Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 1)
The sound of glass breaking was the only thing heard in the immense Purple Light Mountain Range for a second that seemed to last an eternity.
It wasn't an ordinary crunch. It was the agonizing shriek of the world's laws collapsing. The "Dome of a Thousand Violet Suns," the legendary Saint-Grade defensive formation that had protected the Purple Light Sect uninterruptedly for three millennia, didn't simply fade under the weight of the invasion; it shattered into pieces.
For a microsecond, the tens of thousands of disciples and Elders on the mountain held their breath, eyes dilated with absolute disbelief. That barrier was their faith. It was the irrefutable proof that the heavens favored them.
And then, the sky spit in their faces.
The immense violet energy dome burst. Millions of fragments of solid Qi, sharp as microscopic guillotines and charged with the unstable energy of a collapsed array, fell from the heights like a torrential rain of spiritual shrapnel. The green jade and gold roofs of the millennial pagodas were pierced as if they were made of paper. The outer court disciples, those who had the unfortunate instinctive reaction of looking up, were impaled and mutilated by the very shields meant to protect them. Panic erupted in a chorus of heart-rending screams, drowned out by the roar of the wind and the crunch of stone.
At the exact epicenter of the immense main training plaza, black smoke and ash swirled into a dense tornado. There, inside a smoking crater ten meters deep and twenty meters in diameter, Kael Morningstar (Sequence 1) slowly stood up.
The Infernal King stretched his neck, making his vertebrae crack with a dull sound. His immense sword, Magma Fang, wasn't wreathed in large, showy flames; the black and red fire was so monstrously compressed on the blade's edge that the air around it warped, instantly evaporating the blood of the nearby dead.
Hundreds of elite Purple Light Sect disciples, wearing their pristine violet robes, frantically surrounded him. Their hands trembled as they gripped their noble swords. Their battle formations were broken by the pure existential terror emanating from the reptile-eyed youth in front of them.
"He's... he's just one!" yelled a Senior Deacon, his shrill voice breaking with panic, desperately trying to instill courage in the terrified youths. "He's a suicidal invader! Kill him! For the glory of the Purple Light!"
Kael tilted his head. His vertical crimson pupils fixed on the Deacon. A slow, savage smile full of dragon fangs formed on his face.
"Glory..." Kael murmured, his guttural voice grating against the fearful silence. "What a useless word."
He raised his left hand, thick and covered in incipient scales, and pointed his thumb upward.
"Look up, scum," Kael said, his eyes shining with homicidal euphoria. "I'm not alone. I'm just the one knocking on the door."
The Deacon and the hundreds of disciples looked up.
The starry sky had disappeared. There was no moon. There were no clouds. There was only obsidian, gold, and stellar steel. The monstrous, titanic Morningstar Citadel had descended in absolute silence, stopping ominously just a few hundred meters above the sect's highest peaks. It was as if an entire continent had come down to crush them. The gigantic shadow erased any hint of natural light, plunging the mountain range into a total, unnatural eclipse.
Above, from the obsidian balcony of his throne, Samael Morningstar moved a single finger, a gesture as subtle as an orchestra conductor about to begin a requiem.
"Close the pen. Don't let even the air escape."
The order was carried out before the echo finished resonating.
Cedric (Sequence 4), the genius of defense and arrays, had not jumped into the center of the slaughter. His descent from the Citadel was like the fall of a golden meteor, landing with a brutal crash on the northern perimeter of the mountain range.
The instant his boots touched the earth, the [Fractal Consciousness Network] of his draconic bloodline expanded at lightning speed. In Cedric's mind, the mountains, trees, and pagodas disappeared, replaced by a holographic grid of ten thousand mathematical variables and Qi flows. He calculated the sect's tectonic tension nodes in less than a microsecond.
The Morningstar tank knelt and struck the ground with both palms, injecting his mercury blood and pure metal Qi directly into the earth's veins.
"[Art of the Emperor of Seals: The Four Pillars of Confinement]."
Four colossal cylindrical columns of golden light and boiling liquid metal erupted violently from the earth at the absolute cardinal points of the mountain range (North, South, East, and West). The pillars shattered entire buildings in their ascent, rising hundreds of meters into the black sky until they rhythmically clashed and connected with the bottom base of the Morningstar Citadel.
The structural cage was ready. It lacked the existential seal.
