CHAPTER 207: The Obsidian Throne and the Spear of Silent Sunset
Three days passed.
The leave had expired, and the illusory peace of the Eternal Dawn Mini-World was cut clean by the weight of martial authority.
At the apex of the immense Throne Room, dominating the darkness of the black marble, sat Samael Morningstar. Seated upon his obsidian throne in all his imposing height, his long white hair cascaded like dead snow over the shoulders of his Imperial Void Dragon Armor. The metal reflected neither the gleam of runic axes nor the fire of the braziers; it was pure abyssal crystal that devoured the room's light, plunging the monarch's body into a tyrannical, perpetual gloom.
Framing his sharp-featured face, the high, black-scaled collar supported the Crown of the Primordial Sovereign. The seven stellar black diamond needles no longer required mystical threads to anchor them to his skull; they orbited his head autonomously, tearing through the fabric of reality to leave behind fine, silver spatial scars that pulsed with a continuous hiss. The contrast between the absolute black of the metal and the tricolor glow—gold, violet, and crimson—bleeding from the rifts gave him the appearance of a heretical deity dictating the end of the Great Dao. At his chest, the central gem throbbed like an ancestral dragon's heart, and at his back, levitating in agonizing silence, floated the great Odachi Kurohime.
Right to his right, sharing the apex of that military firmament, sat Seraphina Morningstar.
The woman's bearing was that of a sovereign born to crush empires beneath her heel. Her long, pristine silvery-blue hair fell elegantly over the Scarlet Aurora Mantle, battle armor woven from dimensional spider silk and crimson jade scales as fine as lotus petals. Her deep blue, almost translucent eyes were not looking at the troops; they were fixed in profile upon her husband's face. They exuded an absolute, icy, and voracious pride—a possessive gaze that warned every being in creation that the monster seated on the throne was solely and exclusively hers.
The silver ring tracing her pupils rotated slowly, reacting to the emotions of her womb, which displayed the heavy, prominent curve of a divine fertility that no mortal robe could conceal. Crowning her forehead, carved entirely from millennial glacier crystal, the Blue Phoenix Ice Crown released a permanent icy mist, while the central gem—a tear of liquid fire trapped within the ice—beat to the same rhythm as Samael's chest.
When Seraphina's icy Qi resonated with the liquid obsidian of Samael's armor, the entire hall experienced an optical cataclysm. Light and darkness fused at the center of the dais, birthing the dreaded phenomenon of the Eternal Dawn Eclipse. The air in the chamber turned warm, comforting, and familiar to those of their blood... but suffocating and lethal to the rest of the universe.
Looking down the dais steps, three figures dominated the ante-chamber like three pillars of contained calamity.
To the left sat Lilith Morningstar, the clan's second Matriarch. Draped in heavy silks of war in smoky tones and deep scarlet, her garments hugged dominant hips and a neckline of undeniable martial authority. Her white hair, streaked with silver and red threads, floated around skin of a seeable ash-like glow, while her phoenix eyes burned with a homicidal thirst for war that had been muzzled for decades.
Beside her sat Sienna, the Maiden of the Infinite Mirror. Her posture was relaxed, yet the generous curves embraced by her dark dress projected a crushing physical presence. Her black hair, cut straight at the jawline, framed the terror of her physiognomy: two sockets devoid of iris or pupil—perfect silver mirrors that reflected the sins of anyone who made the mistake of looking into them. On her left wrist, a small golden bell held by a red thread chimed subtly. At the other end waited Vexia, the Grand Marshal of the Void, clad in her severe, Victorian-style tactical uniform with a starched apron. Her white gloves covered fingers of primordial metal, and behind the lenses of her runic glasses fell an infinite cascade of strategic data.
And backing the rear of the hall, standing upright like six pillars of iron and homicidal intent, waited the Six Clan Elders.
Astarion the Cloud-Breaker, his lean frame scarred with lines that flashed like blue plasma circuits; Thalassa the Abyssal Trench, an imposing woman with long midnight-blue hair and cyan eyes resembling an ocean abyss; Marcus the Mountain Blacksmith, a colossus with hypertrophied shoulders perpetually stained with ash and soot; Torian the Black Steel Edge, the one-eyed weapons master whose empty socket throbbed, sealed by a sphere of liquid mercury; Sela the Night Whisper, compact, lethal, and wrapped in a suit of shadowy silk that reflected not a single speck of light; and Livia the Jade Breath, barefoot upon the marble tiles with her green hair swaying like living vines.
Samael swept his vortex eyes over that formation. Every single one of his elders radiated the cultivation base of a Stage 8 Saint—warriors who, upon unleashing their bloodlines, touched the brute physical force of a Grand Saint. In any mid-tier sect outside, they would be revered as founding ancestors. Lilith, for her part, stood at Stage 4 of the Grand Saint Realm, concealing within her blood the tyranny to rival Stage 8. She was a sovereign shield.
However, upon fixing his attention on his aunt's empty hands, an idea crossed the monarch's mind.
"Hey, Aunt Lilith," Samael spoke, breaking the silence with a sharp half-smile.
