The island was dying.
The land was being violently torn apart before everyone's eyes, bypassing any slow or gradual decay.
The first spatial tear had merely been a warning.
Now, dozens of jagged fractures ripped through the battlefield, quickly multiplying into hundreds.
The cracks spread through the sky, the mountains, the plains, and the very air itself. Some were no larger than a finger, while others stretched for hundreds of meters, revealing the endless, hollow darkness hidden beyond reality.
The war ceased entirely.
No one cared about enemies or factions anymore.
Cultivators broke formation, fleeing in blind panic, screaming, and throwing themselves to their knees to pray.
A cultivator from Morgan's army reached desperately toward a wounded companion whose leg was pinned beneath a shattered boulder.
"Hold on!" the man yelled, grabbing his friend's wrist to haul him free.
Right then, a spatial tear swept cleanly between them.
The man stumbled back, staring in horror at the severed wrist still clutched in his hand.
The rest of his friend's body had vanished into nothing.
The scream that followed struck a primal chill into everyone nearby.
Elsewhere, a fleeing warrior suddenly stopped mid-stride.
His torso continued running forward while his legs remained rooted to the spot.
The man stared down at his own waist in brief, quiet confusion before collapsing into two separate halves.
Blood painted the broken earth.
The battlefield had fully transformed into a slaughterhouse, and heaven's lightning was no longer the greatest threat.
Reality itself had turned hostile, erasing lives by the second.
...
Morgan stood at the center of millions of golden threads, his face completely stripped of all composure.
The ancient inheritance continuously dumped information into his mind, and every broken diagnostic pointed toward the exact same source:
The mountain.
The Starborn portal.
A buried memory surfaced in his mind. Ancient records and forbidden intelligence detailed the true reason the Starborn Clan had once stood above countless prime realms.
It wasn't their superior bloodline.
It wasn't their natural talent.
It was the portal.
The gateway led somewhere entirely unknown, a place that had remained hidden for countless generations.
Morgan's eyes widened as the dots connected in his mind.
The lightning, the tribulation, the dome, the spatial collapse, and the mountain.
Everything aligned.
"The portal..." his voice came out hoarse.
The heavenly tribulation had struck every square inch of the island.
Nothing had been spared, including the ancient mountain and the portal hidden within it.
The realization made his blood run ice-cold.
The portal had suffered a structural collapse under the lightning, and whatever cataclysmic forces existed beyond it were now leaking directly into reality.
"No..." Morgan hissed.
He aggressively commanded millions of golden strands to shoot across the island, attempting to seal the source.
But before the threads could reach their destination, a newly formed spatial tear snapped open in their path.
The golden constructs disappeared, consumed instantly by the void.
Morgan's pupils contracted.
He forced another wave of magic forward, but another tear swallowed them whole.
Then another.
And another.
"Damn it!"
For the first time since claiming the throne, absolute panic took over.
The inheritance wasn't failing him.
Reality itself was unraveling.
High above the chaos, Sigil remained hovering in the air.
The heavenly lightning had actually begun to weaken because the widening spatial tears were actively swallowing a portion of the tribulation itself.
Massive golden bolts vanished straight into the darkness, entire streams of divine punishment disappearing before they could ever reach their target.
A faint scarlet radiance began to bleed into Sigil's black and white flames.
His forced breakthrough was still accelerating, pushing his body to the absolute brink of total collapse.
Yet his mismatched eyes never drifted from the ground.
He locked his gaze onto a single point on the battlefield.
Three.
Another wave of screams echoed across the plains as the tears began to swallow people whole.
Entire squads disappeared without warning, peak cultivators who had survived hours of brutal warfare finding themselves completely helpless against the spatial decay.
One moment they were running.
The next they were deleted.
Even the surviving Starborns suffered as the burden-sharing network flickered violently.
The invisible bloodline connections snapped or stretched to impossible distances, causing several clan members to cough up mouthfuls of blood before being dragged screaming into the dark voids.
Still, not a single warrior abandoned the link.
Even at the absolute end, they refused to let their Patriarch stand alone.
Morgan refused to surrender his ambition.
A blinding golden light erupted from his flesh as he pushed the inheritance to its absolute limit.
The dome brightened to a burning glare, the threads thickened, and the collapsing space around him trembled.
For a brief moment, it looked as though stability had returned, and a flicker of hope appeared in the eyes of the survivors.
Then reality broke completely.
A massive, jagged tear erupted directly beneath Morgan's boots.
His expression twisted as the ground vanished and space folded inward like paper.
Millions of golden threads immediately wrapped around his body as the inheritance fought to pull him free from the vacuum.
Morgan struggled, raw, unadulterated fear blanketing his face for the first time in decades.
"No!"
The tear expanded violently, its suction intensifying past the point of resistance.
Even the ancient machine could not fight the void forever.
Thread after thread snapped apart, the golden strands dissolving into the pitch-black tear.
Morgan reached out desperately toward the sky, toward the dome, and toward the glorious future he had sacrificed everything to obtain.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
His final scream vanished a millisecond later, leaving nothing behind.