In perfect synchrony with Cedric's pillars, three figures materialized out of nowhere at the East, South, and West bases. They were shadow clones of Malak, the Sovereign of the Scythe and Commander of the Silent Shadows Legion. And on the North pillar, next to Cedric, appeared the Shinigami's main body.
His faceless figure, enveloped in black smoke and with two orbs of blue will-o'-the-wisp watching from the void of his hood, raised his immaterial arms.
"[Shadow Domain: Veil of the Eclipse]."
The tattered cloak of solidified darkness hanging from Malak's shoulders expanded exponentially. A tide of liquid, freezing darkness shot out from the four cardinal points, climbing up Cedric's golden pillars and closing over the mountain like a suffocating dome.
Space itself solidified. The laws of the outer universe were expelled.
In the Purple Light Sect Patriarch's tower, the highest-ranking Elders, sweating cold at the collapse of their millennial dome, desperately tried to infuse Qi into their rare, valuable Spatial Teleportation Talismans to evacuate the sect's elite seeds.
But as soon as the Veil of the Eclipse closed, the golden scrolls in their hands simply withered, turning into useless ash and gray sand. The connection to outer space had been decapitated.
From the dark mantle covering the inside of the dome, the One Hundred Silent Shadows poured out like drops of black ink. Two-dimensional, devoid of volume, and with their terrifying white porcelain masks marked with the rune for "Silence," the shadows melted into the walls, roofs, and alleys, disappearing from the divine senses of the Elders. Anyone who tried to flee through the perimeters would find a paralyzing poison dagger in their throat before hearing a single footstep.
Cedric's voice, cold, mathematical, and amplified by the resonance of his pillars' stellar metal, echoed throughout the entire sect.
"No one enters. No one leaves. Welcome to the arena."
In the gigantic armored transport ships floating around and below the Citadel, a thousand Morningstar Clan disciples—those in the Qi Condensation, Origin, and Earth realms—waited in a tense gloom. They were heavily armed, their hearts beating wildly against their ribs. For the vast majority of them, young people rescued from the rubble of the old headquarters and force-trained in the clan's gravitational hell, this was their first full-scale war. The fear of failure, and of the terrifying Patriarch watching them from above, was palpable.
Then, a thousand wrists vibrated at the same time.
Their Clan Identity Tokens, the runic black metal plates that bound them to the Empire, emitted a pulse of heat. A red light interface, projected directly from the clan's Task Pavilion and automated by the inscrutable System, appeared floating in front of each disciple's eyes.
[SYSTEM ALERT: PRIORITY CLAN MISSION ISSUED!]
[Supreme Objective: Absolute Extermination. Total Purge of the Purple Light Sect.]
[Confirmed Execution Reward Table:]
» Outer Disciple Head: 10 Contribution Points.
» Inner Disciple Head: 100 Contribution Points.
» Deacon/Tutor Head: 1,000 Contribution Points.
» Elder Head (Saint Realm): 100,000 Contribution Points + Unrestricted Access to the Palace's Secret Library.
[WARNING: Friendly fire or cowardice will be punished by immediate execution and purging of your bloodline by Marshal Vexia.]
The eyes of the thousand disciples read the numbers. The fear paralyzing their legs evaporated—not replaced by heroic courage, but consumed by a greedy, fanatical hysteria. In the Morningstar Clan, there was no place for the honor of the righteous; weakness was paid with death, but someone else's blood was paid with pure evolution.
"A hundred thousand points!" yelled a squad captain, an Earth Realm cultivator, his eyes bloodshot and swollen with greed. "By the broken gods, with a hundred thousand points I can buy a Dragon Ascension Pill! We can refine our bones!"
The bottom hatches of the transport ships creaked and dropped heavily.
"DON'T LEAVE A SINGLE ONE ALIVE! KILL THEM ALL!" they roared, unsheathing thousands of swords and spears.
The invasion that jumped from the ships wasn't an orderly army of disciplined soldiers; it was a plague of crazed locusts, drooling over the Contribution Points that meant the difference between being a servant and becoming a king.
But before the mob of human disciples could touch the sect's roofs, Vexia, standing on the Citadel's main deck, imposed tactical order.
"Heavy Infantry. Perimeter clearance deployment," she ordered with a whisper that traveled through the Hive Mind network.
