Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 9 - End)
Time seemed to stand still in the Purple Light Mountain Range. Ancestor Feng-Wu's violet fireball—a sphere of concentrated destruction capable of vaporizing the Central Peak and everyone on it—did not explode. It simply stopped. Not because it had crashed against a massive Qi barrier, nor because a shield of divine light had contained it, but because a black spear, simple and unadorned, had pierced its core.
There was no sonic boom. There was no thermal shockwave. The Antimatter Spear: "The End of the Axiom" was not blocking the Stage 4 Great Saint's karmic fire; it was annihilating it. The tip of the spear, made of absolute vacuum, redefined the existence of the enemy's energy. The violet fire flickered like a candle drowned in the ocean and dissipated into nothingness, erased from the equation of reality.
But before Kael—his body shattered and eyes wide with disbelief—or the two astounded Ancestors could react to the miracle, the sky changed.
Miles above, in the Morningstar Citadel floating like an obsidian leviathan, Samael set his wine glass down on the arm of his throne. His violet eyes shone with an authority that defied mortal comprehension. He raised his right hand, gloved in power, and snapped his fingers.
[Law of Void & Space: Mirage of the Primordial Sovereign]
The snap made no noise. Instead, the sound of the entire continent died.
Suddenly, color drained from reality. The sky above the sect didn't cloud over; it became a two-dimensional black hole that covered the firmament from edge to edge. The sound of the wind, the crackle of residual flames, the agonizing gasps of the wounded, and the clash of swords vanished in an instant. The 1,000 disciples of the Morningstar Clan, the wounded Sequences, and the surviving enemy disciples felt their own hearts stop beating. The air grew heavy, vitreous, as if they were all trapped inside a dark diamond.
In the center of that black firmament, space "tore" as if it were old parchment paper. The rift revealed a screen of infinite depth, vibrating at its edges with silver and violet static. It was a dimensional window, the Eye of the Sovereign opened upon the world.
Samael appeared in the center of this fracture. His projected image alone emitted a gravitational pressure that forced thousands of knees to buckle.
Then, the rings of the 1,000 elite Morningstar disciples and the runic processors of the 30,000 puppets of the Dead Blood Legion vibrated in unison with a dictatorial command.
[IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE]
[PRIORITY: ABSOLUTE]
[MESSAGE FROM THE PATRIARCH:]
Samael's voice did not travel through the air. The Law of Space connected directly to the auditory nerve of every living being on the mountain. The platinum light runes seemed to burn themselves into the back of their skulls.
"Stop."
In the lower valleys, a Morningstar disciple who was millimeters away from decapitating an enemy elder froze, his sword suspended in mid-air. The 30,000 combat puppets, with their weapons raised and gears spinning, halted abruptly, turning into an army of gray metal statues beneath the darkness. A sepulchral silence, absolute and terrifying, seized the blood-soaked mountain.
"You have fought well for points and glory," Samael's voice continued, flowing with the tranquility of a river of ice and the lethality of an ancient god. "But massive brute force is the last resort of the ignorant and of beasts. Today, I do not give you riches, nor cultivation manuals. Today... I give you eyes."
On the giant screen in the sky, the Sovereign's image faded and was replaced by a live broadcast from the Central Peak. With crystal clarity that allowed them to count every grain of dust, the 1,000 disciples saw the leaders of their generation: Kael, Cedric, Nylas, Rowan, and the others, kneeling, mutilated, and on the brink of death. They saw the two Great Saint Ancestors, Feng-Wu and Lian-Hua, radiating auras that distorted space itself.
And, with her back to the dimensional camera, standing between the gods and the youths, a maid holding a black spear.
"Observe," Samael commanded, his voice sealing the fate of the Purple Light Sect. "The Grand Marshal is going to impart the first lesson of the Morningstar Academy. Today's topic is: The Dissection of Mortal Divinity."
On the Central Peak, Vexia completely ignored the immense celestial projection above her. To the Grand Marshal's hive mind, scenery, drama, and awe were irrelevant variables. She only cared about efficiency.
