Chapter 142: The Awakening of the Young Gods and the King's Order
The immense Morningstar Citadel, an apocalyptic and terrifying floating island of black obsidian, stellar steel walls, and golden towers, had materialized abruptly out of nowhere in the middle of the dark night sky.
It appeared suspended exactly at the zenith, right above the highest peak of the Purple Light Sect, blocking the bright, pale moonlight in a single stroke and extinguishing the glow of every star in the firmament. The shadow. A massive, unfathomable, dense, and crushing shadow, darker than the worst of hells, plummeted like a conceptual guillotine over the entire mountain.
Below, the chaos was absolute. The millennial alarm sirens and spiritual war horns began to howl desperately, tearing through the stillness of the night. Thousands of violet emergency lights frantically turned on, revealing the panic of tens of thousands of disciples who looked up and saw not the sky, but the obsidian belly of a beast ready to devour them.
But above, at an altitude of ten thousand meters, on the surface of the Citadel, reality was diametrically opposed. The world was submerged in that sepulchral, tense, and suffocating calm that precedes extinction-level natural disasters.
In the Citadel's immense Inner Courtyard, before the colossal and unbreakable golden doors of the Palace of Primordial Heritage, an entourage waited in absolute silence. The atmospheric wind howled against the city's shields, but in this courtyard, the air weighed as if it were made of liquid lead.
Samael Morningstar was seated on an imposing temporary throne carved from a single block of black obsidian, elevated on a dais. He wore abyssal black ceremonial robes, intricately embroidered with red gold threads that looked like throbbing veins of magma. To his right, Seraphina stood tall and majestic. She held little Celeste, who was sleeping placidly in her arms, oblivious to the brewing cosmic violence, while on the Empress's waist rested the mythical sword Star Render, emitting a cold so intense that the moisture in the air crystallized a hand's breadth from her body.
To the left of the throne stood Vexia. The Goddess of Logistical War did not wear heavy armor or glowing runes. She wore her impeccable, severe, and starched Victorian head maid uniform, with celestial spider silk white gloves hiding the cold, inhuman metal of her hands. Her steel-gray hair was pulled back with a strict jade comb. At first glance, she looked like a perfect, serene, and harmless lady-in-waiting. However, under the dim light of the courtyard's illumination crystals, the shadow she cast on the stone floor was not the silhouette of a woman; it was a chaotic and terrifying stain that simulated a battlefield strewn with broken spears, corpses, and crimson static.
Samael pulled out his antique silver pocket watch. The second hand ticked to the exact time. The seventy days of hell in the temporal dilation had concluded.
"Time is up," Samael said.
His voice, low, deep, and devoid of inflection, was not a shout, but it broke the silence with the force of a physical command.
As if immediately responding to their creator's order, the immense golden doors of the Palace of Heritage vibrated.
DOOOOOOOM!
The sound was telluric, deep, and ancient, as if the world's tectonic plates had just collided. The air around the inner courtyard abruptly became dense, hard to breathe. The complex and labyrinthine sealing runes, which glowed with a warning red over the golden metal, began to turn off one by one, clicking one after another in a mechanical and magical sequence.
The heavy door leaves, which had remained hermetically sealed for seven days on the outside—seventy agonizing and endless days in the pocket dimension—began to slowly open outward.
A thick, heavy mist of an intense golden color poured from inside the chamber, rolling down the steps and covering the courtyard floor like a spectral tide. But this mist didn't smell of millennial treasures or sacred incense. It smelled of old blood, burned flesh, shattered ozone, and the disgusting putrefaction of cosmic laws that had been violated. It smelled like the corpse of a false god.
From the dense fog, no young voices emerged cheering their victory. There were no hurried footsteps or laughs of relief.
Lethal footsteps emerged. Heavy. Rhythmic and perfectly calculated.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The first to cross the threshold and tear through the mist was Kael Morningstar (Sequence 1).