From the Citadel's largest bays, 30,000 dark gray figures jumped into the void without parachutes, without wind mitigation talismans, and without flight magic. They fell like thirty thousand anvils from the heavens.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
The sound of the 30,000 black ice alloy and stellar steel bodies impacting simultaneously against the millennial buildings, immense marble plazas, and sacred walls of the Purple Light Sect was indescribable. It wasn't a magical attack; it was a pure orbital kinetic bombardment. Entire buildings collapsed in clouds of dust and splinters simply from the telluric shockwave of the impacts.
In the Eastern Sword Courtyard, a group of elite Purple Light Sect disciples, led by an Origin Realm Senior Deacon, lunged at the first dusty figures slowly rising from the smoking craters.
"They're constructs! Aim for the joints! Cut them!" ordered the Deacon, babbling desperately as he launched his ultimate technique, a massive pressurized wind slash capable of cleaving a five-meter-thick rock in two.
The wind blade collided directly against the exposed neck of Puppet 405.
CLANG!
The wind technique burst into useless breeze, and the Deacon's own physical sword shattered upon impact. Puppet 405 didn't even blink. Its skin—the disgusting, perfect amalgamation of Black Ice, Stellar Steel, and human flesh, held together by Samael's Primordial Dragon Blood—was structurally immune to physical and magical attacks below the Saint Realm.
The puppet, its soulless red eyes fixed on its target, raised an immense mechanical hand. It grabbed the terrified Deacon's head as easily as a man would take a ripe apple, and closed its fist.
Splash.
A red and gray mist stained the robes of the remaining disciples. The 30,000 Dead Blood Guard soldiers began to advance in unison. They didn't run with the fury of barbarians. They walked. And as they walked, they killed everything that breathed in front of them with a mechanical, bored, and chilling efficiency. They were tanks of flesh and steel. They absorbed entire volleys of fire spells, armor-piercing arrows, and Qi slashes, letting the magic crash against their runic chests, and kept advancing—crushing skulls, breaking spines, and tearing huge, bloody gaps in the defensive lines so the human Morningstar disciples could enter from the flanks to finish off the wounded and collect their points.
In the midst of the absolute chaos in the Western Sector of the mountain, a young Morningstar Clan disciple was crawling face down through an alley turned into a mudhole. He was barely 17 years old. He didn't belong to the noble branch, he had no prominent name or famous master. His evaluated talent was a miserable Yellow Grade. His leather armor was soaked, and his common steel sword was slightly nicked.
His senses were subjected to a brutal overload. The smell of mud, excrement, and hot blood flooded his nose, provoking gag reflexes he forcefully swallowed. A sharp, deafening ringing drilled into his eardrums from the nearby explosion of a stone wall shattered by heavy infantry.
Hiding behind the rubble of a ruined pagoda, the young novice watched about ten meters away. A Black Ice Puppet was fighting at close range against two formidable Purple Light Sect Inner Disciples, both in the Middle Origin Realm. The enemies were fast, agile, and their swords glowed with superior violet Qi.
They managed to evade a lethal sweep, and one of them drove his lightning-wreathed spear straight into the center of the puppet's metallic chest. Sparks flew, but the spear barely penetrated a centimeter. The puppet, impassive to the damage, ignored the embedded spear and thrust its two massive arms forward, catching the two Inner Disciples in a demonic bear hug.
The 17-year-old novice watched, paralyzed by a mix of terror and morbid fascination, as the puppet's stellar metal arms contracted. The sound of the ribs and armor of the two proud Purple Light Sect disciples breaking was horrifying; they sounded exactly like dry branches snapped under a lumberjack's boot. The two enemies fell to their knees in the mud, immobilized, coughing up gouts of blood, their lungs pierced, but still alive. The puppet, programmed for massive attrition, simply dropped them like trash and turned on its heavy heels, marching toward another larger group of defenders.
The two Inner Disciples were left groaning in the mud, desperately trying to reach their healing pills with trembling hands.
The young Morningstar disciple, the Yellow Grade boy, saw the golden opportunity. The ringing in his ears stopped. The fear of death was eclipsed by a burning beat in his chest.
He didn't hesitate a single millisecond. He burst from his hiding place and lunged forward, sliding in the bloody mud. He raised his nicked sword and, with a cruelty born of desperation, plunged it deep into the exposed throat of the first Purple Light Sect disciple, silencing his choked gurgle. Without stopping to watch, he twisted his wrist, ripped the blade out with a violent jerk, and drove it straight into the eye socket of the second wounded enemy, piercing his brain to the hilt.
The bodies fell inert.
