Chapter 132: The Fall of the Sky and the Massacre of the Valois (Part 3)
Time seemed to stand still in the once-majestic and now-shattered Emerald Valley.
The mummified upper torso of the Third Valois Ancestor—a cultivator at the peak of Stage 8 of the Saint Realm—plummeted onto the pavement of the central courtyard. The sound of its impact—Thud—was a wet, heavy, hollow noise that resonated above the ravages of battle. Seconds later, the lower half of his body fell from the sky, spinning grotesquely in the air before crashing into the marble debris.
There was no final war cry. No pleas for mercy, nor famous last words to be remembered in the sect's annals. Only the macabre dripping of a rain of hot, dark blood was heard, spraying the pale faces of the fifteen thousand Valois soldiers. The infantrymen, captains, and generals looked toward the sky with their mouths agape, their weapons falling from their trembling hands, absolutely paralyzed by an existential horror that their limited mortal minds could not process. They had just witnessed a god of their religion being erased as if he were an insect.
High above, floating with the majesty of a sovereign of the abyss, Samael Morningstar slowly shook his immense Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse.
But the Ancestor's blood did not drip from the black blade to clean the steel. The sword... drank it.
Before everyone's eyes, the sinister black flames coating the blade turned a deep, thick, and vibrant crimson for an instant. A dull, guttural, and terrifyingly metallic heartbeat resonated from the depths of the steel, as if a prehistoric heart had just begun to pump within the forge of the weapon.
Thump-Thump. Samael felt the brutal vibration rise through the hilt, travel through the bones of his obsidian-clad arm, and resonate directly in his shoulder. The weapon was hungry. The hyper-condensed blood and the soul of a Stage 8 Saint had acted as a catalyst, awakening something ancient, cruel, and dormant beneath the layers of Heaven Grade metal.
In front of him, dozens of meters in the air, the Great Ancestor (Stage 9 Apex) and the Second Ancestor (Stage 8) recoiled violently, completely breaking their aggressive battle formation.
Their mummified, withered skeletal faces, which had maintained an unbreakable mask of divine arrogance for three hundred long years of isolation, now contorted in horrible grimaces of disbelief and primal fear. The stench of death from their tombs seemed to turn sour.
"He killed him..." the Second Ancestor whispered, his voice screeching while his hands trembled uncontrollably within the wide sleeves of his burial robe. "With a single blow. He shattered his Protective Domain, his spiritual chain mail, and his millennial artifacts... as if they were damn wet paper."
Samael turned slowly toward them. He walked upon the void of the air as if descending an invisible and solid staircase. His eyes, two violet supernovae in perpetual collapse, shone with a predatory malice that darkened the sun even further.
"One has fallen into the abyss," Samael decreed, his deep, echo-laden voice resonating in the valley. "The sword demands more blood to finish its awakening."
Samael raised his arm and pointed the black tip of the Odachi directly at the Great Ancestor's chest.
"Don't go anywhere just yet, you damned fossils. You are the main course."
Below, in the courtyard-turned-crater of smoking ruins, the reality of war cornered Patriarch Alaric Valois.
The leader of the family (Stage 5 Saint) was completely alone and surrounded by ashes. Just a few minutes ago, he had defeated Violeta and Eris using his overwhelming cultivation advantage, but Samael's divine intervention, the appearance of the primordial bloodline, and the instantaneous, humiliating execution of his sacred Ancestor had shattered his concentration and his sanity.
Now, Alaric looked at the bloodied sky, seeing how his revered "saints," the absolute protectors of his millennial family, were hunted like cornered cattle in a slaughterhouse.
"This... this is a fucking nightmare," Alaric stammered, hyperventilating. His bulging eyes darted in every direction, scanning the courtyard. He took a step back, slipping on the blood of his own guards, instinctively seeking, like a frightened rat, the nearest escape route toward the back mountains.
"Where the hell do you think you're going, pig?"
The voice was not a shout. It was a dry, raspy whisper devoid of all emotion, sounding exactly like a handful of dead ash being dragged by an autumn wind across a gravestone.
Alaric spun sharply, panic injecting adrenaline into his veins, and raised his guard, forming a green energy shield.
A hooded figure had materialized in absolute silence right behind him. His exposed skin was of a sickly gray hue, cracked like the earth in an eternal drought, constantly peeling off in microscopic flakes of dust that floated and died in the air. It was Altair (Sequence 10). The Lord of Entropy held his immense rusted scythe—a High Earth Grade weapon that looked like it had been unearthed from a mass grave—with a terrifying calm, his pupil-less black eyes fixed on the Patriarch.
