Chapter 131: The Baptism of Golden Blood and the Awakening of the Gene (Part 3)
The Throne Room was saturated.
The immense enclosure, which previously felt sterile, cold, and immaculate due to the ancient isolation arrays, now weighed down with a suffocating biological density. The air was stale. It smelled intensely of ancient blood, burnt ozone, melted stone, and, above all, the unmistakable pheromones of alpha predators who had just marked their territory.
The First Wave—Kael, Violeta, Eris, Cedric, Xylia, Elara, Elowen, Lyra, Aylin, and Altair—had retreated in complete silence into the deep shadows cast by the massive side columns of the dais. Their bodies, after surviving the genetic carnage, had returned to an apparent humanoid form, but the macabre details betrayed them in the gloom.
Kael exhaled small clouds of burning ash with every breath, his red obsidian horns barely visible in the darkness. Violeta frosted the solid stone merely by resting the sole of her boot on it, her mismatched eyes shining with the cruelty of absolute zero. Eris smiled in the shadows, her veins of catastrophe throbbing beneath her pale skin with a magmatic glow. Aylin caressed her spear while her pupils, now completely vertical and a reptilian amber, caught the room's scarce light like a nocturnal feline stalking in the undergrowth. They were a tableau of stabilized monstrosities.
Samael Morningstar remained seated on the Dragon Throne, motionless as a statue of molten obsidian. His gaze, cold, calculating, and lacking any hint of fatigue despite having extracted his own essence, swept the vast room until resting on the exact center.
There, waiting their turn under the crushing weight of the Dragon King's gaze, was the Second Wave.
The remaining ten warriors (Draven, Rowan, Tamsin, Lys, Maren, and the other specialists) stood firm. They had been present. They had seen the heart-rending screams of their companions. They had heard the sickening, wet crunch of Kael's bones breaking through his own chest. They had smelled the rotting flesh and dead ash pouring from Altair. They had seen Cedric vomit mercury and Elara lose her physical cohesion.
Any mortal in their right mind would have run terrified toward the doors, begging to keep their humanity. But in the eyes of this Second Wave, fear was absolutely null.
There was no terror; there was a fierce ambition, a dark and latent envy. Seeing their companions mutate and rise with a strength capable of subduing the Laws of physics, they too wanted to devour that power. They craved the pain if it was the only toll to stop being the weak scum of the world.
Samael slowly raised his right hand, still stained with his own primordial blood. With an imperceptible gesture of his Void, eleven drops of golden and crimson essence separated from his palm and floated lazily through the heavy air of the hall, stopping millimeters from the lips of each of the specialists.
"Your talents are subtle," Samael continued, his voice breaking the tension like a guillotine blade. "Poison. Light. Wood. Acceleration. Wind. You are the scalpels of my empire, not the war hammers. You are the edge that cuts in the dark when brute force fails."
Samael leaned forward. The radiant light of the blood drops reflected in his starry and crimson pupils.
"But a fragile scalpel made of cheap steel snaps instantly when trying to cut the bone of a Saint Grade calamity. It is useless if your technique is perfect if your anatomy collapses from the friction of your own speed, or if your lungs burst from breathing the enemy's poison. This blood floating in front of you will not give you senseless brute force. It will not make you heavier or clumsier. It will awaken the latent predator running through your veins that has been dormant for generations. It will rewrite your DNA strand by strand so that you stop being prey, and become the plague that will devour the entire world."
In Samael's mind's eye, the gears of the universe handed down the sentence.
[ACTIVATING SUPERIOR FUNCTION: PRIMORDIAL BLOODLINE CONTROL]
[Selective Target:] Second Wave Specialists.
[Injection Intensity:] Primordial Biological Awakening (5% - 8%).
[Survival Rate without Intervention:] Critical.
"Swallow," Samael ordered sharply. "And remember this well as your bodies are torn apart: pain is nothing more than weakness and mortality leaving your flesh."
