CHAPTER 204: The Weight of Heaven and the Patience of Monsters
The heavy, icy hum of the fading light monoliths still vibrated through the marble floorboards of the Throne Room. The forty-five Sequences, shrouded in the sepulchral silence that followed the revelation of the divine treasury, kept their fists clenched tightly. The abyss of their own poverty had struck them more rawly than any enemy axe, but rather than breaking their wills, that overwhelming display of unattainable inheritances had ignited an eternal bonfire in their chests.
Samael watched them from the height of his obsidian throne. His gaze gleamed in the gloom with a calculating, almost cruel calm. In his mind, however, the sovereign ruled upon a truth he would never utter aloud to his soldiers: Of course the System demands millions of points to hand over these relics. They have to earn them by bleeding. But if, in the heat of conquest, any of them demonstrate a truly heretical will—if they manage to shake the very foundations of my Dao—I will place those relics directly into their hands. The price is merely an illusion to keep the wolves hungry.
The Patriarch stood up with a fluid, majestic movement. Beside him, Seraphina mirrored him, the soft silk of her dress swaying with a grace that sharply contrasted with the hall's oppressive atmosphere.
"I am returning to seclusion," Samael announced, his deep, silken voice cutting the air like a marble sentence. "Lilith, Sienna, Vexia... you three take charge of the clan's logistics and the assimilation of the loot. I will come out as soon as you finish the kids' conditioning week. But if any anomaly occurs that challenges the authority of this territory, summon me immediately."
The forty-five Sequences, alongside the three commanders, brought their right fists to their chests in a flawless unison that shook the dust from the columns.
"Yes, Patriarch!" roared the vanguard.
In the very next heartbeat, the silhouettes of Samael and Seraphina lost their physical density, dissolving into the air in a blur of violet static and frosty light.
When reality reassembled within the private chambers of the Primordial Heritage Palace, the tactical coldness of the Throne Room vanished.
Before Samael could even take a step toward the silk bed, Seraphina pounced on him. There was no hesitation in her movement; the woman who had maintained the composure of an untouchable deity before their subordinates grabbed her husband's neck with both hands and kissed him with a voracious, possessive, and overwhelming intensity. It was a brief kiss, but laden with the weight of millennia of loyalty—a silent oath dictating that no matter how much blood the Morningstar shed in the mortal world, she would always be his refuge and his anchor.
Samael, blinking with a momentary surprise that was quickly replaced by the sharp, confident smile of a monarch accustomed to desire, did not let the offense go to waste. He slid his thick, gloved hands down the curve of Seraphina's waist until catching the voluptuousness of her rear, squeezing the flesh through the silk with a firmness that forced the Empress to break the kiss, letting out a soft, sharp, breathy moan.
As they parted, a thin, glittering thread of frost and saliva linked their lips for a fraction of a second before snapping. Seraphina, her cheeks burning with a scarlet blush that rivaled the neon of her eyes, lowered a trembling hand to rest her palm against the slight curve of her belly.
"Not now, Husband," she whispered, her voice vibrating with atypical heat as she pressed her thighs together. "The twins... are still assimilating the Qi."
Samael immediately understood the warning. He let out a low, hoarse, exceptionally warm laugh, raising a hand to his cheek to scratch his skin with feigned innocence.
"Hahahahaha... forgive me, my love. It is simply impossible to contain my blood's instinct when I have such an absurdly beautiful Empress alone in this room," Samael murmured.
He pulled her gently, drawing her against his broad obsidian chest, and began to comb and caress her long, silky silver hair with an exasperating, rhythmic slowness. Seraphina rested her cheek against her husband's sternum; listening to the dense, immemorial, steady beat of Samael's heart, the tension left her shoulders, allowing herself to be enveloped by the absolute security of the silence.
After a few minutes of stillness, Seraphina lifted her face slightly. The blush on her skin had been replaced by the flawless pallor of a deity, and her blue eyes began to darken, the pupils expanding until they swallowed the color, transforming into two unfathomable, frigid abysses. Her smile no longer held a trace of sweetness; it widened with an icy, arrogant, purely predatory slowness.