There was no longer the slightest trace of the impulsive and arrogant young genius who had entered. His upper tunic had been completely incinerated during the battles, revealing a muscular torso sculpted from what looked like charred granite, covered in fresh scars that glowed faintly with subdermal fire. But what truly froze the blood were his eyes: his pupils had become completely vertical, narrow slits of a boiling crimson red, the pure, undiluted gaze of an apex predator.
His immense Odachi sword, the Magma Fang, rested casually on his right shoulder. The weapon no longer emitted the vulgar expansive flames of a rookie; the heat was so monstrously and perfectly compressed inside the blade that the air around the edge suffered a thermal collapse, creating frost on the sword's guard itself due to temperature suction.
Kael walked to the foot of the dais.
"Patriarch," he said. His voice sounded different, raspy and guttural, like two volcanic rocks rubbing against each other.
Kael dropped to one knee in a sign of respect. The instant his knee touched the obsidian stone of the courtyard, a cobweb-like network of fissures expanded under his weight. It wasn't brute force; it was the overwhelming conceptual density of his body.
Behind the Infernal King, Violeta (Sequence 2) emerged.
If Kael was the ultimate expression of compressed fury, Violeta was the concept of static death. The lethal assassin walked without touching the ground, levitating five centimeters above the black stone. Her beautiful silvery-white hair now had deep streaks of neon violet. Around her, the physics of reality had surrendered; the moisture in the air crystallized into tiny ice diamonds, but instead of falling to the ground due to gravity, they slowly floated upwards, defying natural laws, orbiting her like satellites.
Violeta's presence did not emit vulgar cold. It emitted void. Looking at her was like observing a visual disturbance, a hole in the fabric of existence shaped like a woman.
"We are ready," she said, in a voice devoid of any human inflection, giving a languid and elegant bow as she sheathed her transparent rapier.
Then emerged Cedric (Sequence 4).
The legion's tank was now immense. His silver hair was short and messy, and his steel-gray eyes showed not the slightest hesitation. He wore white and gray robes covered in thousands of blinking runes. He no longer needed to carry his shield with his arms; the gigantic runic shield floated lazily behind his back, disassembled into dozens of glowing liquid metal cubes that spun and assembled at the will of his mathematical mind. Every step Cedric took made the dais tremble, making the porcelain cups on Samael's table clink.
Eris Morningstar (Sequence 3) leaped out of the mist, twirling her spear at breakneck speed. Unlike Violeta's calm, Eris was enveloped in pure anarchy. Her pale skin contrasted with the furious sparks of black and white flames (the Flame of Ruin) that leaped uncontrollably from her hair and eyelashes. Her smile was deranged, savage, predatory; the smile of one who has devoured a sun and is hungry for more.
Altair (Sequence 10) walked in absolute silence. His sepulchral appearance had been accentuated. With every step he took on the courtyard's decorative lawn, the green grass immediately turned a sepia color, drying up and turning into dead dust. Altair left a trail of entropy and gray ash behind him, carrying the weight of the world on his slumped shoulders.
Xylia, with blue voltaic arcs jumping between her fingers; Rowan, blurry and translucent, registering no friction with the atmosphere; Aylin, with her hands turned into green diamond drills...
One by one, the twenty-one youths emerged from the golden mist.
They were deeply and irremediably changed. They had entered that chamber as immensely talented disciples, as rough diamonds with a lot of power but little real malice. They had come out of the chamber as absolute veterans of an apocalyptic war that only they would remember.
Their individual auras, which seventy days prior clashed with each other forming inefficient chaos, were now intertwined, fused, and compacted into a single monstrous entity. They were Stage 8 Half-Saints (Peak) in pure cultivation base. However, their actual Combat Power—refined by the constant assimilation of Samael's primordial dragon blood, driven by suffering, and molded by the absolute compression of their Saint-Grade Codices—made the air of the Citadel vibrate. The combined pressure they emitted was not that of twenty-one youths; it was the crushing and dense murderous intent of a full squad of true Saints.
At the end of the procession, the mist solidified into a singular figure. Elara, the First Disciple (Sequence 6).
She didn't walk from the door. One millisecond she wasn't there, and the next millisecond she appeared kneeling exactly at the foot of the obsidian throne, head bowed, as if she had always been part of the shadows of the dais.
