Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 2)
At the western end of the sect, the millennial Library Tower, a ten-story pinnacle of martial knowledge built with spiritual ironwood and runic stone, was being besieged by Vexia's heavy infantry.
At the base of the tower, a Purple Light Sect Elder was waging a one-man war. He was a Stage 2 Saint, but unlike most high-level cultivators who relied on ranged elemental attacks or flying swords, this elder was a monster of body cultivation. His torso was bare, revealing hypertrophied musculature covered in violet tattoos that throbbed with every beat of his heart. He was tearing apart the puppets of the Dead Blood Guard with his bare fists.
CRASH! CLANG!
The sound of stellar metal denting and black ice splintering echoed in the courtyard. The elder grabbed a puppet by the skull and smashed it against the library wall, sinking the metal into the stone. With his other hand, he pierced the alloy breastplate of a second cybernetic soldier, ripping out a handful of gears and runic circuits before kicking it away. His physical strength was so immense that the shockwave of his punches burst the air.
"Toys!" roared the elder, his voice hoarse and laden with unyielding arrogance, his knuckles stained with the black oil and diluted primordial blood of the machines. "Send me some flesh! Where are the cowards leading this scrap metal?! Come and face the Tyrant's Fist!"
As if the universe had heard his plea, the tide of gray puppets stopped abruptly. The metal soldiers simply lowered their weapons, turned on their heels in perfect robotic synchrony, and walked away, leaving him alone in the shattered courtyard.
The Elder frowned, his muscles tense and steaming from the heat of his own Qi. "They're fleeing?"
They weren't fleeing. Simply put, the zone had been claimed.
The air temperature plummeted. An ash-gray mist with furious, hypnotic violet streaks began to seep through the cracks in the stone tiles, falling from the roofs and rising from the dust. In less than three seconds, the fog became so thick that the Elder lost sight of the library walls, the corpses, and the sky darkened by Malak's dome.
"Another poison barrier?" the elder scoffed, expanding his Stage 2 Saint aura to disperse the mist with the sheer brute force of his atmospheric pressure. "Useless! My body is invulnerable to toxins."
But the mist didn't retreat. It swirled, and suddenly, the stone floor disappeared.
The Elder blinked. He was no longer in the tower's outer courtyard. He stood in the middle of an infinite hallway, flanked by immense black-framed mirrors that stretched forward and backward until they were lost in the darkness. The floor beneath his feet seemed to be liquid crystal.
"Low-level illusions?" The Elder laughed disdainfully. He clenched his immense fist, wreathing it in a destructive violet aura, and threw a devastating punch at the giant mirror to his right. "Shatter, coward's trick!"
The mirror exploded into a million pieces with a crystalline crash. But behind the broken glass... there was no library. There was another identical mirror. And behind that one, another.
The Elder grunted and began to punch frantically, shattering dozens, hundreds of mirrors, advancing blindly through the cascade of broken glass. But there was no exit. And then, panting slightly, he looked at his reflection in one of the intact mirrors.
What he saw froze the blood in his hypertrophied veins.
The reflection did not return the gaze of a proud Saint. It returned the image of a rotting corpse. In the mirror, the elder saw himself with his chest ripped wide open, his muscles melted like wax, and his lungs full of black maggots. In the next mirror, he saw himself decapitated. In another, burned alive. In each reflection, the mist projected his subconscious fears, showing him his own death in infinite, grotesque variations.
The air grew heavy, freezing, and laden with the smell of formaldehyde and dead flesh.
Sitting on a wooden beam that appeared floating in nowhere, several meters above the hallway of mirrors, Lyra Morningstar (Sequence 8) swung her legs lazily. Her dark blue hair fell over her shoulders, and her neon blue eyes shone in the gloom of the illusion with a freezing, distant, and terrifying beauty.
"They are not illusions, grandpa," Lyra whispered. Her voice didn't come from her lips; it resonated from all directions at once, bouncing off the mirrors, amplified by the Out-of-Phase Echo of her Codex, slithering into the elder's brain like an auditory parasite. "They are the inventory of your nightmares."
The Elder roared, trying to jump toward the beam to crush her, but his legs didn't respond. Suddenly, he felt a sharp, stabbing, unbearable pain in the center of his chest.
He fell to his knees, coughing violently. He looked down.