"Husband..." Seraphina spoke, her tone dropping several octaves, sounding like the echo of a fracturing glacier. "Wouldn't it be more logical and efficient for you to consume the entirety of those Divine Grade treasures yourself? If you assimilate that energy, your crown would break through the Saint Realm in less than a cycle. Make no mistake, our enemies in the outer continent are going to multiply exponentially after tonight. I have a firm, delicious feeling that those forty-five brats, when they march under our banner again, will bring nothing but absolute, apocalyptic chaos to the other factions..."
Seraphina didn't finish the sentence. Vibrating with the anticipation of war, the biological seals on her soul loosened, and the heritage of the Betrayed Empress who used to rule worlds reclaimed her anatomy.
From her silver hair sprouted two sharp horns of pure ice that grew and intertwined with aggressive geometry, forming the true Crown of True Frost upon her skull. At the same time, hexagonal scales of an almost white blue—resembling plates of stellar nacre and translucent sapphire—emerged along her slender neck, covering her shoulders and forearms like a mythological armor embedded in her flesh. Behind her waist, a long, slender, deadly tail of articulated crystal descended until it brushed the floor; the tip ended in a closed lotus of dense ice, so ridiculously sharp it sliced the silk carpet with an imperceptible hiss.
And from her back, defying the laws of space, unfurled the Wings of Zero Aurora. They were not limbs of flesh nor reptilian membranes; they were six immense cloaks of scarlet light and icy mist that floated suspended millimeters from her shoulder blades, freezing the air currents in the room.
Samael, who hadn't stopped stroking her hair even though the scales now brushed against his gloves, watched the transformation with absolute fascination. He did not step back before the glacial oppression of the Empress. Instead, he lifted her chin with two fingers, forcing her to hold his gaze. The monarch's violet eyes lost all humanity, turning into two swirling purple vortexes that beat in perfect, tyrannical resonance with his wife's blood.
"I could do it, Sera," Samael replied, his voice devoid of urgency, exuding a confidence bordering on heresy. "I could swallow the entire palace and ascend today. But why the damn hell would I do that? I don't need to beg a catalog for shortcuts. The Clan... engrave this into your soul, my Empress: the only thing truly sacred to me in this vast world is you all and this Clan. I will carve my own paths in blood to shatter the firmament. And as long as I have all of you breathing by my side, and I have you holding my hand..."
Samael lowered his face until he brushed her lips, injecting an overwhelming, sovereign weight into every syllable:
"...there isn't a single god who can make me kneel."
Seraphina shivered violently under his grip, a current of icy Qi running down her spine as she clenched the scales on her legs.
Samael gave her no quarter. He locked his abyssal eyes onto hers and unleashed his manifesto:
"So it is far better that the kids, the Legion, and all of you grow monstrously stronger. But if along the way you hit a wall—if a calamity appears that your swords cannot cut—I will cut it. I will bear the weight of destiny and the ceiling of the heavens for you. I will gladly carry all the sins, all the heresies, all the curses, and all the deaths of this plane for you. Do not worry about a thing as long as you have me breathing. The kids are going to cause chaos of titanic proportions out there? Let them. They are going to decapitate imperial heirs, young masters of ancient clans, holy sons, or the very daughters of mortal Emperors? Let them decapitate them! Those factions are going to cry and seek revenge? Let them come. I will be waiting for them right here. They demand explanations for their dead? Let them come down and ask the King of Hell for them."
Samael swept his free arm toward the vastness of the palace, his voice booming with absolute tyranny:
"No one will put a leash on us. An enemy appears that we cannot defeat today? What damn difference does it make? I will drag everyone back inside this palace, lock the doors with my authority, and until you are beasts enough to crush that enemy to pieces with your bare hands, no one leaves. And they will never be able to find us in the folds of this Mini-World. We only need time, Sera... and time is the one thing we have in abundance in this paradise. Let them march. Let them enjoy the carnage. Let them destroy whatever they must destroy; the Morningstar will pay the bail with the blood of the accuser. We are a family. And no one lifts a single finger against a member of this house without facing a nest of bloodthirsty primordial dragons. No one will stop us. Not even the gods themselves."