"You... another disgusting desert rat!" Alaric tried desperately to regain his composure and his crushed ego, summoning the totality of his Jade Aura. A dense, brilliant, and regenerative barrier of emerald green light completely surrounded him in an impenetrable dome. "Look at me, you bastard! I am a Stage 5 Saint! Your disgusting Stage 1 rot can never touch me!"
Altair did not attack with a frenzy of brute force or roars of rage. He simply took a step forward, dragging his heavy boots over the rubble.
"Your light is old, Patriarch," Altair said, his voice lacking inflection. "And everything that is old in this world... must die."
The Inevitable Aging pulsed from the core of the young ash dragon. Altair extended his gray, cracked left hand and gently rested his fingers directly upon Alaric's burning barrier of light.
At the exact point of contact, the brilliant, vital green light turned a deathly sepia gray instantly. Conceptual "rust," entropy distilled in its purest form, spread across the immense barrier like a fast-forwarded bacterial infection.
Crack... sssss. The supposedly impenetrable defense of a Stage 5 Saint master cracked loudly. The spiritual jade lost its cohesion, withered, and crumbled into a rain of dead light dust, leaving Alaric completely exposed to the cold air.
"What... what the fuck?!" Alaric screamed, looking hysterically at his own hands, feeling the Qi in his meridians rotting inside his body. "My energy! What have you done to my energy, you demon?!"
"I took its lifespan," Altair replied, raising his weapon.
And then, he executed the Touch of Withering through the steel. He did not seek the neck. He did not seek to kill quickly. He sought Alaric's right arm—the same arm he had used to strike and break Eris's ribs.
The heavy rusted blade of the scythe sliced through the Patriarch's flesh. The wound was ghastly precisely because it did not shed a single drop of blood. The cut tissue turned coal-black immediately. Entropic necrosis spread visibly beneath Alaric's skin, crawling up his veins like dark spiders, killing the muscles, rotting the nerves, and turning the bone as fragile as chalk in a matter of seconds. Alaric's entire arm withered, becoming a dessicated, useless, and painful limb.
"AAAAAAHHHH!" The Patriarch's scream was heart-rending as he fell to his knees, clutching his withered shoulder.
"NOW, HUNT THE DOG!" a voice roared from above.
From the marble arches of the shattered walls, the asymmetric trap snapped shut. Cedric (The Emperor of Arrays) plummeted from the sky.
His massive Runic Siege Gauntlets shone with dense blue and silver light formations. Utilizing his Kinetic Formation Seal style, Cedric did not seek to strike Alaric's face. He landed heavily and, with astounding mathematical precision, slammed both of his incandescent steel palms directly onto the shoulders of the kneeling Patriarch.
The "Extreme Anchor" rune and the Explosive Seal Palm detonated simultaneously. A shockwave traveled through Alaric's collarbone, driving the impact force directly into his internal organs, crushing him against the floor and anchoring his body to the molten rock.
"Stay still, you piece of scum!"
Xylia (The Empress of Thunder) appeared sliding over the rubble at the speed of sound. With an elegant and furious flick of her wrist, she lashed out with her divine whip, Indra's Scourge.
The braided cable of gold and living plasma hissed through the air and violently coiled around Alaric Valois's throat.
An electrical arc of millions of volts traveled down the weapon. The blinding discharge electrocuted the Patriarch's nervous system, frying his motor synapses and paralyzing his vocal cords, preventing him from conjuring any spiritual technique for escape, teleportation, or immolation. Alaric convulsed on the ground, drooling blood, anchored by Cedric's runic weight and strangled by Xylia's electricity.
Then, the ambient temperature rose to volcanic levels.
Kael Morningstar slowly approached the group. The heat from his scaly body distorted the air around him. He planted himself in front of Alaric's convulsing and humiliated body.
The aristocratic leader, the man who controlled the destinies of millions, raised his teary eyes, which were burst from the pressure. He saw the primal, crimson fury in Kael's vertical pupils.
"Mmmm! Mnnnghh!" Alaric stammered through the whip's paralysis, weeping tears of blood, trying to speak through the choking. "I... have money! Mine secrets! Everything!"
Kael brought the immense red-hot edge of the Magma Fang close to Alaric's face. The extreme heat scorched the Patriarch's eyelashes and eyebrows in a second.
"We know, old man," Kael whispered, his voice vibrating with sadistic pleasure. "And we're going to take every damn gold coin, every core, and every secret directly from your mutilated corpse."