"Master," Elara whispered, her cold voice traveling through the frost molecules.
The twenty-one nuclear-level monsters knelt in unison before Samael Morningstar's throne. The sound of their knees hitting the stone was a single clap of thunder.
"HAIL THE PATRIARCH!" they roared.
The force of their combined voice, laden with the authority of their Codices, fired a sonic shockwave toward the sky that instantly scattered the dense purple clouds for miles around, revealing an abyss of stars above the city.
Samael observed them from the heights of his throne. There was immense pride burning in his violet eyes, but his face remained impassive, cold, and absolutely regal.
"Rise, my dragons," Samael's deep voice ordered.
The twenty-one youths stood up as a single organism. Their auras clashed in the air, but not with conflict, rather in a violent harmony, like toothed gears of a perfectly oiled killing machine.
"You have survived the Forge of the dead gods," Samael said, his voice projecting over the mountain wind. "You have broken your mortal limits. You have devoured the light of a Saint and reduced it to slag. Now, and only now, are you truly strong."
Samael slowly rose from the throne. The immense black cloak billowed behind him. He walked to the edge of the dais, stopping next to Seraphina and Vexia. He raised his arm and pointed relentlessly downward, into the abyss of the night, where the gigantic fortress of the Purple Light Sect was only just beginning to understand the magnitude of the terror looming over them.
"But strength without a clear purpose is nothing more than simple violence," Samael decreed, his gaze hardening. "And we are not bandits or wild beasts. We are the Morningstar Empire."
Samael lowered his hand and met Kael's gaze, then Violeta's, Cedric's, Eris's, and finally swept his violet eyes over the entire kneeling legion.
"For the last few years, since our clan was nothing more than ash, dust, and humiliation, I have been your invulnerable shield and your executioner's sword. I have slaughtered the Valois leaders myself, I have torn apart the Judges of the temple, and I have brought down the deities who dared to look upon us with disdain. I have cleared the path with my own blood."
Samael slowly shook his head. His Patriarch aura thickened.
"But that ends today, my dragons."
Genuine surprise crossed Kael's hardened face. The flames on his sword flickered.
"Patriarch?" the Infernal King asked, unable to contain his confusion. "Are you not going to fight tonight? Are you not going to descend with us to burn these bastards?"
Samael smiled, and it was a blood-curdling smile, not that of a bloodthirsty warrior, but the cold, calculating, and unreachable smile of an Emperor looking at the world from an incomprehensible height.
"I am the Sovereign of this empire, Kael," Samael replied, every word distilling cosmic authority. "And Kings do not charge on the front line of infantry to tangle with filthy vassals and historical enemies who are already doomed. Kings do not dirty their hands with those who only deserve to be erased. Kings simply hand down the sentence."
Samael turned to his left, without losing an ounce of his imperial bearing.
"Vexia. Step forward."
The apparent iron maiden walked with inhuman elegance to the center of the courtyard, positioning herself directly in front of the ranks of the twenty-one Sequences. Kael, Eris, Cedric, and the others looked at her with instant suspicion. They knew Vexia was immensely strong—they felt it in the air—but they had never seen her fight or command in real combat; until now, they had only seen her serving tea or dusting.
"From this exact cosmic moment," Samael announced, his voice magically amplified, echoing in every corner of the Citadel, "Vexia assumes the mantle of Grand Marshal of the Void and Supreme Commander of all Morningstar Armies."
A tense murmur, like the crackle of ice about to break, ran through the ranks of the young assassins.
"She will command and choreograph this war," Samael continued, his tone becoming lethal, admitting no reply. "She will decide, based on pure logistics, who attacks, who defends, who advances, and who has permission to die. Her word is, and will be, my absolute word. If one of you, regardless of whether you are the First or the Last Sequence, disobeys a single tactical order of hers in the heat of battle... I swear to you on the blood of my ancestors that I will descend and kill you myself before the enemy's sword can touch you. Is that absolutely understood?"
Kael fixed his crimson gaze on Vexia.
