Chapter 138: The Anvil of Dead Gods (Part 1)
The sound of the immense, heavy, colossal double doors of oak and gold closing behind them was not a simple metallic clang, nor the mechanical click of a giant lock. It was the cosmic, unappealable, definitive sound of a death sentence handed down by the universe itself.
The interior of the Palace of Primordial Heritage was not a training room with reinforced walls, nor a sacred dojo for martial meditation. It was, in every physical and ontological sense of the word, an isolated pocket dimension—a purgatory designed millennia ago by dead gods solely and exclusively to forge monsters or grind the weak into stardust.
There was no ceiling. Upward, there only stretched an oppressive, dense, suffocating golden and reddish mist that swirled in infinite, violent gravitational spirals, intermittently illuminated by cyclopean floating runes that shone with an ancient, ruthless light far older than the desert sun itself. The floor beneath their boots was not made of stone or metal, but of a smooth, translucent, unfathomable material, akin to an ocean of water eternally frozen in time. It did not reflect their current human faces, but rather the monstrous, twisted, distorted versions of their own evolving souls: faceless shadows, black fire dragons devouring the world, void storms, and beasts made of boiling blood.
The twenty-one young heirs—the fearsome 21 Sequences of the Morningstar Clan—stood absolutely motionless the moment they crossed the threshold.
The ambient pressure of the concentrated Qi inside defied mammalian biology. It was not the hostile, focused pressure of an enemy trying to crush them; it was the raw, blind, indifferent pressure of pure existence.
Breathing that air saturated with primordial energy felt exactly like trying to inhale boiling liquid mercury directly into the lungs. The weight on their shoulders was not that of heavy iron armor; it was a gravitational anchor tied directly to every single red blood cell in their bodies. Every step forward cost the same physical energy and muscle tearing as running a marathon with a mountain strapped to one's back. Their heart valves beat with agonizing effort, groaning in their chests, trying to pump blood through veins that felt crushed by space itself.
Kael Morningstar (Sequence 1) was the first to break the sepulchral silence, forcing his muscles not to yield under the immensity of the hundred Gs of gravity.
His broad, muscular torso was completely bare, but it was not a pleasant sight. It was horribly furrowed and covered by an intricate map of deep, open cracks in his flesh and scales—fissures that glowed intensely from within with the glare of lava and sickly golden light. They were the living, painful, oozing scars of having forced his fledgling Dragon bloodline far beyond the safe limit of a mortal body in the recent exterior massacre against the Judges.
"The Boss wasn't joking about a single damned word," Kael grunted, his voice hoarse and raspy from the effort. He spat a thick clot of black, coagulated blood onto the crystal floor, which hissed corrosively upon touching the surface. "This damned room weighs a hundred times more than the gravity of the entire planet. My own bones are trying to punch downward through my muscles."
Violeta (Sequence 2), barely floating a few scant centimeters off the floor, propelled by her spatial power, looked around with her expressionless, lethal, mismatched eyes. Her skin was so alarmingly pale it had become almost translucent, revealing a complex, dangerous network of electric blue ice veins throbbing on the verge of bursting beneath her epidermis.
"This is not simple physical gravity, Kael. It is purely conceptual pressure," she dictated, her voice sounding chillingly identical to the sound of fine glass breaking under a boot. "In here, time does not flow with the speed of the wind; it drags itself like a mutilated corpse. The temporal distortion is so massive that the brain cannot process it correctly. Seventy days locked in here... are going to psychologically feel like seventy dark, eternal years of uninterrupted torture if we do not stabilize our cores immediately. We are going to go mad before we heal."
Cedric (Sequence 4) took a single, deliberate, titanic step forward.
THUD!
The sound of his boot impacting the crystal floor was dull, immensely heavy, and telluric. Cedric no longer looked like a human being, and his outer anatomy had permanently renounced the weakness of mortal flesh. His skin had taken on a metallic hue, a hard, invincible, living alchemical alloy of celestial bronze, dense gold, and stellar steel. He didn't wear armor over his clothes, because he, in his own biology, was the armor. Small, perfect geometric cubes of liquid metal passively orbited his shaved head like lethal, automated defensive satellites.