Kael raised the heavy, burning blade with both hands, aiming at the Patriarch's collarbone.
"Say hello to the gods of hell for me, Valois."
SPLAT!
Kael did not make a quick, merciful cut. He let the overwhelming weight of the sword fall, driving it deep into the flesh, and then pulled it downward, dragging it slowly, like a butcher's knife opening a steer. The immense blade of magma and atomic friction split Alaric Valois from his left collarbone to his right hip.
The Patriarch's body was brutally separated into two smoking halves, the edges of the immense wound instantly cauterizing from the heat to prevent bleeding, revealing roasted organs.
The undisputed leader of the Emerald Valley had ceased to exist. He was sacrificed like a farm animal by a group of vengeful youths.
The silence that followed the execution in the courtyard was sepulcral.
With their supreme leader dismembered in public, their "Holy Son" tortured, and their immortal Ancestors fleeing and cornered in the sky, the private army of 15,000 elite soldiers of the Valois family broke psychologically once and for all.
Organized panic turned into collective, bestial madness. Captains threw away their heavy swords and halberds. Infantrymen desperately ripped off the green dragon emblem embroideries from their uniforms, as if burning their house colors could save them. They pushed, trampled each other, and broke ranks, running in a desperate stampede toward the various exits of the valley.
But there was no exit. None at all.
The monumental Purgatory Cage created by the Shinigami, Malak, was still standing. A cyclopean and suffocating wall of shadows—dark, solid, and impenetrable—rose from the edge of the mountains to connect with the dark sky, sealing the perimeter like a gigantic coffin.
From the top of a shattered watchtower, Malak watched with his hollow eyes as the human ants crashed uselessly against the dark glass of his technique, slamming into and crushing each other in their desperation to escape.
Beside him, Lilith, the Grand Elder of the Morningstars, materialized wrapped in a searing aura. Her dark red hair floated wildly, and the true power of the Ash Phoenix ignited the air around her. Red, gold, and gray flames erupted in the palms of her hands.
The elegant, maternal woman who served tea in the Morningstar Mansion had disappeared, giving way to the sadistic and brutal commander who had survived the dirtiest wars of the south.
Lilith amplified her voice with Qi, making it resonate in the minds of the entire Morningstar army—from the Elders down to the last low-ranking disciple—and especially addressing the twenty-one Sequences on the battlefield.
"Listen to me well, you bastards!" Lilith bellowed, her voice dripping with venom and a terrifying matriarchal authority. "Don't let a single living being that breathes in this valley escape! They attacked us first! They tried to erase our blood! Let not a single wretched chicken in the stables, nor a hunting dog, nor a damn fly buzzing in their gardens be left alive!"
Lilith smiled, a manic and bloodthirsty grin that illuminated her beautiful face with an infernal glow.
"And if by some fucking miracle, or because of your disgusting incompetence, you let even one of these Valois pigs cross the shadows and escape... I swear to the Heavens that I myself will tie you by the ankles to the Star Tree and lash you until the flesh is torn from your back. HAVE I MADE MYSELF CLEAR?!"
Lilith's mandate was not met with rebellious roars or laughter. Despite having become omnipotent Semi-Dragons, the Sequences who heard that threat felt a genuine chill run down their spines.
Kael, magma sword in hand, swallowed audibly. Altair, the bearer of dead time, tensed. Even Eris, who was being carefully carried by Violeta in her arms while healing from her broken ribs, let out a low moan and clung to her sister's robe.
The terror they felt was not an oppressive or tyrannical fear; it was an absolute, deep respect rooted in blood. She was the woman who had cleaned their wounds when they were orphans, the one who had fed, raised, and forged them. She was their aunt, their surrogate mother. And they knew perfectly well, without any doubt, that Lilith always kept her beloved promises. If she said she was going to skin them alive for failing, she would have the hooks ready that very night.
No one in the clan, not even the most sadistic monsters, wanted to fall under the disappointed wrath of Grand Elder Lilith.
Driven by that respect and filial terror, all the members of the clan in the valley, including the six revered founding Elders (Marcus, Torian, Sela, Livia, Thalassa, and Asterion), drew their weapons in unison and moved as a single devouring entity.
The Morningstar Clan disciples charged en masse against the unarmed crowd. It was not a glorious battle. It was an industrial cleaning operation.
The crazed Valois infantry crowded against the wall of shadows surrounding the valley, striking the frigid barrier with bare, bloodied fists, their faces deformed by blind panic as they saw the carnage approaching from behind.
