Chapter 154: The Void Sequences and the Baptism of Golden Blood (Part 1)
Exactly three days had passed since the immense obsidian gates of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn were sealed off from the outside world. Three days of a sepulchral, oppressive, and dense silence in the vast Citadel, broken only by occasional Qi explosions, muffled roars, and seismic tremors echoing from the closed meditation pavilions.
The thousand elite disciples and the new vanguard were locked away, assimilating the rewards, elixirs, and martial arts of the Ceremony of Blood and Gold like starving beasts. The Yggdrasil Seed had mutated the Mini-World's atmosphere; the air was now so thick, sweet, and charged with spiritual energy that breathing felt like drinking water from a divine spring.
At the pinnacle of that isolated world, Samael Morningstar remained seated on the obsidian Dragon Throne, on the immense highest terrace of the Upper Palace.
He hadn't moved from that position in seventy-two hours. With a goblet of Dragon Blood Wine resting lazily in his right hand, he observed the stars of the false sky he had forged himself, a firmament that now belonged to him by right of conquest. His breathing was slow, but his mind was a hurricane of calculations, a three-dimensional chessboard where the pieces were empires, sects, and human lives.
He was calculating the imminent, future war against the great Cryon family. He knew crushing them would be a necessary message, a bloodbath that would cement the terror of his banner. But, at the same time, he evaluated the political tightrope he was walking. He couldn't afford to make himself a direct, total enemy of the Empire... yet. Samael was a monster of logic and calculated cruelty; he knew that, for now, he didn't possess the absolute power to massacre the Emperors and immortal ancestors hiding in the continent's shadows.
It's better not to make enemies on that scale unless provoked, Samael thought, taking a sip of the thick wine. But if they do... if they make the pathetic mistake of crossing my line... I wouldn't mind causing destruction that erases half the continent. No one messes with my family and comes out unscathed. No one.
Thinking of his family, Samael's murderous aura stabilized into a possessive, ancient, and territorial warmth. He thought of the immense logistics of resource distribution for the next six years of temporal isolation. He thought of Seraphina, his anchor and his queen, cultivating in her own chambers. He thought of little Celeste, the pure light amidst his world of shadows. And he thought of the imminent birth of his daughters, the twins growing in Seraphina's womb. For them, he was willing to drown the world in an ocean of blood. They would inherit the empire he was building upon the corpses of his enemies.
Suddenly, the soft artificial breeze swaying the crystal leaves of the Stellar World Tree stopped dead.
The space before his eyes rippled, and a golden light panel flickered, illuminating the gloom of the immense open-air hall. It was his redesigned engine of conquest and evolution.
[PRIMORDIAL PATRIARCH SYSTEM]
[CLAN STATUS NOTIFICATION]
«The 24 individuals designated as "New Elite" have successfully assimilated their base rewards. Their meridians have expanded to the mortal limit. Their tolerance for trauma and pain has reached the required threshold.»
[FUNCTION UNLOCKED]
«Do you wish to enable the Latent Draconic Bloodline Awakening (10%) for this select group?»
[ESTIMATED EFFECT]
«Violent breakthrough of bottlenecks. Immediate ascension of a Major Realm or multiple minor stages. Forced biological adaptation (Manifestation of Concealable Draconic Traits). Mortality risk from pain shock: High, but mitigatable by the host's will.»
Samael smiled. A slow, sharp smile that slightly bared his fangs. His eyes, a swirling abyss of violet and crimson, shone in the dark. The Dragon Blood Wine in his goblet froze and cracked instantly due to the sudden, overwhelming, and icy temperature drop of his aura.
"It's time," the Patriarch whispered.
Samael released an invisible thread of his [Void Perception]. He didn't use conventional telepathy; he sent his will like an ice blade that directly grazed the spinal cord and brain of the twenty-four chosen ones resting or training in their respective pavilions.
To the Throne Room. Now.
The order allowed for no doubt or delay. It was the alpha predator's call to his pack.
In less than three minutes, heavy gears groaned and the gigantic obsidian doors of the Throne Room swung wide open. Twenty-four figures entered in sepulchral silence, moving with the iron discipline, synchrony, and contained lethality of a pack of starving wolves.
Dante walked at the head. The young infantry prodigy wielded his aura naturally; his cold gray eyes instinctively scanned every corner, shadow, and pillar of the immense hall looking for threats, followed closely by the stoic Paradox Twins, Aion and Aia.
They reached the foot of the imperial dais stairs and, without needing to exchange a single word, knelt in unison. Twenty-four right fists struck the jade floor with a dull thud that echoed through the palace.