She held the Antimatter Spear with a single hand. Her gothic maid uniform was immaculate. The black skirt, pristine white apron, and headdress didn't have a single speck of dust or drop of blood on them—a completely absurd contrast to the crater of magma and death surrounding her.
In front of her, Ancestor Feng-Wu (The Sage of the Violet Flame) and Ancestor Lian-Hua (The Melody of the Void) instinctively stepped back. That woman did not emit the heat of a normal cultivator; she emitted the coldness of a statistical abyss.
"A... maid?" squawked Feng-Wu. His empty sockets, filled with will-o'-the-wisp fire, blinked in disbelief. He looked at the black spear and then at Vexia's impassive face. "You blocked my Karmic Purgatory Fire with one hand? Who the hell are you?"
Vexia, with an elegant, mechanized motion, raised her right hand and adjusted the rectangular glasses on the bridge of her nose. Her voice, captured by Samael's array and amplified to resonate in the minds of the army, was cold, clinical, and devoid of any empathy.
"I am the one who cleans up the mess."
Vexia turned slightly, glancing out of the corner of her eye at the shattered Sequences behind her, and then spoke to the void, addressing the spectators.
"Little geniuses... the thousand disciples watching from below with reverential awe. Open your eyes wide and calibrate your retinas." She twirled the Antimatter Spear, and the air whistled, complaining as it was torn by the vacuum. "This is not a heroic rescue. This is a live autopsy."
Vexia took a step toward the two Great Saints. The sound of her shoe's heel against the vitrified rock cracked like a hammer blow.
"You relics," Vexia said, fixing her violet gaze on the Ancestors. "You have lived a thousand years buried in stone. They call you Ancestors. The ignorant of this continent call you 'Gods'."
Vexia shook her head, a genuine expression of disappointment crossing her features.
"But your technique is ridiculously messy. Your Qi flow is noisy, chaotic, and full of leaks. Your so-called 'divinity' is nothing more than an inefficient accumulation of years, rotting in an obsolete biological system. Today, we are going to correct that miscalculation."
Ancestor Feng-Wu roared, his millennial pride and his status as a Stage 4 Great Saint mortally wounded by the monotonous arrogance of that maid.
"DIE, INSOLENT WRETCH!" bellowed the living corpse, his aura erupting like a volcano. "No one mocks the Sage of the Flame and lives to tell the tale!"
The entire sky turned a radioactive violet. Feng-Wu, understanding that the maid was no ordinary opponent, did not hold back. He burned his own withered vital essence to summon the entirety of his domain, forcing reality to obey his thermal law.
[Great Saint Domain: Inferno of the Nine Violet Suns].
Space fractured. Nine spheres of karmic plasma, each the massive size of a house, materialized around Vexia, surrounding her from all directions. The heat given off was so monstrously intense that the peak's rock began to bubble and evaporate, turning into liquid glass.
Below, on the plains, the 1,000 Morningstar disciples watched the sky projection with absolute terror.
"It's impossible!" shouted one of the captains, breaking into a cold sweat despite the distance. "The pressure of that domain melts light! No one can survive at the epicenter!"
Vexia didn't move from her spot. Her unaltered voice resonated clearly in the audience's minds.
"Lesson One: Inefficiency."
Vexia adjusted her glasses. The [Omniscient War Codex] activated in her retinas. The world lost its colors for her, transforming into a cyan data grid. She didn't see fire, or suns, or deities; she saw golden trajectory lines and probability calculations. In her vision, the "Danger of Death" marked a resounding 0.00%.
"The enemy is using one hundred percent of his mystical energy reserve to heat-saturate an area of three hundred cubic meters," Vexia explained in a professorial tone. "But my physical body only occupies approximately five cubic meters. 99.99% of his massive attack is... waste."
The nine suns collapsed toward her, an implosion of karmic fire destined to leave not even the ashes of her soul.
Vexia walked. She didn't run. She didn't use a teleportation technique or summon an energy shield. She simply walked gracefully toward the first giant sun.
In her left hand appeared a liquid silver stiletto that vibrated with an inaudible hum: the [Laplace Compass].
When the immense sphere of violet plasma was about to incinerate her nose, Vexia moved her arm. It wasn't a powerful strike. There was no martial shout. It was a tap. A surgical, millimeter-precise prick in a seemingly random point in the burning air.