"Stop whining like spoiled brats whose sword feels heavy on their first day of training," Cedric ordered, assuming his position as the defensive pillar, his voice echoing metallic and hollow, as if he were speaking from the hermetically sealed interior of an armored siege tank. "We had a direct order, and we have a continental mission to fulfill. The Purple Light Sect is not going to sit politely on their mountain waiting for us to stop crying, bleeding from our cracks, and pitying ourselves. Advance."
In the exact center of the immense mist, mechanically responding to the ironclad combative will of the heirs, twenty-one immense, colossal pillars of solid light descended violently from the golden storm on the ceiling, crashing into the floor without a sound. In front of each of those pillars, floating on a pedestal of pure energy, appeared the Codex or Manual that Samael had individually given them months before the war.
They were not simple paper books stained with ink. They were divine legacies, the physical conceptual laws that, until now, due to their low cultivation base, they had only been able to graze the surface of and had not been able to open, assimilate, or fully understand without the risk of instant death.
Kael trudged under the crushing gravity toward his assigned pillar.
His bare torso showed how the immense crimson scales running down his spine bristled like saw blades at the proximity of the power. The heavy, dark book floating in front of him began to pulse violently, emitting waves of scorching heat, smelling of pure sulfur, active volcanoes, and infinitely old blood: the [Sutra of the Infernal King's Sword].
Kael did not open it with the delicacy of a scholar. He placed his immense, scaly hand directly onto the black cover, claiming authority over the text.
The book did not open; it literally ignited and burst into flames.
An immense, hungry, viscous black and golden fire instantly surged up Kael's right arm, devouring the surface skin. But Kael did not scream in pain. His savage golden dragon eyes shone with homicidal excitement as the information was not "read" into his mind, but carved with red-hot fire directly into his DNA chains and the marrow of his bones, fusing with his nervous system.
"I've been a fool. I've been fighting like a vulgar, ignorant barbarian swinging a heavy piece of iron," Kael murmured, his voice trembling from the epiphany, as the painful, overwhelming divine knowledge flooded and burned his mortal brain. "I have been using my fire solely to burn flesh through friction and heat, when its true universal law demanded I use it to... consume existence."
The Sutra spat the absolute truth in his face, revealing the deep mechanics of his element: His initial technique didn't need his own limited Qi as its primary fuel. The Purgatory Flame was a dark golden cosmic parasite with black edges. The enemy's defensive Qi, their magic shields, their divine pride... that was the true organic fuel of the Infernal King. The more powerful and thicker the opponent's shield, the more violent, gigantic, and ravenous the flame would become upon contact with it.
But there was something else. Something beating immensely deeper in the darkness of the Codex.
Kael closed his eyes, gritting his teeth until they bled. In his broad chest, where his vital organ worked overtime to keep him alive under the pressure, the conceptual Sword Heart beat in unison, rhythmic, sharp, and violent, with his turbulent dragon blood. He remembered the small, insignificant Intent Seed he had obtained in the painful, humble beginnings of the clan. That small conceptual seed, which had been watered, drowned, and fed with liters of blood from tens of thousands of soldiers and Saints in the last exterior war, was vibrating. It was about to sprout, threatening to break his ribs from the inside to claim the outside.
Kael abruptly unsheathed the colossal, immense Magma Fang from his back. Under the room's hundred-G gravity, the physical sword objectively weighed tens of thousands of metric tons, enough to sink a battleship, but in his right hand, burning with the assimilated dark fire, it felt as light and incorporeal as a simple crow's feather.
"Ultimate Move," Kael hissed, black fire spilling from the corners of his mouth, his scales glowing with solar condensation. "Solar Slash: Judgment Day."
Kael didn't strike a physical target; he raised his immense sword and instantly absorbed all the light, the golden glow, and the heat within a five-kilometer radius inside the hall, plunging his sector into a freezing gloom. All that immense ambient energy violently compressed into the weapon's dark edge, creating a "Black Sun" contained within the steel. And then, he launched an enormous, immense vertical slash directly into the empty space in front of him.
There was no vulgar explosion of red flames or molten magma. The thick, broad blade of the sword instantly turned a blinding, incandescent white, so atomically hot that the condensed air of the room itself ionized and turned into screaming plasma.
