Chapter 146: Genesis: The Architecture of Divinity
The colossal Morningstar Citadel floated in the freezing void of the stratosphere, completely enveloped in the inscrutable Mantle of the Void. To mortal eyes and the divine senses of the outer continent, it simply did not exist. It was an obsidian ghost gliding through the night clouds, moving away from the smoking ruins of the Purple Light Sect.
But inside, protected from the wind and the world, the air was not peaceful. It vibrated with an electromagnetic and spiritual tension so overwhelming that it would make a Saint King fall to his knees, begging for mercy from a heaven he no longer ruled there.
Samael Morningstar stood on the immense balcony of the highest level of the Patriarch's Palace. The extreme high-altitude wind furiously whipped his black tunic and raven-feather cloak, but he did not feel the biting cold. He felt something much deeper, intoxicating, and absolute.
He felt Power.
In front of him, floating in the night air, the System displayed the rewards of the Epic Quest they had just completed with blood and fire. The holographic screens were not simple blue icons or floating texts; they were physical manifestations of contained universal laws, compressed singularities that distorted the light around them, anxiously waiting to be unleashed to rewrite creation.
"For a thousand years, the Purple Light Sect accumulated destiny," Samael murmured, resting his gloved hands on the obsidian railing, his deep voice resonating in the solitude of the heights. "They stole the earth's Qi, decimated the spiritual veins of the south, enslaved pure bloodlines, piled corpses beneath their foundations, and called themselves 'Saints.' They believed themselves to be the sun of the south."
Samael extended his right hand, his violet eyes shining with an insatiable hunger, and brushed the surface of the first hyper-compressed sphere of light with his fingertips.
"Today, all that history, every prayer they received, and every drop of luck they stole... belongs to me."
The System blinked with a blinding intensity that illuminated the entire balcony.
[EPIC QUEST COMPLETED: "The Awakening of the Invincible Dawn"]
[System Evaluation:] Perfect Annihilation. (Zero hostile survivors. Total destruction of the enemy's hierarchical structure. Absolute assimilation of resources).
[Available Rewards Unlocked].
Samael moved his index finger in the air, materializing the objects that would change his clan's destiny forever. As he observed them, he understood the magnitude of what he had won. They weren't simple Saint-Grade weapons. They weren't temporary divine pills. They were foundations. They were the building blocks of a pantheon.
[Dragon Vein Fusion: Imperial Grade]: A sphere of constantly boiling gaseous energy containing the luck, karmic destiny, and immense Qi accumulated over a thousand years by the extinct Purple Light Sect.
[Seed of the Palace of the Eternal Dawn - Divine Grade]: A polyhedral crystal the size of a human fist that, when stared at, revealed a miniature universe spinning inside.
[Blueprint: Tower of Thunder Tribulation]: An archaic scroll containing no ink, but static sparks, acting as the architectural blueprint to forge divine bodies through celestial punishment.
[Origin Dragon Pool]: A single drop of boiling amber liquid suspended in the void, representing the very source of primordial life and the absolute purification of the bloodline.
[Exclusive Upgrade: Imperial Sequence]: An intangible Law designed to break mortal shackles.
The System's androgynous, mechanical voice echoed directly in his cerebral cortex, loaded with an apocalyptic warning.
«[INITIATING GENESIS PROTOCOL]»
«Critical Warning: Rewriting local reality and dimensional expansion may cause temporary cosmic instability. The load on the Citadel's space-time fabric will be extreme. Do you wish to proceed with the Genesis?»
"Proceed," Samael ordered, without a hint of doubt in his voice. "Break the limits. Tear the sky apart if necessary."
Samael took the first reward with both hands: [Dragon Vein Fusion: Imperial Grade].
As he held it, the karmic weight nearly crushed his wrists. It wasn't a simple ball of magical energy. It was a living nebula. Inside the gaseous sphere of violent violet and gold colors, Samael could hear ghostly echoes: the war cries of millions of past disciples, the arrogant chants of the dead ancestors that Vexia had just lobotomized, and the roar of the "luck" that had sustained a superpower for a millennium.
It was a century of history compressed into fifteen centimeters in diameter.
Samael violently clenched his fists, applying the crushing force of the Void to break the sphere's conceptual container.
CRACK!
The sound was deafening, like a god's femur snapping in half. The millennial nebula was unleashed.
