Chapter 137: A Feast for Crows – The Ash Librarian (Part 2)
Barely a chronological hour after that intimate and tender moment, the atmosphere and heavy air in the immense Inner Courtyard of the Floating Citadel was deeply funereal, strict, and martially solemn.
Lined up and in an "at ease" formation, the 21 Elite Sequences of the Morningstar Clan were gathered in front of the gigantic, closed double doors of oak and gold of the ancient Palace of Primordial Heritage. The death squad, composed of the young heirs, assassins, and commanders (Cedric, Kael, Eris, Violeta, Draven, Lirael, Joren, Bren, Altair, Tamsin...), showed no arrogant smiles today. There was no internal mocking over enemy casualties, no loud boasting of their impressive achievements in the basement slaughterhouse.
Physically, despite being victorious, they looked absolutely ghastly, terrible, and biologically torn apart. Their mortal bodies, though genetically altered and healed with high-grade pills, were deeply shattered on a structural level. Literally cracked, as if they were delicate vessels of fine porcelain that had been forced to contain the liquid fire of the sun. Deep bleeding fissures and painful glowing scars furrowed their scaly skin, exuding and bleeding pale threads of light and uncontrolled Qi through biological seams, being totally and painfully incapable of safely containing and channeling the immense, monstrous, and divine latent power of Half-Saints and hybrid Primordial Dragon transformations that they had forced, burned, and pushed beyond all healthy human limits during the intense, bloody, and exhausting hours of the war of extermination, entropy, gravity, and conceptual poisoning.
Samael Morningstar walked with heavy steps and stopped a few meters in front of them. With the new crown resting invisible on his brow and his aura retracted to the absolute minimum so as not to crush them with the King's gravity, he didn't look at them with the demanding eyes of a cruel general inspecting his selfless and expendable cannon fodder; he looked at them with the unwavering, worried, and strict severity of a father hardened by a thousand wars who finds himself in the terrible obligation of sending his children deep into the darkness of a furnace so they learn by force not to burn themselves in the future.
"You have served me well today. You have given me a bloody, legendary, and unquestionable victory over the imperial scum..." Samael said, his deep and paternal voice echoing in the silent, cold courtyard, looking them each in the eye. "But the damned and unacceptable price you have paid for abusing power has been the limit of your humanity."
Samael crossed his arms over his broad, armored chest, his gaze darkening upon seeing the light of Qi leaking painfully from the cracks in Violeta's neck and Kael's trembling fists. "If we were to march directly to the final siege today, you would be left halfway. And not because the enemy has unbreakable shields or sharper swords, but because your own unstable, boiling beast blood would tear you apart, devour your sanity, and burn your meridians until you became stupid ash long before you even stepped on the stairs of their central mountain. You are dull weapons about to break under the sheer weight of the steel."
Samael took an ancient, faceted, heavy, and glowing stone from his tunic and walked slowly toward the ancient stone command console anchored in front of the palace. With a sharp motion, he perfectly placed and slotted the coveted and powerful [Minor World Stone] into the main slot of the Control Array of the vast and immense Underground Tempering Chamber connected to the Palace's core. The millennial, complex, and arcane mechanism of golden and crystal runic gears turned with a dull, deep, and eerie hum. The air and time itself inside the immense building shrank, visibly distorted, and fractured with a muffled noise.
The holographic sign of the Citadel's System flashed fiery red above the lintel of the doors: [EXTREME TRAINING SYSTEM: TIME DILATION AND SPIRITUAL COMPRESSION ACTIVATED]. [Physical/Temporal Ratio Set:] 1 DAY in the Outside World = 10 Agonizing DAYS of Increased Gravity in the Inner Chamber.
The immense, heavy double doors of oak and gold of the palace slowly opened, groaning on their hinges, revealing a dark, dense, heavy, and suffocating inner abyss filled with a furious golden and red mist that oppressed the lungs just by looking at it. It was not a healing hot spring spa for wounded heroes; it was a gravitational slaughterhouse, a chamber of horrors designed solely and exclusively to fracture the soul and forge pure diamonds under a hundred times the earth's gravity, forcing bodies to assimilate bloodlines or die trying, crushed against the floor.
