavenly lightning shot down, and he absorbed it just as he had done a dozen times before. The violent energy flooded his core, his bloodline responded, and his meridians began to refine the power.
Then, his entire right arm vanished.
Orion froze. Beside him, Three's eyes widened in pure terror. For a fraction of a second, Orion's arm simply ceased to exist in this reality. There was no open wound, no blood, and no severed muscle, there was simply a void where his flesh should be. A moment later, the arm snapped back into existence, with violet lightning still crackling across the skin as if nothing had ever happened.
Orion remained dead silent. The lingering sensation was chilling; his arm hadn't been injured or chopped off. It had simply been somewhere else entirely.
Three looked around, realizing the distortions were becoming impossible to ignore. Shards of stone vanished into nothing and reappeared yards away. Distances stretched out to miles and then compressed into inches within a heartbeat. The battlefield no longer felt real. It felt like an old canvas painting that was actively tearing itself to pieces.
High above the chaos, Morgan's face turned ugly. He had completely abandoned the war below, dedicating every ounce of his focus to the ancient inheritance. Millions of golden threads wrapped around his silhouette, each representing his absolute control over the system. But the longer he observed the network, the worse his unease grew. Several major threads refused to obey his mental commands, others generated broken, incomplete diagnostics, and some vanished completely before snapping back into place.
It was impossible. The inheritance was an ancient, perfect machine. It was built to be stable, yet it was malfunctioning. Morgan extended his divine sense deeper into the core of the dome. Everything registered as operational, but then another spatial distortion hit the system. An entire section of the inheritance simply vanished from his perception. It wasn't destroyed; it was just gone, as if an invisible hand had erased a line from the blueprint of reality.
Genuine panic surfaced in Morgan's chest. He immediately slammed his authority into the artifact, shouting a mental command: Stabilize.
Golden light flooded the dome as millions of threads moved in tandem. The inheritance executed the order flawlessly, yet absolutely nothing changed on the ground. The spatial distortions kept happening. Morgan pushed harder, funneling more energy, more authority, and more soul force into the core, but the result was identical. The battlefield continued to twist and warp.
His expression turned completely furious. The inheritance was obeying his orders perfectly, but the problem wasn't stopping, which meant only one thing: this disaster was completely beyond the authority of the inheritance.
Down in the mud, another Starborn warrior died, then another, followed by three more in rapid succession. Their bloodline connections flickered to a stop right before each man collapsed. The burden-sharing network was failing, slowly and relentlessly. The surviving clansmen felt the links dying, but nobody ran. They simply stood their ground and endured, matching the unyielding posture of their Patriarch.
Sigil raised his head toward the storm just as a catastrophic heavenly bolt shot down. The blinding white light swallowed him entirely, exploding against the earth with a force that shattered mountains, evaporated rivers, and buried the plains in a sea of plasma. For several agonizing seconds, the glare blocked everything from view.
When the whiteout finally cleared, Sigil was still standing. But the space immediately surrounding his body was trembling violently—not from the output of his own power, but from an overwhelming spatial instability. The dome, the heavenly tribulation, and his own forced breakthrough were three absolute forces actively colliding at the exact same set of coordinates. The fabric of reality simply could not contain that much pressure.
A faint, sharp cracking sound echoed across the island. It wasn't loud, and many cultivators barely heard it over the wind, but every single person felt it instinctively. Heads snapped around. Eyes widened.
The sound repeated, sharper this time. Crack.
The sky fractured open. An absolute silence fell over the entire island. The crack wasn't massive, only several meters long, but its mere presence froze the entire war. It looked exactly like a fracture spreading across a sheet of glass, except the glass was reality itself. Beyond that jagged rip in the sky lay absolute darkness. It wasn't the dark of nighttime or the shadow of a cloud; it was a pure, endless, hollow void.
The sight struck a cold, primal terror into the hearts of everyone on the island. Even the heavenly tribulation seemed distant compared to that empty rip in existence.
The fracture began to widen, moving calmly and steadily, as if reality had simply accepted its own destruction. Morgan stared at the tear, his breathing turning shallow before expanding into pure fury. "No!"
Millions of golden threads erupted from his flesh as he completely abandoned all caution. The spatial tear threatened everything he had fought for, the dome, his inheritance, and his future ascension. He poured every drop of his authority into the damaged zone, forcing a wave of brilliant golden light to seal the breach. The fracture trembled under the magical pressure, seeming to stabilize for a split second. A desperate hope flared in the eyes of the surviving cultivators.
Then the crack ripped wider, and Morgan's golden light shattered like cheap glass. His pupils shrank to pinpricks. The perfect inheritance had failed. The realization hit him harder than any physical attack ever could.
Across the plains, the Starborn network flickered violently, causing hundreds of warriors to cough up blood simultaneously as their bodies collapsed. Orion immediately stepped in front of Three and Khate's body, his violet lightning exploding outward with an aggressive roar that made the air scream.
The fracture widened another inch, then another. A strange, invisible force began to bleed out from the darkness inside the tear, a subtle, gentle pull that was mathematically impossible to resist.
Dust began to rise toward the sky, followed by loose pebbles, and then massive chunks of shattered bedrock. The soldiers watched in horrified silence as the debris of the battlefield drifted upward, floating lazily toward the fracture. Three felt the tug against his own skin, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end as the gravity warped.
Even Sigil turned his head away from the sky, locking his mismatched eyes onto the widening tear. For the first time since he had challenged the heavens, his focus had been forced elsewhere. Every survival instinct inside his body was screaming the exact same warning: the island wasn't just being destroyed, reality itself was collapsing into nothing