The two dragons activated their Divine Eyes in a desperate strobe of light, one iris burning like a dying sun, the other a void of pulsing obsidian. They expected to see the mechanical workings of a spell or the thin threads of a mortal illusion.
Instead, they saw the soul of a predator, and it was beautiful enough to make them scream.
The silver water of the "Heartless Sea" vanished, replaced by something far more ancient and macabre. The white lotuses were choked out by Black Paramita, the fabled Flowers of the Dead. These weren't mere plants; they were jagged, velvet-dark blossoms that bled a scent of musk, burial incense, and cold earth. The valley had transformed into a funeral pyre of aesthetic perfection.
Even the great waterfalls had ceased to flow. The water had been replaced by billions of falling Paramita petals, cascading down the mountainsides in a silent, rhythmic tumble. They moved exactly like liquid, a vertical river of black silk, yet they remained bone-dry and terrifyingly sharp.
"It's not just an attack," the first dragon whispered, its voice cracking as the sheer weight of the boy's intent pressed down on its lungs. "It's a masterpiece of spite."
From the sea of black petals, a single flower detached itself. It didn't fall; it drifted upward toward the dragons, defying gravity. They watched it in slow motion, hypnotized by its unnatural elegance. As the flower drew closer, the center of the bloom began to unfurl like a ribcage opening to reveal a heart.
From the heart of the petals, a woman rose.
She was an Apsara, but she was born of the abyss. Her skin was the color of bruised lilies, her garments made of the same dark, semi-transparent silk as the Paramita petals. She stood in a delicate, twisted dancing pose, her eyes devoid of pupils—just twin wells of black ink. She looked less like a person and more like a beautiful parasite born from a grave. The flower itself seemed to glow with a dark, vengeful anger as she manifested.
She leaned toward the dragons, a cruel, ethereal smile tugging at her lips, and blew a handful of petals from her palm as if she were tossing a kiss to a lover.
The effect was instantaneous. The petals, soft as silk a moment ago, turned into blades of obsidian. They hissed through the air, shearing through the dragons' ancient scales as if they were wet parchment.
"Illusion!" the second dragon roared, trying to shake its head to clear the fog. "Break the veil! Burn the garden!"
But the veil would not break. Another petal, sharpened to a microscopic point, flew straight and true, piercing the second dragon's red eye. A fountain of divine, golden blood sprayed across the gate, followed quickly by the black ichor of the first dragon as a petal sliced through its obsidian iris. The world went dark for them, but the nightmare was only getting louder.
Blindness did not bring silence; it brought a choir of terrors.
From every one of the thousands of flowers in the valley, a new woman rose. The air became thick with the sound of their laughter, a high, melodic giggling that sounded like silver bells being dragged over bone. These Shadow Apsaras began to dance in the air around the coiled dragons, their bodies weaving a silk prison of movement.
"Our authority!" the first dragon screamed, its voice a ragged roar of agony. "Why can't I feel the Abyss? Why is the light of the Gods silent?"
In this valley, the laws of Heaven and Hell had been overwritten. The dragons tried to retaliate, opening their massive jaws to unleash beams of primordial energy. But the fire and the shadow simply dissipated into the mist, absorbed by the laughter of the women.
The Apsaras didn't stop. They drifted closer, their cold, slender fingers stroking the dragons' horns before raking downward, leaving deep, jagged gouges in the stone-hard bone. They blew more petals, a constant, swirling storm of black razors that slashed at the dragons' mouths, tongues, and furs.
The Blind Struggle
Driven to madness by the pain and the mocking laughter, the two dragons coiled around each other, their massive bodies thrashing in a blind, chaotic frenzy. They swung their claws through the air, hoping to catch the dancing spirits.
For a moment, it worked. A massive claw tore through three of the women, shredding them into black mist. But before the dragon could let out a triumphant roar, the mist settled back into the earth, and ten more flowers bloomed in their place. More Apsaras rose, their laughter growing louder, more rhythmic, and more insane.
Every time a dragon's strike came close to hitting the man atop the gate, a wall of Paramita flowers would bloom instantly, absorbing the impact like a cushion of velvet before erupting into a thousand more blades.
................
The two dragons thrashed in their self-made prison of darkness, their divinity screaming against the silence of the void. They clawed at the air, trying to summon the celestial authority of the heavens, but the sky remained a bruised, indifferent purple. No thunder answered. No divine light descended.
Then, the boy's voice drifted through the valley, cold and hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well.