But it didn't explode outward like an expansive bomb. Obeying the Patriarch's will, it shot straight down, like a pillar of concentrated liquid light. It pierced the unbreakable floor of the balcony, drilled through the seven levels of reinforced marble of the Palace, cut through Vexia's biomechanical laboratories and the treasure vaults, until it impacted dead center in the very Heart of the Citadel, embedding itself in the foundations of the floating mountain.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The entire floating mountain, a mass of millions of tons of rock and metal, shook violently from end to end. It wasn't a physical earthquake, the kind that cracks walls and topples statues. It was an earthquake of destiny.
A shockwave of pure, heavy Golden Light swept the colossal structure from the underground foundations to the highest spire of the watchtowers. Wherever the light touched, physical matter was forced to evolve.
The Citadel's white marble, which had always been cold, sterile, and dead, began to emit a gentle, comforting heat. Thick golden veins of solidified Qi appeared running through the black rock and white tiles, pulsing rhythmically like arteries in a massive living being. The sparse spiritual moss on the garden walls bloomed instantly and explosively, releasing billions of healing light spores that floated through the halls.
The air itself throughout the Citadel transmuted. It became dense, immensely heavy, almost liquid. Breathing felt like drinking water from a sacred spring.
«[System Alert: Ambient Qi Density Increased exponentially... x50... x100... x500].»
In the dormitories on the lower levels, the 1,000 disciples who had fallen into a near-comatose sleep of exhaustion after fifty days of uninterrupted war began to breathe heavily, their chests rising and falling under the new atmospheric pressure.
But it wasn't suffocation; it was spiritual hyper-oxygenation.
Every breath they took now in their sleep was worth, in terms of energy accumulation, an entire month of deep meditation in the richest mountains of the outer continent.
In the elite infirmary, Kael, lying on a jade bed with his arm fused to his crimson sword, let out a moan in his sleep. The golden light penetrated his catastrophic wounds. The destiny of the Morningstar Clan, which before Samael was barely a flickering candle besieged by the winds of the Great Families, had just become an inextinguishable solar torch.
The inherent "bad luck" of mortals, the "inner demons" generated by battle trauma, and possible "Qi deviations" were instantly crushed and purged by the unbearable pressure of the Imperial Luck of the Dragon Veins.
Kael's micro-fractured bones began to mend themselves. Cedric's cerebral hemorrhage receded. Rowan's burned lungs rebuilt their alveoli. The golden light was rewriting the clan's health on a karmic level.
On the balcony, Samael exhaled slowly, feeling the power of a thousand years pulsing beneath his boots.
"The foundation is laid," he said, his eyes shining with a golden light that overshadowed their usual violet hue. "Now, Space. We need a world of our own to house this destiny."
Samael raised his left hand and brought out the second reward: [Seed of the Palace of the Eternal Dawn (Divine Grade)].
It looked insignificant compared to the thunderous display of the Dragon Veins. It was a small, perfect polyhedral crystal that floated and spun slowly on its own axis. But if one had the courage to look closely, beyond the reflections on its surface, one could see tiny galaxies, stars being born and dying, swirling in its core. It was a blank canvas for a creator god.
Samael grasped the crystal and, with a sweep of his arm that carried all the force of the Primordial Sovereign, threw it straight into the dark, enclosed night sky wrapping the Mantle of the Void over the Citadel.
The crystal stopped at the exact cosmic zenith. It spun once. It spun twice.
And then, it opened.
There was no sound. Sound requires air friction, and what happened next consumed and erased all existing air. The crystal unleashed a true Singularity of Creation.
An immense dome of absolutely pure white light erupted outward from the crystal at a terrifying speed, devouring the fake night, swallowing the clouds, and disintegrating the electromagnetic invisibility barrier. The spatial and dimensional "reality" of the Morningstar Citadel was torn at the seams.
RRRRRRRRRRIIIIIP!
The deafening screech of space-time tearing sounded as if the very fabric of the universe were being cut with colossal scissors.
Space stretched like hyper-elastic fabric pushed past its critical limit. What was once a few square kilometers of fortress and floating courtyards now expanded toward a horizon receding into infinity.
Samael gripped the balcony railing, his eyes wide, witnessing the miracle of divine architecture. He saw the dark void surrounding the Citadel fill with matter ex nihilo.
New, immense floating islands emerged from the glowing aether, colliding with geological violence and fusing together to form vast aerial continents that orbit the central Citadel, now turned into the undisputed capital of a floating continent.
