Chapter 130: The Abandonment of the Flesh and the Forging of Laws (Part 3)
The symphony of terror had barely played its first deafening chords in the Throne Room.
While the first eight monsters of the vanguard stabilized the cataclysmic auras that now ruled their bodies, the very air of the immense room began to tear, unable to bear the superimposition of contradictory realities. Thirteen Codices of pure starlight, dark matter, and elemental energy remained suspended beneath the obsidian dome, humming with a divine and impatient fury, seeking their predestined hosts.
Samael Morningstar, immovable upon the Dragon Throne, did not halt the cataclysm. With the slightest blink of his violet eyes, he unleashed the second barrage of celestial decrees.
Eight scrolls and tomes bound in materials that did not exist on the mortal plane shot forth simultaneously, tracing trails of blinding light, and embedded themselves with absolute conceptual violence into the foreheads of the Golden Generation's second line: the Specialists.
The impact did not throw them backward; it anchored them to their worst nightmares.
Aylin (The Tempest of Thorns) was the first to succumb to the rewriting of her own physics.
The artifact that struck her mind, the Spear of the Terrestrial Storm, was a tome whose covers were forged from polished obsidian with edges of celestial bronze, its pages vibrating like tectonic plates about to fracture. The millisecond the knowledge poured into her Sea of Consciousness, Aylin completely lost her spatial orientation.
The concepts of "up" and "down" ceased to exist for her. The Law of Reverse Gravity Anchoring took control of her nervous system. Her body disconnected from the planet's gravitational pull. Instead of falling to the floor, Aylin fell toward the ceiling. Her body shot upwards, stopping dead as she planted her boots against the immense obsidian beam thirty meters above. She hung upside down, standing on the ceiling, with the same perfect stability and weight as if she were on the ground.
But the Law demanded more. It demanded movement. Tectonic Navigation activated instinctively. Aylin didn't drill into the stone; she glided into the massive beam. To the eyes of those present, the solid obsidian rock instantly liquefied, turning into a whirlpool of sand and dense wind that swallowed Aylin and closed behind her without leaving a single crack. For one agonizing second, only a bulge could be seen—like the fin of a prehistoric shark—moving at breakneck speed inside the stone ceiling, surrounded by a bubble of void and pressurized air that dissolved matter in front of her and reconstructed it behind her.
When Aylin was forced by Samael to emerge, the ceiling exploded. Her exit was the Pyroclastic Drill Ascent. A sonic boom shattered the eardrums of the guards stationed outside the sealed doors. Aylin plummeted to the floor wreathed in a colossal spinning aura, a massive brown and emerald-green drill that broke the sound barrier, leaving trails of golden dust in its wake. She landed softly on a single foot, but the G-force pressure threatened to collapse her own organs if she didn't quickly consolidate her Semi-Saint body.
Aylin's deafening entrance was immediately devoured by the most absolute, suffocating, and repulsive silence that had ever inhabited the palace.
Altair (The Monarch Ash) had received the Book of Mute Entropy.
The Codex was not ostentatious. It was a book bound in withered, yellowish parchment skin that always seemed on the verge of disintegrating into dust, yet eternally refused to do so. Its pages were blank, but upon fusing with Altair's soul, ash-gray letters began to burn his mind from the inside out. It smelled of open graves, dead flowers, and eons of solitude.
The mental impact was devastating. The Law of Decay did not demand strength; it demanded sacrifice. To protect Altair's fragile physical body from being turned to dust by his own aura, the Codex began feeding on his childhood memories, erasing the faces of his dead parents to use that emotional energy as a shield. Altair did not scream, because the Domain of Withering that had just been born within him annihilated the very concept of sound around him.
A visual distortion, an opaque and oppressive bubble with a ten-meter radius, burst silently from his body. Everything within that zone instantly lost its color, turning a sickly sepia and murky black-and-white, as if the air were saturated with microscopic ash. The majestic red silk curtains adorning the nearby columns aged a thousand years in a single blink; they frayed, rotted, and fell to the floor as gray dust.
Altair was now the epicenter of Vital Silence. If anyone tried to heal a wound within his radius, medicinal pills would crumble into useless dirt, and wood Qi would rot before touching blood. The entire environment began to passively die, and that stolen vitality flowed directly into Altair's veins, keeping him in a state of inexhaustible energy and terrifying youth while the world around him withered.
