Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 7)
The Veil of the Eclipse was not simply a dome of darkness; it was the total absence of creation.
When the Hidden Guardian—a Stage 8 Saint who had been ripped from his dimensional hiding place by Samael Morningstar's casual hand—was thrown into the southern sector of the mountain range, he did not crash into the ground. Like the supreme master of assassination that he was, he spun in the air with incomprehensible agility, dissipating the kinetic force of the fall and landing on his feet without emitting the slightest sound.
The elder, wrapped in gray robes that absorbed the light, narrowed his eyes. His breathing stopped by instinct. His hands, hidden in his sleeves, already gripped two daggers forged in the core of a dead meteorite.
He was the Phantom of the Purple Light Sect. The assassin who had decapitated kings, annihilated entire clans, and murdered other Saints without them ever seeing his face.
He tried to expand his Stage 8 Divine Sense to scan the surroundings, but his energy bounced back. The space around him felt dense, as if he were submerged in black tar. He tried to activate a spatial jump talisman embedded in his wrist, but the rune flashed and turned to dust. Space was solidified.
Suddenly, he understood the nature of his prison.
"An absolute Shadow Domain..." murmured the Hidden Guardian, his voice as dry as sandpaper. A gloomy smile formed on his face. "That brat underestimates me. Throwing the master of shadows into a dark cage is like throwing a fish into the ocean."
The Guardian crouched down and blended into the darkness. He activated his supreme camouflage technique, becoming undetectable in body, Qi, and soul. He was going to find the creator of this domain and slit his throat.
But the Guardian made a fundamental mistake. He believed the darkness was his ally.
Here, the darkness was the Shinigami.
Around him, the silence was broken by a hiss that did not come from the wind, but from reality itself tearing. From the puddles of absolute blackness covering the ground, two-dimensional silhouettes began to emerge. They looked like black paper cutouts, devoid of volume.
Malak's 100 Silent Shadows materialized, surrounding the Hidden Guardian in a perfect circle. Their faces were masks of smooth white porcelain, with a single violet rune on their foreheads that dictated the law of this space: Silence.
Thanks to the [Cloak of Non-Existence], the Hidden Guardian had not sensed them. To his Stage 8 Divine Sense, the space in front of him was still empty. Only his physical eyes registered the threat.
"Energy puppets... Half-Saint Level," the elder let out a low, derogatory laugh. A third black dagger appeared in his right hand. "Don't waste my time."
The Hidden Guardian moved. He didn't break the sound barrier; he slipped through the cracks of perception. In a microsecond, his figure flickered in a hundred places at once. A hundred perfect, surgical cuts, aimed at the back of each shadow's neck.
The heads with porcelain masks fell to the ground in unison. The black paper bodies dissolved into smoke.
The Guardian shook the nonexistent blood from his dagger, disappointed.
"Pathetic."
But the black smoke did not disappear. It swirled on the ground, fueled by the immense power of the [Veil of the Eclipse]. In less than a second, the smoke condensed again. The 100 Shadows rose once more, unharmed, without making a single sound.
The elder frowned. Before he could attack again, the shadows began to move in a dizzying geometric pattern. They didn't try to stab him; they crossed their [Daggers of the Eternal Night] in the air, weaving threads of liquid darkness that connected one shadow to another.
[Formation: Network of Chained Souls].
The Hidden Guardian felt a dead weight drop directly onto his spiritual core. His legs buckled slightly. It wasn't a physical weight; it was as if a hundred lead anchors had hooked onto his soul. His incredible Stage 8 speed was halved. His assassin's fluidity became clumsy.
"Damn leeches!" he roared, channeling his immense Qi to break the spiritual threads.
But then, true death made its appearance.
In front of him, just a meter away, the darkness thickened to form a hooded silhouette floating inches from the ground. There was no face beneath Malak's hood, only two orbs of freezing blue will-o'-the-wisp looking at him with the apathy of an open grave.
Malak spoke no word. He extended his hand, formed of boiling pitch and black smoke, straight toward the Guardian's chest.
The Stage 8's survival instinct howled. He twisted his torso with superhuman flexibility, dodging the touch by a millimeter, and slid his dagger toward the gray energy vortex in Malak's chest. The assassin's blade passed through the Shinigami's body... but met no resistance. It only cut cold smoke.
At the same time, Malak's hand brushed the elder's shoulder.
[Touch of the Grave's Chill].
The Hidden Guardian let out a muffled scream. The pure death energy injected by Malak instantly froze the meridians of his left shoulder. He felt his own blood turn into thick black ice. His entire arm was rendered useless, dead and cold as a mausoleum stone.