"All of you, enter right now, without looking back," Samael ordered sharply, pointing to the immense darkness inside. There was no comfort in his tone. "The citadel's journey through the air to the vast mountain range and headquarters of the Purple Light Sect will take us at void cruising speed exactly one entire week of real-world time. That means, under the damned compression of the Minor World Stone, you will spend approximately seventy agonizing, uninterrupted full days inside there, alone with your demons and under a hundred Gs of crushing gravity."
Samael walked over to the formation and stopped gently in front of Elara (Sequence 21, the youngest, most fragile, and inexperienced assassin of the elite group, whose thin legs visibly trembled from the fatigue and Qi exhaustion consuming her inside). The Patriarch, lowering his enormous height, raised his gloved right hand and rested it with surprisingly gentle and heavy firmness on the girl's small, hunched shoulder, transmitting a paternal and protective warmth that contrasted with his expressionless face.
"Do not dare to walk out that door, and I will not allow you to falter, until each and every one of your biological cracks and light leaks have closed, scarred, and perfectly sealed like cold-forged steel, Elara," Samael said, looking directly into her frightened but resolute eyes. "Do not come out and do not ask for mercy until your minds and bodies absolutely and permanently dominate, subjugate, and chain the damned beastly blood dragon roaring inside your bellies. Either you walk out of that door as true, divine generals worthy of commanding my legions in the north, or you simply do not come out alive and leave your crushed corpses inside as fertilizer."
Violeta Morningstar, the frigid and lethal spatial assassin and second-in-command, stepped half a pace forward. She was covered in her own frozen blood on her stomach from a counterattack she had received, but stoically ignoring the intense pain of splintered ribs, she nodded sharply. Her beautiful, cold, mismatched eyes brimmed with a deep, eerie, and chillingly freezing murderous determination. "We will not fail you, Boss. I swear it on my core. And when the tempering doors open and we emerge from this darkness in seven days, Patriarch... the edge of our weapons will make all the proud masters of the Sect on their damned mountain kneel and beg for the mercy that we did not have today and will never have."
Samael nodded rigidly, a flash of immense pride burning hidden behind the wall of his dark eyes. One by one, in perfect and martial sepulchral silence, the twenty-one young heirs—limping from physical wounds, bleeding from the eyes, or leaning iron-willed on the shoulders of their brothers-in-arms, without complaining or shedding a single tear of weakness—crossed the grand and imposing threshold. They ventured inside, completely disappearing into the turbulent, thick, dense, and gravitationally crushing sea of golden and red mist within.
The heavy, thick, and immense doors brutally closed behind them, locking with an enormous, definitive mechanical BOOM that echoed in the empty courtyard like a hammer falling on an anvil dictating a verdict from hell and sealing their biological fates.
With his heirs, children, and lethal swords secured and locked in the relentless divine forging chamber to heal, rank up, and assimilate their bloodlines, and with the immense, macabre, and systematic forging of the new elite biomechanical army of 30,000 immortal puppets in full, furious operational development under the soulless, sadistic, and hyper-efficient logistical engineering of the ruthless deity Vexia in the industrial sublevels, Samael felt that the pieces of the continental chessboard were finally aligning perfectly in his favor.
But one more step was missing. The biggest one. The one that would turn the southern house into a true, unreachable terror, into a cosmic monster that no one on the immense continent could defend against, simply because they wouldn't be able to see it coming.
Samael left the Inner Courtyard, walked in solitude, and descended a long secret spiral staircase of obsidian glass, making his way slowly and deliberately until he reached the extreme underground vaults, finally entering the protective cavern of the geo-spiritual core of the imposing citadel: The chamber of The Star Tree.
The immensely large and ancient mystical tree of crystal and glowing light, which for long, desperate years of exile had acted as the sole source of light energy, vital magical fuel, and passive shield that had precariously maintained, fed, and hidden the impoverished clan from the inclemencies of the Bone Desert, now behaved and vibrated in a highly strange, anxious, and unstable manner.
Buried in its millennial silver sap taproots, the legendary World Tree Seed (the mythical supreme treasure, dormant and sleeping, that Samael had ripped out and stolen after the violent and successful initial massacre and extirpation of the ancient, arrogant Valois Blood Family in the south) had finally finished its lethargic, slow, and agonizing period of silent rooting and absorption of nutrients and corpses, and had managed to germinate and open completely in the depths of the dark earth.