The woman, who looked like a delicate, strict porcelain doll dressed as a Victorian maid, returned his gaze through the lenses of her runic spectacles. Vexia's gray eyes showed no aggression, they didn't radiate burning murderous intent, much less the arrogance of the strong. They only possessed an inscrutable, absolute, and suffocating calm, like the motionless waters at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
In that microsecond of eye contact, Kael's "Sword Heart," his super-predator instinct forged in a hundred deaths, didn't scream a warning; it was terrified. Kael's murderous, volcanic instinct crashed head-on against an impenetrable wall of cold mathematical logic. He realized, with a chill running down his spine, that this woman had no "blind spots." She had no emotional weaknesses he could exploit. There was no fury in her that would make her commit mistakes. In Vexia's mind, Kael and the rest of the world were nothing more than equations she had already solved, dismantled, and classified.
It was a level of existential danger infinitely superior to any Saint Kael had ever faced.
Kael gritted his teeth, mastered his dragon ego, lowered his head, and took a knee.
"Understood, Patriarch," Kael said, bowing his neck to the maid. "At your orders, Marshal."
"UNDERSTOOD!" the other twenty chorused, kneeling in perfect tactical submission, their instincts warning them of the same thing as Kael.
Vexia walked slowly in front of the kneeling ranks of the Sequences. She didn't look at them with an officer's disdain for fresh recruits. She looked at them with the cold appreciation of someone inspecting perfectly sharpened weapons of mass destruction. Vexia knew better than anyone what they were; she knew these youths had massacred the millennial Valois Family, survived the temple deities, and had just torn apart a Stage 5 Saint construct. They were veritable monsters, absolute geniuses specialized in assassination and entropy.
"I do not need to teach you how to spill blood," Vexia said. Her emotionless metallic voice cut the air like a silver scalpel. "You already know how to flay reality. You have bathed this desert in corpses before."
Kael nodded slowly, standing up and resting his massive flaming sword on his shoulder with a lethal and bloodthirsty naturalness. Eris twirled her spear in a pinwheel of black sparks, bored with the preparatory talks and anxious to hear the sound of necks snapping.
"What I need from you today is not passion; it is relentless coordination," Vexia continued, stopping in the center of the formation. "The Purple Light Sect is not a bandit nest. They have numbers on their side, they have millennial formations, and they have the false security of their history. We have nuclear quality. And we have the hammer."
Vexia turned toward the side walls of the immense courtyard and raised a hand sheathed in her white glove.
"Open the deployment bays!"
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The industrial sound was deafening. The immense steel hatches of the lower deck, hidden on the sides of the Citadel, flew wide open. The darkness of the holds vomited out its creation.
The 30,000 soldiers of the Dead Blood Guard, the biomechanical puppets of black ice alloy, stellar metal, and primordial blood forged in the crucibles by Vexia, marched into the dim light of the outer courtyard. They didn't breathe, they didn't blink. Their red eyes glowed in unison, and their steel spears moved with a robotic synchrony that shattered morale just by looking at them.
The Sequences didn't gasp in fear; they were far beyond mundane terror. Instead, their predatory eyes lit up with cold tactical approval.
Kael looked at the sea of gray steel marching toward the launch edges and let out a low, hoarse whistle, immensely impressed.
"Beautiful cannon fodder," Cedric, the master of defense, commented, his mathematical eyes evaluating the gleam of the black ice alloy of the soldiers' skins. "They will withstand at least two or three direct hits from the watchtower ballistae before crumbling. Very useful for absorbing the initial volley."
"They are structurally efficient," Violeta noted, her freezing voice dragging the words out. "Without organic fear. Without the annoying weight of moral doubts. They will be the perfect brush to sweep away the low-level trash and clear the sect's courtyards while we, the long knives, go straight down to cut off the heads of the Elders and Saints."
Vexia nodded slightly, satisfied that the young geniuses understood her logic of annihilation without the need for moralizing.