The silence of entropy was brutally shattered by a blood-curdling sound: the expansive crunch of a continental glacier fracturing under immense tectonic pressure.
Draven (The Glacial Brute) was experiencing an anatomical hell.
The Tome of the Living Glacier, forged from heavy slabs of deep blue glacial diamond, hadn't granted him the ability to throw useless snowballs; it had injected him with the genetic code of a crystalline architecture with a will of its own.
Draven fell to one knee, roaring in pain. Unlike Violeta's lethal, silent, and spatial ice, Draven's manifestation was raw, physical, and bloody. From inside his own pores, from the very marrow of his bones, thick, sharp plates of translucent, geometrically perfect blue ice began to burst outward. The ice tore through his skin, covering his brawny arms, chest, and face, fusing with his flesh to form the Organic Exoskeleton.
It wasn't simple armor; it was a biological tissue of crystal.
The plates actively intertwined and grew. If the pressure of their growth cracked the ice, a flash of blinding white light would appear, and the crystal would instantly "heal," extracting the scarce moisture from the air and the very heat from Draven's blood to regenerate. The temperature on his side of the room dropped so violently that the air turned cobalt blue, and an unusually heavy, painful snow began to fall exclusively around his massive armored figure. He was now a walking bunker, a hydraulic giant fueled by frost, capable of raising absolute zero fortresses in seconds.
In the face of the glacier's crushing heaviness, physical reality opted for absolute lightness, bordering on invisibility.
Rowan (The Wandering Cyclone) seemed to disappear.
Upon assimilating the Dance of the Sharpened Wind—a winged silver Codex with pages so thin they looked like transparent water—Rowan's body entered an agonizing conflict with the atmosphere itself. The Law granted him the Frictionless Void. In a millisecond, a millimeter-thin, absolute layer of void wrapped around his skin and clothes.
The air lost the ability to touch him. Rowan ceased to offer resistance to the universe. His physical body blurred, a translucent ripple identical to a heat mirage over desert sand.
But the cost was immediate: with no friction, Rowan discovered he couldn't breathe. Oxygen simply slipped down his throat without being absorbed. In his initial panic, he took a step back. That simple movement, completely devoid of molecular friction, shot him at supersonic speed against the nearest wall. He stopped millimeters from crashing, generating a muted sonic boom, a surgical "swoosh" that sliced a chunk off the nearby stone column as if it had been severed by a laser. Rowan had to mentally force himself to microscopically "turn off" the void around his lungs to inhale. His body had transitioned into a fluid state; if a sword tried to cut him now, his flesh would simply part like the wind, letting the steel pass right through a tactile illusion.
But while Rowan became untouchable, the hall began to fill with a scent that threatened to paralyze the hearts of everyone present.
Tamsin (The Lotus Widow) was on her knees, her body arched backward in what appeared to be agony rapidly transforming into euphoric lethargy.
The Art of the Black Flower, a tome bound in black silks cold as a snake's skin, had rewritten her circulatory system. The thick veins along her pale neck, arms, and face suddenly turned a vibrant, bluish-black, bulging beneath her skin and branching into intricate patterns that mimicked the vines of rotting flowers.
Tamsin opened her mouth, and instead of breath, she exhaled the Pollen of Oblivion. Colorless and odorless Qi particles, mixed with a sweet, floral, and lethally narcotic perfume, expanded silently. The toxin didn't attack the skin; it traveled directly to the nervous systems of those nearby. Even Torian and Astarion, the experienced Elders watching from a distance, blinked in confusion. For a horrifying instant, they forgot how to channel their own Qi. Their arms felt heavy, numb. The Widow's Veil had fallen over the room. An absolute sensory anesthesia where the victims, surrounded by illusory black petals falling from the ceiling, would lose the ability to feel pain or panic while their meridians were filled with thorns and they were chopped to pieces with smiles on their lips.
Poison and entropy threatened to wither the collective mind of the hall, but the True Light always demands its toll in blood.
Lys (The Guardian Angel) experienced a miracle that nearly destroyed her.