"Open the barrier! For all the gods, please!" a portly Valois captain cried out, falling to his knees, clawing uselessly at the solid darkness. "We surrender! We hand over our weapons! We were only servants following orders!"
Malak, the Shinigami, smiled slightly from the shadows above. His dark eyes shone with the mechanical cruelty of the grim reaper.
"Surrender is accepted at negotiation tables before the battle begins, scum," Malak's spectral voice replied, resonating in the captain's mind. "Now... the Morningstars only accept corpses."
In response to his master's command, the immense wall of shadows came to life. From the dark ground and the impenetrable wall, hundreds of immense black spears—formed of solidified darkness and jagged edges—erupted at lightning speed. The stakes pierced the first and second rows of crowded Valois soldiers, impaling them like insects on a board and hoisting them into the air as they bled out screaming.
Meanwhile, in a dark and opulent corner of the back gardens of the main mansion, far from the chaos and blood of the central courtyard, the most important man in eastern diplomacy was trying to flee like a coward.
The Envoy of the Purple Light Sect—a chubby man wrapped in exquisite silks now soaked in stinking sweat—ran panting through the thickets. His stubby hands trembled so much he almost dropped an exquisite teleportation talisman carved from supreme-grade imperial jade.
"Damned barbarians! Animals without honor!" the Envoy muttered frantically, weeping and looking over his shoulder at every step. "The Central Sect will hear of this heresy! They will send a holy crusade of punishment and burn your desert until it turns to crystal!"
The Envoy channeled all the Qi from his core into the stone. He activated the talisman. The imperial jade shone intensely with a warm and saving purple light, marking the spatial coordinates toward the safety of his sect... and then, the light simply flickered and died with a dull sound.
The physical space of the mountain was completely blocked, hermetically sealed by the abyssal domain of Samael Morningstar.
"Leaving so soon, fatty?"
The Envoy squealed like a pig and spun sharply, his heart about to burst in his chest.
There was no one behind him. The garden was empty. Only a thin mist, strangely dense and pearl-gray in color, crawled along the ground, chilling the grass beneath his boots.
Suddenly, out of the thick mist and less than a meter from his face, Elara's small figure materialized. The frost girl stepped out of the haze without making the slightest sound. Her huge gray eyes and vertical pupils held not a single drop of pity, rage, or sadism; they only reflected the cold and mathematical efficiency of a professional executioner carrying out a formality.
"Your diplomatic invitation to our continent has been permanently revoked," Elara whispered, her voice lacking an echo.
The Envoy opened his mouth, filling his lungs to emit a desperate cry for help, or perhaps to try to bribe her with millions of spiritual stones.
But the Fangs of Non-Existence dagger—forged from the pure bone of a primeval Void Beast—was already buried to the hilt in his skull.
The blade did not shine. It did not shed a single drop of blood. It entered smoothly through the man's right temple without even breaking the skin loudly. The translucent edge operated on a higher plane: it did not sever the brain matter; it directly, cleanly, and surgically cut the silver cord that connected the immortal soul to the physical body.
The Purple Light Envoy's fat, silk-wrapped body fell backward like a limp sack of potatoes. He was dead long before his back touched the garden floor. His expression of absolute and grotesque terror remained frozen for all eternity, his eyes wide open.
Elara withdrew the bloodless dagger, nodded to herself after checking her victim's non-existent pulse, and vanished once more into the gray haze, seeking the next target marked for death. No message would reach the sect. No witness would speak of the Semi-Dragons' weapons.
Above, floating in the valley's stratosphere, completely oblivious to the minor massacres occurring below, the Dragon King observed the panorama.
Samael Morningstar crossed his arms over his chest. His galaxy-violet and blood-colored pupils looked toward the walls, seeing how his aunt Lilith threatened the newly-forged calamities so that they wouldn't let even a fly escape. A slight, genuine, and unusual smile softened Samael's cruel features for a brief second.
Despite the title of King, Samael knew that the emotional pillar of the clan was not him, but her. Seeing Lilith unleash that maternally sadistic and authoritarian side filled his chest with a strange warmth. It was the irrefutable confirmation that, no matter how much power, dragon bloodline, or divine artifacts they obtained, the structure of the Morningstar family remained intact. His demons had rules, and those rules were dictated by the twisted but unbreakable love of his family. Samael nodded silently, giving tactical control to the Grand Elder.
Then, Samael sighed and returned his heavy gaze to the two problems floating just meters in front of him: the Great Ancestor (Stage 9) and the Second Ancestor (Stage 8), who watched Samael with paranoid terror after their brother's instantaneous death.
