CHAPTER 194: Primordial Blood: The Awakening of the Nine Queens
Vorg the Unbreakable, the veteran Stage 7 Saint, charged across the courtyard like a blood-drenched siege bull. His muscles, swollen to the brink of tearing by the violent [Internal Collapse Fist], sent shockwaves distorting the air with every massive step he took. His fury at seeing his eleven comrades humiliated, flayed, and destroyed had completely overridden his instinct for self-preservation. He was going to kill these young demons, even if his own "Exhausted Heart" burst in the process.
But the Morningstar Clan's Blood Vanguard did not retreat a single millimeter. From among the group of assassins, two figures stepped forward with a blood-curdling calm: Altair and Maren.
Vorg roared, throwing a devastating punch into the void. The vibratory wave of internal collapse shot towards them like an invisible projectile, a force capable of denting Saint-grade armor and bursting vital organs with mere air pressure.
"Slow," Maren yawned.
The young man's eyes shone with a blinding blue light. His [Lightning Acceleration Intent] erupted. In a millisecond, he activated his [Lightning Form]. His physical body simply ceased to exist as solid matter, transmuting into pure wandering electricity. Vorg's monstrous shockwave uselessly passed through the space where Maren had been standing, crashing into the back wall and reducing it to rubble.
Before Vorg could even blink, a blue lightning bolt crossed the courtyard. Maren did not run; he shot out like a direct discharge from the heavens. He physically passed through Vorg's immense torso in his light form. In doing so, Maren did not cut flesh, but directly attacked the electrical impulses of the veteran's brain and nervous system. A massive discharge of thousands of volts fried the Grand Captain's nerves from the inside.
The giant spat a torrent of boiled blood and smoke from his mouth, his muscles suffering violent and uncontrollable spasms. But Vorg wasn't the leader for nothing. His decades of slaughter on the borders granted him inhuman instincts. Ignoring the short circuit that threatened to paralyze his heart, he spun his body on its axis and launched a sweeping elbow infused with vibratory Qi, managing to graze Maren's shoulder just as the young man rematerialized, forcing him to step back with a slight cut on his cheek.
"Damned slippery vermin!" bellowed Vorg, his iron forearms glowing red-hot from the thermal friction of his own suicidal power.
He prepared to charge again, entirely focused on predicting Maren's electrical speed. And that was his fatal mistake. He completely forgot about the expressionless shadow walking slowly toward him.
Altair did not run. His dark eyes, abysses devoid of any spark of life or passion, locked onto Vorg. He raised his hands, enveloped in the [Embrace of the Void], his heavy Low-Grade Saint Black Gauntlets forged from Stellar Lead.
"Your body is already dead, old man. Your brain just hasn't realized it yet," whispered Altair, his voice resonating parched and gloomy, like dirt falling on a coffin lid.
Altair opened his codex: the [Book of Mute Entropy]. Its blank pages filled with letters of ash.
A murky, sickly gray aura expanded in an exact ten-meter radius, engulfing Vorg. The world lost its colors, turning a cadaverous sepia. Simultaneously, Altair released the [Cloud of Dead Stardust]. The air around the Grand Captain filled with a heavy, suffocating ash that did not burn, but rather devoured light, oxygen, and sound.
The spiritual claustrophobia that struck Vorg was absolute. He tried to breathe, but the stardust clung to his meridians and lungs, instantly suffocating his Qi. He felt isolated, submerged in a terrifying deafness where even the clash of steel sounded like old wood breaking kilometers away.
But the most terrifying aspect was the passive domain of [Wither]. Everything inside that gray bubble aged at an insane speed a thousand times faster, nullifying any concept of healing. Vorg, a warrior who relied on his massive vitality, felt a cellular hell within. His thick, weathered skin wrinkled and dried like parchment left in the sun, peeling off in dead scales. His Herculean muscles atrophied in seconds, wasting away until they clung to his bones. The living flesh around the thick iron plates embedded in his arms began to necrotize and rot violently, giving off the stench of an open grave while the metal itself filled with rust.
"My... my strength...! My Qi! Cough, cough!" Vorg fell heavily onto one knee. He coughed up clots of black blood. He was completely blinded by the dust cloud, feeling in real time how his indomitable skeleton became porous, hollow, and fragile as damp chalk.
