The night was a suffocating cage of absolute obsidian, and Jai was its only prisoner.
He didn't sleep. He merely existed in a terrifying state of paralysis. His mind was a chaotic, bloody battlefield where the ancient past and his impending future violently collided.
Every single time his eyelids flickered shut, the darkness of his room transformed. It became the blinding, frozen white of that apocalyptic, ancient battlefield.
He saw the violent severing of the arm again. He heard the wet, sickening thud of sovereign flesh hitting the ice.
He physically felt the phantom spray of golden blood. It was the absolute ichor of a god, burning his skin like highly concentrated acid.
Was he the butcher holding the void-blade? Or was he the pathetic meat being carved?
These thoughts were like jagged shards of profound glass. They violently ground against his sanity until the sky finally began to bleed the gray, sickly light of dawn.
Jai sat up abruptly. His expensive silk sheets were tangled around his legs like a burial shroud.
He felt a strange, freezing weight in his chest. It felt exactly as if his human soul were being slowly, violently replaced by something heavy, ancient, and deeply malevolent.
Finally, sheer exhaustion won for a brief hour, but it was an entirely hollow victory. A sharp, rhythmic pounding on his door dragged his consciousness back to the waking world before he could find any absolute peace.
"Come in, Mother," Jai rasped. His throat felt like he had swallowed a handful of dry, burning sand.
He naturally assumed it was Mable. She was the only person in this cursed, arrogant house who dared enter his absolute sanctuary without a formal, groveling summons.
The heavy door creaked open on silver hinges, but the scent was completely wrong.
It wasn't the expensive, cloying lily-perfume of his aristocratic mother. It was the sharp, bitter stench of cheap lye and unwashed, fearful sweat.
A maid shuffled in, her head bowed in absolute submission, holding a silver tray.
She possessed a pathetic Tier 10 cultivation. In the brutal hierarchy of Aetheleon, Tier 10 was the absolute bottom—a level of Gnosis barely sufficient to light a candle or aggressively scrub a floor without completely collapsing.
Jai's blue eyes snapped open. They glowed with a sudden, unearned, demonic ferocity that startled even him.
"Why the fuck did you bring the coffee?" Jai snarled, his killing intent leaking. "Where is my mother?"
The maid violently flinched. Her rough hands trembled so violently that the fine porcelain china rattled against the silver tray like chattering teeth.
"S-sorry, young master Jai," she stammered, terrified. "Madam Mable is personally overseeing the preparation of the celebratory breakfast in the lower kitchens. She commanded me to bring this to you immediately. She said you absolutely needed to be alert for the ceremony."
Jai's temper had been frayed to a single, glowing thread by the haunting ghosts of his dreams. It violently snapped like a dry twig under a heavy iron boot.
"Put the fucking coffee on the table," Jai hissed, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly cold register. "And get the hell out of my sight before I find a convenient excuse to have your tongue violently ripped out of your throat and fed to the estate hounds."
The maid didn't wait for a second warning.
She scurried forward in absolute terror. She placed the tray down with a shaky hand, spilling a few scalding drops of the dark liquid. Then, she bolted from the room as if a supreme demon were snapping at her heels.
As she closed the heavy door, her paralyzing fear curdled into a dark, silent resentment.
Arrogant little shit, she thought. Her eyes violently narrowed as she hurried down the opulent hall, her heart still hammering in her chest.
I absolutely hope the Heavens spit on you during the ceremony today. It would be a beautiful, glorious day if you awakened absolutely nothing—just like that pathetic beggar bitch, Rena. Let's see how much you talk then, you worthless, golden-haired brat.
Inside the room, Jai ignored her miserable existence entirely.
He walked to the large window. The freezing stone floor bit sharply at his bare feet. He sipped the bitter, scorching brew, staring blankly out at the massive estate's private gardens.
Down below, perfectly aligned rows of profound Blue Lilies and vibrant Sunflowers swayed gently in the biting morning breeze.
He was the one who had meticulously designed this sanctuary. He was the only person in the entire Chenwongo aristocratic clan who spent hours tending the profound soil with his own bare hands, completely shunning the help of the "lesser" servants.
It was the absolute only place in the world where the screaming voices in his head finally went quiet.
He watched the glowing petals for over an hour. He was entirely lost in the stillness of the garden, completely unaware that his family's fragile patience was violently rotting away downstairs.
In the grand dining hall, the atmosphere was suffocating. The tension felt like a massive physical weight crushing their chests.
The high walls were lined with the massive, arrogant portraits of ancient ancestors. They looked down upon the current generation with cold, completely judging eyes.
Edward Chenwongo sat at the head of the long obsidian table. His fingers tapped rhythmically on the dense surface—a terrifying sign he was extremely close to a violent outburst.