The Psalm of the Eternal Dawn, a divine artifact forged from white gold and solar sapphire, tolerated no darkness, deceit, or rot. When the Law integrated into Lys's soul, her eyes, which previously wept human tears, began to bleed. But the blood welling from her tear ducts was instantly cauterized, transforming into threads of burning, liquid gold.
The pain was unimaginable. The light was so pure it burned her own fears from the root. Lys raised her face to the ceiling, and a Field of Immaculate Revelation erupted from her small body. An immense pillar of solid, golden light, accompanied by the harmonic sound of an invisible, echoing choir, swept the hall.
Where the light touched, the illusion shattered. Tamsin's black pollen was mercilessly incinerated. Altair's gray particles of entropy were pushed back, hissing as they evaporated. The threads of golden light floating around Lys were divine scalpels; they possessed Cauterization by Grace. If they touched an ally, they would close their wounds by sewing the living flesh together and forcing regeneration; but if Lys chose to use the Spear of Solar Judgment, that same blinding white beam wouldn't push or cut: it would simply vaporize matter, turning steel and bone to white dust instantly without spilling a single drop of blood, purging the sin from existence.
The angelic choir was immediately cut short by a dull, violent, and brutal crack, followed by the unmistakable smell of charred flesh and melted metal.
Maren (The Neurotic Lightning) was losing anatomical cohesion.
The Steps of the Lightning God Codex, composed of liquid metal and electrical arcs, demanded he abandon traditional biology. Maren tried to scream, but his vocal cords vibrated at too high a frequency. The sound of his voice phased out. In plain sight, Maren's physical body literally disintegrated. His flesh, bones, and clothes suddenly turned into a million unstable electrons and sparks of bright cyan light.
For a millisecond, he ceased to exist as a human being.
A dry, deafening CRACK! shook the palace foundations. Maren suddenly reconstructed fifteen meters from his original position. The atomic reconfiguration generated a thermal shockwave that instantly vitrified the obsidian slabs beneath his boots. His body was wrapped in thick, erratically arcing lightning. His eyes were two spotlights of intense, empty white light. His nervous system was overloaded; he now perceived the flutter of a fly or the fall of a bead of sweat as events happening in slow motion, processing information at quantum speeds, ready to execute the Short-Range Flash and reappear behind enemy lines before the sound of his thunder even reached them.
But speed and light are concepts that lose all meaning when the very fabric of the universe decides to collapse onto a single point.
Nylas (The Devouring Abyss) was being crushed by the weight of the cosmos.
The Chronicle of the Event Horizon, a repulsive artifact forged from pure void obsidian that looked like a black hole with pages, had permanently altered Nylas's relationship with the planet's gravitational mass.
At the instant of assimilation, Nylas could not bear the weight of the Law. He fell violently to his knees, cracking the unbreakable stone. He pressed both hands against his own chest, as if trying to keep his heart from bursting. But the problem wasn't his heart. It was the air in front of his sternum.
An immense Gravity Well was forming involuntarily. The optical space around Nylas's torso warped grotesquely, as if viewed through an immense sphere of deformed glass. In the center of his chest, a micro-singularity, a marble of absolute and terrifying darkness, came to life.
The weight was monstrous. The solid stone columns of the Throne Room groaned, leaning toward him, threatening to tear off the roof. Dust, debris, and the very light of the room were inexorably sucked toward that tiny null point. Those nearby felt their bones weigh tons, their knees buckling under the pressure of a hundred atmospheres crushing them against the floor.
Nylas was about to swallow the entire room, consumed by the gravity he could not yet control.
From the upper dais, Samael Morningstar stood up, his Void cape billowing furiously against the gravitational storm.
"Enough," the Sovereign decreed.
He didn't shout, nor did he adopt a combat stance. He simply extended his right hand, wrapped in liquid obsidian, toward Nylas's kneeling figure. Samael didn't try to fight the gravity or raise a physical shield to block it; he possessed Supreme Authority. His Primordial Void simply denied the gravitational command.