Altair stopped a meter away from him, his gauntlets hissing as they absorbed the mercenary's withered vitality. He held back the power of his Codex with a slight mental effort; if he left it active for one more second, Vorg would turn into a pile of dust swept away by the wind, and the directive was to leave them alive for impending torture.
That microsecond of entropic pause was the signal Maren was waiting for.
The blue lightning plummeted from the smoking sky. Maren materialized in the air, right above the kneeling Vorg. His kicks and punches descended not as a martial art, but as a surgical and sadistic execution designed to dismantle an already rotten structure.
CRACK! Maren's heel struck the base of the giant's neck, fracturing his left collarbone into multiple splinters. SNAP! A brutal spinning kick shattered the ribs on the mercenary's right side, driving the weakened bone deep into his necrotic lungs. Vorg howled, a hoarse, bubbling, and pathetic sound that did not seem human.
Giving him no respite, Maren landed, grabbed Vorg's thick right arm, and with a violent, ruthless twist, dislocated his shoulder. Taking the joint beyond its limit, he snapped the elbow in the opposite direction. The wet crack was repulsive as the splintered bone tore through the aged skin and emerged into the light, stained with oxidized blood.
Vorg fell face-first, reduced to a sack of pulverized bones and withered flesh, unable to move a single finger, drowning in his own blood. Finally, Maren leaned in and placed the flat of his palm on the Grand Captain's skull.
"Goodnight, old man," whispered Maren, releasing a meticulously calculated discharge of electrons into the giant's brainstem. Vorg convulsed with extreme violence one last time, his eyes rolled back, and he lay paralyzed, barely managing to inflate his broken lungs.
The silence that followed the fall of the Unbreakable was absolute. Below, in the wide courtyards and walkways of the Igneous Fault canyon, the thousands of corpses of mercenary scum smoked in silence. And in front of the inner walls, the Alliance's twelve invincible Captains lay in a collective puddle of mutilation, flayed, aged, or trapped in psychosomatic agony.
High atop the fortress's armored pavilions, the Depleted Summit—the last three standing commanders—watched the massacre with petrified hearts. Rurik (the beast tamer, Stage 2 Grand Saint), Kaelen (the array master, Stage 3 Grand Saint), and Leng Bi (the head of intelligence, Stage 1 Grand Saint) had livid faces.
Never, in their worst nightmares, did they imagine that a direct frontal assault would sweep away their bastion in a matter of minutes. But what truly froze the blood in their veins was the absurd reality before them: all these invaders radiated the authority of the Saint Realm, and they were all insultingly young. What kind of hidden empire, what kind of primordial clan possessed the obscene resources to raise forty-five Saints in the prime of their youth, endowed with powers that trampled the very laws of cultivation?
Unable to bear the oppressive uncertainty and the terror gnawing at his guts, Rurik, mounted on his immense three-headed Magma Hound, amplified his voice with Qi so it would echo throughout the sealed canyon.
"WHO ARE YOU?!" roared Rurik, his voice betraying a slight tremble beneath his false mercenary bravado. "Why are you attacking us?! We are the Iron Blood Alliance! We accept blood contracts for gold, but we have never crossed paths with you! We don't even know you!"
From the center of the slaughterhouse below, a soft laugh, deeply melodious yet steeped in lethal arrogance, cut through the toxic air.
Lilith, the Second-in-Command and Commander of the Morningstar Clan, floated down with the languid grace of a goddess of war, followed closely by Sienna's sadistic smile. Lilith stopped a few meters above the ground, raising her emerald gaze toward the Commanders with an evident sneer on her lips.
"You are right, scum. You don't know us," Lilith conceded, her voice projecting with overwhelming clarity that ignored the noise of the lava. "But tell me then, who ordered your people to be so stupid? Who told your... what was his name? Your Grand Saint, Elder Li?"
Lilith took a theatrical pause, sighing and shrugging her shoulders with an indifference that stabbed at the mercenaries' pride.
"Well, who cares what a corpse is called, right?" she laughed softly. "Returning to your question. This whole spectacle, all this spilled blood, is due to a small and pitiful miscalculation on your part. Your people tried to block access to a Saint's Tomb that our Morningstar Clan planned to plunder, which also happened to be the designated training ground for our youth. You were arrogant and greedy in front of the wrong people."
Leng Bi's eyes widened, her pupils trembling. Elder Li and the five True Saints! That was the lucrative border mission they never returned from!