"I don't have time to play with you anymore," he said. "Go away."
The dragons froze. Was it that their authority had been stripped, or was the boy's presence simply so overwhelming that the universe could no longer hear their prayers? Above them, the sky began to bleed. Billions of black Paramita petals swirled into the stratosphere, forming a vortex that blotted out the stars.
The Shadow Apsaras did not stop their macabre ballet. Every twist of their wrists, every arch of their backs sent invisible waves of force through the dragons' bodies. Slashes appeared on their flanks as if by invisible razors. Their golden and black blood didn't splash into the sea; it was pulled by a cruel gravity onto the stone of the gate, painting it in a ritualistic mess.
"We only have one move left," the first dragon hissed, its voice thick with gore. "Call it. Now."
"Wait," the second countered, trembling. "The cost is too high."
"Do you want to die in a garden of ink? Call it!"
The Kiss of the Dead
Before they could finish their pact, two Apsaras flickered into existence directly in front of their massive snouts. With terrifying, fluid grace, the women reached out and cupped the dragons' chins in their cold, silk-wrapped palms.
"Fools," the women giggled in unison, a sound that vibrated inside the dragons' skulls. "Look at us. Look at this beauty. Wouldn't you like this to be the last thing your eyes capture before they close forever? Don't you have eyes to see how lovely we are?"
The first dragon felt its mind slipping, the hypnotic gaze of the pupil-less women drawing its soul toward the "Heartless Sea."
"Don't fall for it!" the second dragon roared, snapping its jaws and whipping its head to break the contact.
The Apsaras pouted, drifting backward with a mocking, fake sorrow. "What a shame for such mighty doragons," they whispered. "Pity..."
The lead dragon roared in a panic, realization hitting him like a physical blow. "The Gate! It's not responding! The Gate won't open for us... Do it! Use the final seal!"
The two dragons roared, but it wasn't a sound of war; it was a sound of sacrifice. From their mouths, two spheres of energy, one pitch black, one blindingly divine, erupted and collided. The Apsaras nearby dissolved into petals, rushing in to shred the energy, but they were too late.
The spheres expanded, spinning into a massive, rotating Tai Chi diagram that hovered in the air like a dying star.
Then, the horror truly began. The two dragons didn't just summon something, they became it. Their bodies were pulled into the spinning diagram, melting, snapping, and fusing.
From the center of the Tai Chi, a golden human torso emerged, muscular and radiant. But as soon as it took shape, a massive, jagged black tortoise shell slammed onto its back, fusing with the spine. A black-and-gold arm and leg tore through the human skin, covered in scales and dripping with divine ichor.
From the shoulders, two vibrant, red-orange wings, burst forth, shedding feathers of fire. From the base of the tortoise shell, five long, whip-like tails tipped with stingers unfurled.
The heads of the two dragons didn't disappear; they moved to the top of the creature's shoulders, adorned now with long, flowing bird feathers that stood upright like royal plumes. Finally, from the front of the shell, a gnarled tortoise head emerged, its eyes milky and ancient.
As the Tai Chi diagram finished its work, it settled beneath the feet of this monstrosity as a mount: a massive, with golden stripes that rippled like ink. The diagram then shrunk and moved behind the creature's back, forming a halo, a ring of eyes that throbbed like a visible heart, each iris moving independently, frantically searching for the boy.
The chimera stood at the center of the valley, a grotesque union of the four celestial beasts and the gods themselves. It was a power that should have ended the world.
But the laughter didn't stop.
If anything, the giggling of the Apsaras grew louder, more hysterical. More and more women began to climb out of the Paramita flowers, their numbers doubling, tripling, until the valley was a sea of moving shadows.
..................
The seven remaining guardians—the broken, fused remnants of heaven and hell, stood trembling in the centre of the blooming sea. They looked up at the boy perched upon the gate, their eyes wide with a dawning, horrific realization. The runes etched into their foreheads, the marks of the dragons' enslavement, were flickering and fading. For the first time in an eternity, they were waking up, only to find themselves drowning in a nightmare.
With a final, desperate roar of their own dying wills, the guardians charged. They moved like flashes of jagged lightning, their blades shearing through the lotus stalks. But for every flower they cut, ten more erupted from the stump. It was an infinite recursion of life and death. The petals didn't just fall; they birthed new horrors.