They had changed drastically in just seventy-two hours. The divine treasures, bloodthirsty cultivation methods, and elixirs had purged most of their mortal impurities. Their auras were dense, dark, and highly dangerous. However, before the Patriarch's eyes, they were still, in essence, fragile humans. Glass vessels trying to contain storms.
Samael Morningstar slowly stood up.
The instant he left the throne, his presence—the crushing presence of a True Saint harboring the boiling blood of a Primordial Dragon and the weight of cosmic laws—descended upon the twenty-four warriors as if an entire mountain had been dropped onto their shoulders. The marble and jade floor beneath their knees cracked, forming fine spiderwebs of fissures.
Every single one of them physically trembled. Their human bodies' biological instinct screamed at them to flatten themselves against the floor, curl into a ball, and beg the predator for mercy. But they gritted their teeth until they bled; loyalty and the pride of belonging to the Morningstar Legion kept their backs straight, resisting the gravity imposed by their Lord.
"Raise your heads," Samael ordered. His voice wasn't a shout, but it vibrated in each of their chests.
The twenty-four raised their faces, their eyes fixed on the imposing dark-armored figure looming over them.
"The Imperial Sequences," Samael began, stepping down the first stair. His heavy boots didn't make the slightest sound upon touching the stone, as if he walked on the void itself. "Kael, my sisters, Cedric, Xylia... They are the blinding light of this Empire. They are the divine generals who will march at the head of my armies, those the outside world will see, admire, and fear with despair. They are the inextinguishable fire that will burn enemy cities to slag."
Samael continued descending, slowly and deliberately, until he stopped barely two meters from Dante and the twins.
"But a fire, no matter how intense, cannot exist without casting an immense shadow." Samael swept his gaze over them, analyzing each one's murderous potential. "You are not the light of this clan. You are not the golden banners or the heroes of legends. You are the rusted dagger in the dark. You are the undetectable poison in the enemy Emperor's crystal goblet. You are the midnight wind that is not heard until the throat has already been slit."
Samael paused, allowing the weight of his philosophy to sink into their souls.
"From today on, in the records of the world and in the heart of this clan, this group of twenty-four individuals will no longer be called 'the new stars' or 'the infantry elite.' From this exact second... you will bear the title of the Void Sequences."
The name fell upon them like a heavy dark blessing, a baptism of blood and shadows. Dante's gray eyes shone with a fierce, almost fanatical understanding. Void Sequences. It was a title that didn't demand the glory of bards, didn't demand statues in public squares; it demanded absolute death, silent efficiency, and loyalty beyond sanity.
"However," Samael continued, turning around and walking back toward the throne, his black cloak billowing majestically, "a pompous title is useless if your bodies are still made of fragile mortal glass. The Imperial Sequences were born with or assimilated pure dragon blood. But you, my Void Sequences... you already possess a dragon inside."
Samael turned, raising his right hand toward the hall's ceiling.
"Your humanity is a cage," the Patriarch declared. "You have a latent ancestral bloodline, deeply asleep and chained within your human DNA, a beast that has been repressed by generations of weakness. Today, I will not give you a foreign power. Today, I will give you my blood to break those chains. You will receive your own baptism. The bloodline that slept... will awaken today to ten percent. You will break the human cage. And I warn you: your mortal biology will scream in agony as it is devoured and rewritten by the beast. Survive, and you will be dragons. Yield to the pain, and you will be ash."
Samael clenched his fist. Through his neural link, he ordered: Primordial Patriarch System. Activate the Legacy of Golden Blood. Initiate Awakening.
[INITIATING DRACONIC AWAKENING PROTOCOL: 10%]
[PHASE 1: RANKS 24 TO 18]
[CONCEPTUAL INJECTION OF PRIMORDIAL ESSENCE: APPROVED]
Samael didn't need to physically cut his veins. His [Legacy of Golden Blood] operated on a conceptual level. Being the absolute Progenitor, seven drops of his Primordial Blood Essence, as bright as liquid suns and as hot as a star's core, materialized in the air in front of him and shot out like bullets of light, directly impacting the chests of the last seven warriors in line.
A crimson and golden light erupted from the jade floor of the Throne Room, enveloping the seven unfortunate, blessed souls in a tornado of oppressive energy.
The muffled, guttural scream of seven throats instantly filled the air. It wasn't normal pain; it wasn't the burn of a sword wound or a beast's venom. It was the indescribable, torturous sensation of their own genetic architecture, their human DNA, being torn apart molecule by molecule, shredded, and forcefully rewritten by a superior, alien source code. Draconic mutation was an absolute violation of human biology. Blood boiled, bones broke and repaired in milliseconds, only to break again. Human skin tore because it could no longer contain what grew beneath.
