Chapter 131: The Baptism of Golden Blood and the Awakening of the Gene (Part 4)
The Throne Room was saturated to the limits of sanity.
The air, which hours before felt sterile, cold, and immaculate due to the action of the millennial isolation arrays, now weighed down with a suffocating biological density. The immense chamber smelled of ancient blood, burnt ozone, corrosive acid, and the heavy pheromones of alpha predators who had just claimed their territory.
The First 15 Sequences—Kael, Violeta, Eris, Cedric, Xylia, Elara, Elowen, Lyra, Aylin, Altair, Draven, Rowan, Tamsin, Lys, and Maren—had instinctively retreated into the deep shadows cast by the dais's massive side columns. Their bodies, after surviving the genetic meat grinder, had returned to an apparent and deceptive human form, but the macabre details betrayed them in the gloom. Their pupils, now permanently slit and vertical, caught the room's scarce light like those of nocturnal felines. Kael exhaled ash; Altair gave off a dull scent of the grave; Violeta froze the moisture with her mere presence.
They had been the first. They had felt the cellular tearing, they had vomited their own humanity, and they had survived. Now, from the darkness, they watched their remaining six siblings. In the eyes of the fifteen already-formed monsters, there was no pity or compassion for those who were about to suffer; there was a cold, calculating expectation, the same with which a wolf pack watches its pups trying to take their first bite of raw meat.
Samael Morningstar remained seated on the Dragon Throne, motionless as a deity sculpted from molten obsidian. His gaze, cold, calculating, and devoid of fatigue, swept the room until it stopped at the exact center.
There, awaiting their baptism of blood, stood the Third Wave: Nylas, Joren, Lirael, Bren, Elian, and Varian.
They had seen the biological holocaust. They had heard the sickening crunch of Kael's bones breaking through his own chest. They had smelled Altair's rotting flesh and seen Maren disintegrate into electrons. Any mortal would have fled in terror, but in the eyes of these six assassins, fear was absolutely null. There was excitement. A dark, latent ambition throbbed in their veins. Seeing their companions rise as calamities, envy devoured them; they too wanted to sit at the top of the food chain.
Samael slowly raised his right hand. Six drops of his Primordial Blood Essence separated from his palm and floated lazily through the heavy air, stopping millimeters from the lips of the warriors.
"Your talents are subtle," Samael decreed, his voice breaking the tense silence. "Gravity. Silence. Unreality. Vibration. Heavy Water. Absolute Vision. You are the clan's scalpels, the daggers that cut in the dark, not the war hammers. But a scalpel, no matter how sharp, is still fragile. And a fragile scalpel breaks instantly upon striking the bone of a Saint Grade cultivator."
Samael leaned forward. The golden and crimson light of the primordial blood reflected in the depths of his starry-sky eyes.
"This blood will not give you senseless brute force nor make you slow. It will awaken the Latent Dragon that runs through your veins and has been diluted for generations. It will rewrite your DNA so that you stop being fragile prey and become the indestructible plague that devours the world."
The System flashed with a relentless fury in the King's mind.
[ACTIVATING SUPERIOR FUNCTION: PRIMORDIAL BLOODLINE CONTROL]
[Selective Target:] Third Wave (Final Sequences).
[Injection Intensity:] Biological Awakening (5% - 10%).
"Swallow," Samael ordered sharply. "And remember: pain is nothing more than weakness leaving the body."
No one hesitated. In unison, they opened their mouths, swallowed the essences, and clamped their jaws shut.
The effect was not an immediate thermal explosion. It was a brutal systemic invasion. The heavy dragon blood contained in the drop recognized the mortal, diluted blood in their bodies and initiated a hyper-aggressive purge.
The first to collapse under the weight of the universe was Nylas (The Event Horizon).
Upon awakening the Demonic Dragon of the Abyss, Nylas's biology ceased to be subject to the planet's laws of buoyancy. His entire body was dragged toward the floor with atrocious violence. Nylas fell onto his hands and knees, and the indestructible obsidian cracked, forming a perfect crater beneath his figure. His hair, the color of a dark miasma, thickened and floated around him as if he were underwater, ironically defying the gravity that was crushing him.
The Authority of the Gravity Well erupted uncontrollably. Within a two-hundred-meter radius, everything became fifty percent heavier. The dust suspended in the air fell like lead pellets. The internal organs of Joren, Lirael, and the others began to weigh tons, severely hindering their breathing.
Nylas opened his mouth, trying to scream, but what he vomited wasn't red blood; he expelled a liquid miasma as black as pitch. It was his Marrow of Abyssal Demonic Energy. This liquid acted as a black hole of will. The light from nearby torches bent and was devoured by his blood. Nylas was withstanding a weight of hundreds of tons that his own body accidentally generated, his muscles tearing and rebuilding themselves in nanoseconds to withstand the density of a dwarf star, becoming the ultimate predator in a world of crushed prey.