Samael walked toward the enormous trunk, feeling the ground vibrate with contained energy, and looked at the illuminated crystalline bark. "You have slept long enough as an underground slave. The time has come for you to rise, devour the stars, and walk with the gods," whispered the Sovereign, his voice a deep and ancient echo, almost a primordial incantation resonating in the immense underground chamber, loaded with the authority of the crown on his brow.
Samael extended his enormous armored arm and firmly placed the immense bare palm of his gloved right hand directly, open and flat, onto the rough, glowing, and harsh bark of the sacred tree, unleashing a massive injection of Void Dragon Qi and activating the seed.
THUMP!
The sound was neither geological nor acoustic. It was not a vulgar, earthly tremor that shook the dust of the vaults. It was a heartbeat. A cosmic biological and spiritual pulse. An immense, overwhelming, warm, and sweeping expansive shockwave of blinding, living, liquid emerald light, vibrant and speckled with shining gold, that erupted from the tree's core and physically swept the cavern's foundations, rising through the towers, piercing the obsidian walls, and engulfing each and every corner, building, and basement of the immense Floating Citadel in a microsecond.
Beneath his feet, in the bedrock, the wide, millennial, long, and white translucent crystalline roots of the old Star Tree began to convulse, swell, and mutate aggressively and rapidly. They ceased to be conventional mystical structures. They lost their pale silver luminosity. They widened, darkened deeply, and became dense, heavy, rough, and infinite, like immense, thick pillars of living wood literally made and hand-sculpted from the dark, unfathomable matter of deep outer space, profusely veined and pierced by glowing spirals and rivers of entire purple galaxies and golden stardust flowing through their cosmic sap.
These immense new roots grew violently, uncontrollably, and frantically in a span of five seconds, spreading like immense cosmic space-wood serpents, relentlessly piercing, crunching, and chewing through the extremely hard bedrock of the citadel's immense inverted obsidian mountain. They weren't growing to structurally split or destroy the great floating island from the center; they were taking hold. They were magically weaving, sewing, armoring, gripping, embracing, and welding the immense mountain and all its towers to turn the immense mass of dead stone of the city into a powerful organic, unbreakable, and manageable biological warship.
The System's golden notification panel exploded before Samael's retina.
[IMPERIAL SYSTEM: FUSION OF DIVINE FLORA AND COSMIC BLOODLINE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED][New Supreme Organism Identified:] Star Tree of the World Tree. [Current Stage of Organic Evolution:] Cosmic Young Sprout. [New Global and Tactical Effects Unlocked for the Imperial Capital:][Cosmic Dimensional Roots (Infinite Void Energy):] The colossal infrastructure of the Floating Citadel and all its defense arrays no longer require, consume, or depend on scarce, limiting, and expensive physical fuel (enormous mountains of vulgar spirit stones or thousands of valuable beast cores). The immense, expansive roots of the tree now pierce the veil of physical reality and drink Qi, dark matter, and inexhaustible energy directly from the immense, cold outer cosmic Void to perpetually sustain, heat, and fly the great city. [Mystic Law Fruits (The Tree of Gods):] Once exactly every 10 years (measured inexorably by the closed realm's own modified and independent internal time), the Star Tree will bloom, bleed golden sap, and give birth, without exception, to a single, supreme fleshy fruit. Whoever consumes and integrates it into their soul will automatically and instinctively absorb an immense, powerful fragment of a random Great Universal Law (time, fire, gravity, death...), granting the chosen loyal servant or family member a direct shortcut, free of bottlenecks, tribulations, or risks, to the apex of the immortal Great Saints' power, creating gods on demand. [Maximum Strategic Active Skill:][Void Mantle].
[Details of the Void Mantle (Supreme Cosmic and Spatial Stealth):] Upon the skill's activation by the King, an enormous, unbreakable dome of dense, translucent darkness (mimicking a patch of eternal starless night) hermetically envelops the entire Citadel and its fleets. The immense, colossal floating walled island and all its occupants do not simply become "invisible" (which is a crude, mundane trick of optical refraction and light illusion that any mediocre second-rate Saint can see or dispel with thermal detection or sensitive spiritual Qi).