In the center of his chest, the thick skin that had withstood stellar steel had split wide open. A deep, clean wound, as if an immense, invisible sword had run him through from sternum to spine, was gushing blood.
He looked up, terrified. No one had touched him. Lyra was still sitting on the beam, ten meters away, playing with a lock of her hair. There were no weapons around her. There was no trace of cutting enemy Qi.
"W-What sorcery is this...?" the Saint babbled, feeling his lungs fill with his own blood. His invulnerable body was failing.
"It's Absolute Psychosomatism, elder," Lyra explained with academic coldness, closing her heavy [Grimoire of Dream Illusion] with a soft snap. "Your mind believes you are in hell. Your brain has been tricked by the mist into fervently believing that a million invisible swords have just pierced you. So your body, obeying the perfect machine that is the mind, simply splits wide open to make the belief a reality. I'm not killing you. You're committing suicide."
"LIES!" roared the elder in a fit of hysteria, losing all the composure of an expert. His eyes grew bloodshot. He unleashed all his Qi in a frenzy of madness, throwing punches of violet energy at nothingness, shattering more mirrors, striking the air, trying to kill the illusion.
But with every punch he threw, his mind projected a phantom returning the attack. And with every hallucination, a new, real, bleeding, deep wound magically appeared on his physical body. He was cutting himself to pieces with the weight of his own terror.
The Elder screamed, fighting agonizingly against nonexistent enemies, his bodily invulnerability turned into a macabre joke. Finally, with his heart beating a thousand times a second due to the panic and traumatic stress imposed by the illusion, the Stage 2 Saint's thick heart muscle burst inside his chest from pure exhaustion.
The elder's shattered body fell heavily onto the tiles of the real courtyard. The mist slowly dissipated. Lyra floated down gracefully, stepped over the corpse's blood, and walked toward her next prey, leaving behind a man who had died without a single blade touching him.
If the terror in the west of the sect was psychological and loud, in the immense Eastern Courtyard, death had become an absolute sensory void.
War is, by definition, deafening. It is the clash of steel against steel, the expansive burst of pure magic, the shouts of commanders ordering formations, the howls of the dying, and the crunch of bones. Sound is the metric of battle.
But in the Eastern Sector, the war had gone completely mute.
Within an exact radius of three hundred meters, a perfect Acoustic Deprivation Zone had been established. Joren Morningstar (Sequence 17) walked through the center of the plaza. He didn't run, he didn't jump; he glided like a ghost in his own realm of silence.
Around him, the scene was Dantesque. Dozens of disciples and three Origin Realm Elders were trapped within the range of his Codex, [Silent Wind]. The terror on their faces was unimaginable. They screamed with all their might, the veins in their necks about to burst, but not a single decibel came out of their mouths. Their swords clashed against Vexia's puppets, but the metal produced no sound whatsoever. The fiery explosions and lightning bolts they launched detonated in the deepest, most terrifying muteness.
The sudden loss of the inner ear destroyed the cultivators' sense of balance. Many fell to the ground, vomiting from extreme vertigo, unable to coordinate their own feet or hear where allied attacks were coming from.
Joren, his face expressionless and his brown eyes devoid of pity, moved his dagger-wreathed hands almost lazily. He didn't push the air; he separated it. He created multiple [Absolute Void Edges].
The blades had no mass, displaced no oxygen molecules, emitted not the slightest hiss, and were completely invisible. They traveled through the acoustic void at supersonic speeds.
The three Elders trying to orient themselves in the center of the plaza simply fell apart. Their necks slid off their shoulders in a perfect, microscopic cut, and their heads fell to the ground in slow motion. Blood spurted from severed arteries, spraying the marble pavement. No one heard the cut. No one heard the blood spill. No one heard the bodies collapse. In Joren's silence, death was not an event; it was a state of matter that occurred without warning.
And if Joren embodied annihilation from the inert void, his partner in the eastern sector's massacre was overload and absolutism incarnate.
On the opposite flank of the plaza, Lys Morningstar (Sequence 14) walked bathed in a divine, golden glow. The angelic figure, her golden hair shining as if she had woven starlight, contrasted disturbingly with the slaughterhouse surrounding her.
Lys wasn't healing. The Supreme Healer of Light was executing.