Beside him sat James's father. His face was a tight mask of similarly suppressed, aristocratic rage.
Both men were Tier 3 Lords. They were nearing eighty years of age, yet their skin was completely smooth and their muscles were visibly taut.
They had ruthlessly abused the clan's secret longevity techniques. They had selfishly consumed hundreds of thousands of high-grade spirit stones just to artificially maintain their youth.
But their internal souls were entirely stagnant. They were big, arrogant fish in a terrifyingly small pond. They desperately clung to the ancient glory of their ancestors while the real, violent world of true cultivators completely passed them by.
"Why the hell isn't he down here yet?!" Edward growled. His voice vibrated with the heavy, low-frequency hum of his Tier 3 Gnosis.
Mable looked at the furious men, her expression entirely calm but unyielding.
"The boy is completely exhausted, Edward. He and James violently pushed their meridians to the absolute limit for the graduation yesterday. This is his day. Let him have his final moment of peace before the world tries to ruthlessly tear him apart."
She didn't wait for a loud rebuttal. She knew Edward's temper was a destructive wildfire, but she was the only one who knew how to completely dampen it.
She took a silver tray of specially prepared spirit-grain porridge and ascended the grand stairs herself. When she opened Jai's heavy door, she found him standing silently by the window.
His golden hair moved slowly in the freezing air. For a fleeting, tragic second, he was smiling. It was a soft, entirely genuine expression.
"Jai," she called out softly.
The psychological transformation was sickeningly fast.
The soft smile completely vanished. It was instantly replaced by a terrifying mask of cold, aristocratic indifference. He slowly turned around, his blue eyes as sharp and unforgiving as daggers.
"What is it, Mother?"
"The maid said you were being unnecessarily difficult," Mable said, setting the steaming food down on his desk. "So I brought your breakfast myself. I absolutely want my son healthy and strong for the Synod today. Your father is already losing his fucking mind downstairs."
Jai looked at the expensive food with visceral, unadulterated disgust.
"I have absolutely no interest in eating. I explicitly told the help that. But you still insist on aggressively shoving this down my throat, as if expensive food can magically fix what is fundamentally broken with this family."
"I do it because I actually care about your survival, Jai!" Mable snapped, her Gnosis slightly flaring. "Don't act like an arrogant brat today of all days. Do you want to end up exactly like Rena? Do you want to be the pathetic shadow in the corner that everyone casually steps on?!"
Jai's jaw violently tightened.
"I understood your concern the first ten fucking times you said it, Mother," Jai replied coldly. "Now, please... leave the room. I want absolute peace before this pathetic circus begins."
Mable's eyes flashed with a momentary, genuine hurt. But she knew his terrifying temper was an exact mirror of her own. She turned and left without uttering another word. The heavy rustle of her silk dress sounded exactly like a lingering warning.
Left entirely alone, Jai stared down at his trembling hands.
His mind shifted to the absolute laws of Aetheleon. He thought about the Eighteen Supreme Powers and the brutal Tier hierarchy. In this world, the hierarchy was the only true law.
The eighteen absolute powers were: Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, Wood, Wind, Lightning, Ice, Light, Shadow, Spirit, Poison, Blood, Space, Time, Gravity, Destruction, and Creation. Then, there was the ranking.
Tier 10 to Tier 3: The "Mortals." Even at Tier 3, his arrogant parents were essentially just higher-class meat waiting to be butchered by true experts.
Tier 2 to Tier 1: The God-Seekers. These were the absolute, apocalyptic monsters.
His grandmother, Beatrice, was a terrifying Tier 2 master. She was over six hundred years old. She was a ruthless veteran of a hundred bloody, heaven-shaking wars. She was still infinitely more beautiful and terrifying than her own daughter—the broken, powerless Rena.
Jai knew the disgusting secret behind his parents' Tier 3 power.
They hadn't earned it through the absolute "Pure Will" and endless slaughter that he craved. They had merely inherited powerful, ancient artifacts. They used relics of the dead to artificially boost their stagnant dantians.
I completely refuse to accept their hollow, hand-me-down glory, Jai thought, his fist violently clenching until his nails dug into his palm.
A darker thought immediately followed. What supreme power am I going to awaken today?
The Chenwongo aristocratic bloodline was supposedly the absolute direct lineage of the Emperor Dominatrix—the legendary, terrifying warrior-queen who had violently built the Human Kingdom.
The arrogant elders constantly whispered that Jai was her literal reincarnation. They believed he was a divine miracle born to lead them back to the absolute apex of the world.
But Jai didn't believe in pathetic miracles.
He only believed in the cold, hard weight of a bloody sword and the metallic smell of death on the wind.