No. The island, mathematically and under the heavy, tyrannical concepts of the Void, becomes, for all intents and purposes, totally non-existent and immeasurable to the laws, physics, tracking, and magic of the surrounding material world. The Mantle grants large-scale intangibility to the entire city and bestows the divine, sacrilegious, and passive state of being [Completely Undetectable to Fate and Causality].
Neither the most complex imperial tracking arrays, nor blind oracles or diviners reading stars or entrails, nor the central empire's powerful and expensive networks of immense magical satellites with all-seeing eyes, nor even the piercing, omniscient, and divine naked eye of the immortal Great Saint Kings and Sovereign Emperors themselves from the center of the continent, who can scrutinize realms a thousand kilometers away, will be able to physically detect, karmically track, magically see, or even intuit the slightest trace or disturbance in the air breezes generated by the immense, noisy, and gigantic fortress-city flying menacingly and blotting out the sun above their own, unprotected and vulnerable heads. It turns, for all intents and utilities in the field of continental war, the newborn, gigantic 3-million-ton Morningstar empire into a damned, unreachable, invisible, indestructible, and undetectable armed ghost in the skies. And with the capability to perform short, sharp spatial jumps in the atmosphere.
Samael took a deep breath in the darkness. With his mind calmed and expanded to absurd proportions by the Crown of the Primordial Sovereign bound and humming on his brow, he closed his eyes and felt with perfect clarity, sharpness, and reach how the old tree's immense, warm, archaic slumbering consciousness connected biologically and instantly with the nerves of his own crown, like millions of fine wires linking to his brain. Samael opened his eyes in the cavern and smiled in the shadows. He was no longer ruling from a throne in a separate room; suddenly, the Patriarch felt the city's temperature, the creaking of the steel, the footstep of every biomechanical soldier, and the heartbeat of the core as if they were his own internal organs. The immense, lethal floating citadel was no longer just an object, it wasn't a ship or a jumble of stones; it had marvelously become an immense, complex living being interconnected with him. And he, without any dispute, had become its mind, its owner, and its burning, vengeful, beating black heart.
At dawn the next day, with the golden first lights of morning brushing the clouds and painting the Desert of Bones a bright blood red, Samael Morningstar stood on the enormous, polished obsidian bow of the immense Floating Citadel's main, frontal command dais, where the walls and imposing cannons fell into a thousands-of-meters abyss over the vast nothingness.
Vexia stood tall to his left. As always, the goddess marshal of logistics maintained an immaculate, perfect, severe, and strict Victorian military posture, with her gloved hands clasped behind her back and not a single gray hair out of her tight bun. In her free hand, methodically analyzing data streams at a speed that would burn a computer's circuits, she held an immense matrix report and a bright, thick silver runic ledger, reading and reporting to her Sovereign with her characteristic gloomy, robotic, cultured, monotonous, and freezing voice, totally devoid of empathy or emotions.
"My Sovereign and Master. The initial batch, and the respective experimental military alpha test, of the first 30,000 organic prisoner-of-war subjects of the northern army have been totally, painfully, and successfully processed on a large scale and baptized under fire through my personal Biomechanical Genesis program and mandatory mass immersion in the Infernal Instruction Array," Vexia reported, coldly adjusting the bridge of her elegant, austere glass spectacles, without flinching or hesitating a millisecond in the relentless precision of her terrible, chilling, calculating logistical statistics. "I am exceedingly proud to report to you, my Lord, that I have calibrated the immense underground smelting furnaces and adjusted the pain purge so absolutely, millimeter-perfectly, that my impeccable rate of biological mortality failures and accidents during the prolonged, agonizing, stressful, and molten process of injecting stellar steel directly into the living bloodstream, ribcage, spine, and tendons, was exactly, and with immeasurable pride, 0.00%. A perfect mathematical efficiency in asset retention, Lord. Absolutely no valuable and necessary organic puppet burst uselessly in the painful metamorphosis procedure, maximizing the spoils. In addition to assured loyalty, the harsh, deep cellular integration of the unstable, incredibly hot stellar and glacial metal stolen directly from the smoking remains and immense shattered shield batteries of the Leviathan Battleship, surprisingly reached an optimal, impressive integration rate into their mutated muscles of 40%. That astoundingly solidifies and reinforces their blunt resistance. They will be true cyborgs, immortal war machines and meat grinders operating on the plane of cold. And by the authority of my calculations, the biomechanical swarm will be functional, in elite purge mode, and ruthlessly ready for frontal combat deployment and massive strategic assault and pillage the very same day you decide and order us to land mercilessly and step upon their sacred temple and destiny."