A Stage 1 Saint Realm Elder, a master of stealth assassination from the Purple Light Sect, had managed to evade the puppets' line of sight. Taking advantage of the chaos, he had slipped through the shadows of a broken column and lunged at Lys's back, aiming a dagger poisoned with violet toxin directly at the base of her skull.
He believed he had the fragile healer in his hands. But the elder didn't know that true light has no blind spots.
The instant the Elder entered a five-meter radius of Lys, he violently crashed into a solid, semi-transparent barrier that had just appeared: the [Dome of Dawn].
The impact wasn't like hitting a stone wall. It was like crashing into the outer core of a miniature sun.
The dome of hyper-compressed photons didn't just repel him. The extreme, contained heat of the barrier melted the assassin's spiritual layer on contact. His skin began to bubble and blister instantly. The Elder stumbled backward, his eyes wide, choking back a scream in Joren's acoustic void, and raised his melted dagger, realizing his fatal mistake.
Lys didn't even flinch. She slowly spun on her heels with the grace of a celestial dancer. Her hazel eyes showed no compassion; they radiated the fanatical, terrifying devotion of a crusader.
She raised a single open palm and aimed it directly at the terrified elder's face.
"My Patriarch's light purifies all things," Lys said with a sweet, radiant, and infinitely cruel smile. "And you were disgustingly filthy. [Psalm of the Eternal Aurora: Spear of Solar Judgment]."
A concentrated pillar of blue-white light, the hottest and most destructive frequency of the stellar spectrum, erupted from her palm. The beam didn't travel; it simply occupied the space between her and the elder in a millionth of a second.
There was no resistance. The molecular heat of Lys's light was so absurd, so tyrannical and devastating, that the Stage 1 Saint's Qi defense didn't even have a chance to splinter. He was cauterized at the atomic level. The pillar of light pierced the elder's skull, torso, and limbs, evaporating the water in his cells, disintegrating his bones, and vaporizing his soul.
When the blinding light disappeared an instant later, the Elder no longer existed. In his place, on the immense white stone column behind him, a haunting black shadow had been imprinted—the silhouette of a man burned into the pure stone, the only carbonic trace that he had ever been alive.
The war waged on.
In less than thirty real minutes since the Morningstar Citadel emerged from the clouds, the Purple Light Sect's outer defense—a fortification that had repelled invasions from other sects for centuries—had catastrophically collapsed.
The sight was macabre. Vexia's biomechanical infantry had shredded the defense battalions and broken the main gates of all four sectors. The thousand human disciples were in a psychotic frenzy, hunting down the wounded, backstabbing survivors, and looting spatial rings while their plates became saturated with notifications and contribution points.
But the most terrifying thing wasn't the fall of the walls. It was the fall of the immortals.
In just half an hour, fifteen Saint-Grade Elders (Stages 1, 2, and 3), the pillars of the sect's wisdom and martial power, had been systematically and brutally murdered at the hands of twenty teenagers. Young monsters, forged in the blood of a dragon, fighting with supernatural coordination, ignoring the laws of physics, and dismantling millennial cultivation concepts with the ease of a child taking apart a wooden toy.
From the unreachable summit of the Central Peak, the highest point of the mountain range that had not yet been profaned by the fire of the invasion, the Grand Elder of the Purple Light Sect watched the scene.
He was an ancient man, a Stage 7 Saint. His power should have made him feel like a god on earth. However, at that moment, his gnarled hands trembled, gripping the railing of his pagoda's balcony until the ironwood was reduced to sawdust.
His bloodshot eyes swept the shattered horizon of his home. He saw Eris's black fires consuming the supply warehouses. He saw Cedric's enormous golden pillars holding up Malak's shadow cage, preventing any hope of escape. He heard the sound of machinery crushing the skulls of his disciples. Three millennia of history, martial secrets, pride, and political supremacy were being turned into an industrial slaughterhouse.
"This is not a war!" roared the Grand Elder, his voice breaking from desperation and disbelief, spitting blood from the sheer pressure of his contained fury. "It is a massacre! A calculated genocide!"
Full of hatred, he looked up at the sky, ignoring the slaughter on the ground. His eyes fixed on the immense Morningstar Citadel suspended above him.
There, thanks to his Saint vision, he could see the obsidian balcony. And what he saw humiliated him more than any sword wound.