"Exactly. Statistics rule, Sequence Two. They are the wall-breaking hammer. They will take the damage. You are the needle that will pierce the heart." Vexia raised her hand, pointing directly into the abyss opening beneath their feet, toward the thousands of blinking lights of the frightened Purple Light Sect. "Tonight's objective is ridiculously simple: Absolute Punishment. They attacked us in the past. They were active accomplices alongside the Valois family in the plans that nearly led to our destruction a year ago. They are not stray vassals who can be forgiven and reeducated. They are infected historical enemies. Coexisting with them is an impossible mathematical paradox. Therefore, they must be exterminated down to the last dog on their mountain. It is time to collect the toll for their arrogance."
Samael nodded in pleasure, turning his back to the void and sitting back down majestically on his obsidian throne.
Seraphina, beside him, gently took his immense hand, feeling the contained vibration in his knuckles.
Are you sure about this? Seraphina asked him directly in his mind via Qi transmission, looking at the restrained fury of the twenty-one youths. You could erase that sect by yourself in half an hour if you wanted to.
They need to do it themselves, Sera, Samael replied in his mind, gently squeezing his wife's hand. They are wolf pups who have just grown venomous fangs. They need to taste the real hunt, without their father holding their leash, so that one day they can lead the Empire's pack when the higher worlds look at us.
Samael let go of Seraphina's hand and raised his right hand to his own head. It was time to crown the annihilation.
From his storage ring space, he summoned the ultimate symbol of his power: the [Crown of the Primordial Sovereign].
The instant Samael placed the crown on his head, the physical reality of the inner courtyard and the entire city violently warped. The visual transformation was worthy of a wrathful god. The crown's seven fine needles were no longer gleaming crystals; they had evolved and mutated due to Samael's abyssal power. Now they were spikes of stellar black diamond, a material of infinite density that absorbed the ambient light around it. The seven needles weren't attached to any physical base; they floated, orbiting independently around Samael's head, leaving micro-spatial fractures in their wake, like silver cracks in the fabric of the universe rhythmically opening and closing.
The effect of its fused properties was catastrophic to local physics. Samael activated the [Infinite Mental Calculation] and the [Absolute Authority of Micro-Space].
His violet eyes dilated until they swallowed the iris, becoming two pools of total and absolute darkness, within which waterfalls of equations, algorithms, and golden mathematical runes incessantly glowed. The speed of his mind broke the light barrier.
And in the real world, the air simply died. The eternal hurricane lashing the top of the Citadel stopped dead in a perfect ten-meter-diameter sphere around Samael's throne. No dust fell, no sound propagated freely; time and space were enslaved and frozen by the Patriarch's unyielding will. An immense circular halo of pure platinum light erupted behind his head, casting a supernatural shadow over the clouds that seemed to have a life of its own. Everything in that radius took on a grayish tint: it was the Sovereign's Domain.
Samael leaned forward on his throne, looking directly at the black mountain ten kilometers below.
He was going to speak, but he wasn't going to shout into the wind. Using the cosmic power of his crown, Samael directed and focused the acoustic waves and the weight of his soul uniquely and exclusively inside the defensive barrier of the enemy mountain. No neighboring empire, no beast in distant forests, nor spy far away heard a single decibel. All the fury, gravity, and majesty of the Saint King's voice were compressed and discharged directly into the eardrums, minds, and hearts of the one hundred thousand inhabitants of the Purple Light Sect.
Samael's voice echoed on the enemy mountain not as a sound, but as a divine thunder coming from inside their own skulls, shaking the stone foundations, shattering the paper lanterns, and cracking the glass of the sect's main pagodas.
"PURPLE LIGHT SECT!"
Down below on the mountain, the noisy panic and chaos were abruptly silenced, replaced by a paralyzing, cold terror. Thousands of disciples in the training courtyards, Elders in their meditation towers, and beasts in their stables fell to their knees, clutching their ears, pale and trembling. All the high commanders instantly recognized that resonant voice—the voice of the demon they thought dead or confined to the shadows.
"I AM SAMAEL MORNINGSTAR."
Samael gripped the obsidian arm of his throne, his eyes shining with a cold, definitive judgment of no return.