BOOM.
As he uttered his absolute oath, reality inside the Eternal Dawn Mini-World collapsed. Samael's sovereign will acted as a detonator; an immense, suffocating pillar of violet and crimson Qi erupted from the roof of the Primordial Heritage Palace, piercing the artificial clouds of the realm.
Thousands of ancient dragon souls sleeping within the Primordial Heritage Palace of the Mini-World felt the shockwave. Sensing that tyrannical, pure, despotic intent, they felt as though the very Progenitor of the Origin had just descended to earth. A chorus of ten thousand draconic roars tore through the firmament.
The perpetually serene sky of the paradise darkened in a heartbeat. Blinding golden lightning, arcs of blood-red bolts, and purple static began stitching the clouds together, making the earth rumble with a continuous quake. The density of the atmospheric pressure suddenly multiplied a hundredfold; in the training grounds, in the pavilions, and on the ramparts, every living being without exception felt an invisible hand crushing their skull against the ground.
The forty-five Sequences—the arrogant assassins who had just scoffed at millions of points—dropped to their knees, gasping for oxygen. Lilith, Vexia, Sienna, the ancient clan elders, and even Malak and Abaddon had to drive their weapons into the earth, paralyzed by an instinctive, sacred terror.
In the palace gardens, however, the only creature who did not bend her knees before the cataclysm was a one-year-old little girl. Celeste.
Walking beside her, her guardian beast Kala reacted immediately. Her slender, feline body—the size of a large leopard—tensed. Her polished obsidian scales ceased absorbing light; the abyss within them opened, and the galaxies of white stars trapped beneath her skin began to spin in violent resonance with the lightning in the sky. Thick violet smoke escaped from her irisless eye sockets, while the long ethereal tendrils on her snout—the Whiskers of Destiny—floated upward, devouring the ambient karmic static. Behind her, the Wings of Stellar Shadow unfolded, revealing a cloak of perpetual night.
On the child's other side, the colossal Valka reared her robust, serpentine frame. Her Jade Iron and Void Diamond scales rippled like dunes in a storm, while the immense crystal fins on her back vibrated with a deafening hiss, instantly liquefying the garden's marble slabs to create a gravity moat around her ward. Her black horns acted as lightning rods, absorbing the stray arcs of electricity.
Celeste, her silky silvery-blue hair swaying in the hurricane of Qi, tilted her beautiful face upward. Her left eye—an icy, absolute blue like the core of a glacier—and her right eye—a dark, ravenous violet like Samael's own void—reflected the immensity of the sky.
Above, tearing through the storm, the astral projection of two mythological entities spanned the horizon from end to end.
A colossal Void Dragon—so immensely massive it cradled the curvature of the Mini-World between its claws, with obsidian scales reflecting the end of the universe, eyes of a ravenous neon crimson, and black horns like crowns of heresy—floated coiled around distorted, dying stars. Beside it, in perfect, indestructible harmony, the silhouette of the Nacre Deity: a slender dragon of white scales, a sharp frost crown, and six wings of scarlet aurora that froze the firmament. Behind both monarchs, thousands of amorphous draconic shadows bowed in perpetual reverence.
All the Morningstar blood in the realm boiled in a mystical ecstasy.
The Sequences, gritting their teeth against the ground, looked to the sky with dilated eyes. They felt no fear; they felt fanatical devotion. How beautiful... Kael thought, feeling his sword wanting to fly toward the storm.
Sienna and Vexia, gripping each other by the shoulders, exchanged a look of absolute stupefaction. Not in the legends of the Primordial Era... nor in the records of the Higher Heavens does a bloodline like this exist, the Silver Matriarch ruled.