Lilith looked away from the columns to him, tucking a white strand of hair behind her ear. "Yes, nephew?"
"Your primary weapon is the spear, isn't it?"
"Well... yes," the Phoenix replied, shrugging her shoulders slightly. "Though I don't tend to draw it very often. I learned the basics alongside your father a long time ago. I don't consider myself a supreme master of the spear, but I have mastered the fundamental strikes. I also assimilated the technique our Eris wields, the one you unearthed in the twin tomb some time ago: the Sky-Piercing Phoenix Spear."
"Ah, that old manual... Mmm." Samael rested his chin on his armored knuckles. "If I put a real spear in your hands... would you dedicate yourself body and soul to refining its Dao?"
"Mmm, let's say yes," Lilith smiled fiercely. "It isn't always wise to entrust one's life entirely to bloodline or my regeneration flames. Why not be an absolute master of all weapons? Mastering metal to the limit of the basics can mean the difference between amputating a head or losing your own."
"Perfect. I have the exact gift for you." Samael widened his smile to reveal his canines.
Lilith narrowed her red eyes, stepping back half a pace out of pure survival instinct as a bead of cold sweat slid down her temple.
"That smile of yours reeks of a cruel prank, Samael," the woman warned. "Whatever you're about to pull out of that storage had better be a blade worthy of my hand, and not a piece of old firewood to decorate the hall."
"Don't worry, Aunt. It is a weapon that fits your Phoenix vanity perfectly. Since myths claim your race births the purest fire in creation... let's see how true that legend is."
The Patriarch raised his right hand and tore open a rift into his dimensional inventory.
In the next second, the perpetual gloom of the Obsidian Throne was annihilated. The entire hall plunged into a white, pristine, absolute, and blinding glare. Samael held between his gloves a colossal spear forged entirely of solid conceptual light. The energy flowed along the shaft in helical spirals, emitting an intent so pure and celestial that the black marble beneath his feet began to crack, rejecting the weapon's ferocity. It was a transcendental relic—a divine replica designed to ignore any barrier and judge the existence of the target's soul.
Lilith's eyes widened, her breath catching in her throat, completely overwhelmed by the sacred oppression of the blade.
"Patri—Patriarch," the woman stammered, pointing at the beam of light with a trembling finger. "That thing... isn't that the relic from the clan vault? The one that demands hundreds of millions of clan contribution points?"
"That exact one, Aunt," Samael affirmed boldly. "And I would a thousand times rather see it covered in enemy blood in your hands than gathering dust in my vault. Take it."
Samael compressed his spatial authority; the colossal spear left his throne and floated down slowly until stopping before the Ashen Phoenix's chest.
Lilith reached out her right arm and closed her fingers around the shaft of celestial light.
In that exact millisecond, the structure of reality within the hall let out an agonizing groan.
CRACK.
The fire of her Law of Primordial Sunset detonated from the depths of her meridians. A tide of grayish Qi, dense as the ash of a burned world, erupted violently through the pores of Lilith's pristine skin, climbing up the shaft of light like a swarm of abyssal parasites. The white, divine glow of the spear began to wither at a terrifying speed; the solid light underwent total conceptual degradation, aging millions of years in a single heartbeat under the weight of the Morningstar bloodline.
The celestial beam petrified, transmuting into an opaque, pale, and porous obsidian pike with the texture of ancestral bones unearthed from a mass grave. The piercing tip split into a bident prong, housing at its exact center a perpetual gray flame that emitted no heat, but rather the suffocating chill of the martial void. The divine weapon had been subdued, kneeling before its new sovereign to be reborn as the executioner of the Great Dao.
Lilith weighed the pale bone spear, feeling the internal conduits of the weapon weld directly to her Sea of Qi. A smile of absolute sovereignty and pure predation curved her sadistic deity lips.
"This... dear nephew, this is no longer a simple spear," Lilith whispered, as the reflection of the gray flame danced in her retinas. "This is the death sentence for anyone stupid enough to stand before us."
Samael let out a low laugh, a dark and guttural sound that echoed against the marble, breaking the sepulchral respect the weapon's mutation had imposed upon those present.
"What absolute savagery..." Samael murmured, crossing his arms while Seraphina's gaze beside him flashed with icy approval. "I knew your bloodline harbored an anomaly, Aunt Lilith, but this borders on blasphemy. You took a concept of pristine light from the Higher Heavens and rotted it into a gravedigger's shovel."
Lilith gave her wrist a swift flick; the bone pike sliced the air of the ante-chamber without emitting a single hiss of wind. Instead, it traced a fine line of gray dust that settled onto the marble like dead snow.
"Are you afraid of what you just birthed, nephew?" the Phoenix challenged, resting the shaft on the floor.
"Afraid? Not at all." Samael's smile turned sharp as a dimensional slash. "I am fiercely curious. That relic bypasses one hundred percent of any runic, physical, or spiritual defense. Now that it is saturated with your entropy, I want to see what happens when you impale an enemy Saint King's chest. I wonder if their inner world will crumble into ash dust before their knees even touch the ground."