The transverse cut did not travel forward like a normal ballistic energy beam; the cut physically "stuck" to the fabric of space itself. It left behind an immense, perfect, burning vertical scar, suspended in the air, that did not fade. It was a static pillar of black-gold plasma that bent gravity around it, drawing the mist into its center like a miniature black hole.
Kael stared at the terrifying, vitrified scar burning in space. He could feel it... the impossibly fine, conceptual, divine edge of the true Sword Domain. He didn't have it complete and polished yet, he was still far from the mastery of the patriarch, Samael, but he could see the key engaged in the lock.
"Anyone unfortunate enough to touch this..." Kael whispered, the fire reflecting in his dilated pupils, "...will turn into instant ash from the inside of their own meridians to feed my next strike. The enemy is not an obstacle. They are my damned firewood."
A scant twenty meters to his right, the immense, armored Cedric had not moved a single millimeter.
He was not attacking the void. He was being brutally, constantly, relentlessly bombarded by the room's own environment. The Palace of Heritage, instinctively reacting like an antibody to the tremendous heretical power the youths were releasing, had begun to generate hundreds of violent Karmic Projections from the dense mist—echoes of solidified energy from the ancient owners of the Codices and from divine beasts. These hostile projections attacked and battered him mercilessly from all blind angles with the kinetic force of meteorites falling from orbit.
BAM! BAM! CRASH! BAM!
Cedric didn't even bother to raise his heavy golden arms to cover his face. He stood completely still, planted like a statue from antiquity in a relaxed martial stance, mentally reading with extreme, almost terrifying calm the [Manual of the Emperor of Seals].
His impenetrable, golden metallic skin simply absorbed, dissipated, and nullified the massive impacts. The energy projections smashed against his chest and shattered into useless sparks that rained onto the floor.
"A divine-grade array doesn't need pathetic, antiquated, vulnerable physical flags planted in dirty earth," Cedric murmured, his mind connected to the manual, calculating millions of runic equations per second, turning the void around him into his own canvas. "My own metallic skin is the unbreakable parchment. And my molten blood is the only ink I need to rewrite the world."
Under his mental commands, using his own fingers as divine brushes, the intricate gold and platinum runes hidden beneath his metallic skin emerged, floated millimeters from his biological armor, and shone blindingly.
When the next devastating karmic strike—a mace of pure light the size of a house—impacted squarely against his shoulder, Cedric didn't just passively resist it; his entire body vibrated with a sacred, geometric resonance.
[Ultimate Skill: The Emperor's Mirror].
All the immense kinetic force and pure Qi of the massive blow were instantly absorbed by his skin's arrays, rotated at a mathematically exact 180-degree angle within the network of his stellar metal core, multiplied by the acceleration of his own seals, and violently, explosively fired back toward the origin in the form of a beam of pure force. The immense attacking karmic projection exploded into a thousand pieces of dust as it was erased and humiliated by its own returned energy.
Cedric, the Living Fortress of the South, smiled with mathematical coldness. He was no longer just an immense, indestructible shield and a giant punching bag to protect his siblings. He was an immovable anvil, and a wall covered in sharp conceptual spikes that punished anyone who dared to touch it.
In the freezing, desolate, and lethal northern sector of the immense, misty palace, the ambient temperature had plummeted, dropping dangerously close to the limits of absolute zero, freezing even the thick golden mist into sharp geometric flakes that cut the skin.
There, in the midst of a frigid, isolated storm, Violeta and Draven (Sequence 11) trained and clashed constantly, mercilessly testing the physical and conceptual limits of their codices. Their two combat styles were the two diametrically opposed and extreme sides of the same freezing element.
Draven, with his eyes glowing spectral white and brutally assimilating the vast knowledge of the [Tome of the Living Glacier], represented the strength, the geological persistence, and the immovable physical brutality of ice as matter.
Every time he struck the crystal floor with his enormous fists, he raised, wove, and forged in milliseconds colossal, thick defensive walls of dark ice thirty meters high. His ice wasn't a dead, passive material; it was dark blue, unbearably heavy, cellular, and organically regenerative. It possessed a frost architecture that frantically absorbed what little moisture was in the room's air to instantly repair any crack, as if it were biological tissue healing a wound.