The elder jumped back several meters, breathing heavily. His left arm hung inert. The Network of Chained Souls continued to drain his vitality, weighing heavily on his mind. The 100 shadows watched him. And the Shinigami floated impassively, raising his immense scythe, the Soul Harvester, whose obsidian crystal blade emitted the silent laments of a thousand tortured spirits.
The Hidden Guardian understood the naked truth.
He was an assassin of matter. But the being in front of him was not alive. He had no organs to poison, no blood to spill, no neck to slice. A traditional assassin cannot kill Death itself.
"Well played, monster of the south," spat the elder, his voice losing its calm and filling with fanatical resentment. "You have trapped me in the only cage where my arts are useless. But if you think a Guardian of the Purple Light Sect will die like a cornered dog... you are gravely mistaken."
The Hidden Guardian brought his right hand to his own chest. Not to heal himself, but to sink his fingers like claws directly into his sternum.
He broke his own ribcage with a disgusting crunch and grabbed his physical heart.
"If the light cannot save me in this darkness..." the elder's voice distorted, becoming guttural, monstrous, resonating with multiple layers of demonic echoes, "...THEN I WILL LET HELL CONSUME ME!"
The elder crushed his own heart.
But he did not die. Instead, he activated his hidden card. The absolute taboo of the Purple Light Sect. The Forbidden Art that condemned him to eternal nonexistence in exchange for a power beyond mortal comprehension: [Blind Blood Sacrifice: Incarnation of the Demon God of Slaughter].
The Hidden Guardian's body erupted. His human skin tore apart, revealing black and red muscles swollen with putrid energy. Two jagged obsidian horns sprouted from his skull, breaking through his scalp. His eyes became pools of boiling blood. His left arm, previously frozen by Malak, was shattered from the inside by a new, three-meter-long demonic claw oozing a miasma.
The aura unleashed by the Stage 8 Demon was so monstrously overwhelming that the Network of Chained Souls of the 100 Shadows shattered in an instant. Several porcelain-masked shadows were disintegrated simply by the pressure of the toxic air emanating from the beast.
The Guardian was no longer an assassin; he was a machine of pure carnage, a demon who had sold his soul for sixty seconds of absolute power, capable of temporarily rivaling a Stage 9 Saint.
"I WILL DEVOUR YOU INTO NOTHINGNESS!" roared the demon.
He vanished. His speed, multiplied by the demonic transformation, surpassed the laws of physics.
He appeared instantly in front of Malak. His demonic claws, wreathed in a corrupting black fire, sank deep into the gray vortex of the Shinigami's chest. This time, the attack carried such a high density of demonic energy that it managed to damage Malak's spiritual form. The jet-black smoke tore open, and Malak was violently thrown backward, crashing into the solid walls of his own Veil of the Eclipse.
The demon didn't stop. He spun around and unleashed a storm of bone spikes and miasma in all directions. The 80 remaining shadows, attempting to surround him, were pierced, pinned to the ground, and melted by the demonic acid. The destruction was so absolute that the Veil's regenerative power could not rebuild them immediately.
The Demon Guardian leaped toward Malak, who was barely reforming, and crushed him against the spatial barrier with both hands.
"DIE! DIE! DIE, MISERABLE SPIRIT!" roared the beast, using his corrosive aura to burn Malak's tunic of darkness, trying to extinguish the will-o'-the-wisp in his eyes.
But even as his spiritual form burned beneath the demonic flames and his domain trembled... Malak's blue orbs showed no surprise, fear, or pain.
Malak observed him with the same apathy with which an entomologist watches a bug fluttering inside a jar.
To a Shinigami, the increase in physical power, demonic muscular strength, or speed were irrelevant variables. An invincible body is merely an empty shell if the thread tying it to life is severed.
Malak's freezing blue eyes blinked and turned a deep, bloodthirsty crimson.
"Your time is up," whispered Malak's voice, sounding like a thousand tombstones dragging across stone.
Malak didn't try to break free from the demon's grip. Instead, he used the [Blink of Darkness]. His smoke body dissolved between the beast's claws and instantly rematerialized behind the Demon Guardian's gigantic back.
The immense scythe, the Soul Harvester, was raised in the darkness. The obsidian crystal shone with a green spectral fire.
The demon turned to attack, but Malak had already executed his sentence.
[Cut of the Silver Thread].
Malak swung the scythe in a perfect, silent arc. The immense blade passed through the dense armor of miasma, crossed the black, invulnerable flesh, broke the demonic ribcage, and exited through the Guardian's chest.
There was no physical wound. Not a single drop of blood spilled.
But the Demon Guardian froze mid-motion. His claws mere inches from Malak's hood. His bloodshot eyes widened.