Before his eyes, entire mountain ranges composed of rock, basalt, and pure spiritual jade rose upwards, piercing the new cloud formations. Abyssal canyons opened up in the landmasses. Raging rivers of crystalline spiritual water were born from springs created out of thin air, flowing across the new continents and cascading over the edges of the islands in eternal, thunderous waterfalls, plunging into an unfathomable sea of lower clouds that seemed to have no bottom.
And then, Heaven itself changed its nature.
The dark and threatening void of the terrestrial night was irrevocably replaced by the Eternal Dawn. An astonishing, hypnotic firmament, composed of swirling bands of deep indigo, bright violet, and liquid gold. It was a sky where the sun and darkness had no place; where three artificial moons, of different sizes and pale colors, orbited slowly, dictating a cycle of celestial tides.
There was no night here. Only a perpetual dawn. An omnipotent light that bathed the jade islands and promised eternal beginnings, eliminating the fatigue of the night and nourishing the cultivators' spirits twenty-four hours a day.
Samael looked at his new domain spreading out around him.
The Morningstar Citadel was no longer a floating fortress sneaking through the skies of the southern continent. It was no longer a simple war vehicle.
It was a World.
A massive Pocket Realm, thousands of square kilometers in extent, completely sealed and isolated from the physical laws, weather, and prying eyes of the outer continent. Here, Samael was not just a powerful cultivator; he was the undeniable god of creation. Here, his word dictated gravity, time, and death.
But a world needs an anchor so it doesn't crumble under its own massive weight. The center of this new universe reacted to the creation.
The Tree of the Stellar World, planted in the heart of the Citadel's gardens, felt the massive power injection from the Imperial Dragon Veins and the vast expansion of the spatial fabric around it.
GRRRRUUUUUUUUUUUU...
The sound coming from the earth was deep, tectonic, and deafening. The tree's roots, which in the preceding hours had been abundantly fed and watered with the spiritual blood of eighty thousand dead cultivators processed by Vexia, awoke with evolutionary fury.
The roots shot downwards, piercing the Citadel's original rock, and spread through the void like primordial tentacles. They launched themselves toward the new floating islands and surrounding jade mountains, penetrating their bedrock and anchoring them. The World Tree was weaving an immense, interconnected nervous network that geologically bound the entire vast realm together.
The main trunk of the tree, which in its sprout stage had been a beautiful but fragile translucent crystal, darkened immediately under Samael's gaze.
The fragility vanished, replaced by a black, ancient, rough, and indestructible wood, dense as stellar iron forged in the core of a dead planet. The trunk grew, grew, and kept growing at a dizzying pace, rising beyond the lower clouds, rapidly surpassing the immense height of the Patriarch's Palace itself. It stood in the center of creation as the Axis of the World, a colossal pillar that seemed to hold up the new indigo firmament.
And its canopy... the canopy was the climax of the chromatic metamorphosis.
Millions of delicate crystal leaves burst forth, multiplying and changing their structural nature as they absorbed the immense Qi of the Purple Light Sect and the blood heritage of the Morningstar bloodline. The leaves were no longer transparent. They now possessed a core of vibrant Imperial Violet, surrounded by jagged edges of aggressive Crimson Red.
When the perpetual light of the Eternal Dawn bathed the immense branches of the tree, the shadows the leaves cast upon the white earth of the Citadel were not simple dark gray spots; they formed intricate geometric patterns of glowing stellar constellations.
But amidst all that geological violence, dimensional expansion, and apocalyptic growth, the will of the Forest King—and that of the newborn Realm itself—demonstrated an absolute and touching reverence for a small, sacred corner at its base.
Right at the foot of the immense, new black wood trunk lay Clara's small grave.
While the earth convulsed and massive roots pierced the rock to anchor floating continents, the stellar wood drew away from that patch of dirt with incomprehensible delicacy. The roots did not disturb a single grain of dust from its bed. On the contrary, the tree's black bark carefully grew around it, embracing the headstone to form a beautiful, curved, concave natural sanctuary, protecting it from the winds of change.
There, unaltered by the Genesis of the world, the small sleeping dragon of silver and obsidian still hung from the top vertex of the headstone. The gift that had cost her life now sparkled, bathed in the new light of the violet and crimson leaves. Right next to it, the humble wooden practice sword, sheathed in the gleaming fire beast leather she had bought herself, remained firmly planted in the earth, standing tall like an eternal sentinel refusing to abandon its post.
Sensing Samael's deep emotional anchor to that place, the Tree of the Stellar World reacted. From the dark wood forming the sanctuary, dozens of beautiful flowers instantly bloomed: small blue crystal lotuses, golden light orchids, and stellar lilies that existed nowhere else on the outer continent. The flowers entwined their stems around the headstone, adorning the little girl's bed with a perpetual spring that would never wither.