FZZZT!
The giant sun, with the power to annihilate an entire city, blinked comically. Its internal structure collapsed and vanished into a harmless cloud of gray smoke that didn't even ruffle the Marshal's hair.
"Every spell, however divine it may seem, has an atomic structural node," Vexia explained as she calmly continued walking toward the next sun. "Like a building has a main beam. If you apply the exact pressure at the breaking point... the building collapses under its own weight."
ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!
The scene projected in the sky was hypnotic, terrifying, and reality-breaking. Vexia walked through the thermal apocalypse. With minimal wrist movements, using her Laplace Eye to read the tension vectors, she snuffed out the fearsome violet suns like someone pinching out birthday candles with their fingertips.
Ancestor Feng-Wu stumbled backward, watching with abyssal horror as his ultimate technique, his Great Saint Domain that had taken him centuries to perfect, was dismantled with the ease of a child knocking down a house of cards.
"STAY AWAY FROM ME!" screamed the elder, losing all composure. He launched desperate torrents and jets of fire, without form or technique.
Vexia simply deflected the magma streams with the shaft of her spear, as if brushing aside annoying branches on a walk through the woods, arriving directly in front of the living corpse.
"You have wasted three hundred years perfecting the volume of your fire," Vexia said, looking directly into his empty sockets, "and completely forgot to perfect your thermodynamics."
Vexia raised her free hand. She didn't conjure Qi. She simply threw an open-palm slap toward the Great Saint's skeletal face.
But in the millisecond before impact, she activated [Vector Editing: Causality Inversion]. She didn't give it the force of a human hand; she altered the magnitude of the strike. She multiplied the physical vector's acceleration by ten thousand.
CLACK!
The sound echoed across the mountain range like the firing of an electromagnetic cannon. It wasn't a blow driven by anger or revenge. It was physics applied to the extreme. The immense kinetic force shattered the elder's passive barriers. The Great Saint's lower jaw detached completely, twisting his head at a violent angle. Feng-Wu shot off like a projectile, bouncing brutally and embedding himself, broken and stunned, into the vitrified rock.
Vexia wiped her glove.
"Do not fight brute force with more force," Vexia said, looking at the sky camera, speaking to the 1,000 petrified disciples. "Dismantle the structure."
Ancestor Lian-Hua, floating a few meters away, saw her companion fall, and the purest, darkest, most primal panic took hold of her. The logic of her world was crumbling.
"Monster!" shrieked the mummy in a raspy voice. "You're a monster!"
Lian-Hua brought her bleeding, skeletal hands to the broken zither on her back. The magical strings vibrated with a dying glow.
[Great Saint Art: Broken Soul Requiem - Banshee's Wail].
Visible sound waves, concentric and sharp as spectral diamond blades, shot out in all directions toward Vexia. But the physical cut wasn't the real threat; the attack was mental and conceptual. It was a soul frequency designed to penetrate the Sea of Consciousness and induce infinite sorrow, absolute madness, and an uncontrollable desire for suicide.
Down in the valley, despite only seeing a projection, the echo of the frequency caused dozens of the 1,000 disciples to fall to their knees, covering their ears, weeping tears of blood, and feeling their minds fracture. Even the 30,000 metal puppets emitted friction noises from their cores, affected by the frequency of death.
Vexia stood still in the center of the sonic storm. The sound waves sliced the air around her, her maid skirt billowing furiously, but her expression remained inscrutable.
"Lesson Two: Rejection of the Premise."
Vexia took a step forward. [Conceptual Immunity - Error 404].
"Mental attacks and illusions are not magic; they are a psychological negotiation," Vexia said, her voice cutting crisply through the deafening shriek of the Banshee. "The enemy inserts a piece of data into your system. They offer you a reality: 'You are sad, you are afraid, you want to die.' If your brain processes that variable and you accept the offer... you die."
Vexia walked toward Lian-Hua. To nullify the physical impact of the cutting waves, she activated the [Zero Friction Vector]. The sonic waves crashed against her body, but encountering no resistance or friction, they slid over her skin and clothes like water sliding off oil-slicked glass. They didn't leave a single scratch.