The red screen projected by his wristband flashed in his field of vision.
[Confirmed Kills: 2 x Inner Disciple]
[Reward Added: +200 Contribution Points]
The boy panted, his chest rising and falling erratically. He looked down at his own hands, which were now completely stained with someone else's hot blood. He looked at the two proud and "noble" cultivators at his feet. He crouched nimbly, grabbed the valuable spatial rings from the corpses' bloody fingers, and tucked them into his shirt.
A few meters away, the Black Ice Puppet that had immobilized them half-turned. It stared at him for a second with its cold, empty, cybernetic red eyes. The boy's heart skipped a beat, expecting to be crushed for stealing a kill. But the machine simply turned its head back to the front and continued its relentless march looking for new enemies in violet robes, ignoring the ally.
The 17-year-old boy smiled. It was a slow, wet, twisted smile that stretched his mud- and blood-splattered cheeks.
"If I survive..." he murmured, his voice trembling, not from fear, but from an intoxicating thirst for power. "In the outside world, they spat on me. I was Yellow Grade trash, destined to clean stables. But here... in this empire... I am the hunter."
He wiped the blood from his face with the back of his forearm, gripped his nicked sword with renewed strength, and ran silently hunched over through the shadows, heading toward the sound of wailing, looking for his next wounded victim. In the fire and mud of this genocidal war, something deep, cruel, and absolutely loyal to the Morningstar Empire had just been born inside him. A psychopath forged in the Patriarch's pragmatism.
While pure carnage, infantry chaos, and bloody opportunism unfolded in the streets below, the true battle of cosmic laws and elite power began to unleash on the sect's jade roofs and immense white towers.
Seeing their home trampled, twenty Common Elders of the Purple Light Sect—ancient cultivators who had been in seclusion in the back mountains and possessed cultivation bases ranging between Stage 1 and 2 Saint—flew out of their meditation caverns. Their auras erupted, furious and bright, trying to stabilize the morale of their troops.
"Who dares profane the sacred land of the Purple Light?!" roared one of them, an Elder with a long white beard and flowing robes, flying at high speed on an immense giant fan made of mystical peacock feathers. "I am Elder Feng, the Saint of the Cutting Breeze! Fall and offer your heads!"
In front of his majestic and arrogant flight path, two much younger and smaller figures suddenly appeared on the cornice of a temple. Rowan Morningstar (Sequence 12) and Aylin Morningstar (Sequence 9).
Rowan laughed openly, his teenage body floating effortlessly in the air, seemingly devoid of any gravitational weight or friction.
"Cutting Breeze?" Rowan mocked, tilting his head with an arrogant smile. "By all the gods, what a cute and adorable name for a corpse."
Elder Feng turned red with fury at the boy's insult. Channeling all his Stage 1 Saint Qi, he furiously waved his feather fan.
"Die, spawn!"
An immense tornado of wind blades sharp as sabers, capable of shredding an armored formation, shot toward the cornice. Aylin, her dress billowing, didn't even bother to conjure a shield or dodge. With an insulting calmness, she simply let herself fall backward toward the courtyard floor below.
In mid-air, Aylin's emerald eyes glowed. She clasped her hands together.
"[Spear of the Earth Storm]."
The jade roof of the temple beneath Elder Feng simply exploded upwards. Aylin emerged from the rubble riding the tip of a colossal pillar of stone and compressed diamond that shot vertically into the sky with the speed of a ballistic missile, aimed directly at the guts of the elder flying above it.
Elder Feng, though surprised, was a veteran. He snorted in disdain, preparing to wave his fan and alter his own wind vector to dodge upward and evade the deadly pillar.
But when he raised his fan to push the wind... there was no wind.
Rowan was already positioned exactly above him, floating with crossed arms.
"[Dance of the Sharp Wind: Void]."
With a snap of Rowan's fingers, all the oxygen, atmosphere, and air friction within a twenty-meter radius around Elder Feng were instantly annihilated. An absolute vacuum was created. Without air molecules to push with his magic fan, the Stage 1 Saint's spiritual wings failed miserably. Basic physics betrayed him. The elder waved the fan in the inert vacuum, losing all control of his altitude and lift, like a bird that had just been robbed of its feathers in mid-flight.
"Too slow, grandpa! Down!" Rowan yelled, dropping with all the weight of the void and delivering a devastating, brutal descending axe kick directly onto the back of the bewildered elder's neck.