Celeste let out a sweet, crystalline, utterly innocent laugh that carried through the thunder. Behind her, the immense, dark silhouette of a dual-eyed dragon projected into Kala's smoke. The little girl raised her tiny finger, pointing at the two colossi dominating the apocalypse, and whispered with infinite joy:
"Daddy... Mommy... pretty!" Celeste giggled.
Hearing her voice, the immense pupils of the two dragons in the sky looked down, locking onto the child with an overwhelming warmth that dispelled the gravity around her. Celeste didn't just feel her parents' love; she felt the invisible gaze of those other presences waiting in the darkness of the bloodline, blanketing her with the same ancestral devotion.
Hidden in the armory basements, the immense, aberrant mass of Abaddon watched the interaction through his distorted eyes. The clan's final bulwark bowed his grotesque head toward the floor, exhaling a metallic miasma as he swore in solitude:
"Fear not the morrow, my little Sovereign. I will protect your breath—and that of the two deities growing in your mother's womb—until my very matter is erased from time."
While the Eternal Dawn Mini-World celebrated its communion of blood, in the outside world, reality experienced an irreparable tear.
The shockwave of Samael's promise could not be contained within his pocket dimension; it bled through the dimensional rifts, spreading across the mortal continents like an invisible tide of atavistic authority. In the imperial palaces, in the floating academies, in the families hidden behind veils of time, and in the abyssal trenches of the earth, the order of the Heavens trembled.
The great monarchs, the millennial sages, and the tyrants who had lain asleep in stasis for centuries opened their eyes simultaneously. They looked toward the constellations, feeling that the chessboard upon which they had played for eras had just been overturned by an unknown player. They understood, with a shiver of terror and excitement, that the clock of destiny had begun to tick: a Golden Age of bloodshed, of monstrous geniuses, and of imperial collapses had just been born. Orders for recruitment and military mobilization began to be shouted in ten thousand different languages.
The "Regressors"—those tyrants and heroes who had managed to travel back in time to amend the mistakes of their past lives—stopped dead in their respective training sessions. They looked at their trembling hands, completely disoriented; in none of their temporal memories did a record of such a cosmic cataclysm exist. The script of their lives had been shredded.
In the depths of a secret realm perpetually bathed in fog and rot—the absolute headquarters of the Cult of the Pale—an immeasurable, solitary eye with yellow sclera and a vertical pupil opened at the center of an altar of skulls.
Tens of thousands of cultists draped in gray rags fell flat on their faces, groaning in agony as their minds were parasitized. From the pit beneath the eye emerged a demonic voice, incredibly thick, slow, and laden with the miasma of entropy:
"The gears of chaos... have broken. The chains of my captivity tremble. Move, my pale larvae. Search the continents... search the anomalies of Karma. Find the bearer of conceptual ruin... find that girl. Find Eris! Her blood is the key to dissolving my bindings. The era of the harvest... has begun."
At the same time, in the vast, indomitable Beast Sea—an ocean of primordial jungles—thousands of beastly Kings and Monarchs roared at the moon. The great Emperors of scale and fur, who had endured centuries of seclusion watching mortal cultivators hunt their young to extract their cores, bared their poison-dripping fangs. The unspoken truce with humanity was dead; the scent of dragon on the wind reminded them that they were the true masters of the earth.
The Hidden Families—clans that had remained buried in pocket dimensions since the collapse of the Ancient Era—began breaking their stasis seals. Their heirs—monsters raised in the purity of ancient laws—were cast out into the external world with a single command: Devour the competition. Claim the throne of the new era.
The fabric of destiny wove its threads at a demented speed. The continental doomsday clock had ticked its first second.
And while the entire universe braced itself to slaughter one another, the absolute and sole culprit of that cosmic disruption blissfully ignored the chaos he had just unleashed. In the quiet of his bedroom, Samael leaned forward, placing an exceptionally tender, reverential kiss upon Seraphina's forehead, and then another on her frost-covered lips.
"Now... let us cultivate, my love," Samael whispered, his eyes returning to the warm tranquility of a husband.
Seraphina nodded, her frost crown retracting beneath her pale skin. Both monarchs closed their eyes, sinking into a meditation so profound that the Mini-World returned to its habitual, elegant silence.