To everyone's surprise, the murderous fury that had been burning in Samael a moment ago had completely dissipated. In its place, the Dragon King only displayed a crushing weariness. A sovereign, thick, and cosmic boredom.
Samael tilted his head, looking at the old men's mummified skin. Exterminating these fossils who refused to accept their mortality had ceased to be a battle; now it was just an irritating administrative formality. A smudge of dirt that he had to clean before going home. His thoughts drifted. He longed to finish this farce quickly to return to the quiet comfort of his floating citadel. He wanted to sit on the rug and play with building blocks with little Celeste, listen to her laughter, and then retire to the private quarters. He longed to lie down and rest beside Seraphina, his first wife, his right hand and confidante. The love between them had not been a fleeting passion; it had been built brick by brick, step by step, from the foundations of trust to the peak of eternal loyalty. And she was waiting for him on the shared throne.
"You have destroyed the glory of my bloodline..." the Great Ancestor (Stage 9) gasped, his green eyes shining with pure hatred and animal desperation. He knew, in the depths of his shriveled heart, that he could not win in a conventional martial combat. This young, dark-haired monster possessed too many supreme laws, too many anomalies all at once. "You have burned three thousand fucking years of our noble history in an hour..."
"Your history was written with cheap ink on the scrolls of cowards," Samael replied, yawning openly without covering his mouth. "I have only brought the fire to erase the page and make room in the library."
The Great Ancestor roared like a cornered beast. His decrepit skeletal body began to glow and expand violently, radiating a lethal, completely unstable red light. The atrophied meridians beneath his mummified skin swelled until they burst the dry flesh, pumping all the spiritual power stored in centuries of seclusion.
"[Prohibited Sacred Technique: Blood Saint Immolation]."
The Great Ancestor made the final choice of losers. Realizing his inevitable defeat, he decided to burn his own immortal soul, his life essence, and the entirety of his Stage 9 Apex cultivation to generate a massive spiritual detonation—a blast equivalent to a suicide attack by a Great Saint at their peak.
The sky over the Emerald Valley turned a sickly red. The clouds swirled. The immense energy condensed rapidly in the center of the old man's chest, forming an unstable sphere that, if it detonated, would instantly erase the entire valley, destroy the floating Citadel, and vaporize each and every Morningstar below.
"DIE WITH ME, YOU DAMNED DRAGON!" the Ancestor howled, red flames consuming his face as he laughed like a madman. "IF THE VALOIS FALL, WE WILL ALL BURN IN HELL TOGETHER!"
Samael did not recoil a single millimeter in the sky. He did not conjure an immense void shield. He slowly, with an insulting and methodical calm, sheathed his immense Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse.
His violet eyes shone sinisterly, and his dark horns seemed to absorb the red light of the immolation as if they were black holes.
"Explode?" Samael tilted his head and laughed softly, a genuine laugh that resonated over the noise of the impending apocalypse. "Poor, stupid mortals. Before the Absolute Laws of the Primordial Void, unstable energy does not explode. It is simply... eaten."
The Dragon King relaxedly extended his bare right hand toward the immense red sphere that was milliseconds away from detonating and expanding. The very fabric of space around the Ancestor's body distorted severely, folding in on itself like a blanket crumpled by a giant hand.
"[Supreme Void Law: Absolute Void Slash]."
There was no deafening explosion. There was no epic shockwave. There was no flash of light to blind mortals.
The immense void simply opened its conceptual jaws and swallowed the fire. It devoured the red light, the sound of the thermal expansion, the agonizing soul, and the last desperation of the Valois Patriarch. The linear slash did not block the attack; it literally "erased" the area of space where the detonation was occurring, taking with it the physical and spiritual matter of the Ancestor.
It was exactly like snuffing out a small candle flame by pressing it with your thumb and forefinger. One second, the apocalypse was roaring; the next, the most absolute nothingness reigned. The Peak Saint Grade immolation was cowardly erased from the records of existence.
The sky cleared and returned to the pale blue of evening.
Samael was left floating alone.
The Second Ancestor (Stage 8), who had witnessed how the final sacred sacrifice of his leader—the master stroke designed to take his enemies down with him—was "erased" as if it were a cheap illusion, lost the last fragments of his sanity.
Terror seized his mind. He spun around abruptly in the air and fled, flying frantically toward the frigid north, burning the little life blood he had left to gain supersonic speed.