With a slight twist of his wrist, the micro-singularity on Nylas's chest flickered, smothered by an infinitely older and darker energy. The black hole snapped shut with a dull thud, vanishing into nothingness. The pressure of a hundred atmospheres disappeared instantly. The columns stopped groaning, and Nylas pitched forward, greedily breathing the air that had regained its normal density, looking up at his Patriarch with absolute devotion. It was a silent but terrifying demonstration: even though they were now incarnations of the universe's Laws, Samael remained the creator of the nightmare, the Sovereign capable of snuffing out their powers with a single thought.
But the hall had no time to recover its stability. Nylas's gravitational void was immediately replaced by an acoustic void that threatened to burst the eardrums of those present.
Joren (The Silent Wind) had just taken the impact of ancient knowledge. The Codex wrapped in white sonic spider silk sank into his Sea of Consciousness. The assimilation didn't generate a visual explosion, but the physical effect was profoundly disorienting. The moment Joren exhaled his first breath as a Semi-Saint, a sudden, painful pressure assaulted the ears of everyone within a hundred-meter radius, akin to the sensation of sinking rapidly to the bottom of a frozen ocean.
The noise of the world was abruptly shut off.
The Zone of Acoustic Deprivation was born. The hum of flames, the creak of Draven's armor, Nylas's heavy breathing... everything ceased to exist. The guards stationed on the other side of the heavy obsidian doors, caught on the edge of the hundred-meter radius, tried to speak to each other, but they moved their lips without a single vibration coming out. The silence was so thick, so absolute and unnatural, that it destroyed the balance of the inner ear, causing immediate chronic vertigo.
Joren stood up in the midst of his own sonic void. His body seemed to absorb the scarce nearby light. Through the pure instinct of his new Law, he manipulated the air currents around him. He completely eliminated the air in a thin line in front of his hand, creating an Absolute Void Edge. The blade was entirely invisible and odorless. He swung his arm in a horizontal arc toward one of the thick stellar iron chains hanging from a support beam.
There was no whistle of the wind, because there was no air to displace. There was no sound of clashing steel. The immense chain simply parted into two perfect pieces, the lower half falling to the floor and striking the obsidian in the most absolute and macabre silence. Joren had mastered the art of perfect assassination: he could decapitate an entire army before the first victim even heard the whistle of death.
Unreality and Internal Destruction
The absence of sound was sharply contrasted by the fracturing of the material world just a few steps away.
Lirael (The Reflection of the Broken Moon) was experiencing the dissociation of her own body. Upon receiving the Codex forged in encapsulated liquid silver, her presence in reality began to glitch. To the Elders' eyes, Lirael's armor and skin lost their opacity, becoming completely transparent, as if she were made of stagnant water under pale moonlight. Only a thin, frigid outline of lunar white could be distinguished, tracing her spectral figure.
She had assimilated the purest form of the Law of Unreality. Lirael drew her dagger, which also turned into invisible liquid crystal. The young assassin did not aim at any physical target. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the deep shadow cast by one of the hall's massive basalt pillars. With a fluid motion, Lirael slashed the air, striking directly through the shadow cast on the floor.
There was no material resistance. But the instant the blade cut the darkness, a soft, chilling crystalline chime, akin to a mirror shattering in the distance, resonated in the minds of those present.
The solid basalt pillar, several meters from where Lirael had attacked, shuddered. In the exact area corresponding to the cut on the shadow, the solid stone didn't crack or break: it was simply omitted from existence. A swath of the pillar disappeared into a zone of translucent darkness that showed stars within, indicating that portion of the mineral no longer belonged to the physical world. The rest of the enormous column collapsed in on itself. Lirael had comprehended the Concept Slash; if she cut the reflection or the shadow of an enemy's arm, the real arm would fall dead and inert without a single drop of blood, erasing the limb's "command to exist."
While the dust of the collapsed column hung in the air silenced by Joren, a low-frequency hum began to vibrate the water in the golden chalices on the Elders' side tables.
Bren (The Fist of Seismic Resonance) did not erupt with power; his body simply began to oscillate. The Codex of black granite veined with gold sank into his soul, and the massive warrior felt the very blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones resonate at frequencies of high destruction. An aura of completely transparent distortion formed around his thick arms, similar to the optical effect of hot air over desert sand. Light refracted erratically as it passed near his fists due to the violent vibration of space.