The guardians pivoted, striking at the very roots beneath the silver water, trying to find solid ground to stand upon. They spun in a cyclone of white energy, their bodies tearing through the ink-born flora until they reached the boy. They pierced his chest, making a gaping hole in his midsection—but there was no blood. He simply dissolved into a splash of ink, falling into the water only to reform seconds later atop a different bloom.
Suddenly, the lotus field surged upward. The flowers didn't just bloom; they mutated, growing jagged teeth of obsidian. They tore into the guardians, shredding their divine armour and demonic hide until they were erased from existence, their power absorbed into the black water.
The sky didn't just darken; it bruised. The fog in front of that gate burst outward as the merged monstrosity, the Dragon-Tiger Chimera, leapt from the heavens. It roared with three different voices, its wings of fire beating against the suffocating air.
The Shadow Apsaras met the beast in mid-air. Their slender, ink-dark hands moved in a mesmerizing, synchronized rhythm, parrying the beast's massive claws with nothing but the air. The Chimera snarled, its ring of eyes throbbed behind it, and it unleashed a torrent of red lightning from its jaws.
The sky turned the color of a fresh wound. Thunderclaps shattered the silence of the valley, and tornados of black wind descended, trying to uproot the "Heartless Sea." The lotuses bowed and danced violently in the storm, but they did not break.
The Chimera, riding its divine white tiger, soared toward the zenith of the sky, looking down at the dancing women with a gaze of pure, focused hatred.
Then, the laughter stopped.
The Shadow Apsaras halted their dance. In a chilling, unified motion, they stood still atop the water and opened their palms toward the sky. From the center of each dark lotus flower, a man's hand emerged. Pale, strong, and covered in black calligraphy, these hands reached out and grasped the hands of the Apsaras.
Pairs were formed. A man and a woman, rose from every flower. They stared into each other's eyes with a hollow, loving smile that sent shivers through the very fabric of the valley.
They began to waltz.
Thousands of couples rotated in a perfect, terrifying unison. This was no longer a battle; it was a gala of the damned. As they spun, they created their own counter-storm. Petals rose in a swirling vortex, meeting the dragons' lightning head-on. Every bolt of divine fire was smothered by a thousand black petals; every gust of holy wind was sliced into ribbons by the jagged silk of the Paramita flowers.
The Chimera's attacks were being eaten alive by the sheer volume of the boy's intent.
High in the reddened sky, the Chimera realized its power was failing. It did something that made even the woman on the gate turn her head in disgust.
The golden human torso reached up and, with a sickening crack, tore the head off the divine white tiger it was riding. The beast didn't die; it merged. The golden man leapt into the bleeding neck of the tiger, his flesh fusing with its muscle.
The transformation was a symphony of snapping bone and wet tearing. The tiger's tail lengthened, fusing with the two dragon tails into a single, massive whip of bone and scale. The legs of the tiger and the dragon merged into four powerful, clawed pillars that could crush mountains.
But the heads were the true horror.
The white dragon's head was suddenly covered in a layer of pale, tight human skin, giving it a blind, fleshy appearance. The black dragon's head, in contrast, was stripped of all its meat, leaving only a polished, obsidian skull that leaked a constant stream of green, acidic smoke.
The Chimera was no longer a god or a beast. It was a skeletal, winged titan of fused agony, standing atop the air, staring down at the dancing couples in the sea below.
The thousands of couples below stopped their waltz. They all looked up at once, their eyes glowing with the same ashen light as the boy's. The Infinite Bloom was about to reach its peak.
......
The Chimera descended like a falling star of nightmare, a shrieking engine of divine and demonic wrath. Behind it, the sky tore open as the heavens unleashed everything they had left. Lightning didn't just strike; it coiled into the shapes of the original twenty-four guardians, translucent and terrifying. Fire didn't just burn; it manifested into manes of legendary beasts that roared with the sound of collapsing mountains. A stampede of storms, tornadoes, and celestial fire followed in the wake of the beast, a concentrated spear of authority aimed directly at the heart of the valley.
Below, the thousands of dancing pairs did not flee. They moved with the chilling, mechanical grace of a hive mind. They pulled their joined hands toward the sky, forming a massive, concentric circle that mirrored the ring of eyes on the monster above. From the cups of their merged palms, a new creation emerged: a hybrid bloom, its heart made of the pure white lotus and its jagged edges formed by the black Paramita.
As these flowers took flight, the bodies of the dancers began to fray and unravel. They turned into dark, silken ribbons that spiralled upward, braiding themselves into gargantuan, floral dragons that rose from the water to meet the fire.
The two infinities collided in the centre of the sky.
To be Continued...