No one hesitated for a millisecond. In unison, guided by absolute fanaticism toward their Progenitor, they opened their mouths, swallowed the drops of essence, and clamped their jaws shut.
The initial effect wasn't a cataclysmic thermal explosion like with Kael, nor a halting of space like with Violeta. It was something infinitely more disturbing: a systemic invasion, a rejection at the subatomic level.
The dense, heavy, golden blood of the Primordial Dragon entered their stomachs and instantly recognized the diluted, weak, pathetic human blood running through their bodies. Instead of mixing, Samael's essence initiated an aggressive, merciless purge.
Almost simultaneously, Draven, Rowan, Tamsin, Lys, and Maren fell to their knees. A synchronized spasm doubled them over. Their stomachs and lungs rebelled. They began to violently vomit enormous quantities of their own dark red blood, expelling the human fluid that their new bone marrows, now hijacked by the dragon genome, considered a useless, obsolete poison.
The first to break the chorus of vomiting with a structural crunch was Draven (The Glacial Bastion).
His immense two meters of height and his northern barbarian musculature were not enough to contain the geological rewrite his anatomy was undergoing. The Blue Ice Dragon claimed its territory.
As Draven spat his humanity onto the stone, a guttural howl escaped his throat. The moisture in the air throughout the entire Throne Room was violently sucked toward his body. His companions' sweat and the invisible water vapor rushed toward his open pores. His massive biceps, chest, and back tore from the inside out with a sickening sound of ripping fabric.
The weak flesh gave way to thick, massive, angular plates of a deep, biological blue ice. It wasn't ice on the skin; the ice was his new skin, growing and fitting together like tectonic plates across his anatomy.
Atmospheric Moisture Regeneration went into a frenzy. His newborn scales cracked from their own accelerated growth, but instantly, they extracted moisture from the air and "froze," repairing themselves before a single drop of blood could fall to the floor. Draven was becoming an autonomous snowstorm.
But the true horror was his change in density. The Inertia of Absolute Zero anchored itself in his bones. As Draven tried to stand up, his molecular weight multiplied exponentially. His steel boots sank into the unbreakable obsidian floor, grinding the stone as if it were dry cracker. When he finally stood straight, covered in blue diamond scales and exhaling blizzards from his jaws, Draven became immovable. If a siege titan were to ram into him at that exact instant, Draven wouldn't budge a millimeter; the beast would simply shatter against his chest. He was the final anchor of the empire.
Beside him, Draven's crushing heaviness was mocked by the total annulment of matter.
Rowan (The Sharpened Cyclone) was being flayed alive by his own bloodline.
Upon awakening the Cutting Wind Dragon, Rowan's biology began to consider physical friction an insult to its existence. His body rebelled against everything that touched it, including his own clothes and his human epidermal skin.
Rowan let out a choked shriek as he fell to the floor, but he never actually touched the stone. A millimeter above the obsidian, his body slid horrifyingly. The Zero Friction Glide had activated at an uncontrollable level. His combat tunic tore and slipped off his body as if covered in absolute oil, and with it, the top layer of his mortal skin peeled away, revealing a new, translucent dermis beneath, adorned with extremely fine, aerodynamic pale blue scales that rippled like captive air currents.
His circulatory system collapsed and reinvented itself on the spot. Rowan's liquid blood boiled at freezing temperatures, turning into Cyclone Vapor Blood. His veins now carried a gas.
Unable to control the constant excitation of his muscles, Rowan began to convulse at a speed imperceptible to the human eye. He was moving so fast in place that his physical body began to emit a deafening hum. From his throat and pores escaped the lethal Voice of the Tornado. It wasn't a scream; it was a continuous, piercing, extremely high-pitched whistle, the product of his blood flowing at extreme gaseous pressures.
That whistle directly impacted the inner ears of Tamsin, Lys, and Maren, who were mutating beside him. A wave of brutal vertigo dizzied them, threatening to knock them over, disoriented by the invisible hurricane Rowan was generating in his own agony, while his body began to "phase," losing solidity and becoming a blurry smear of murderous wind.