"And the worst part of all," continued Lilith, her smile turning icy and sharp, "is that you dared to ally with the Violet Cloud Sect to stand against us at that door. A fatal mistake. Though I must admit that is privileged information... considering that the Violet Cloud was just physically erased from the face of the continent by our Marshal merely hours ago."
Lilith's words fell like lead anvils on the minds of the Commanders. The Violet Cloud Sect? A superpower with ten thousand disciples, millennial arrays, and a Quasi-Saint King, wiped off the map in a single night?
"So, as you can understand," concluded Lilith, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with complete tranquility, "we were not going to sit patiently and wait for your insignificant attempt at revenge for the six idiots we killed at that door. We preferred to come clean the house ourselves. And now you can feel honored... since you are next. Hehe."
The sepulchral silence reigned once again. The Iron Blood Commanders were stunned, their minds drawing a blank. This was not a calculated war for fertile territory, nor was it a moral crusade. Their impregnable fortress was being destroyed, their armies massacred, and their veterans tortured into madness, purely and simply because they got in the way of a looting and did not show the proper respect.
They were mercenaries. They understood greed, contract killing, and the supremacy of strength. In that instant, looking at the young demons in black robes surrounding them, they understood that they were facing the very pinnacle of cruelty in the cultivation world. There was no negotiation or ransom possible. The sky was sealed, the moat was petrified, and there was no escape.
If they were going to die, they would do so by drowning these arrogant youths in a river of magma and blood.
Rurik, the master tamer, raised his immense battle axe. His three-headed Magma Hound howled fiercely, spitting bursts of toxic fire and sulfuric gas that melted the stone beneath its colossal paws.
"If you want our bones, come tear them out of the lava!" roared Rurik, unleashing his oppressive Stage 2 Grand Saint aura, preparing to leap into the courtyard and sweep away the Sequences with his infernal beast.
But Lilith didn't even deign to draw a weapon. She simply glanced over her shoulder, with the apathy of someone asking to sweep away the dust.
"Eris, Violeta, Xylia, Vania, Mira, Eira, Lys, Lia, Lirael," named Lilith, her voice adopting the resonance of absolute military command. "You nine. Go against that noisy tamer and his lapdog. Have a little fun."
"Yes, Commander!" replied the nine girls in unison, their voices vibrating with lethal anticipation.
Rurik saw the nine young women take a step forward. Despite having witnessed their monstrous strength annihilating his captains, his pride as a Grand Saint surfaced. He had the best mutated beast of the volcano, a creature fed on souls. They were just little girls of the Early and Mid Saint Realm. He was going to melt their pretty faces until only their skulls remained!
But Rurik's sadistic smile froze on the spot, and his weathered face turned a sickly ash color upon seeing what began to happen before his eyes.
There was no strident war cry. There was a primordial resonance that vibrated the marrow in the bones of everyone present. The nine girls began to transform simultaneously. The air saturated with an ancestral pressure. They were unleashing the most terrifying and oppressive heritage in the universe: the pure blood of the Dragon King.
The battlefield, already plunged into chaos and destruction, seemed to run out of oxygen as physical reality itself warped violently around the nine chosen ones.
The Awakening of the Dragon Queens
Eris was the first. She let out a sigh, and the oxygen in front of her simply ceased to exist, replaced by a heat so unnatural that the stone beneath her boots began to vitrify instantly. Upon unleashing her Semi-Transformation at the peak of the Stage 5 Saint Realm, her face lost any trace of humanity, adopting the bloodthirsty expression of a deity of extinction. Her right eye erupted into an absolute crimson red, her pupils fragmenting into three concentric slits that spun erratically; with it, she didn't see physical matter, she saw the quantum breaking points in the structure of the world. Her left eye ignited into a pit of neon violet with crimson flashes, detecting the combustion potential in empty air.
Along her neck, shoulders, and flanks, her skin was violently devoured by the eruption of [Dark Scales], hexagonal plates of a matte black so unfathomable that they did not reflect light, but swallowed it. These scales vibrated, drinking in the intense heat of the surrounding magma and transmuting it into pure fire. From her forehead, two immense [Igneous Obsidian Horns] curved backward, heavy and cracked, from which a purely white plasma began to ooze and drip. The roar of her aura physically erased the ground she stepped on, leaving furrows of absolute nothingness as an imposing crown of dark flames rose between her horns, turning her into an apocalyptic titan.