"YEARS AGO, WHEN MY CLAN WAS NOTHING MORE THAN ASHES, YOU ATTACKED US. YOU WERE THE COMPLICIT DOGS OF THE VALOIS. YOU CONSPIRED, PLUNDERED, AND BELIEVED YOU COULD HIDE BEHIND YOUR HISTORY. BUT HISTORY DOES NOT STOP THE VOID. TODAY, I HAVE COME TO SETTLE THE OUTSTANDING DEBTS. AND TODAY... IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO CEASE TO EXIST."
Samael lowered his immense hand slowly. His voice was no longer a shout of warning; it was a condemnation. It was time to activate his crown's newest and most terrifying property: the [Edict of Imposed Reality].
The Sovereign was going to dictate a Temporal Law that would become absolute and indisputable truth for the matrix of existence.
"HE WHO ATTACKS US AND HARMS US HAS ONLY ONE PAYMENT..." Samael murmured, and although it was a whisper in the Citadel, it was a hurricane in the Sect's mind. Samael fixed his gaze on the sect's imposing central watchtower—the tallest, heavily armored, and loaded with dozens of siege weapons and defensive mages ready to fire.
Samael pronounced the Edict.
"...CEASES TO EXIST."
Reality itself obeyed the King's grammar. There was no lightning bolt, no fire, no spell flying through the air. The concept was imposed. On the mountain below, the immense, sturdy, millennial white marble watchtower, along with its reinforced walls, its siege ballistae, its shield arrays, and all the warriors inside it, simply unraveled. It went from solid matter to inert gray dust and floating ash in an absolute millisecond, collapsing in on itself and being erased from the topography of the world without emitting a single sound of destruction. The tower had ceased to exist because the King decreed it.
Samael broke eye contact with the ruins and turned his crowned face toward his War Marshal, relaxing on the throne after the Edict's massive expenditure of energy.
"Vexia. Erase the name of this Sect from the continent's history books."
Vexia smiled. It was a small, thin, terrifyingly beautiful smile inside her face of pure calculation.
"At your command, my Patriarch."
Vexia walked to the exact edge of the immense launchpad, turning her back to the kilometric void, and faced the combined legion of living and dead monsters. Her voice cut the silence like a frozen steel whip.
"Kael! You are the spearhead! You and Alpha Squad breach the main energy barrier!" Vexia ordered, her directives raining down like machine-gun fire. "Cedric, I want you to secure and stabilize a safe landing zone in the sect's central courtyard! Eris, I want the entire east side in flames; burn their warehouses and medical supplies! Dead Blood Guard... descend, march, and purge until your gears break!"
The eyes of the thirty thousand biomechanical soldiers glowed with intensity.
ROAAAAR!
There wasn't a single fraction of hesitation.
Kael Morningstar was the first to move. He didn't jump with the careful technique of a novice flying cultivator; he threw himself into the void without looking, like a ballistic missile.
In the air, his body was enveloped in black and red flames, his sword Magma Fang shining like the core of a dying planet. As gravity dragged him ten thousand meters in free fall, Kael let out a wild, demented laugh. The wind howled against his scaly face. He had desperately missed this sensation. He had missed the fall.
Behind the Infernal King, the other twenty assassins jumped in perfect formation.
They were not gray silhouettes; they were twenty comets of vibrant, deadly colors. Violeta's silver light, Maren's cyan static, Altair's sepia trail, Varian's emerald green... The geniuses crossed the dark sky leaving behind trails of pure, hyper-compressed Qi, nose-diving, already calculating how they were going to assassinate their first targets. They had done this before. They knew how to fall, how to kill, and how to win.
And just one second behind the twenty-one divine meteors, the industrial nightmare was unleashed.
Thirty thousand massive bodies of black ice alloy and stellar steel jumped in unison from the Morningstar Citadel's open cargo bays. Like a rain of thick ash, like a biblical plague of expressionless, soulless metal locusts, Vexia's inexhaustible puppets rained silently down upon the desperate, terrified, and doomed mountain of the Purple Light Sect.
The apocalypse had crossed the threshold. The final Purge had begun.