Rank 24: Borg, "The Line-Breaker"
Borg roared like a cornered wild beast. The bearded colossus, normally a lover of loud brawls and frontal clashes, felt his humanity collapsing. His muscles didn't just grow; they violently hypertrophied and tore, the flesh ripping from the inside as it expanded until tearing his heavy combat tunic.
His aura exploded like a pressure bomb, breaking the Stage 2 Transcendent Realm bottleneck with the force of an earthquake, shooting straight toward the peak of the realm. Borg fell to his hands and knees, splintering the marble. The true pain began when his mortal skin started opening into bloody fissures. From inside his muscles and veins, thick, heavy bronze-colored scales, his [Organic Bronze Dermis], emerged tearing the epidermis, fusing with his skin to create an armored, disgusting carapace in its initial conception.
Borg vomited hot blood as his jaw widened and his teeth became grinding blocks. A monstrous lump grew in the center of his forehead. The internal pressure of his skull was so immense that his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets before a [Primordial Bronze Horn], thick, blunt, and made of living metal, pierced his frontal bone and tore the skin of his forehead, emerging bathed in human blood to crown him. The bloodline of the Bronze Rhinoceros Dragon had awakened, turning his body into an unstoppable battering ram and siege machine, where every running step would multiply his mass until he became a living meteorite of flesh and bronze.
Rank 23: Lia, "The Eye of the Storm"
Beside him, Lia, the cyan-haired sniper with an hourglass figure, couldn't even roar. Her scream died in her throat as she fell to her knees, convulsing, bringing both hands to the right side of her face.
She felt as if a red-hot nail, charged with a million volts, had been driven directly through her pupil into her brain. A blue and white lightning bolt flashed across the room, violently originating from her own face. She didn't wear an eyepatch; her right eye, normally human, was undergoing an aggressive mutation.
CRACK!
The sound of burning flesh and ionizing air reeked of ozone and charred blood. Her fingers tried to claw her eye out from the pain, but her nails had suddenly elongated into curved claws, perfect for drawing bowstrings, tearing the skin of her own cheeks in the process. Her right eye was revealed: the white sclera turned abyssal black in a second, and her pupil tore, becoming a vertical golden slit that crackled with living static electricity. Blue sparks erupted from inside her eye socket, cauterizing the edges of the skin on her eyelids and cheek, marking her with lightning-shaped burn scars. It was the [Thunder Falcon Eye], capable of seeing the enemy's nerve impulses and calculating atmospheric drop.
But the mutation didn't end there. Her forearms and shoulders exploded in pain. The [Electric Scale Feathers] grew like shards of blue and silver crystal, cutting her own flesh from the inside out, emerging soaked in her blood to form biological shooting stabilizers that locked her arms in absolute tension. The Thunder Falcon Dragon pushed her violently straight into the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
Rank 22: Ren, "The Hawk Eye"
Ren didn't scream. The hyper-vigilant boy with short, messy hair simply began vibrating at an imperceptible speed, entering a microscopic, paralyzing convulsion state.
The Wind Viper Dragon bloodline wasn't about brute strength; it was about extreme sensitivity. And that made it infinitely more painful. Ren felt that every nerve ending in his body, every inch of his skin and organs, was being flayed alive by invisible air currents operating at the cellular level. His nervous system was being rewired to connect with the atmosphere.
His silver eyes, already immensely wide from paranoia, dilated to the brink of madness and turned into menacing emerald green slits. His muscles, thin but wiry, compacted, stretching his tendons to the breaking point, becoming as dense and taut as steel suspension cables.
The pain forced him to open his mouth in a mute scream, revealing how his human tongue split in half, tearing from the center to form a reptilian [Forked Tongue]. Ren gasped, and upon tasting the air, he tasted the metallic flavor of his comrades' blood and the chemical particles of Qi in the hall. Small, sharp, translucent scales, designed for camouflage, tore through the pores of his neck and cheeks, drawing diamond patterns before sinking back beneath the skin. Ren stopped occupying space; the air around him simply flowed through him. He reached the Peak Stage of the Transcendent Realm amidst his silent agony.
Rank 21: Tormund, "The Wall of Flesh"
Tormund simply closed his eyes and crossed his immense arms over his broad chest. The bald giant received the mutation in a silence that was even more terrifying than the screams.
His pain wasn't external; there was no tearing skin or sprouting scales. The punishment of the Immovable Basalt Dragon occurred deep within his marrow. His human bones began to calcify, absorbing minerals and earth Qi at a suicidal rate, becoming denser than Heaven Grade steel. The immense internal friction made his blood literally boil, emitting steam from his pores.