"Get ready," Edward's voice boomed from the hallway exactly an hour later. "We go to the Synod of the Veil to completely secure the Goddess's absolute favor."
The Synod of the Veil was massively built deep inside the very palace where they currently lived.
It was not just a holy temple. It was a staggering cathedral of pure, unadulterated arrogance. It was constructed entirely from polished white profound-marble that seemed to arrogantly glow with its own internal, divine light.
The air inside was heavily saturated with a highly hallucinogenic soul-incense. It made the entire world feel completely blurry, distant, and falsely holy.
It was supposed to be a sacred gate to the divine. It was a place where the human world casually touched the heavens. But to Jai, it felt exactly like walking into a massive, suffocating tomb.
In the absolute center of the cathedral stood the towering statue of the Emperor Dominatrix.
She was devastatingly beautiful. Her stone form was draped in a flowing white dress that seemed to physically move like rushing water. But her face was entirely hidden behind a thick, heavily sculpted veil of solid stone.
Jai slowly knelt alongside his expectant parents. The silence was absolute, broken only by the violent crackling of the expensive soul-incense.
Suddenly, the entire cathedral violently erupted.
A massive, terrifying pillar of blinding, golden divine light violently descended from the vaulted ceiling. It slammed directly into Jai's head with the catastrophic kinetic force of a falling mountain.
His parents violently gasped. Their aristocratic faces immediately lit up with a manic, cult-like, absolute joy.
"A supreme blessing!" Edward whispered loudly. His voice cracked with pure, unfiltered greed. "The Goddess has officially chosen him! The supreme heir has been marked!"
But Jai wasn't feeling completely blessed.
Inside his fractured mind, the divine golden light was being violently torn apart by a terrifying, absolute shadow.
As the light hit his soul, his vision completely shattered. The pristine white marble temple violently vanished.
In its place, he saw a terrifying, endless Void. It was a place where the absolute laws of time and space entirely ceased to exist.
And in that apocalyptic Void, he saw a boy.
The boy had hair as black as the absolute abyss. And he possessed eyes that were a terrifying, glowing Crimson Red.
They were the exact same eyes Jai had seen in his horrifying dream. They were the absolute eyes of Yaowang Ming.
The mysterious boy stood there in the Void. He stared directly through Jai's soul with an absolute, heavy gaze that promised absolutely nothing but endless slaughter, total ruin, and the violent end of all things.
The fear that violently gripped Jai was entirely primal. It was the exact fear of a helpless rabbit making eye contact with a demonic wolf that had already violently slaughtered it a thousand times before.
The crimson-eyed boy slowly reached out a hand.
Immediately, the "divine" golden light of the Goddess began to turn pitch black. It aggressively rotted away at the edges, completely destroyed by the boy's absolute presence.
Who the absolute fuck is this kid?! Jai screamed internally, his sanity cracking. Why the fuck is he hiding inside my soul?!
The sheer, terrifying intensity of the vision was far too much for his physical shell to bear. The apocalyptic clashing of the "divine" golden light and the ancient, crimson darkness completely fried his nervous system.
Jai's body violently buckled. His blue eyes rolled entirely back into his head. He collapsed heavily onto the cold marble floor, his limbs violently twitching as if he were being brutally electrocuted by invisible, heaven-defying wires.
"JAI!"
Edward's heavy hand was on his shoulder instantly, violently shaking his son's seizing body. "What the hell happened?! Did the absolute power of the Goddess overwhelm your weak meridians?!"
Jai slowly blinked. The terrifying crimson eyes finally faded back into the blinding white marble of the temple.
He felt entirely, deathly cold. His bones ached violently, feeling as if they had been entirely frozen solid and then brutally shattered with a hammer.
"Nothing, Father," Jai whispered. His voice was a jagged, terrified rasp. "I just... I dozed off. The soul-incense is far too strong. I'm just incredibly worried about the ceremony."
His parents exchanged looks of absolute, greedy triumph.
They didn't see his sheer, unadulterated terror. They only saw the massive golden omen. They only saw the absolute promise of their own continued, unearned power.
They quickly led his trembling body back to the carriage, escorting him to his room. They left him entirely alone to "rest" for the grand awakening.
Jai lay completely still on his silk bed, staring blankly at the dark ceiling. His trembling hand hovered tightly over his racing heart.
He knew the golden light was an absolute, pathetic lie.
The Goddess hadn't blessed him. She had blasted him with light in absolute, sheer terror. She was violently terrified of the crimson-eyed boy hiding inside him.
He knew that boy was eventually going to completely take down the arrogant Chenwongo Bloodline.
And when that violent day finally came, he knew his family wouldn't get the divine savior they were desperately praying for.
They would get an absolute, apocalyptic monster.