The very Realm of the Eternal Dawn, newborn and conscious through the semi-laws dictated by the Patriarch, felt the karmic weight of that grave. Automatically, the fabric of space-time folded over the sanctuary, weaving an invisible barrier, soft yet absolutely unbreakable. Not the strength of an Emperor, nor the most destructive lightning from the Tower of Tribulation, nor the millennial passage of time could ever graze Clara's rest. In a world created for war and survival, her grave became, by decree of reality itself, the safest and most untouchable place in all of creation.
From his balcony, Samael watched the Tree cradle the memory of the little girl, and his violet eyes softened for a fraction of a second before regaining their monarchical hardness.
Satisfied with its anchor, the colossal Forest King finally exhaled, releasing a dense, glowing silver mist that began to cover the training courtyards.
«[System Alert: Environmental Effect - Martial Enlightenment activated].»
Samael knew what that message meant. Any disciple, no matter how obtuse, who sat to meditate under the shade of that tree or within that silver mist, would enter a state of perpetual epiphany. They would understand martial techniques, cryptic codices, and elemental laws at a speed ten times faster than the most brilliant genius in the outer Empire.
[Mini-World Identification: REALM OF THE ETERNAL DAWN]
Anchored Resources: Absolute Imperial Luck, Qi Density x500.
Isolation: Supreme Mantle of the Void (Undetectable to Fate). Neither oracles, nor imperial artifacts, nor Great Emperors can track its existence in space-time.
Dimensional Anchor: Stellar World Tree (Axis of the World).
Samael admired the beauty of his creation, but beauty alone does not win continental wars against biomechanical monsters like House Cryon. The Realm needed teeth. It needed factories of pain.
"Strength," Samael ordered in a sharp whisper.
He threw the third object into the air: [Blueprint: Tower of Thunder Tribulation].
The fragile archaic scroll did not fall. It stopped in mid-air and burst into flames on its own, instantly turning into clouds of blue ashes charged with deafening static. The ashes flew swiftly, driven by an invisible hurricane, toward one of the new floating islands located on the eastern periphery of the realm; a vast, deserted island composed entirely of inert, jagged rock.
The moment the ashes touched the barren ground, the Aurora sky above that specific island darkened and corrupted. Unnatural storm clouds, thick and ink-black from the abyss, swirled furiously. Within them, blood-red lightning cracked and bellowed like caged beasts.
KRA-KOOOM!
A lightning bolt the thickness of a castle descended from the black sky and struck dead center on the deserted island.
But the impact didn't destroy the rock or leave a smoking crater. It forged it.
From the exact point of electrical impact, the melted, liquefied stone began to rise, obeying the aberrant magnetism of the continuous red lightning. Floor by floor. Square block by square block. The tower was not being built by human hands or Vexia's machines; it was being sculpted and molded live by the pure geokinetic wrath of the sky.
A hundred immense, monolithic floors of solid Thunder Obsidian rose into the clouds in a matter of mere seconds.
The resulting structure was monstrous and monolithic. It didn't have a single window on its smooth, black, light-absorbing walls. It only featured immense, open ogival arches on every floor through which raw electricity flowed in and out in a constant, chaotic stream. The air within a ten-kilometer radius of the island began to smell pungently of burnt ozone and extreme mortal danger.
At the main entrance of the base, enormous blue fire runes etched themselves into the basalt, flashing an inescapable warning: "Here steel is forged and fragile glass is broken."
It wasn't a training pavilion. It was a machine of divine torture, mathematically designed by heaven to filter out the weakness of the flesh through atomic violence.
Samael, with his Infinite Mental Calculation, could "see" the Tower's internal mechanics from his balcony.
Each floor increased the frequency of punishment. It captured the sky's lightning and, by passing it through the Obsidian walls, stripped it of the "disintegration" property, turning it into pure "molecular compression force." Disciples who entered would be bombarded. Their muscle fibers would be systematically shredded and their bones broken by micro-lightning, only to be healed a millisecond later by the tower's Qi, creating a cycle of agony designed to generate a physical body with the density of Divine Steel.
For those stuck in their cultivation, the tower would seek out impurities in their meridians with its electric arcs and blow them apart. The painful path to absolute strength.
And at the pinnacle of the tower, invisible from below, floating between two immense conductive magnetic rings, spun an unstable white plasma sphere. This was the conduit to the hidden level that would make even the clan's Saints tremble.