One week later.
In the bowels of the Primordial Heritage Palace, the infinite labyrinth of Sienna's Mirror Dimension reeked.
The floor, normally an immaculate, reflective white, was covered in a disgusting, slippery film of dense sweat, splatters of dried black blood, and puddles of bile and vomit. Sprawled across the crystal surface at grotesque angles and unnatural postures, the forty-five Sequences lay completely immobilized. Their chests rose and fell in an agonizing, rhythmic gasp; they had no Qi left in their Dantians, no strength in their fingers—they were so exhausted they couldn't even grasp the air.
That physical carnage was not like the infernal six-year training under temporal compression they had endured long ago—that hell was the sacred scar that had forged them into an indestructible military brotherhood. This week had been something far more technical and humiliating: Lilith and Sienna had thrown them into the mirror slaughterhouse for a "nut-and-bolt adjustment" following their collective ascension.
For one hundred and sixty-eight uninterrupted hours, the two Matriarchs had hurled them against hordes of captured beasts, against projections of Purple Cloud Saint Kings, and finally, against their worst, most absolute nightmare: their own mirror clones. Clones that felt no fear, that executed their exact same sword and movement techniques with sadistic perfection, punishing every millimeter of hesitation by shattering their ribs. They hadn't been able to defeat their reflections—after all, if they improved by two percent mid-fight, the mirror assimilated it instantly—but they had managed to consolidate their unstable foundations, hardening their meridians until they were like steel cables.
The forty-five reflections staring back from the glass walls showed sunken, pale faces adorned with fresh, colorful bruises, but the pupils gleaming beneath their swollen sockets exuded an edge infinitely more inhuman, cold, and lethal than seven days prior. They smelled of contained calamity.
And amidst their collective paralysis, they had all sworn a single, unbreakable divine law branded into their trauma: never, under any circumstances conceivable by the human mind, would they ever provoke Lilith again.
The Ashen Phoenix was an absolute martial psychopath. She broke them with blows, incinerated them with flames of forced regeneration to heal their tissues, and broke them again before the new skin even finished stretching. They weren't masochists; the girls in the rearguard shivered physically just hearing the rustle of her skirts. Though, as in any pack, there were always mutations: the most sadistic minds of the shadow squad, like Aia and Eris herself, lay with cracked lips stretched into small, silent, macabre smirks, filing away in their brains every anatomical torture technique Lilith had used on them to apply to their future prisoners.
Sitting three meters up on an elegant obsidian chair conjured in mid-air, Lilith took a delicate sip from her cup of jasmine tea. Her feathered dress was immaculate; there wasn't a single bead of sweat on her forehead, and her face radiated a sadistic, absolute, and charming maternal pride.
"Look at them, Sienna..." Lilith hummed sweetly, crossing her legs. "They are such adorable little sponges. They absorb blows and convert them into killing intent with an ease that touches my heart. I no longer worry about what happens to them out there... I feel sorry for the poor bastards who cross their path."
Sitting beside her, Sienna slowly shook her head, a sardonic smile curving her silver lips. The Maiden of Mirrors looked up toward the front crystal wall; her dimensional authority warned her that Samael was standing on the other side of the barrier, politely waiting for her to open the way—even though the monarch possessed the brute force to shatter his way into the entire dimension with a snap of his fingers.
Sienna snapped her fingers. The immense front mirror rippled like the surface of a placid lake.
Click-clack.
The sharp, heavy, martial sound of Samael's obsidian heels stepping onto the crystal echoed through the slaughterhouse.
That simple auditory stimulus acted upon the forty-five Sequences like a conditioning trigger. Ignoring muscle tears, stress fractures, and their complete lack of Qi, forty-five emaciated bodies attempted to stand up out of pure, terrified military instinct, emitting a chorus of bone cracks that disgusted even Sienna.
Samael raised his right hand, stopping them with a lazy gesture.