"But my mind is a classified quantum processing archive, Lady Lian-Hua," Vexia continued, approaching relentlessly. "I do not process irrational emotions. Your attack sends me a sadness command. My system returns an error code: Emotion not found. I do not accept unsolicited offers."
Vexia arrived directly in front of the mummified woman, who was floating backward in retreat. Terrified, Lian-Hua pushed her soul to the limit and played the highest note, the "Note of Absolute Death," a hyper-concentrated vibration capable of liquefying the brain of any organic being within a hundred-meter radius.
Vexia raised her right hand. And she grabbed the sound. Literally.
Her gloved hand closed the empty space around the thick zither strings as they vibrated at the speed of light. She redefined the vibration vector to Static Absolute Zero.
Any hand of flesh and blood, even a Dragon's, would have been sliced into thin ribbons down to the bone. Vexia's elegant white silk glove disintegrated from the initial friction, revealing beneath the fabric a robotic hand, forged in dark, gleaming divine metal, articulated with biomechanical perfection.
The strings' inertia collided with Vexia's concept of "Nothingness."
The vibration stopped dead. The sound of the Requiem died like a radio unplugged from the wall.
"And you, Ancestor..." whispered Vexia, clenching her metal fist... "are out of tune."
CRACK! With brutal, mechanized force, Vexia didn't just rip out and snap the zither's magical strings, she caught the Ancestor's fragile fingers in the process and bent them backward at a repulsive angle.
Lian-Hua let out a howl of pure human pain, losing her levitation and falling to her knees on the ground.
"Pain is biological data," Vexia decreed, looking down at her. "Process the data."
The two Ancestors of the Purple Light Sect—bleeding, broken, and humiliated before the world—crawled across the rock until they were huddled together. The fear reflected in their eyes was unprecedented in their millennia of existence. They weren't fighting a cultivator. They weren't exchanging sword strikes. They were fighting a Natural Computational Law that they didn't understand, one that treated them as simple anomalies in an operating system.
"Fusion..." hissed Feng-Wu, clutching his face and painfully resetting his hanging jaw, his voice a gurgle of blood and desperation. "It's the only option. Burn the entirety of our millennial soul. Let the mountain burn. Let the world burn. Kill her and die."
"Yes..." cried Lian-Hua, her shattered fingers trembling. "Let the abyss swallow us together!"
The two Great Saints, knowing there would be no tomorrow, joined their bloody hands. The sky above the Central Peak split in half, torn open by a taboo energy. The Karmic Violet Fire and the Sound of the Void fused into a final sacrifice.
[Forbidden Sacrifice Technique: The Dirge Dragon].
A colossal dragon, forged from scorching violet flames and invisible sonic vibrations, five hundred meters long, materialized in the skies above Vexia. Its scales of fire roared, and the mountain beneath them literally began to disintegrate into fine dust from the combined pressure. It was an attack that broke the continent's limits, brushing against the destructive power of a Stage 5 Great Saint. It was a calamity sufficient to erase Vexia, the wounded Sequences, and half the Morningstar army in the lower valleys.
Kael, his face pale and sweating cold, tried uselessly to stand, dragging his broken body.
Vexia let out a slight, very faint sigh. With utmost slowness, she removed her glasses with her left hand, pulled a small, immaculate handkerchief from her apron, cleaned the lenses, and put them back on with millimeter precision. Then, she looked up at the sky screen.
"Lesson Three: The Law of Separation."
The Grand Marshal stowed her Antimatter Spear. She stood upright, empty-handed, facing an apocalyptic dragon descending upon her like punishment from the heavens.
"When two weak and desperate concepts unite to try and form a strong one," Vexia explained calmly, "the union itself becomes the greatest structural flaw."
Vexia raised both hands, her open palms pointing toward the sky and the roaring dragon. She didn't fire a beam of energy. She didn't summon a massive shield. She made a simple gesture, crossing her hands and then pulling them sharply apart in a "tearing" motion, as if she were forcibly opening the heavy curtains of an old theater.
[Divine Skill: Fusion Rejection - Dismantling of Laws].