The "silver thread", the metaphysical concept that bound his divine Stage 8 soul to the grotesque demonic body, had been cleanly severed.
The demon's body, with all its boundless power and monstrous vitality, became useless. The soul paralysis was absolute. The Guardian was trapped inside his own flesh, conscious of his power, but totally unable to give a single command to his muscles. The demonic energy, lacking a soul to control it, began to turn erratic, burning him from the inside, but he couldn't even scream.
Malak rose slowly above the paralyzed colossus. His scythe began to shine with a violet and crimson will-o'-the-wisp.
The enemy had his soul exposed and disconnected. It was the moment of ultimate truth.
"[Purgatory Harvest]."
Behind the paralyzed demon, the Veil of the Eclipse tore open. An immense Gate of the Underworld, forged of petrified bone and black iron, materialized in the empty space. The doors opened with a dull creak, revealing an abyss of wails and rusted chains.
Malak raised his scythe one last time and decapitated the demon.
He didn't cut the physical neck. The blade hooked the howling, luminous, and corrupted soul of the Stage 8 Guardian, violently ripping it from its prison of flesh. The demon's body slumped, instantly turning into dead ashes upon losing its spiritual anchor.
The Guardian's soul tried to flee, weeping from pure existential terror, but thousands of spectral chains shot out from the Gate of Purgatory, enveloping it completely. They dragged the soul's light into the underworld, ensuring its existence was erased from the cycle of reincarnation for all eternity.
The obsidian doors closed with a final slam that echoed in the soul of the world, and vanished.
Malak descended slowly. The crimson fire of his eyes returned to their usual freezing blue. With a fluid motion of his scythe, the Veil of the Eclipse began to retract. The darkness dissolved like ink washed away by water, once again revealing the night sky and the purple clouds of the Sect's mountain range.
Below, in the ruins of the plazas, the armies of the Morningstar Legion, exhausted and bloodied after the carnage, looked up.
The five Supreme Guardians of the Purple Light Sect had been eradicated.
However, the air in the mountain range did not relax. On the contrary, the temperature began to rise to catastrophic levels, and a blinding golden light tinged the black clouds.
The Central Peak of the Purple Light Sect was no longer a mountain; it was a nuclear furnace.
The Grand Elder, known in the annals of history as "The Executioner", was not fighting. He was radiating. His cultivation at the peak of the Stage 7 Saint Realm saturated the air with particles of solid light so dense that the gravity of the mountain range seemed to stop working. He floated ten meters above the ground in the center of the main mountain, arms crossed, surrounded by six immense orbs of light that orbited like destructive satellites.
He had awakened the Guardians. And now, after sensing the death of his hunting dogs, the sun of the Sect was ready to purge the south with celestial fire.
Samael Morningstar watched from the Citadel. His fingers drummed softly on the obsidian throne. He had massacred the sect. He had tested his Legion. This elder was the last pillar of power before taking total control. The logical, the expected thing, was for the Primordial Sovereign to rise and crush the Grand Elder's head with his own hands to crown the conquest.
But Samael did not move. His gaze lowered to the figure standing beside him, on the edge of the floating Citadel, looking toward the burning Central Peak.
Seraphina.
His beautiful wife. The reincarnated empress.
She wore no robes of nobility tonight. Her silver hair fell in a cascade of silk over a fitted, silver battle armor that accentuated her ethereal figure. With her cultivation at the peak Stage 6 Saint Realm, the Eternal Lotus Empress Body she inhabited emitted a freezing, monarchical aura that rivaled that of the gods themselves.
"You promised not to intervene in this war directly, my queen," Samael had said hours ago, when she demanded her place in the vanguard.
"I promised to let you rule, Samael," Seraphina had interrupted him, approaching him with that freezing, seductive elegance that stole his breath, placing a cold hand on his cheek. "But I am your right hand. And if I do not temper this Eternal Lotus Empress Body in the fire of despair... Let me extinguish their stupid sun."
Samael had smiled, unable to deny anything to the woman who gave meaning to his existence.
Now, back in the present, Seraphina looked at Samael. Her beautiful eyes shone with a deep affection reserved solely for him, mixed with the absolute arrogance of a stellar conqueror.
"Keep the throne warm for me, my love," whispered Seraphina, her melodious voice carried by the wind.
Without waiting for an answer, Seraphina took a step into the void.
Her body fell from the Citadel like a meteor of silver ice, heading straight for the nuclear furnace of the Central Peak. Beneath her feet, a gigantic, illusory Yin Ice Lotus bloomed in the scorching air, freezing the light itself.
The Empress was going to hunt the sun.