The self-proclaimed ruler of the island was simply gone.
With Morgan gone, the collapse accelerated into an unstoppable chain reaction.
Left without a master to anchor it, the golden dome turned highly unstable, causing massive tears to rupture across the terrain.
Entire mountains vanished.
Forests disappeared.
Massive chunks of bedrock were ripped away into the void.
The ocean surrounding the island churned into a boiling frenzy as the very fabric of existence unraveled.
Orion stood near the center of the ridge beside Khate's cold body.
His clothes were soaked in blood, his aura flickered weakly, and the raw lightning he had absorbed had left deep, smoking wounds across his flesh.
Yet his attention stayed fixed on the woman lying beside him.
A spatial tear snapped open only yards away, the sudden pull warping the local gravity.
Three stumbled forward, losing his footing as the vacuum dragged him toward the edge.
Orion reacted instantly, his violet lightning exploding in a desperate burst as he anchored his boots deep into the breaking earth.
For a brief second, he managed to hold the line.
But a second tear ripped open right behind them, doubling the suction.
The bedrock beneath Orion's feet shattered.
He glanced up at Three, a rare, calm smile breaking through the blood on his face.
"Looks like this is where we part."
With his remaining strength, Orion wrapped his arms around Khate's body.
The darkness swallowed both of them instantly, vanishing them from the world without a trace.
Three stared blankly at the empty dirt where they had just been standing, watching another piece of his world disappear.
The gravitational pull intensified again, and this time, the vacuum reached him.
Three felt his boots leave the earth as the darkness rushed closer.
A massive, catastrophic tear had opened directly above the central battlefield, its suction eclipsing everything before it. Genuine panic filled Three's eyes as he drifted toward the void.
Suddenly, a streak of white fire shot across the sky like a whip.
The bloodline connection wrapped securely around Three's waist, halting his momentum in midair.
Sigil.
The Patriarch yanked the line with brute force, tearing his son away from the edge of the fracture.
At that exact moment, the upper heavens delivered their final verdict.
The lightning that had been drifting into the tears suddenly altered its nature.
The clouds roared with an ear-splitting frequency as the golden lightning condensed, compressed, and merged into a single point.
The heavens had entirely lost their patience with the island.
The sky went completely dark, casting a shadow over the carnage as a single, pitch-black bolt of lightning emerged from the vortex.
The moment it appeared, a heavy silence fell over the entire island.
Even the terrifying spatial tears seemed insignificant before the raw weight of this strike.
The tribulation had produced its final, absolute judgment.
Sigil looked directly at the approaching black lightning, and then down at Three. An overwhelming sorrow appeared in his mismatched eyes.
This was the final price of his path.
He knew exactly what had to be done.
The white lasso tightened around the boy's waist as the suction from the surrounding tears grew stronger.
The island was going under.
Three's eyes widened as he looked up at the sky.
"Father!"
Sigil smiled.
A small, quiet smile.
The exact same one he used to wear countless years ago when the world was peaceful.
Then he pulled the line with every ounce of his remaining strength.
Three shot across the sky like a comet, launched at an impossible speed far beyond the collapsing battlefield, far beyond the reaching tears, and far beyond the borders of the dying island.
Then the black lightning descended.
Sigil remained completely alone in the sky.
His black flames, white fire, and the new scarlet radiance merged into a single, blinding aura.
The Patriarch rose higher into the heavens, the breaking island trembling beneath him while the clouds roared above.
Yet he stood firmly between them like a final, unbreakable wall.
He reached his hand forward, condensing a massive spear forged from the culmination of everything he possessed and everything he was.
Sigil let out a guttural roar, direct and defiant as he challenged heaven itself.
He hurled the spear.
The sky exploded as the black lightning descended and the multicolored spear ascended, the two absolute forces colliding in a final, blinding whiteout.
The resulting light consumed everything.
More black lightning crashed through the void.
Hundreds of bolts as the heavens unleashed their entire arsenal against the island.
Sigil's laughter echoed through the blinding flash, blood pouring from his mouth as his flesh cracked open under the pressure.
Yet he continued to strike back, launching attack after attack against the firmament until the clouds themselves vanished, the sky disappeared, and even his own silhouette was lost to the light.
Then, an absolute quiet took over.
The tears disappeared.
The lightning stopped.
The battlefield, the mountains, and the entire island vanished from existence.
Nothing remained.
The broken remnants of the golden dome floated aimlessly above the endless ocean, left without a master, a purpose, or an island to contain.
Without an anchor, the immense ancient construct slowly compressed inward.
The golden barrier folded into itself repeatedly, growing smaller and smaller until only a single, silent golden droplet hovered motionless above the waves.
A tiny violet sphere appeared out of nowhere, drifting quietly toward the golden droplet as if it had always been waiting there.
The violet sphere swallowed the golden droplet in a single motion.
Then both vanished over the horizon, rushing toward the endless, open sea.
Left behind was nothing but absolute silence.
The era of the Starborn had come to an end.