"I am the damned Wall of the North!" Draven roared, his deep voice echoing off the ice pillars as the Organic Exoskeleton technique fully activated. He was slowly enclosing and fusing himself with a gigantic, monstrous, lethal armor of dense ice shaped like a colossal giant polar bear, whose diamond claws scraped against gravity and tore up the floor with every step.
Violeta, on the opposite side and flying gracefully over the chaos, read in absolute silence the lethal wisdom of the [Song of the Void Winter Sword].
She didn't raise vulgar walls to defend herself or seek physical collision. She simply floated, dodging the brutal, destructive, heavy swipes of Draven's armor with millimeter movements, holding her incredibly thin, invisible sword, the rapier, with aristocratic delicacy, from which petals of black frost bloomed and fell into the void.
"Your ice is dense, immensely strong, and visually impressive, Draven," Violeta said, her voice devoid of breath, analyzing her brother's attack patterns with pure murderous logic. "But it is physically massive. It requires material displacement. And therefore, it is unacceptably slow."
Violeta executed a single, smooth, almost lazy thrust into empty air, forty meters away from her target. She sheathed and unsheathed in an almost imperceptible movement.
Her translucent sword did not travel cutting through the air toward the ice giant, nor did it generate a freezing arc. Through the law of Dimensional Stasis, the weapon's fine edge simply appeared, bypassing the laws of physics and distance, embedded cleanly and directly mere millimeters above Draven's actual neck, right at the vital, internal joint of his colossal living glacier armor, threatening his jugular vein.
"Crystal Coffin: Absolute Zero," Violeta whispered.
There was no vulgar explosion of frost, nor did ice suddenly cover Draven's body. The conceptual strike didn't freeze the water in his cells; it froze the flow of time at the exact point of impact. The spatial coordinates contracted to a single point. Draven's immense armor, which up until that second was aggressively regenerating in an attempt to protect him, simply stopped. All biological and magical activity ceased because, at that specific spatial point surrounding her brother's neck, the body's "memory" had been erased and the next second of existence would never arrive. He was trapped in an invisible, translucent black diamond monolith.
But the biological price of using a supreme, taboo technique of such caliber was brutal on the young assassin's mind and body. Violeta coughed violently, capillaries in her throat bursting, and she spat a dark puddle of instantly frozen blood onto the transparent floor. She fell to her knees, trembling uncontrollably and leaning heavily on her invisible rapier, completely exhausted and drained by the immense mental and spiritual consumption. Bending and violating the mathematics and laws of space-time at will was pure torture that burned the meridians of someone who was still, in essence, a humble mortal Half-Saint.
Suddenly, from the very frozen blood Violeta had just spat on the floor, a grayish, dissonant shadow moved, becoming independent of the laws of physics.
From it emerged, in absolute, terrifying, undetectable silence, Elara (The First Disciple and lethal Sequence 6). Elara, Samael's personal hidden weapon, did not possess a number from one to five in the general hierarchy, but in her hands she carried a manual that represented something infinitely more disgusting and dangerous to biological life than fire or ice: The [Legacy of the Eternal Mist Dragon].
Elara did not walk, breaking the friction of the floor; she assumed the State of Non-Existence. She simply dissolved. Her own mortal body constantly frayed and turned into a dense, cold, odorless gray smoke, rendering her intangible to physical attacks. She reappeared, materializing millimeter-perfectly to Violeta's right, mere centimeters from her exposed neck, with a small dagger of solidified poisonous mist pointed directly at her jugular vein.
"Big Sister," Elara said, her voice devoid of all human emotion, exuding a purely professional coldness, like a coroner describing a corpse. "You took exactly 0.5 seconds too long to recover your guard stance after your brilliant temporal thrust and spitting blood. A decent assassin from the upper sects of the continent's center would have used that minuscule fraction of time to separate your head from your neck without you being able to blink."
Violeta, still on her knees with her younger sister's lethal dagger brushing the pale skin of her neck, did not flinch or try to back away. Slowly, she raised her face and smiled a deranged smile, her mismatched eyes shining with a lethal, dangerous spatial blue light. She wiped the frozen blood from her mouth with the back of her trembling hand.