Samael looked at the top of the tower and smiled cruelly. His mind accessed the knowledge of Floor 101: The Chamber of the Electric Void. The Anvil of the Law.
While the first hundred floors attacked the weakness of the flesh, Floor 101 attacked the soul's connection with the universe.
There, in the absolute void above the tower, the lightning wasn't physical electricity; it was "Conceptual Lightning." If a disciple entered to perfect their Law of Space, the floor would cause the ground beneath their feet to teleport randomly to torture their concentration. If they used the Law of Blood, the pressure would make their body attempt to empty its own veins. It was a paradox of agony where the tower inflicted Mental Thunder, striking directly at the Sea of Consciousness.
The final stage of that chamber generated a Qi Void, draining all the user's power, leaving them only with their Law against crimson-black lightning bolts. Every impact piercing the soul. The pain designed to erase the user's notion of identity, forcing their Law to become a pure, naked survival instinct burned into their spirit.
Anyone who enters there and stays for more than thirty minutes will permanently lose their mind... but if they survive, their Law will dominate empires, Samael thought, anticipating the screams that would soon echo on that island.
"Pain and strength," the Patriarch whispered. "But we need Life to endure it."
Samael dropped the fourth object. The primordial drop. The [Origin Dragon Pool].
The single, solitary drop of thick amber liquid fell from the Sovereign's hand, plummeting hundreds of meters downward. It passed through the palace courtyards and landed with mathematical precision right at the epicenter of the nexus of the colossal Tree of the Stellar World's giant roots.
The instant the tiny drop touched the stone floor, the earth itself dissolved smoothly and circularly, surrendering to an older power.
An immense natural basin, about thirty meters in diameter, composed entirely of gleaming, smooth translucent White Quartz, emerged from the ground. The black roots of the World Tree immediately writhed and coiled around the basin like giant protective veins, pulsing with a faint golden glow.
The amber drop touched the quartz bottom and, inexplicably, multiplied exponentially out of nowhere.
In a matter of seconds, the deep basin filled to the brim with a dense, thick, hot liquid, moving with the sluggish texture of boiling honey. It wasn't spiritual water. It was Pure Vital Essence. Its color was a dazzling, incandescent gold, crisscrossed by thick, moving veins of deep blood red that swam beneath the surface with a will of their own.
A thick, mystical vapor began to emanate from the surface of the boiling liquid. As it condensed in the cold air, the vapor didn't take the shape of clouds, but molded into detailed, ephemeral figures of small eastern dragons that twisted, roared silently baring their ethereal fangs, and then vanished.
The vapor was so dense that it quickly created an atmosphere of "solid light" around the pool, preventing anyone from the outside from seeing into the water.
Samael, from his balcony, could feel the heat radiating hundreds of meters away. It wasn't a thermal heat; it was a primitive, savage biological radiation, screaming for his own primordial blood to submerge in it.
The Origin Dragon Pool was not a healing hot spring to relax tense muscles. It was a Womb of Forced Evolution. It was the ultimate biogenetic crucible.
Anyone who submerged in that amber would not experience a bath, but a DNA-level reconstruction. The liquid would detect genetic weaknesses and burn them away without harming the outer flesh, disintegrating mediocre bloodline chains. For anyone possessing a single drop of dormant ancestral blood in their veins, the pool would multiply it, inducing a violent atavism that would awaken scales, claws, and draconic eyes.
And for those bearing extreme bloodlines, like Kael, Seraphina, or the highest Sequences, the pool would offer the painful but miraculous phenomenon of "Return to the Egg."
The Vital Essence would generate a thick crust of amber crystal over the user, encasing them in a protective cocoon while the World Tree supplied vital Qi to keep the cultivator from dying as their body was literally liquefied, disassembled at the cellular level, and reassembled under the perfection of a divine design.
Whoever entered those golden waters weak would be dissolved and turned into nutrients for the next candidate. Whoever survived the amber cocoon would emerge as a deity of war.
Finally, with the ecosystem of power, torture, and evolution established, Samael looked at the last intangible reward floating in his mind.
[System Upgrade: Imperial Sequence].
It wasn't a physical object. It wasn't a martial arts manual that could be handed over. It was a Law. A rewriting of the shackles that the gods of the original universe had imposed upon humanity.