Vexia didn't attack the dragon; she inserted a mathematical "division operator" directly into the core of the Great Saints' fusion.
The world turned gray for a prolonged instant. The immense Dirge Dragon, mere meters from incinerating the mountain, stopped unnaturally in mid-air.
And then... it split.
There was no epic explosion to shake the earth. The dragon unraveled. Vexia separated the basic components of the enemy's equation. The violet fire was violently pushed to the left. The destructive sonic sound was violently pushed to the right.
The fusion was mathematically rejected by Vexia's Computational Authority.
Forcibly separated, the two elements lost their synergy. Without the wind of the sound to feed it, the fire went out. Without the heat of the fire to carry its waves, the sound went deaf. The laws canceled each other out.
POOF!
The ultimate sacrificial attack, the millennial pride of the Purple Light Sect, vanished in a pathetic shower of cold sparks and a hollow hum carried away by the night wind.
The silence on the mountain and in the valley was absolute. No disciple, no general, no enemy dared to breathe.
Vexia, using her Zero Friction acceleration once more, appeared instantly between the two exhausted Ancestors, who were in total shock. She grabbed Feng-Wu by his skeletal neck. She grabbed Lian-Hua by her white hair.
With a fluid motion of biomechanical strength, she lifted them off the ground and smashed them brutally against the rock in front of Kael.
BOOM!
"Kael. Approach," Vexia ordered without looking back.
The young Sovereign, Sequence 1, trembling with awe and reverential terror at the magnitude of what he had just witnessed, limped closer, dragging his leg and his burned arm.
Vexia slid her hand over her apron and materialized her silver stiletto, the Laplace Compass, now holding it like a sharp surgical scalpel.
"Many on this continent fear the Great Saints because ignorance makes them believe they are untouchable, immortal gods," Vexia said, kneeling over Feng-Wu's body. "Let's see what lies beneath divinity."
Vexia ripped open the elder's tattered robes with a single pull. Feng-Wu, terrified, tried to struggle and bite, but Vexia stepped on his sternum with her heel. The sound of the corpse's ribs breaking echoed outward.
"AAAAAAHHG!" shrieked the Ancestor.
"Silence," Vexia said coldly.
Without hesitation, Vexia plunged the silver stiletto deep into the center of the elder's bare chest, right over where his withered heart should be.
"Look closely at the screen," Vexia ordered the 1,000 disciples watching from the valley. In the sky, the dimensional camera's focus obeyed instantly, doing a hyper-detailed zoom on the elder's open chest. The blood wasn't red; it was a thick, radiant liquid.
"A Great Saint, over millennia, mutates their body. They create a 'Stellar Network' around their biological heart to store the immense amount of Qi their Domain requires," Vexia explained, plunging her gloved fingers directly into the open wound, digging into the raw flesh, completely ignoring Feng-Wu's agonizing, inhuman screams.
From among the bleeding muscles, Vexia hooked and pulled out an intricate, glowing network of thick veins that pulsed with intense violet light.
"It is simply an artificial second circulatory system. A battery connected to a pump," Vexia said, looking at the throbbing network. "If you locate the main conduit of the network... and cut it."
With a masterful twist of the Laplace Compass: SNIP!
Vexia sliced the central vein of violet light.
The effect was instantaneous and horrifying. The overwhelming Great Saint aura emitting from Feng-Wu, the pressure that had paralyzed the Sequences minutes ago, shut off like a switch. The sockets of his eyes, filled with divine fire, flickered and extinguished, revealing two human eyes—milky, full of cataracts, old age, and absolute panic. His skin wrinkled even further, sinking over his bones. His divine power evaporated into the air, spilling out through the open wound.
"...he becomes a normal, fragile, obsolete old man with osteoporosis and dementia," Vexia finished, wiping the blood from her stiletto with a sharp flick.
She then turned to Lian-Hua, who was dragging herself pathetically, trying to flee the live autopsy.
"Nylas. Gravity. Lend me some weight."
Nylas, who could barely stay conscious, forced a weak wave from his Gravity Well onto Vexia's back. The Marshal nodded, walked over to Lian-Hua, and placed a single finger on the lower area of the woman's spine.