Beside her, the temperature plummeted at once, assassinating the volcanic heat. Violeta took a step forward, and the world around her seemed to slow down, suspended in crystalline stasis. Her face adopted the imperturbable coldness of a statue carved at the end of time. Her [Pearlescent Ice Scales] erupted over her cheekbones, shoulders, and arms. They were not opaque; they were translucent plates that emitted a constant icy cyan mist, acting as dimensional distortion lenses. Her physical outline became blurry, erratic, like a lethal mirage suspended in a frozen desert.
From her head grew elegant [Crystalline Ice Horns], forged in primordial black ice and astral crystal, within which the suspended flow of blue nebulas could be seen. These horns vibrated with an ultrasonic frequency so high that the air cracked into geometric fractures. The wave of her [Absolute Calm Domain] swept the courtyard. The sound of war died out, and all the ash, poisonous smoke, and Qi particles in the air stopped dead, frozen mid-fall like glass beads in a spatial coffin. In her eyes, two inscrutable pools of stellar cold, the doom of her enemies was reflected.
Xylia raised her face, and the closed sky of the canyon responded to her divine mandate. The smoking firmament suddenly turned a dark, leaden purple. Heavy storm clouds spun in a concentric vortex directly above her. The massive static tension made the hair of injured mercenaries stand on end for kilometers around. Her eyes opened, and her purple pupils faded completely, becoming an immaculate, blinding white that connected with the lightning bolts in the sky.
Physical scales did not grow on her skin, but rather an intricate network of [Imperial Plasma Scales], patterns of solidified lightning that flickered like an electromagnetic storm. Beneath her skin, her veins glowed like threads of ignited light, pumping her luminescent neon purple [Plasma Blood]. Her body repelled the atmosphere, and voltaic arcs of violet and platinum began to weave the [Infinite Lightning Network] around her, a force field that hummed with the judgment of the heavens, turning her into the untouchable deity of tribulation.
Vania tilted her neck with majesty, and the entire coliseum suffered a lethal barometric alteration. A crushing pressure—identical to being dragged ten thousand meters below the ocean—fell upon the battlefield. The dense air turned a tint of indigo blue and dark violet. Along her temples, neck, and shoulders erupted polished, translucent plates of [Vibratory Sapphire Scales].
This divine armor vibrated at a mystical frequency that instantly canceled out any external sound, shockwave, or explosion. The roar of the lava and the screams of agony were swallowed by an unbearable acoustic void. Beneath the pale skin of her throat, her [Crimson Gold Vocal Cords], hardened with dragon cartilage, revealed themselves. Her eyes ignited with a cyan blue glare in the gloom, as she prepared to intone a requiem that would not enter through the ears, but would burst her enemies' hearts from the inside.
The world lost its vibrant colors and sank into a bluish, gloomy twilight when Mira crouched slightly, adopting a serpentine posture. Her eyes lost their humanity, transforming into two faceted crystals with [Amethyst Vertical Pupils]. With her thermal vision, the stone wall disappeared; she saw the meridians and the burning flow of Qi beating inside Rurik and his beast, marking the exact node of their weakness with crimson crosses.
Her body emitted a rhythmic and macabre, painless crackling as she activated her [Ophidian Bone Flexibility]. Her human skeleton was replaced by dragon cartilage, allowing her to dislocate and arch her body at impossible and fluid angles. From her pores, she began to exhale a dense, heavy, dark purple mist that dripped to the ground, crawling across the slabs like a toxic miasma. Mira merged with her own venom, moving with the undulating, feline grace of a viper ready to sink its fangs into the blind spots of the soul.
The scorching heat of the magma ceased to exist around Eira. Her biology mutated, adopting a state of absolute endothermy. Her skin transformed into a [Frigid Porcelain Dermis], a matte, pale surface with the density of primordial crystal, incapable of retaining temperature. The immense heat of the fortress and the fire of Rurik's beast was passively devoured, sucked into her veins that now shone with a neon cyan glare beneath her skin.
Her [Crystal Amber Eyes] shone with a cold, translucent light, similar to ancient fossil resin. In the center of her pupils spun a white Fractal Seal. With that gaze, she imposed the lethal [Law of Non-Vibration]. Any weapon, Qi shield, or physical body she tracked instantly lost its molecular resistance, becoming as fragile as blown glass, ready to fragment into diamond dust at the slightest touch. Eira didn't need to strike hard; she only needed to touch to crumble the world.