Rowan's blow pushed the Stage 1 Saint violently downward, directly onto the sharp tip of the earthen diamond pillar that Aylin was raising at sonic speed.
SPLAT!
The sound was grotesque and wet. The body of the proud Saint of the Cutting Breeze was brutally impaled thirty meters up in the air, the rocky tip of Aylin's earth spear entering his stomach and cleanly exiting his back, shattering his golden core in the process. The Saint's blood rained down on the roof.
Aylin braked the pillar, jumped nimbly into the air, and Rowan, floating effortlessly, bumped his fist against hers. The lethal duo of spatial and terrestrial control didn't stop to celebrate their hunt; their eyes were already frantically sweeping the battlefield for the next target with a juicy enough core to deserve their attention.
Meanwhile, at the southern end of the sect, the chaos was different. It wasn't explosive; it was silent and suffocating.
In the sacred, millennial Medicinal Herb Garden of the Purple Light Sect, three Elder Specialists in poisonous alchemy (all in the Peak Half-Saint Realm) were sweating profusely, performing intricate hand seals, desperately trying to activate the sect's Great Toxic Miasma Formation to flood the courtyards and dissolve Vexia's invading infantry.
But before they could activate the array's last runic node, a different mist began to roll between the beds of rare flowers. It was a dark purple, oily mist that gave off a deceptively sweet smell, like flowers undergoing accelerated fermentation. It covered the garden in seconds.
"What is this filth?" coughed the Senior Elder of the group violently, covering his mouth with the sleeve of his robe. "Another illusory mist? Dispel it with the purifying fan, quickly!"
"Brother... I can't..." groaned the second Elder, falling heavily to his knees and clutching his chest with clawed fingers. Thick black bile began to ooze from his mouth. "My meridians... the Qi in my veins... it's melting. It's burning me from the inside!"
Tamsin (Sequence 13), the beautiful and sadistic Jade Widow, strolled out from among the tall spiritual lotuses. She walked barefoot, with a sweet, lethal smile on her dark lips. With every step she took, the mystical, millennial grass she stepped on turned a disgusting tar-black color and withered, dead before it could organically wither.
"Your stupid millennial poisons are obsolete, elders," Tamsin said in a soft, cooing voice, like a mother calming a child. "Your toxins try to attack the mortal body. What a lack of ambition. My Pollen of Oblivion does not seek your flesh; it attacks and rots the conceptual structure of your own Qi."
The three elders, proud masters of poison, found themselves choking pathetically on their own corrupted energy, unable to even muster the strength to lift a dagger.
Behind Tamsin, from the shadow of an ancient spiritual fruit tree, emerged Elowen Morningstar (Sequence 7). The legion's Supreme Healer, the alchemist of war, looked at the elders writhing in pain on the ground with cold emerald eyes.
Elowen raised her right hand, the Hand of Life, and pointed to the beautiful beds of millennial medicinal plants surrounding the fallen.
"Everything alive is hungry, elders. You just have to remind them how to eat. [Genesis of the Vital Root]."
Elowen's aberrant, parasitic magic seeped into the sacred earth of the garden. The sect's docile, valuable medicinal plants, carefully tended for centuries, mutated instantly and horrifyingly under her control. The soft leaves became thick, black vines like muscular snakes; the healing flowers opened to reveal rows of serrated spiritual iron teeth.
The alchemists' own herbs lunged at their former masters. The carnivorous vines violently coiled around the necks, arms, and legs of the three poisoned elders, dragging them across the ground.
"No! Please! AARGH!"
The screams were brief. The toothed roots pierced flesh and bone with the force of industrial drills, sucking the rich spiritual blood of the Half-Saints and draining their lives in a matter of a few agonizing seconds, leaving only three husks of dry skin on the black earth.
Elowen walked calmly to one of the swollen, dark vines. With a flick of her fingers, the mutated plant forced its biology to open one of its corrupt flowers, spitting out a bulbous, bright, deep red fruit the size of an apple. Elowen caught the fruit gently.
"Pure condensed essence and Half-Saint Blood," Elowen said with a chilling, pragmatic smile, storing the fruit in her jade-lined spatial box. "Very useful as a primary catalyst for refining superior-grade explosive pills. The Patriarch will be pleased with the harvest."
The Medicinal Herb Garden hadn't been a battlefield for them; it had simply been an orchard from which to harvest supplies. The annihilation continued.