Bren clenched his massive right fist. Without needing to approach anything physical, he threw a sharp punch into the air. The movement didn't generate a gale. It was a strike of pure vibration. The air rippled subtly. Thirty meters away, one of the thick limestone daises where guests usually sat suffered no immediate external damage. It seemed the punch had missed.
But Bren had used the Echo of Destruction. The vibration was trapped and stored inside the stone, microscopically bouncing off its atoms. A full three seconds later, Bren gritted his teeth, commanding the detonation. The limestone dais, in complete silence due to Joren's zone, exploded violently from the inside out. It didn't break into chunks; it turned into ultra-fine dust, liquefied by phase oscillation. If Bren connected that dull, wet thud against an enemy's breastplate, the armor would remain intact, but the organs, veins, and bones inside the opponent would turn to pulp before the body hit the ground.
The molecular density of the crushed stone dust was immediately subdued by a liquid weight that crushed the atmosphere.
Elian (The Heavy Mercury) altered the surface tension of reality. Upon integrating the alchemical knowledge of his Codex made of liquid metal sheets, Elian's body was surrounded by a fluctuating mirror sphere. Brilliant, blinding silver mercury flowed constantly around his clothes and skin, moving with a lethal, hypnotic elegance, forming threads, spheres, and blades that orbited his body in a state of perfect hydrostatic gravity.
Elian raised a hand, and a single fist-sized "drop" of that mercury separated from its orbit and fell to the indestructible obsidian floor. Upon impact, there was no liquid splash. The sound—had Joren's zone not silenced it—would have been that of a thousand-ton siege mallet striking the earth (CLANG!).
The immense hydraulic mass and absurd density of the mercury caused the small drop to cave in the resilient basalt floor, creating a deep, perfect crater. Elian was now the absolute defense and the crushing offense; any attack that touched his fluid armor would be trapped in the metallic viscosity, and any silver whip he lashed out would shatter his enemies through sheer molecular pressure.
And finally, closing the forging of the legion, the gaze of the end was lifted toward the sky.
Varian (The Sky Hunter) was the last to open his eyes. The Codex bound in winged beast leather didn't hide itself; the immense jewel eye embedded in its cover fused directly with the lens of Varian's own right eye. When the sniper woke from his trance, he didn't look at his companions or the Dragon Throne. He looked straight up, toward the solid obsidian vaulted ceiling and the thick layers of the defensive array.
His right eye now glowed with intense concentric rings of emerald green light. Varian activated the Infinite Horizon Vision. To his perspective, the ceiling ceased to exist. The stone became translucent. His consciousness was projected into the stratosphere. Through hundreds of meters of solid rock and darkness, Varian saw the moon peeking through the winter clouds, saw night birds flying kilometers away, and could perceive the Qi flow of the guards patrolling the outer walls of the citadel. Everyone was revealed to him as pulsing bright lights in a world of shadows. In front of him, an immense bow composed of solid light and sinews of crackling energy materialized in the air. Varian didn't need wooden arrows. As he drew the invisible string, an electric blue and bright green arrow of light took shape, emitting a metallic hawk's screech that vibrated in everyone's souls. The infallible assassin was born, the one whose projectiles possessed a will of their own and whose gaze marked a doom that could not be evaded, even if the victim hid behind mountains or crossed dimensions.
The Picture of Desolation and the Vision of the Pinnacle
The mental download was over.
The twenty-one specialists, having assimilated the entirety of the Divine Codices, finally managed to subdue the initial overflow of their new Laws. Joren retracted his sonic void, returning sound to the room, Lirael solidified her form, and Kael extinguished the dark flames consuming the air.
One by one, guided by an instinct burned into their new nature and by absolute respect for the figure who had orchestrated their ascension, the twenty-one Semi-Saints dropped to one knee on the shattered obsidian floor. They bowed their heads in perfect, synchronized reverence toward the Dragon Throne.
The tableau was terrifying and majestic.
From the shadows of the pillars, the view for Lilith, Malak, and the six founding Elders was one of breathtaking awe. They no longer saw the talented, frightened, ambitious youths they had recruited from the streets, minor sects, or destroyed families. Those children had died in the bowels of the Pavilion of the Five Paths.