In the center of the somber formation, dispelling the dark terror with absolute purity, Lys displayed her sacred majesty. Her body was armored by [Sacred Refraction Scales], pearlescent white plates polished with the density of celestial diamond. The toxic lava, the poisonous fire, and the shadows of the canyon reflected off them, dissolving any trace of darkness into dead sparks at the first touch.
With a dull burst that flooded the courtyard with clarity, majestic [Wings of the Primordial Aurora] sprouted from her shoulder blades. Six immense wings of pure light Qi that extended for six meters, shedding blinding stardust that bathed the earth. Her [Eyes of Luminous Truth] lost their mortal features; the sclera and irises unified into incandescent liquid gold, and her pupil spun like a Solar Seal. Her gaze swept the fortress, instantly piercing any illusion or camouflage, revealing the malice in Rurik's heart as a repulsive black stain ready to be eradicated by the sentence of her light.
For Lia, the flash of her [Thunder Hawk Eyes] was blinding. Her sclera was a black abyss that absorbed photons, while her iris shone like molten gold. From her thin vertical pupil sprouted violent purple electrical arcs. With her conductivity vision, the world became a network of spiritual cables; she predicted the enemy's movement before their brain even ordered it, measuring the wind's density to curve space.
Along her forearms and wrists erupted [Electric Scale Feathers] of zenith silver. With a metallic snap (Clang!), these scales generated a magnetic field that locked her arms in perfect stasis, unmovable against hurricanes or earthquakes. Tense and lethal, she raised her bow. The string of light ignited into dense plasma, ready to unleash an arrow that, paradoxically, would strike her enemy's heart a millionth of a second before she released her fingers.
Finally, the night shadows around Lirael curved with melancholy. Her physiognomy underwent a frigid, spectral transmutation. Her [Shattered Moon Skin] acquired the texture of incredibly fine pale ceramic, furrowed by geometric cracks from which a silvery, incandescent light oozed. This light refracted off her body, creating multiple three-dimensional mirages of herself that overlapped and confused mortal senses.
Her eyes lost their amber color to become [Silver Mirror Eyes], perfect specular surfaces of chrome. She did not look at Rurik's physical body; she locked her gaze onto his Spiritual Reflection. Within those mirrors, she trapped the mercenary's soul. Along her spine and hips erupted [Pale Selenite Scales]. These plates greedily absorbed the scarce light of the area, storing it to unleash a blinding stroboscopic flash. Hidden behind her mirages and the blindness of her light, Lirael prepared to execute her immaterial cut, a slash that would not touch flesh, but would decapitate the tamer's very shadow.
Nine dragons in the form of maidens. Nine primordial monstrosities with their auras fused into a single block of absolute and suffocating oppression, raising their weapons toward the walkway.
The battlefield froze in a stupefied silence. The thousands of corpses, the cornered survivors, the eleven shattered Captains on the ground, and even the Commanders up high stopped breathing.
No one, in the entire bloody and malevolent history of the Iron Blood Alliance, expected their executioners to not be simple human geniuses, but draconic deities exhaling the primordial chaos of the beginning of time.
Up on the walkway, the Stage 2 Grand Saint, Rurik, felt the world open beneath his feet. The stupid dream of crushing arrogant "little girls" evaporated, leaving only a paralyzing cold. But the confirmation of his imminent doom came not from his own human instincts, but from his mount.
The immense three-headed Magma Hound, an aberrant and murderous beast that had devoured countless cultivators and lesser beasts, suddenly stopped roaring. The threatening toxic flames overflowing from its jaws extinguished with a pathetic sizzle. The beast's three massive heads looked toward the nine dragons, and nature's oldest biological instinct struck the creature with the force of a meteorite: the absolute, primal terror of the Apex Predator.
The hellhound let out a sharp, pitiful whimper, tucked its thick tail between its hind legs, and began to tremble uncontrollably, stumbling backward and clawing at the stone of the wall in its desperate attempt to get away from the abyss.
"Damned animal, stay still!" yelled Rurik, his face white as paper and sweating cold. He yanked savagely on the heavy chains and injected his Qi through the whip to force the beast to attack.
But it was useless. No magic, no torture, and no tamer's whip in this world could force a frightened dog to willingly jump into the jaws of nine starving dragons.
Down in the blood-stained courtyard, the nine Morningstar Queens flexed their legs in perfect synchrony. The unbreakable volcanic stone of the floor collapsed under their condensed power.
The hunt for the Depleted Summit had just begun.
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