The monarch shifted his eyes for a fraction of a second toward the internal interface of his retina to view the result of the assimilation:
[Artifact Record Post-Bloodline Mutation]
Original Designation: Spear of Longinus (Divine Replica) Current Designation: Longinus of the Silent Sunset (Conceptual Spear) Martial Grade: Divine Conceptual Weapon (Transcendental Authority). Base Property: Bypasses 100% of any magical, physical, Qi, or runic barrier, guaranteeing existential penetration of the target. Bloodline Synergy (Law of Primordial Sunset): Upon piercing the adversary by bypassing their protections, the blade injects the concept of the Withering of the Great Dao. The pierced anatomy not only suffers the physical destruction of the impact, but its linear time and local causality accelerate instantly to the end of its karmic cycle, reducing bones, organs, and meridians to sterile, immobile gray ash that can never know regeneration.
A piece worthy of my house, Samael calculated.
However, before he could close the notification window, the System panel flashed with an imperial golden glow so violent it shook the core of his brain.
[X3000 CASHBACK!]
[The tyranny of the investment has altered the plane's equilibrium. Reward granted: Emperor Grade Conceptual Domain — "Sea of Silent Sunset Spears"]
BOOM.
Samael did not unleash the conceptual domain onto the floor tiles of the hall, but the mere impact of storing that supreme inheritance within his soul generated an invisible spiritual quake. An overwhelming martial intent spilled down the steps of the throne, pushing waves of pressure that made the obsidian columns groan. The room's oxygen saturated with the latent, distant, homicidal tolling of millions of fractured pikes awaiting their command to be drawn in an adjacent dimension.
Lilith, gripping her ash shaft, staggered on her heels from the jolt of authority that erupted from the youth's body. Within her, her Sea of Consciousness experienced a violent synchronization; it was as if the vaulted space of the hall had transformed into an invisible ancestor, branding a thousand years of memory in the art of the spear directly into her soul.
"N—Nephew?..." Lilith stared at Samael with wide eyes, while the ash spear in her hand vibrated with wild emotion, as if greeting its true home. "What the hell did you just do? I can feel the Spear Dao flowing directly into my meridians. It's as if it's teaching me how to fight just by breathing this air."
"I told you, Aunt," Samael remarked, looking at her with razor-sharp confidence. "I don't make bad deals. Now you not only have the ultimate spear to harvest the souls of your enemies; you have the absolute conceptual domain to refine your art and subjugate any battlefield. From today on, anyone who wields a spear under our banner will shatter the heavens."
The monarch snapped his fingers, tossing two black scrolls into the woman's lap. "Assimilate these two old codices of war: the True Destruction Slash and its execution variant, the Eternal Sunset Singularity. Master them."
"You are completely insane, Samael..." Lilith whispered, sitting back down heavily on the steps, mesmerized by the runes on her new weapon.
Behind her, the Six Clan Elders swallowed hard in rigid silence, their spines drenched in cold sweat after witnessing that display of Dao transfer.
Samael shifted his reptilian eyes to the back of the room, sweeping his gaze over the six lean, muscular warriors.
"I am intensely curious..." the monarch spoke softly. "Why don't you take a seat as well, Elders? The marble is wide enough."
The six rearguard sovereigns exchanged an instant glance. Marcus the Blacksmith took half a step forward, lowering his head in absolute reverence.
"Do not worry about us, Patriarch," Marcus replied, his voice rumbling like an anvil. "Here, standing behind your throne, we are exactly where we belong."
The other five nodded in an unbreakable pact.
"If that is your choice, so be it." Samael let out a low chuckle, exhaling violet vapor before turning his face toward the immense entrance portal of the gallery. "Prepare yourselves. Here they come."
No sooner had the words left his lips than the colossal black marble doors of the main entrance were pushed open with a sharp crash.
Forty-five silhouettes stepped through the threshold.
They did not march with the weary pace of disciples; they marched with the heavy, precise, and synchronized cadence of a primordial pack. The physical space around them folded and warped with every step, exhaling a homicidal aura so dense and concentrated that the air in the lower gallery seemed to frost over in red. Reaching the exact center of the hall, the forty-five youths halted their advance dead in their tracks.
Their eyes flickered for a fraction of a second over the pale obsidian spear resting in Lilith's hands; sensing the conceptual intent of death exuded by the bone, their pupils contracted in instinctive panic. Immediately after, they raised their chins in perfect military formation, locking their eager eyes onto the gloom of the supreme throne.
"We present ourselves before the Patriarch, the Empress, the Matriarchs, and the Clan Elders!" roared the forty-five throats in unison, bringing their fists to their hearts.
Samael raised his right hand, stopping the echo of the military shout with a sovereign smile.
"At ease, my little monsters, Hahahahaha," resonated the Herald's voice. "I see you have taken advantage of every second of your time and have returned with sharpened fangs. The rest is over. It is time to hand you your blood edicts. Are you ready?"
The forty-five faces erupted into predatory grins.
"WE ARE READY!" bellowed the vanguard.
Samael stood up on the black marble. The shadow of his abyssal dragon rose behind him, devouring the vaulted ceiling of the hall.
"Good," the monarch ruled, his purple eyes flashing in the darkness. "Then... let us begin the distribution."
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