The gravitational collapse was abruptly cut short by the most absolute and repulsive sensory panic.
Joren (The Zephyr Banshee) was losing the ability to communicate with reality.
Upon assimilating the blood of the Cutting Wind Dragon, Joren's human heart began to palpitate with the uncontrolled fury of a Category 5 hurricane. His circulatory system expanded to its limit, pumping High-Pressure Zephyr Blood. The super-oxygenation in his brain was so brutal that the blood vessels in his brown eyes burst, dyeing his sclera bright red.
The Domain of the Silent Void activated as a biological defense mechanism. Within a three-hundred-meter radius, Acoustic Death devoured space. Sound simply ceased to exist. Nylas, who was a few meters away, felt his inner ear shut off, provoking an attack of nausea and vertigo.
Joren writhed on the floor, suffocated by his own hyperventilation. In his desperation to get up, his legs, now driven by his bloodline's sonic propulsion, spasmed. He did not stand up; he executed an involuntary "blink." His physical body disappeared and materialized instantly five meters away. The movement was so fast that it generated an invisible air blade by mere displacement; the obsidian wall behind him suffered a deep, smooth, perfect cut without the slightest sound of friction being heard. Joren had become the sword that decapitates before being seen or heard.
But the sepulchral silence was desecrated by visual pain, a horror of broken perspectives.
Lirael (The Broken Moon) was suffering the physical and conceptual dissociation of her own being.
The genome of the Moonlight Dragon rejected the idea that Lirael was bound to a single material body. The beautiful assassin with bright orange hair fell to her knees, hugging her stomach. When she vomited, she expelled a puddle of brilliant, spectral liquid silver: Lunar Mercury.
The Authority of the Lethal Reflection fractured reality around her. The state of Broken Duality took over her anatomy. Lirael let out a scream of agony (silenced by Joren), but her body flickered and split.
Suddenly, there wasn't just one Lirael on the floor. The silvery vapor of her blood formed three absolutely tangible physical clones, perfect and identical to her. The four women writhed on the obsidian, shedding silver tears and scratching the floor in pain. Unlike Lyra's dream illusions, these clones had mass, body heat, and the exact same energy signature. For the spectators in the shadows, it was psychological torture: it was mathematically impossible to know which of the four beautiful, agonizing women was the bearer of the original soul. Lirael was forging her Dance of the Broken Mirrors through madness.
The ground beneath Lirael's mirages began to tremble with prehistoric fury.
Bren (The Seismic Behemoth), the muscular, bald giant, collapsed like a shattered siege tower.
The Magma Earth Behemoth Dragon allowed for no subtlety. Every knee Bren dropped against the floor as he fell caused a microquake that cracked the obsidian. His transformation was a thermodynamic hell.
His blood didn't flow from his wounds; it erupted. The veins in his arms burst, spraying Solid Magma Blood at nuclear temperatures, melting the stone around him. The giant roared, and the Authority of Seismic Resonance turned his pain into a weapon of mass destruction. The Vibrating World settled into the hall.
Every muscle in Bren expanded, becoming dense and dark like newly cooled volcanic rock. The vibrations from his body traveled through the floor and up the legs of everyone present. With the exception of Samael, all the warriors felt their own internal organs—lungs, liver, heart—begin to dangerously vibrate at the same frequency as Bren's agony. If the giant hadn't been subduing the bloodline, he would have liquefied them all from the inside out.
The seismic vibration was finally dampened by an aquatic density that crushed the lungs of the room.
Elian (The Mercury Tide) was drowning in the air.
The blood of the Heavy Water Abyssal Dragon transmuted his vital fluids in a second. Elian, usually relaxed in posture, curled into himself, bringing his hands to his throat. He expectorated violently, vomiting large quantities of a thick, brilliant, silvery liquid: heavy water fused with mercury.
The Crushing Inertia claimed the hall's oxygen. The air around him became so dense and heavy that breathing felt like inhaling sand at the bottom of an oceanic trench ten thousand meters deep.
His own mercury blood, instead of spreading across the floor, came to life. Defying Nylas's demonic gravity, the silver liquid floated, forming blind spheres and tentacles. In the chaos of the mutation, the blood tried to envelop Elian's own head, suffocating him in a bubble of infinite density. It was a battle of wills. Elian's deep eyes became injected with silver blood, and with a titanic mental effort, he subdued his own tide. The mercury stopped millimeters from his face and flowed docilely into his pores, integrating as a liquid armor hidden beneath his skin.
And closing the circle of calamities, the hunter experienced the visual paradox of the universe.
Varian (The Sky Hunter) was assaulted by a pain that did not reside in his muscles, but in his optic nerve and frontal lobe.