"Then don't stop to give me theoretical lectures, child. Force me to pay with real pain for those 0.5 seconds of error. Teach me with fresh blood to be immensely faster, First Disciple. Or I swear to you by our patriarch's Crown that the next time you get this close to my personal space, I will freeze the very mist that forms your pathetic heart directly in time, and you will stay as an ice ornament in my room."
Elara nodded mechanically, accepting the tactical challenge. Her biological form blurred again, and her body completely dissolved into silver smoke.
She didn't seek direct combat, or the massive, destructive, explosive damage of the other vanguard generals like Kael or Cedric. Elara trained tirelessly and with macabre dedication in the technique of Systemic Invasion: like a cold, predatory draft, she sought to enter through the nose or mouth, and then silently, imperceptibly solidify small shards of dragon bone or lethal frost thorns directly inside the lungs, heart valves, or soft brain tissue of the enemy's defenses. A pure, suffocating conceptual assassin who killed from within the very air you breathed to survive.
Far away, on the diametrically opposite side of the immense pocket dimension, far removed from the cold, technical, calculating silent discipline of the assassins and Cedric's impenetrable runic defense, stretched a vast zone of pure, apocalyptic, uncontrolled destruction, radiation, and annihilation.
There, Eris (Sequence 3) was rapidly losing her sanity.
She screamed at the top of her lungs, vocal cords tearing, her red hair billowing wildly, surrounded by the immense center of a roaring, deafening hurricane of black fire, pure radiation, and lethal dark-gold heat. The heavy, indestructible [Scripture of the Solar Catastrophe Spear] floated defiantly in front of her, resisting the infernal temperature of thousands of degrees as its thick pages turned themselves frantically, driven by the monstrous force of the thermal wind and the zone's inverted gravity.
Eris spun her immense, heavy war spear, the Sky Piercer, with a bestial, suicidal force.
Every time, without exception, that the weapon's thick dark tip forcefully struck the palace's transparent floor, a catastrophic, nuclear explosion of major force occurred, threatening to burst everyone's eardrums.
But thanks to reading and violently assimilating the codex, Eris had understood that this was not a simple, normal fire explosion or a burst of raw Qi.
BOOM-CRACK-WHOOSH! They were fearsome explosions of Ruin based on destructive feedback in uncontrollable chains. The first brutal physical impact generated an immense concentric shockwave, but the infinite "micro-sparks" of entropy released by the weapon detonated, in turn, all the residual Qi from her siblings' attacks, the oxygen, and the suspended magic air in the environment. This created, in a millionth of a second, a second, third, and fourth explosion immensely stronger, more massive, and more destructive than the last, feeding upon themselves infinitely and devouring the battlefield like a dark fire cancer as long as there was energy or matter nearby to consume.
"MORE!" Eris screamed, her beautiful eyes bloodshot, her retinas on the verge of burning from the intensity of the radioactive light, and the muscles in her arms tearing internally from the pure, sadistic kinetic tension of maintaining the technique. "IT'S NOT ENOUGH HEAT TO KILL A GOD! BLACK SUPERNOVA!"
With a howl of dragon fury that rivaled her older brother's, Eris leaped several meters into the air under the crushing gravity and initiated the Void Ignition. She spun her spear until it became a vortex that sucked all the heat from the room, and then plummeted like a meteorite, driving the white-hot, incandescent tip of the spear directly into the unbreakable floor.
All sound within a hundred meters was violently sucked away. The impact didn't generate fire, but a colossal, perfect, spherical shockwave of lethal, absolute black energy of dark matter that expanded brutally outward. Within the sphere, black lightning destroyed every trace of matter. It didn't burn the deity-forged crystal floor; it disintegrated it at a pure subatomic level. The explosion shattered, erased, and annihilated hundreds of meters of the Divine Heritage Palace's indestructible floor, leaving an immense, black crater of smoking dead radiation.
Eris stood in the center of the crater, her body emitting an ashen glow, her mind fractured but her soul on fire. She didn't seek Lirael's martial elegance, nor Joren's surgical precision or stealth. Eris was molding her soul, forcing her cracked bones to deliberately and literally become a tactical, living, walking, reusable atomic bomb in the service of the Morningstar Empire.