"You're a fucking monster! That's cheating! You're a heresy against the Heavens!" the old man screamed as his figure was lost on the distant horizon.
Samael didn't even bother to move to chase him. Boredom clouded his senses. He snapped the fingers of his left hand and looked toward his waist, where the black scabbard rested.
"Odachi," Samael murmured, giving it a simple and plain order. "Hunt the pig. Bring me his soul."
Samael unsheathed the heavy sword and casually tossed it into the air, like someone throwing a piece of bread to ducks.
The immense Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse did not fall to the ground due to gravity. Mid-air, the weapon straightened itself, defying all laws of inertia. It spun on its dark axis, pointing north, and shot off like a transcontinental ballistic missile of black metal, instantaneously breaking the sound barrier with a piercing and deafening sonic howl.
The weapon blindly pursued the energy signature of the fleeing Second Ancestor. It crossed three kilometers of airspace in just two seconds.
SHUNK!
The thick blade of black metal and magma pierced the fleeing Ancestor's back and chest with surgical brutality, skewering him in mid-air and stopping his flight dead.
The old man didn't have time to scream. He dried up, literally, instantly. His skin and muscles shrank until they became mummified dust. All his precious century-old blood, all his immense Stage 8 Saint Qi reserve, and his own fragmented soul were violently sucked and absorbed by the pores of the cursed blade in a single blink, leaving only empty robes that fell harmlessly onto the distant forest.
Satiated and vibrating with terrifying power, the Odachi turned around and flew back to Samael's hand at an even greater speed.
When the Sovereign caught the hilt, he felt that the steel was boiling. The weapon vibrated and writhed violently between his fingers, as if it were a wild, dark, and colossal beast trying to break the bars of its own metal cage.
Before his eyes, the immense and wide black blade began to crack loudly. An intricate network of crimson red light and magma zips ran across the metal in all directions. Finally, with a sound of breaking glass, the opaque outer layer of alloy corresponding to the "Peak Heaven Grade" peeled off and fell like scabs of dead skin floating toward the ground.
What was revealed beneath that shell was a metallurgical abomination of sublime beauty.
The new metal of the blade was a deep, living Blood Red, fused at the atomic level with a pure Void Black. The damask pattern on the blade was not static; the dark veins seemed to move subtly, flowing like liquid beneath the sharpened surface.
But the true anatomical aberration occurred at the crossguard, right where the long blade met the obsidian hilt. The metal guard opened with a wet sound. An immense eye was revealed. A real, organic, throbbing, and biological eye, with a black sclera and an immense, hypnotic golden pupil slit vertically—identical to that of an abyssal dragon.
The weapon's eye blinked slowly. Its gaze fixed intently on Samael's imperturbable face.
The System's gold and crimson alerts exploded on the Dragon King's retina.
[DING! EVOLUTION SYSTEM: WEAPON METAMORPHOSIS ALERT DETECTED.]
[Critical Condition Met:] Drink the life blood, concentrated Qi, and intact soul of 3 High Saints and 1 Great Saint in less than an hour.
[Rank Evolution:] From Peak Heaven Grade ---> to ---> [SAINT GRADE (AWAKENED SPIRIT)].
[Registered Name:] Kurohime: The Black Princess / The Widow of the Void.
[New Superior Attribute:] Predatory Will. (The weapon has ceased to be an inert object. It possesses basic parasitic consciousness. It can attack autonomously, defend its master by instinct, and suffers from an insatiable bloodlust. Passively increases cutting and penetration power by 200% against any enemy possessing attributes of divinity, light, or holiness).
Instead of a metallic noise, the sword sent a dense and heavy telepathic pulse straight to Samael's mind and soul. The "voice" of Kurohime in his head sounded incomprehensible, ancient, and abyssal, like stones grinding at the bottom of an ocean of blood, but the Sovereign clearly understood the concept:
«Hunger. Satiated. Por ahora. Maestro.»
The sword emitted a gigantic wave of murderous intent, a pulse of pure psychic terror that radiated in all directions.
But that invisible pulse did not travel through the valley. It did not alert the Saint Kings of the central continent, nor did it make the elders of other sects in the mortal world tremble. That pulse resonated at a much more fundamental level; it traveled along Samael's deep and ancient karmic connections, penetrating into the most hidden and walled-off confines of spiritual existence itself.
The Secret at the Root of the Soul
At that precise and microscopic instant of time, in a place that did not exist on any astrological, physical, or spiritual map conceived by the human or divine mind, an impossible and forbidden event was taking place.