Samael closed his eyes, his consciousness expanding and merging seamlessly with the Core and the flow of the new world through the Tree of the Stellar World. With his Void Vision, he metaphorically visualized the heavy conceptual iron chains binding the spiritual potential of each of his fifty elite geniuses. The chains that represented "Human Limits." The invisible "Bottlenecks" that frustrated the Empire's prodigies.
"Not in my world," Samael decreed, his deep voice imposing the absolute edict. He clenched his fists and commanded reality: "Break."
An invisible, inaudible wave devoid of physical force instantly swept every inch of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn. There were no pyrotechnic explosions or celestial choirs. It was, simply and plainly, a unilateral change in the rules of the game of existence.
In the vast medical dormitories on the lower levels, the change was visceral.
Kael, lost in a feverish nightmare about the pain of his fused arm, suddenly felt a comforting and terrifying heat erupt in his Dantian. Violeta, covered in black frost from the exhaustion of her core; Eris, trembling from blood loss; Cedric, trapped in a fractal coma... each and every one of the fifty disciples of the Sequences felt a cosmic shiver in their sleep.
In that millisecond, the invisible shackles dictating that their bodies and souls must struggle, suffer, and stagnate in the "Human Realm" shattered. Their blocked major and hidden meridians violently expanded, doubling in thickness and resilience without causing pain. Their spiritual cores spun at new frequencies. Their souls, previously tethered to mortal limitation, anchored themselves deeper and more firmly into the physical reality of the universe.
The blocked, narrow, thorn-filled path to the True Saint Realm and beyond, to the unattainable Emperor Realm, had just been paved, cleared of debris, and thrown wide open before their dormant spirits.
Everything was done. The architecture was completed.
Silence returned to the upper balcony platform, but it was a radically different silence than hours before. It was no longer the silence of a steel fortress and assassins floating in the night. It was the majestic, vibrating silence of a living, pulsing ecosystem, immense and charged with infinite martial potential.
The Morningstar Citadel, as a vehicle or fortress, had ceased to exist in concept.
Now, it was the beating heart of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn.
Samael turned around, his mantle billowing majestically, and walked back inside the hall, sitting with the posture of a conquering monarch on his obsidian throne.
He rested his chin on his gloved hand and looked through the immense windows at his newly finished masterpiece. He had created a sky with his own perpetual aurora. He had forged an earth with continents of jade. He had planted a divine tree and erected a forge of thunder. In the span of a few minutes, he had emulated the work of creation myths.
"System," Samael said, his voice relaxed but laden with anticipation.
«[I am here, Patriarch. The dimensional stabilizations have concluded successfully].»
"Temporal adjustments. Exactly how much time has passed on the outer continent since we initiated the Genesis Protocol?"
«[Exactly three hours have passed in the outer Empire. However, the internal temporal density of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn has stabilized thanks to the interaction of the Divine Seed and the anchoring of the Stellar World Tree].» The System's androgynous voice took on a tone that, if human, would sound like pure tactical petulance.
«[Time dilation is now a physical constant. Ten days in the outer world equal one full month within the borders of your realm, Patriarch. A day here will be... extremely productive].»
Samael smirked, revealing a hint of fangs in the dimness of his hall.
Two years in the real world before the Tournament of the Hundred Empires. That was the threat and ultimatum Emperor Kaiser Frost had issued him from the ice throne of the North. But with the new Temporal Law of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn, those two terrestrial years had just transformed, for the Morningstar Legion, into well over half a decade of objective time for cultivation, pain, forging, and evolution.
They would have almost six years to temper their bodies in electric obsidian, purify their bloodlines in the dragon's womb, and unravel the secrets of divinity beneath the starry leaves of the tree.
Below, through the lower clouds of his pocket realm, the first soft, warm, and magical rays of the Eternal Dawn, tinged with violet and gold, were filtering through the Citadel's glass windows, touching the eyelids of his 1,000 disciples lying in medical beds and on stone floors.
The young soldiers and mutilated geniuses were about to wake up. They were about to open their eyes and discover that they were no longer simply ragged mortals or exiled nobles belonging to a rebel clan fleeing through the corners of the south.
They were going to wake up to discover that they were the first citizens born into the blood of a true Divine Empire.
Samael leaned forward on his throne, and his voice, carrying the will of the Law of Space, traveled softly yet inescapably on the winds of his new world, slipping into the minds of every single one of his children.
"Wake up, my soldiers. Wake up, my children," Samael whispered, and his words were the herald of the end of peace. "The nap and the rest are over. Survival was just the warm-up. Welcome to your new home. The true hell of training begins now."