The massive increase in his density and weight was so abrupt that the giant's knees couldn't initially support him. He dropped to one knee, and the solid marble floor beneath his foot simply cracked and sank half a meter, yielding to the tons of weight his human body now harbored. His skin, previously tanned and weathered, temporarily turned a dark, chalky, dry, dead gray, like the crust of cooled volcanic stone: his [Subdermal Basalt Dermis].
When Tormund opened his eyes again, the human, emotional gleam of his brown irises had completely vanished, replaced by [Inert Agate Eyes], cold, blind to emotion, but hypersensitive to tectonic vibrations. The immovable giant ascended to the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
Rank 20: Jareth, "The Toxicologist"
Jareth's transformation was a spectacle of biological horror. The skeletal, pale alchemist let out a dry, cadaverous laugh that quickly turned into a violent cough, spitting large clots of black blood and purple smoke directly onto the marble.
The Purple Miasma Dragon (Basilisk Variant) had entered his system and was refusing to purge the deadly toxins Jareth had accumulated throughout his life. Instead of curing him, Samael's blood was forcing his human biology to fuse with those toxins, turning the poison into his new lifeblood.
Jareth hugged himself, writhing as his flesh seemed to melt and rebuild in cycles of seconds. His veins marked themselves pitch black, throbbing painfully against his sickly, translucent skin. His human nails darkened, hardened, and elongated into painful claws, becoming necrosis injectors. A viscous, purple Qi began dripping from his fingertips, hissing and melting the jade floor tiles on contact. When he raised his head, his white sclera had been consumed, leaving only two sockets of solid, lethal purple. The air around him reeked of swamp and sweet death. He ascended to Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm, now a living focus of infection with entropic acid blood.
Rank 19: Sylas, "The Hawk Eye"
Sylas, the shy, short boy with curly gray hair, arched backward until his spine cracked dangerously.
The Piercing Zephyr Dragon bloodline was wind in its purest, sharpest state. Sylas didn't feel pressure; he felt the edge. The dragon's essence entered his meridians and acted like millions of microscopic blades of hyper-compressed air, cutting, widening, and mutilating his energy channels from the inside to allow a frictionless flow. The human blood he coughed up was strangely light gray.
Sylas's scalp tore with a wet sound. A pair of small, sharp white bone horns violently poked through his gray curls, dripping blood down his face. At the same time, his hands and forearms suffered uncontrollable spasms as the [Wind Scale Dermis], transparent, ultra-thin plates, grew out, tearing his pores, designed to stabilize his muscles in the void and eliminate tremors. His silver [Eagle Eye of the Wind] stabilized, throbbing as his mind painfully adapted to the ability to calculate trajectories and currents from miles away. He broke through the barrier and settled at Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm, his body becoming so light his feet barely seemed to touch the floor.
Rank 18: Iris, "The Weaver"
Finally, Iris's transformation was the most unsettling due to its silence and geometric nature. The young woman with short golden hair, her C-Cup chest firmly contained by her utilitarian clothes and her wide hips anchoring her to the ground in a perfect pear silhouette, showed no physical pain on her face. She didn't scream, didn't convulse.
But the pain was there, and it was infinitely worse than damage to the flesh: it was supreme cognitive torture. The Crystal Matrix Dragon (Rune-Weaver Dragon) didn't alter her muscular strength; it altered the way her brain processed existence itself.
Iris's mind was being forced, without anesthesia or preparation, to download and visualize reality's source code. The flow of universal Qi, the laws, spatial mathematics; everything rushed into her cerebral cortex. Iris fell to her knees, hands clutching her head, while fine tears of glowing golden blood welled from her tear ducts. Her amber eyes mutated horribly; the round pupils cracked and fragmented into intricate golden runic gears that began to spin mechanically.
Physically, the mutation manifested in her limbs. Her fingers cracked as the phalanges of bone and flesh hardened, becoming painfully translucent like runic crystal terminals capable of touching magic. Along her arms, the skin dried and fractured into perfect hexagonal patterns, revealing crystal scales that shone with intellectual light before melting back, unnaturally, into her human flesh. The Weaver, now capable of seeing the world as a tapestry of threads she could cut and rewrite, stabilized at Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm.
The crimson and golden light in the hall began to dissipate, leaving behind a thick scent of ozone, copper, burnt blood, and sulfur.
Samael Morningstar remained motionless before the throne, observing with cold analytical satisfaction the first seven monsters of his new shadow cohort. They had survived the violation of their own humanity. Their shattered bones had been forged into the armor of a dragon.
"Seven down," the Patriarch said, his unalterable voice echoing in the hall filled with blood and power. "Seventeen more. Prepare to die and be reborn."