Upon inheriting the code of the Emerald Storm Hawk Dragon, Varian's beautiful green eyes began to bleed liquid plasma. His Emerald Plasma Blood boiled, flowing toward his hands and infusing his fingers with a storm energy that burned his own skin.
But the true horror was cognitive. The Authority of Fixed Destiny broke his linear perception of time. The state of "Pre-Existing Impact" generated a severe visual paradox for him. For one agonizing minute, Varian saw the room in three simultaneous states: he saw Kael vomiting lava (half an hour ago), he saw Nylas spitting miasma (in the present), and he saw himself standing wielding a wind bow (a fraction of a second in the future). His brain threatened to suffer a stroke from the information overload.
Screaming, Varian tore at his dark green hair. Little by little, the bloodline stabilized. The three timelines collapsed into a single, sharp present. When Varian blinked, his human pupils had disappeared. In their place shone structures similar to the lenses of a high-tech military camera combined with the relentless eye of a divine hawk. The sniper who didn't need to aim was born, because his arrow always arrived before his intention.
Forty minutes of pure, heart-rending agony passed.
The floor of the immense Throne Room was a gruesome canvas painted with the brutality of evolution. It was completely covered in inhuman fluids: black bile that devoured light, golden sap that made thorns sprout from the rock, luminous blood, silvery heavy water, dead ash, and solidified magma. Little by little, the heart-rending screams of the Third Wave turned into hoarse, heavy pants.
Samael Morningstar stood up from the Dragon Throne. Silence reigned once more as his presence demanded absolute attention.
Twenty-one warriors, the entirety of the clan's Sequences, stood before him. All were physically transformed. All were indelibly marked by pain. They were twenty-one Semi-Dragons. The Throne Room was now a tableau of blood, alchemical fluids, and ruthless glory. The faint, fragile scent of humanity had been completely eradicated, replaced by the oppressive aura of a biologically superior species that had just taken ownership of the apex of the food chain.
As Samael observed them, a familiar, massive heat flooded his own spiritual core. The gears of destiny collected their karmic debt.
[SYSTEM ALERT: Karmic Investment Reimbursement Processed.]
[Origin:] Primordial Blood Essence.
[Impact Evaluation:] Birth of 21 stabilized Lesser Dragons. Radical alteration of the continental balance of power.
[Blood Retribution Multiplier Applied:] x1000.
An avalanche of pure, thick, warm energy flooded Samael's meridians. The pallor of the forced extraction vanished from his face instantly. The immense amount of energy was processed by the System with brutal efficiency. However, Samael knew that his body, at the Perfection of the Stage 6 Saint Realm, could not surpass the biological threshold without risking detonation.
The percentage of his Primordial Dragon bloodline stopped, strategically blocked and immovably fixed at an exact and terrifying 20%.
Samael mentally divided the ocean of energy that had been returned to him. Fifty percent flowed directly into his bone marrow, recovering all the invested vigor and refining his anatomy; his blood, although still a dark, abyssal red, acquired a much deeper saturation, with flashes of a primordial golden hue that was visibly purer and more menacing. The remaining fifty percent of the colossal reward was silently compressed and stored in his System Inventory, a reserve of apocalyptic power saved for the wars that were to come.
Samael sat back down on the Dragon Throne, crossing his legs with the elegance of a tyrant who has just won a war without drawing his sword.
"You have survived the purifying fire," Samael said, his deep voice resonating with a cold, absolute pride that made his warriors' chests vibrate. "Now, and only now, are you worthy of bearing my name. You are the true pillars of the Morningstar Empire."
With a casual movement of his obsidian-armored index finger, the air above the large table in front of the dais hummed. An immense, detailed, three-dimensional holographic map of the southern continent unfolded in colors of solid light. Mountains, crystal deserts, and fortresses glowed in blue and white.
But the eyes of the twenty-one dragons fixated on a single detail. Toward the southeast of the map, a prominent red dot throbbed incessantly, like a diseased heart begging to be torn out.
"Rest tonight," Samael ordered, his violet eyes gleaming with a predatory malice. "Go down to the pavilions. Eat the flesh of the highest-ranking spiritual beasts we have in the reserves until you are about to burst. Recover your blood. Tame the Laws that now dwell in your skin."
Samael leaned forward, his crimson gaze fixed on the red dot on the holographic map.
"Because tomorrow at dawn... I will give you the weapons that will be worthy of your new bloodline. And when the afternoon falls, we will march southeast. We will go teach that scum, the Valois Family, that the Morningstar Clan does not negotiate. It does not demand tribute. It takes no prisoners."
The Dragon King clenched his fist, and the hologram of the Valois fortress shattered into a thousand pieces of red light, dispersing into nothingness.
"We will teach them that we bring only absolute extinction," Samael decreed. "Dismissed!"
(End of Chapter)