"At ease. Do not stand up, little monsters," the Patriarch ordered, his deep, warm voice filling the hall as his gaze swept over the puddles of vomit. "I see you fared wonderfully with my aunt. You look exceptionally energetic, Hahahahaha... and most importantly: I see none of you had the bad manners to die in the process."
Samael stopped beside Lilith's floating throne, resting a hand on the backrest as he smiled at her knowingly.
"Aunt... you weren't too soft on them, were you?" he joked.
Lilith flashed him the smile of a satisfied predator, her phoenix eyes dancing with amusement.
"Of course not, my dear nephew. I gave them exactly the love they needed. And judging by the looks of absolute ecstasy on their faces right now, I am convinced they are dying for me to schedule another cycle next month."
A shiver of pure, uncontrollable terror ran down the spines of the forty-five warriors, forcing them to clench their jaws to keep from screaming a refusal.
Samael nodded solemnly, thoroughly enjoying their silent panic.
"Yes, from what I can see on their deformed faces, the news fills them with joy. If you need more compression, just ask for it, Hahahahaha."
The Patriarch dropped his smile, adopting the obsidian stance of the Void Herald. His cape billowed behind him, casting a shadow that devoured the reflections on the floor.
"I commend you," Samael decreed. "You have seventy-two hours of absolute leave. Eat, heal your tears, and sleep. I have already prepared the new array of missions for you. There are contracts of all kinds, from border sieges to infiltrations in Aethelgard. You could try taking them on alone, but since I know the size of your greed and know that not a single one of you is willing to fall a millimeter behind the comrade next to you, I will only authorize deployments in tactical squads."
Samael pointed toward the dimensional exit with his thumb.
"Child's play is over. The outer continent is boiling, and it is time we ride out to collect debts. If you wish, you can drag yourselves to the Exchange Pavilion right now and spend those three million points you have accumulated to buy trinkets that will guarantee your survival tomorrow, or..."
"No," a dry, sharp voice cut him off, devoid of any hesitation.
Samael paused, locking his violet eyes onto the front row.
Despite having his left shoulder visibly dislocated and a nasty gash across his cheek, Kael had managed to drop to one knee on the floor, supporting his body weight on the pommel of his dead steel sword. The swordsman lifted his face; his gaze held no trace of submission—only a frigid, absolute, and terrifying martial maturity. Behind him, Dante, Violeta, Goran, Altair, and the rest of the Sequences mirrored his posture, nodding in a silent pact.
"No one in this room is going to spend a single point on trinkets, Patriarch," Kael declared, his voice ringing with the firmness of a true Daoist. "Why the damn hell would we waste our loot on silk armor or regeneration pills when we aren't even capable of controlling our current physical strength to its absolute limit? We have yet to master the inheritances and techniques we assimilated to one hundred percent. It would be an insult to our swords to seek external shortcuts today. We will save every damn point. And only when we stand before the door to divinity, or when death is a certainty... will we empty the vaults."
Samael did not answer immediately. His vortex gaze swept over the forty-five battered faces, searching for a single crack of cowardice, a single trace of the vulgar greed found in mortal mercenaries.
He found nothing. He only found forty-five monsters willing to march barefoot over magma just so they could buy the entire sky tomorrow.
The draconic shadow behind the Patriarch expanded suddenly, vibrating with a sovereign pride so immense it cracked three nearby mirrors. Samael widened his smile to reveal his canines, his eyes flashing with the promise of eternal, bloody glory.
"Masterful," Samael whispered, his hoarse voice giving Lilith goosebumps. "Since you have decreed it with your blood, I will not be the one to drape silk rags over your scars. I will see you in the Throne Room in exactly seventy-two hours."
Samael turned toward the portal, his cape billowing like the wing of a primordial raven.
"Prepare yourselves, little monsters... my dragons are returning to the outer world. I want to see how many kings' crowns you bring me to adorn my floor. HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
The sovereign vanished in a burst of light, leaving the forty-five Sequences alone with the echo of his laughter, the foul stench of the floor... and the unfading, terrifying, absolute certainty that the continental apocalypse had just found its horsemen.
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