And just a few meters from her, skimming the edges of the radioactive crater, creating the most absurd, disturbing, and eerie contrast imaginable in the war room... the reigning silence was deep, abyssal, and terrifying.
Altair (Sequence 10) did not scream in rage. He did not launch lethal nuclear supernovae, nor build gigantic walls of organic ice, nor generate precise seismic earthquakes.
He simply walked slowly, deliberately, and boredly across the immense training field, with his hands clasped behind his back or stuffed into the pockets of his frayed tunic. He read in sepulchral silence, with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, the ghastly, disgustingly worn, yellowed, and pale [Book of Mute Entropy].
Altair did not directly attack anyone. He didn't even hold a physical weapon or a drawn sword in his pale hands.
But everything... absolutely every physical object, magic, conceptual armor, energy attack, or karmic living being that made the fatal error of entering his lethal, silent, suffocating passive spherical influence radius of ten meters (the Domain of Withering), instantly, pathetically, and hopelessly began to die, rot, rust, and decompose at high speed.
The dozens of aggressive, fast, bright projections of golden energy, created by the angry, reactive Palace to attack and destroy him, did not explode, did not scream, nor did they crash violently against shields as they did with Cedric. Upon blindly entering the thick, murky bubble of Altair's gray aura, they simply lost all their glorious brilliance rapidly and sickly. They turned a pale, dead ashen color, withered weakly like dying flowers under the burning desert sun, and crumbled silently into harmless, useless, sad gray dust and ash before they could even touch the hem of his cloak.
His passive aura of death did not burn with the fire of Purgatory nor freeze with Void Stasis; it applied the most feared sentence of the material universe. It relentlessly and disgustingly accelerated the very mathematical and biological concept of aging and degradation of any form of matter, skin, metal, and energy by a factor of a thousand times its natural speed.
Altair walked languidly over the smooth, polished, transparent floor forged by immortal dead deities, and beneath his silent, solitary dark boots, the incorruptible, unbreakable crystal instantly turned opaque, milky, filled with sad, deep fissures of grayish rust, and cracked weakly and brittly under his weight, rotting through the pure conceptual contact of Decay.
"Everything, absolutely everything in this miserable, loud, stupid bright universe has an inexorable and tragic end fixed in its code, my brothers," Altair whispered in a hollow, passionless, and deeply tired voice, stopping to watch as a fierce, imposing karmic projection in the shape of a saber-toothed tiger made of pure golden energy tried to pounce on him, only to age mid-air, lose its teeth, shrivel, and literally turn into a mound of harmless, sterile sand and dry ash a meter from his face. "The strongest northern ice melts, the Infernal King's most destructive fire inevitably goes out from lack of oxygen, the hardest flesh rots, and Cedric's densest stellar steel sooner or later rusts. I am not an assassin who destroys things or cuts throats. I, simply... kindly move the hand of their clock closer to the end of their useless lifespan. I am the end of the road."
Fifteen agonizing, tortuous, suffocating, eternal, uninterrupted days had passed in the dilated, distorted time inside the gravity chamber. Fifteen dark, incredibly long days under x100 gravity, where breathing remained a Herculean feat and where every millimeter of their bodies was being violated and rewritten by the primordial laws of the tomes they carried.
Biological and mental exhaustion was reaching its critical limit. The bleeding cracks on the bodies of the twenty-one youths were not healing placidly as they had hoped; under the infernal pressure and accelerated assimilation, those fissures burned, widened, and oozed light alarmingly. They were being empirically pushed to the absolute limit of what a human frame—even one genetically altered and bathed in dragon blood—could endure without bursting and becoming a simple, bloody stain on the temple floor.
The madness, the chronic pain, the absolute lack of sleep, and the fusion with concepts of annihilation threatened to snap the thin, invisible thread of their sanity.
But there were still fifty-five days left in that hell, and the remaining sixteen Sequences—from acoustic assassins to puppeteers of mental pain—were only just beginning to unleash the true climax of their destructive power in the other half of the room. The true forge, the evolution that would break the sky and shake the continent, was only just about to reach its maximum boiling temperature.