Within the inscrutable, silent, and boundless depths of Samael's primal soul—in a metaphysical chamber sealed so hermetically beneath layers of lethargy and cosmic ignorance that neither the Dragon King himself nor the all-powerful and analytical Assistance System knew of its existence—a palace materialized.
It was not a building of marble or stone. It was a vast tea room sculpted from the very fabric of unreality, floating in the middle of the infinite void of his Spiritual Root. In that room, dozens of blurry figures, silent shadows, and faceless minor deities wandered in the shadows, trembling at the mere fact of existing in that place.
And in the center of the tea room, presiding over reality, were two absolute presences.
The first was a small and slender figure floating with a grace that defied gravity and logic. Her hair was extraordinary: an immense and silky mantle of pure, immaculate white, so bright that it seemed woven directly with the threads of light from the universe's first dawn. On her head, majestic and intricate pearl-colored horns intertwined to form a divine and imposing crown. From her back unfolded colossal wings of a blinding purity, feathers of solid energy that did not belong to the angelic realm, but to that of the primordial gods who whispered the first laws of physics.
However, her beautiful face was completely incomprehensible, blurred behind a veil of energy. Her entire body looked semi-transparent, slightly out of phase, like an echo of another time projected onto water.
Facing her, seated at a table forged from trapped nebulae, was the second figure.
Unlike the blinding purity of the winged woman, this second deity was even more incomprehensible and terrifying. She did not possess a fixed or defined humanoid form. She was a completely blurry, chaotic, and distorted silhouette in absolute black and non-existent colors. Trying to look at her directly caused the mortal mind to tear and bleed. Her mere existence there seemed to be a direct, flagrant, and unpardonable violation of all Universal Laws—a gigantic walking heresy, an error that reality tried to correct unsuccessfully, causing the space and time around her to "glitch," flicker, and constantly deform with static noise.
The two deities were immersed in a deep and ancient discussion. The tone between them was not that of close friends having afternoon tea; it was dense, full of millennial reproaches, frustrations accumulated over eons of cosmic war, and the weight of strategies spanning millions of reincarnations.
Suddenly, in the middle of an argument from the winged, white-haired woman—the pulse.
The violent and savage telepathic echo of murderous intent emitted by Kurohime upon awakening her Holy Spirit pierced the veil between the physical world and the Root of the Soul.
The two immortal figures fell silent. Their cups, filled with liquids containing essences of dead galaxies, stopped midway to their lips.
Both deities, despite their immense and diametrically opposed natures, had felt the collapse and awakening in the consciousness of the man who harbored their existence. The karmic, matrimonial, and eternal bond that united them to that broken soul transcended death, oblivion, and known dimensions.
A heavy and dense silence fell over the palace hidden in the soul. The immense winged deity tilted her incomprehensible face. The distorted anomaly stopped vibrating.
Around them, the dozens of shadows and figures of minor servants froze in terror at the abrupt silence of their mistresses. One of the shadow figures approached trembling, bowing deeply.
"Oh, Majesties..." the shadow murmured, its voice terrified. "Has... has something occurred in the Wheel of Destiny? The Abyss alerts...?"
The woman of pure white hair, without looking at the servant and keeping her attention centered on the resonance she had just felt in Samael's soul, raised a hand to impose absolute silence.
"Nothing wrong has occurred..." the winged woman replied, her voice sounding like a melody of crystal bells, sweet but immensely heavy. She tilted her head slightly, and although her face was blurry, it was evident to all that an immense and sadistic smile had just been drawn on her incomprehensible lips.
Across from her, the distorted and forbidden silhouette emitted a sound that seemed like a raspy laugh filtered through thousands of layers of static, its chaotic form twisting with dark glee.
"A new toy has awakened," the heresy said, her voice translating directly into pure and menacing meaning. "Much faster than calculated in this iteration of the timeline."
"Those are the echoes of his hunger, sister..." the white figure whispered, her enormous wings slowly closing with pleasure. "Neither the fucking False Heaven, nor the cowardly Greater Destiny, nor the Crystal Monarchs will stop us. Not now, nor ever again. He has begun to sharpen his fangs."
The two women continued smiling in the silence of their self-imposed prison. The aura they radiated in that moment was so lethal, so charged with a predatory intent toward the outer cosmos, that it made every one of the minor souls present in the palace tremble with panic and fall to their knees, internally imploring that neither of these two monarchs decide to hunt them. Both, in their different domains, were the apex of calamity, and now they knew that the man they were waiting for was returning to his old and violent habits.