"The bone density of a body forged by a Great Saint is extremely high," Vexia dictated, "but its structure is absurdly rigid. They rely so much on their hardness that they lose the flexibility of living flesh."
Vexia applied the pressure of Nylas's gravity multiplied by her own biomechanical strength directly to the exact tension point of the lumbar vertebra.
CRACK!
The crunch sounded like the branch of a centennial oak snapping in half. Lian-Hua's spine broke with a dry, brutal sound. The woman let out a choked scream, and her body went limp, completely paralyzed from the waist down, dragging herself with her hands over her companion's blood.
"Structural rigidity is weakness," Vexia decreed, standing up.
She rose, smoothed the pleats of her black skirt, and wiped her bloody hands meticulously on her white apron, staining it for the first time that night with the "divinity" of the sect. The two supposed "Gods" lay on the ground, reduced to human wreckage—weeping, babbling, bleeding, and broken. They were not dead, but they wished they were. The humiliation was worse than death.
Vexia stared fixedly at the sky camera, and through it, into the eyes of the 1,000 disciples who formed the core of Samael's future army.
"There is no divinity in mortal flesh," Vexia said, her violet eyes gleaming with the freezing promise of science and death. "Magic is just a calculation error you don't understand. There is only biological engineering, the structure of matter, and the accumulation of energy. Burn this into your minds, Morningstar Legion: If it bleeds, it can be killed. If it has structure, it can be broken."
Vexia adjusted her gloves, crossing her hands over her lap with a maid's courtesy.
"Class dismissed."
In the black sky, the dimensional rift of the projection closed abruptly. The starry sky and the night clouds returned to the continent. Far away in his Citadel, Samael Morningstar leaned back on his obsidian throne and smiled broadly in the shadows, delighting in the masterpiece of indoctrination he had just witnessed.
Below, in the immense valley surrounded by dead mountains, the 1,000 disciples of the Morningstar Clan remained in absolute silence.
But it was not the silence of reverential fear. It was not the trembling that cultivators felt when they saw the heavens part. It was a silence of cold, hard, and cruel enlightenment. They had seen their most terrifying enemies, the millennial legends that haunted bedtime stories, reduced to flesh, veins, and structural flaws. The mystical fear had been assassinated live, broadcast for all to see. Now they knew that every being, no matter how high they flew, was killable.
At the vanguard of the valley formation, a bloodied young disciple gripped the hilt of his bastard sword until his knuckles turned white. The terror that had harbored in his eyes was gone, replaced by a dangerous, calculating gleam filled with an entirely new ambition.
"Engineering..." the youth murmured, looking at the steel of his sword and then at the sky. "They aren't gods... It's all engineering."
Back on the Central Peak, Vexia turned with indifference toward the shattered Cedric, the Emperor of Seals.
"Cedric. Package them," the Grand Marshal ordered, pointing her chin at the two weeping Ancestors.
Cedric, paler than wax, blinking the blood from his eyes, nodded frantically. Forcing the last drops of metallic Qi from his being, he conjured heavy bindings, gags, and dark runic steel boxes to confine the living remains of the Great Saints.
"We will use them in the [Biomechanical Genesis Protocol]," Vexia added, evaluating the quality of the bodies with an analytical gaze. "Their cores are still active, though disconnected. I will purge their consciousnesses, override their pain receptors, and fuse them with Divine Tungsten in the Citadel. Their bones will serve. They will make two excellent immortal, mindless Commanders for the Dead Blood Legion."
Lady Lian-Hua and Feng-Wu heard their fate and began to weep tears of blood and total despair as Cedric's runic steel plates closed over them, sealing them in transport boxes as if they were livestock bound for the slaughterhouse.
The wind blew across the Central Peak, carrying away the ashes of the Stage 7 Grand Elder, the blood of the Sequences, and the pride of the Purple Light Sect.
The oldest sect in the south had fallen. Not just its immense buildings and magical foundations. Not just its disciples and its gods. Its myth, its unreachable divinity, had been dissected and murdered beneath the moon so that the new order would know that, starting tonight, no one reigned above the Primordial Sovereign.
The Purple Light Mountain Range, now baptized in blood, belonged to House Morningstar.