But Rowan's disorientation was quickly drowned out by a sickly-sweet, absolutely corrosive stench that began to rot the room's atmosphere.
Tamsin (The Jade Widow) was executing the most repulsive and lethally beautiful mutation of all.
The Poison Basilisk Dragon was not a bloodline of brute force; it was the absolute corruption of life.
Tamsin, with her short stature and hypnotic beauty, curled into a fetal position on the floor. Her esophagus burned as if she had swallowed lava. As she vomited her human blood, the liquid was no longer red; the Primordial Acid Blood began to flow.
Tamsin's vomit, a brilliant, sickly neon green, splashed onto the floor. The second the acid touched the indestructible obsidian, a furious hiss filled the air. The stone melted and bubbled, creating smoking craters. Tamsin's vital essence had become so corrosive that the material world was trying to expel it.
The fine veins on her face and neck bulged, glowing beneath her pale skin with a bioluminescent acid green. Her green hair seemed to take on a life of its own, writhing like thin snakes.
But the true disaster was passive. The Infection of the Fabric of Reality awoke uncontrollably. Tamsin didn't need to launch an attack to kill; the simple act of breathing was corrupting the Laws of the air around her. The oxygen within ten meters of her became dense, toxic, and foggy.
Involuntarily, a muffled groan escaped Tamsin's pale lips, the Widow's Sigh. A thick, colorless mist, perfumed with the scent of rotting jasmine, expanded through the room.
Draven, who was nearby, inhaled a fraction of that mist. Immediately, despite his ice resistance, his pupils dilated. A sweet, numbing euphoria assaulted his brain, a seductive lethargy that invited him to surrender and sleep, hiding the fact that his lungs were silently beginning to liquefy and rot. Tamsin was about to murder her own clan brothers with a smile of ecstasy on her face.
From the throne, Samael didn't lift a finger, because he knew it wasn't necessary. The biology of the pantheon would balance itself through violence.
The response to the poison and rot was not long in coming. A blinding burst of luminous tyranny erased the toxic mist.
Lys (The Beacon of the Dawn) had awakened the Starlight Dragon.
Purity did not tolerate the biological blasphemy Tamsin was exhaling. For the genome that had just awakened in Lys's fragile body, gray areas, pacts of neutrality, or peaceful coexistence with rot did not exist. The universe was divided into two absolute concepts: the immaculate, and that which must be incinerated to its foundations.
The Starlight Dragon claimed its sovereignty with cataclysmic violence.
As the Widow's narcotic mist tried to invade her lungs, Lys's newly mutated immune system detonated. The young woman with the angelic figure fell to her knees, arching her back backward at an almost impossible angle as a cry of silent agony tore at her throat. Her pale skin began to emit a searing glow from within, as if she had swallowed the very core of a dying star. Her human veins calcined, and the diluted blood she vomited evaporated in the air before touching the ground, replaced by a liquid, burning, photonic ichor.
The pain was so extreme that the capillaries in her eyes burst. Lys wept tears of pure blood, but the instant the crimson drops grazed her cheeks, the miracle of her bloodline intervened. The blood instantly cauterized, transmuting into thick tears of boiling, liquid gold that rolled down her face, sealing her skin and leaving her flawless.
Her long golden hair lost earthly gravity; it rose and expanded around her, waving like the very solar corona during an eclipse. Dictatorial Purification wasn't a technique Lys decided to invoke; it was an involuntary reflex, a vomit of defensive light.
An immense, blinding pillar of golden energy, solid and overwhelming, erupted from her body, piercing the gloom of the Throne Room. The light wasn't warm or comforting; it was an optical tyranny that judged the space it occupied.
The second the light of the Sun's Sentence touched the toxic mist and Tamsin's Widow's Sigh, there was no wind to disperse it. The poison was literally evaporated from existence, purged by the molecular heat of the starlight. Draven, who was beginning to succumb to the toxic lethargy, was bathed in this radiance. His frozen lungs expanded forcefully, the poison in his system being incinerated and expelled while Lys's Photonic Healing accelerated his cells, closing the micro-fractures in his ice scales without leaving a scar.