"We will cover you from this side of the board, husband..." thought the white-horned woman, caressing the void. "Keep devouring the stars. Keep strengthening yourself. We will be waiting for you here, hidden in the nothingness, until your crown blooms again."
The End of the Valois Extinction
Back in the physical world.
Samael Morningstar smiled coldly upon hearing the mental echoes in the depths of his being, though he attributed it solely to the awakening of his new sword. He gently caressed the hilt with his thumb, right over the eyelid of the biological golden eye. The Saint Grade sword purred like a big cat, vibrating happily in its master's hand.
"Good job, Kurohime," the Dragon King murmured.
The sun finally began to set over the southern mountains. The majestic Emerald Valley no longer boasted its beautiful imperial green. The land, the hanging gardens, and the remains of the training courtyards were completely stained a deep, dense, and dark blood-red color.
The silence in the immense valley was absolute, broken only by the crackling of the embers from the fires started by the Flames of Ruin and Purgatory.
Not a single Valois man, woman, soldier, or infant remained alive to tell the story. Fifteen thousand elite soldiers, two dozen minor elders, three immortal Sect Ancestors, and a powerful Saint Realm Patriarch. All, without exception, had been massacred, hunted, impaled, rotted, and erased from the face of the earth in less than an hour of siege. The stately mansions were smoking ruins and mass graves.
All the incalculable spiritual, commercial, and military wealth accumulated over three centuries by the House of Valois was now nothing more than legitimate war booty for the newly-born dragons of the sand.
In the center of the immense and destroyed courtyard, Kael sat heavily on a pile of marble rubble from a demolished statue. With slow and methodical movements, he used a torn piece of the late Valerius's fine golden ceremonial cape to clean the ash from the immense blade of the Magma Fang. He was covered in blood, burnt entrails, and dust from his reddish hair to his boots, but his chest rose and fell rhythmically as he laughed softly to himself, intoxicated by the dopamine of his first great massacre.
A few meters away, Violeta was kneeling on the ground, using the immense and calculating cold of her Law Grade frost to firmly bandage and lower the painful swelling of her sister Eris's broken ribs. Eris hissed in pain at every touch, but kept her Cataclysm Spear propped on her shoulder, refusing to show weakness.
Altair wandered silently like a millennial gravedigger among the mountains of corpses, inhaling deeply. He was absorbing the thick residual Qi and the immense energy of death and entropy that saturated the valley, his gray and cracked skin glowing slightly with dark and strongly renewed power.
Samael descended calmly from the heavens and landed heavily among his vanguard. The moment his boots touched the bloodstained ground, the colossal pressure of his Saint Realm aura and the dark manifestations of his Primordial Dragon transformation gradually faded. He retracted the horns from his forehead and hid the deep crimson rings of his eyes, returning to his impeccable and inscrutable human form.
Samael scanned the faces of his chosen family. Kael, Violeta, Eris, Altair, Draven, Cedric... All of them were wounded to varying degrees. Their clothes were shredded, their faces dirty with soot, and they were spiritually exhausted, their Qi reserves nearly emptied after the first clash with Saint Realm levels.
But their eyes... the eyes of the twenty-one youths who looked at him with reverence were no longer the eyes of orphans fighting to survive another cold day. They had the shine, the hardness, and the absolute cruelty of true conquering kings. They had crossed the abyss.
"Collect and empty every fucking spatial ring, amulet, and treasury you find in these ruins," Samael ordered his troops, his calm voice cutting through the silence of the dead valley. "Claim the mountains of minerals. Everything belongs to the Morningstar treasury. Once that is done... burn every damn corpse. Reduce them to white ash. I don't want them to leave a trace; I don't want bodies for the sects to perform Qi autopsies or trace their DNA. Erase them from the cycle."
Samael turned slowly, directing his cold gaze toward the distant north, beyond the impenetrable and immense wall of dark shadows maintained by Malak. Beyond the protection of the clouds and the snowy mountains, where he knew, with absolute cosmic certainty, that the cowardly spies of the Cryons, the treacherous emissaries of the Purple Light Sect, and the trackers of distant dynasties had been watching all the carnage, trembling with visual talismans in their hands.
"And when you finish incinerating the trash," the Dragon King ordered, raising the immense red and black blade of Kurohime, which blinked with its reptilian eye toward the ruins, "plant the colossal Banner of the Sun-Devouring Dragon on the last and highest tower left standing of this damned mansion. Let every bastard of the central continent see the flag waving and perfectly understand what has just been born today in the south."
(End of Chapter 132)