What knelt before the dais was an army of incarnate calamities, a pantheon of monsters molded in the image and likeness of the Void's tyranny. They saw the Flame of Purgatory, the Ice Stasis, the absolute Ruin, the Unbreakable Fortress, Non-Existence, Devouring Gravity, and Murderous Silence. They were ready to unleash the end of times, ready to shake the foundations of the known world and devour any empire, family, or alliance that dared stand in the Dragon King's way. The balance of power on the continent had just fractured irreversibly.
The muffled murmurs of the guards in the outer halls, who had felt the aftershocks of these titans' auras, foreshadowed what destiny had already written: the era of mortals in the south was over.
The Miracle of the System and the Ascension of the Primordial Blood
As the reverential, power-laden silence filled the immense room, reality flickered in front of Samael Morningstar.
Invisible to everyone present, the System's holographic screen shone with an intensity that surpassed any previous notification. Letters forged in burning golden and violet light unfolded before the Patriarch's eyes.
[SYSTEM ACTIVATED!] [Closing Function: "Investment and Reimbursement" (Full Cycle Completed).] [Structural Investment Analysis:]
21 Law Seeds (Saint Grade) assimilated.
21 Codices of True Laws and Forbidden Arts integrated with 100% biological success.
Unlimited Access to the Pavilion of the Five Paths and extreme Time Compression.
Superior Alchemy Resources and vital Time sacrificed.
[Evolution Result:] 21 Subordinates have broken the chains of mortality and ascended to Semi-Saints with perfect conceptual foundations.
[Final Milestone Evaluation:] RANK SSS (CLAN MIRACLE).
The sound of the notification was like the tolling of a cosmic bell in Samael's brain.
[GENERATING MASSIVE REIMBURSEMENT AND REWARDS...]
Reward 1 (Unique Item): [Scabbard of the Devouring Twilight (Unknown Grade)]. Forged from the night itself and crystallizations of pure abyss. A scabbard as black as a starless night sky. Awaiting the destined blade. (Automatically stored in the Host's Inventory).
Reward 2 (Passive Skill): "Dominant Patriarch's Aura" (Passively increases the Law comprehension and Qi refinement speed of all allies and clan members by 20% within a continental radius under the Host's domain).
Reward 3 (Fundamental Energy Reimbursement): The System returns 50% of all resources and Law energy spent during the simulation, condensed in the form of "Liquid Law Essence and Pure Dragon Blood", ready for direct absorption.
Samael read the lines of light. There wasn't the slightest doubt in his heart. He wasn't going to distribute this essence among his disciples; they had already eaten to their fill. The King must always stand above his army.
Samael invested one hundred percent of the immense energy reward and Liquid Law Essence directly into his own body.
The effect was a biological tidal wave.
Samael did not scream, but the Dragon Throne beneath him, carved from the most resilient rock in the imperial mines, groaned and cracked profusely, unable to bear its sovereign's absurd increase in existential weight.
The air around Samael warped brutally, light bent toward his figure, and shadows lengthened frantically. His ascension to the Perfection of the Stage 6 Saint Realm didn't cause his body to grow in height or gain grotesque muscles. Quite the opposite: it compressed him. All that immense cosmic energy was forced to condense into his pre-existing structure.
His bones, hidden beneath his skin, ceased to be normal skeletal tissue. They solidified and mutated, acquiring the unbreakable density of dark gold, glowing with a faint divine luminescence that could be perceived through his flesh. But it was his circulatory system that dictated the final sentence. His Primordial Dragon heart beat with a roar that echoed like subterranean thunder in the hall. The blood running through his veins remained a terrifying, deep red, but now, tiny, furious primordial golden flashes swam and shone within it. That new blood did not flow like water; it flowed heavy, lethal, and relentless, with the density and crushing power of pure mercury.
Every heartbeat pushed that colossal liquid through his body, radiating a pressure that forced even Seraphina to brace her feet on the floor, and made the 21 kneeling Semi-Saints feel an invisible mountain settle upon their shoulders.
[Updated Status: Samael Morningstar.] [Cultivation: Stage 6 Saint Realm (Absolute Perfection).]
The Sovereign of the Morning Star opened his eyes, the violet of his pupils spinning with the weight of dead galaxies. The forging was complete. Hell was ready.