Samael Morningstar, the one who had orchestrated the apocalypse, was not drenched in the sweat of battle. He was not casting colossal spells or directing troops. Samael was lounging languidly on his obsidian throne, legs crossed. Beside him, the beautiful pregnant Empress rested peacefully, and the runic-spectacled maid was pouring a golden thread of vintage wine into the Patriarch's glass.
They were bored. They were watching the annihilation of one of the most powerful sects in the region as if it were a vulgar street play barely worthy of their attention.
That arrogance, that absolute apathy toward their millennial suffering, broke the Grand Elder's final barrier of sanity. Humiliation transformed into suicidal fanaticism.
"Do you think we are scum, boy?" the elder hissed, frothing at the mouth. "Do you think a thousand years of history can be erased by a group of young assassins and steel scrap? I will show you the weight of the roots you're trying to pull up!"
The Grand Elder turned abruptly, walking with heavy steps toward the center of his pagoda. There rested the Sect's Central Altar, an immense purple jade monolith engraved with inscriptions from the primordial era.
"If the heavens abandon us, then we will awaken the monsters of the earth!" he yelled, drawing a curved ceremonial dagger.
Without a hint of hesitation, the elder cut the palms of both hands deeply, right down to the bone. He pressed his bloody fists against the central runes of the altar and began to channel by burning his own vital essence, sacrificing hundreds of years of his lifespan in a single torrent.
"Awaken, Guardians of the Peaks! The purple bloodline is being devoured! AWAKEN AND CLEANSE THE MOUNTAIN!"
The Stage 7 Saint's blood stained the jade. The altar hummed with a low, sub-sonic sound that vibrated the molars of everyone present on the mountain, invaders and defenders alike.
Suddenly, an immense, thick, and incredibly violent pillar of violet light erupted from the Central Altar. The beam shot toward the sky, charged with a power so ancestral and pure that, for a tiny second, it cleanly pierced Malak's very [Veil of the Eclipse], connecting the mountain with the dark sky before the shadow closed again.
And then, the earth beneath the war responded.
The true battle, the titanic scale that Samael had been waiting for, had just been summoned.
BOOOOOOM!
Multiple massive earthquakes shook the mountain range at the same time. They were no simple tremors; the mountains themselves began to crack and tear open from the inside. Several of the immense summits surrounding the Purple Light Sect's main peaks exploded outward, firing rocks the size of entire pagodas that rained down on invaders and defenders indiscriminately.
From the depths of the shattered peaks, enormous columns of stale, heavy, ancestral Qi rose toward the sky.
They were the Ancient Auras.
The Sect Guardians. Saints who had been in sepulchral seclusion, locked in stasis for centuries to preserve the purple bloodline's last line of defense. Their eyes opened in the darkness of the caverns, bloodshot with the fury of those awakened from the grave to see their home in flames.
The atmospheric pressure generated by the simultaneous awakening of these fossilized entities swept the battlefield like a physical tsunami. The air became suffocating. Several dozen of Vexia's puppets, the unstoppable heavy infantry that had withstood arrows and spells, were simply crushed to the ground, their black ice alloy chests denting severely and their knees breaking just from the weight of the spiritual gravity of the emerging ancestors.
The frenzy of the Morningstar human disciples stopped dead in its tracks. The Purple Light Sect Deacons looked up, tears of hope welling in their bruised eyes.
However, the young dragons of the Morningstar Legion did not retreat. There was not a single gasp of terror, not a step back, not an instinct to flee.
Violeta stopped in mid-air, shaking the blood from her rapier, her silver eyes locking onto an elder rising from the rubble surrounded by tornadoes. Eris licked her charred lips, gripping her black spear with both hands as her Flame of Ruin grew in intensity at the challenge.
Kael Morningstar, with his destroyed tunic and his sword dripping magma, turned his neck toward the North Peak, where one of the colossal ancestors had just destroyed half the mountain on his way out.
The Infernal King did not feel the fear a normal human would have felt in the face of such an immense power gap. In the distortion of the Palace of Heritage, they had taken down a Stage 5 Saint, yes, but they had done so against a predictable construct, wounded and depleted in intelligence. Facing multiple living, awake, and furious legends was the true graduation test the Patriarch had imposed on them.
Kael smiled, his vertical pupils dilated to the maximum, showing all his teeth in an expression of demented ecstasy. He gripped Magma Fang and whispered to the stale wind of the battlefield.
"Finally, the trash got out of the way. The main course has just arrived at the table."