Tamsin, wrapped in her own acidic euphoria, let out a feline hiss and recoiled, shielding her eyes as her Basilisk instinct recognized its natural predator. Lys's light acted as a relentless biological filter: it healed its allies (like Draven) by forcing regeneration, but any particle it considered a threat (like the uncontrolled poison) was reduced to nothing.
Lys opened her eyes. They were no longer human hazel; they were two miniature supernovae, pools of burning light devoid of pupils. She was experiencing the Resonance with the Eternal Dawn. Even though her body had just been destroyed and rebuilt by Samael's primordial blood, she felt not the slightest fatigue. The light itself was feeding her. She had become the vital anchor, the eternal battery of the legion; as long as she breathed and radiated that golden glory, her brothers could march through the gates of hell and emerge unscathed.
But the majesty of the light was brutally interrupted by the absolute collapse of molecular physics just a few meters away.
Maren (The Silent Thunder) was losing the battle against his own body mass.
The impact of the Celestial Lightning Dragon bloodline demanded that the human vessel abandon the weakness of solid flesh. Maren's biological body, a meter ninety and leanly muscled, entered a state of terminal rebellion.
Samael's primordial blood didn't just run through his veins; it was ionizing the vital fluids of his circulatory system, transforming his bloodstream into the Blood of Divine Electrolytes. Maren's biological heart tried to pump this new, highly conductive liquid and collapsed. With a violent spasm, his heart stopped, only to restart milliseconds later not with a muscular beat, but with an electrical discharge. His chest vibrated at an unnatural frequency.
The neurological pain was the worst any human could conceive. His nerves, designed to process stimuli at organic speeds, were bathed in divine voltages. Maren opened his mouth to emit a howl of agony, but his vocal cords vibrated so fast that the sound completely phased out. The scream reached the ears of the other specialists a second after Maren had closed his mouth.
The Transmutation into Electrons reached its critical mass point.
To the horrified gaze of his mutated companions, Maren's physical body simply ceased to exist. His flesh, his bones, the clothes he wore, and even the blood he had just vomited, lost all molecular cohesion. He disintegrated before their eyes, turning into an amorphous amalgam of pure electrical energy, a silhouette of electric blue and blinding white lightning that crackled with uncontrollable fury.
He was no longer a man; he was a living state of pre-ignition, a "Wandering Lightning Form". Losing its solid anchor, Maren's unstable energy skyrocketed.
With a deafening roar—a CRACK! that shook the obsidian and smelled intensely of burnt ozone—the blue lightning bolted across the room in an erratic, supersonic zigzag. Maren wasn't running; he was linearly teleporting through the atmosphere, seeking the path of least resistance. He crashed against one of the immense side columns, bounced toward the vaulted ceiling leaving an incandescent vitrification mark on the stone, and plummeted toward the center of the room, right next to where Cedric and Altair stood in the shadows.
The lightning struck the basalt floor, creating a smoking crater, and the energy violently condensed again, forcing the electrons back into human shape. Maren materialized, falling to his knees. His electric blue hair was completely on end, small voltaic discharges jumped from his fingertips to his greaves, and his chest rose and fell with inhuman speed.
He was panting, but his vibrant purple eyes darted frantically, processing the reality of the room. His Galvanic Instinct Reflexes were activated; he saw Lys's light particles descending slowly, he saw Tamsin's poison bubbling in super slow motion, and he perceived the electrical signals of every person's brain in the room. If anyone tried to attack him now, his muscles would react via an electrical arc, forcing him to counterattack or dodge milliseconds before his own consciousness even registered that he was in danger. He had become the assassin who killed before arriving, the thunder that struck before the flash was seen.
The evolutionary massacre in the center of the Throne Room finally began to subside.