Samael nodded without looking away from the infinite horizon, a shadow of satisfaction crossing his hard, carved face. "Magnificent and impeccable progress and structural logistics report, Marshal Vexia," Samael praised, feeling the immense military weight added to his back, knowing that behind him, hidden in the hold, rested 30,000 soulless, elite, inscrutable robotic beasts ready to devastate realms under the northern sun. "Keep adjusting, experimenting, and refining that army of Praetorians until our landing and arrival to wipe the continent's peak off the map. Spare no pain or steel in their training and forging if you need to improve them."
Samael stared into the abyss that opened beneath his immense obsidian boots. Down there, in the immensity, hanging like a dense forest suspended over the sky and nothingness, the monstrous, glowing, dark stellar weave of immense roots that clung like thick organic and cosmic spiky veins beneath the flat, rocky underside of the Floating Citadel—the vital base and main natural propulsion infrastructure of the titanic and majestic Star Tree of the World Tree—glowed, awakened, shuddered rhythmically, and pulsed deeply like the slow, methodical, invincible black heart of a cosmic colossus. It was bathed in a faint, powerful, supernatural, and magical dark violet and golden light, ready, hungry, and loaded with immeasurable pressure, tension, and energetic power, brimming with the infinite Qi masterfully stolen directly from the cold void to begin breaking inertia, and waiting to haughtily, proudly, and spectacularly defy all the damned restrictive laws of mundane, atmospheric, and gravitational gravity at the sole, absolute commands of its creator.
Samael, with a tactical blink of the Imperial System in his inscrutable retina, summoned the essential tactical treasure into the open palm of his hand. Under the first bright rays of the dawn sun peeking timidly over the golden horizon, he decisively drew and raised the millennial, intricate relic: the [Dragon Bone Compass]. The dark crystal vibrated powerfully and immediately, as if drawn by karmic wrath. Its ancient, pale, skeletal spiritual needle, bathed in runes and forgotten blood from destroyed stellar empires, became totally erratic; it shook frantically, hysterically, and imperatively for a couple of tense seconds searching for the largest agglomeration of enemy Qi, calculating the sweetest and farthest route of revenge, before stopping magically and unhesitatingly with a loud, sharp click, fixing and locking itself sharply, dryly, violently, and perfectly in a completely rectilinear, unquestionable, and unbreakable direction. It pointed relentlessly and directly toward the immensity of the dangerous, cold Northwest.
Samael raised his hand. "Activate Void Mantle."
The Star Tree of the World responded. A dome of translucent darkness enveloped the citadel. From the outside, the immense floating island simply... disappeared. It didn't become invisible (that's a trick of light). It became non-existent to the material world. [Effect Activated: Undetectable to Fate]. Neither oracles, nor magical satellites, nor the eyes of Emperors could see them. They were a ghost in the sky.
Seraphina walked out onto the balcony, with the Star Render at her waist and the ice crown on her brow. She stood next to him, looking at the sea of gray clouds they were now passing through like specters. "Where are we going, my love?" she asked, though her eyes shone with the promise of violence.
Samael pointed to the distant horizon, where the clouds were tinted a sickly violet. "To kill the past," the Sovereign said. "To the Purple Light Sect."
He clenched his fist on the railing. "They think they are safe on their mountain. They think the desert holds us back. They don't know that death is already flying over their heads." He looked at Seraphina. "I want no surrenders, Seraphina. I want their mountain to be flat when we are done. No one will know what hit them until it is too late."
The Morningstar Citadel, now invisible and silent as death itself, accelerated toward the Northwest, leaving the desert behind to claim its revenge.