Chapter 154: The Void Sequences and the Baptism of Golden Blood (Part 3)
The immense Throne Room had become a true crucible of biological and spiritual nightmares.
Fourteen members of the lethal Void Sequences were scattered across the wide edges of the immense jade and obsidian hall, leaning against the pillars or kneeling on the shattered marble. They were breathing heavily in a toxic air, densely charged with electric ozone, vaporized blood, melted slag, and acidic ash. Their bodies, though returned to human appearance thanks to a titanic effort of will, vibrated imperceptibly with the immense latent power of the lesser dragons that now resided encrypted in their veins and marrow.
Their newly awakened instincts, sharp and primordial, screamed at them. The beast inside them demanded they retreat, get as far away as possible from the epicenter of the hall. They felt that the gravity around them was beginning to fail, that the air itself was turning to lead.
But the silence governing the center of the room was, by no means, a silence of peace. It was the unbearable, suffocating atmospheric pressure that precedes a continent-scale cataclysm.
Before the majestic stairs of the Obsidian Throne, ten stoic figures remained. The absolute Top 10 of Samael's infantry. They were not trembling. They were not looking at the floor seeking mercy. Cassius, Magnus, Eira, Voltar, Ciro, Vania, Orion, the lethal twins Aia and Aion, and at the head of them all, immutable as a mountain of swords, Dante.
Samael Morningstar walked along the edge of the imperial dais. The heavy, metallic echo of his armored boots resonated in the silence like the relentless second hand of a cosmic clock ticking down the absolute end of their humanity. His eyes, now turned into two abyssal vortexes of violet and crimson under the active influence of the [Eye of Destiny], scrutinized the columns of light rising above these ten incomparable warriors.
Through his omniscient gaze, Samael didn't just see flesh and Qi; he literally saw the threads of the world's Karma pulling taut around these ten individuals, vibrating with hostility. The universe itself was preparing to brutally punish them for the audacity of attempting to harbor concepts that defied the natural laws imposed by the Heavens.
The golden panel of the [Primordial Patriarch System] appeared before him, and the light it emitted wasn't a standard warning, but a critical scarlet that bathed his face.
[PRIMORDIAL PATRIARCH SYSTEM: DRACONIC AWAKENING PROTOCOL - PHASE 3]
[Forced Integration Level:] 10% (Awakening of Internal Organs, Soul Mutation, and Absolute Concept Assimilation).
[Critical Level Warning:] Imperial Class and Asura Class bloodlines have been detected in the hosts. The biological transmutation will exceed the physical limits of mortal matter.
[Mini-World Spatial Rupture Risk:] 87%.
[Automatic Action:] Initiating Divine Grade Suppression and Isolation Matrices.
The air in the vast hall became physically solid.
A deafening hum, of a frequency so high and unbearable that it made the gums and tear ducts of the fourteen warriors on the flanks bleed, flooded the palace. Imposing containment matrices, formed by millions of interlocking golden and black runic gears, appeared out of nowhere on the walls, on the jade floor, and on the vaulted ceiling, forming a perfect, impenetrable, and glowing hyper-cube around the ten kneeling warriors and Samael's dais.
Samael wasn't locking them in to protect the world from them; he was protecting the precious Citadel of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn from the destructive and chaotic singular energy these ten were about to release. The clash of the concepts about to be born could create a gravitational and elemental singularity capable of erasing the palace from existence.
"The fourteen who preceded you suffered the grotesque transmutation of flesh and bone," Samael said, his deep voice, loaded with the authority of the Crown of the Primordial Sovereign, caressing and oppressing the minds of everyone present simultaneously. "But in the vast scheme of worlds, flesh is cheap. Bone splinters and heals. What you are about to experience, the hell that will devour your humanity in the next few minutes... is the transmutation of Law itself."
Samael raised his right hand slowly. His nails extended, transmuting into sharp black diamond claws that caught and shattered the runic sunlight faintly filtering through the tall, broken windows.
"Your latent bloodlines are not simple beasts with wings that spit fire to scare mortals. They are ancient concepts, walking disasters that were banished, chained, and forbidden by Heaven itself for being too dangerous for creation. Today... I cut those chains. I return to you the right to be calamities."
Samael clenched his gloved fist with a force capable of crushing stars.
"Let Heaven weep its impotence. Awaken!"
The System's crimson light fell upon the ten warriors like the relentless blade of a cosmic guillotine.
Magnus (Rank 9 - The Iron Titan) was the first to fall, and he did so with the force of a meteorite. The two-meter giant, broad as a bunker, the same man who had drunk Star Mercury as if it were water and who laughed uproariously while tearing down siege walls with his bare fists, didn't let out a single scream of pain. Instead, from his throat sprang a cavernous, dense, and unnatural sound, sounding exactly like the dull, destructive clash of two immense tectonic plates colliding deep within the earth.
The Vajra Earth Dragon's bloodline didn't bother superficially modifying his skin; it traveled like a missile straight into his bone marrow. His human skeleton, which had already been hardened by years of assimilating metal, began to violently absorb the very force of gravity in the room. The mass increase was ridiculous, a physical aberration. Magnus's body weight went from an impressive one hundred and twenty kilos to ten damn tons of dead weight in three brief seconds.
CRAAAACK! BOOOOM!
The sound was like a point-blank shot from a siege cannon. The marble and jade floor, which seconds before had been reinforced by Samael's very own Divine Grade matrices, didn't simply crack; it liquefied and pulverized from the immense, concentrated, and unbearable gravitational pressure. Magnus sank like a stone in water.
His human knees, unable to support ten tons of mass, burst and exploded under his own weight. Blood didn't flow from his shattered kneecaps; it shot out at such an absurd pressure that it cut the air like steel shrapnel, embedding itself lethally into the nearby pillars. But before Magnus's mutilated body hit the bottom of the crater he had created, the remaining blood in his veins boiled, turning into iron and magma. The spilled blood instantly crystallized into a dark, metallic granite, healing the open wound and forcefully welding new, monstrous hydraulic joints capable of supporting his new physical deity.
Magnus felt his human spinal cord boil until it evaporated, being painfully replaced by liquid gold and Vajra metal. His skull brutally widened, tearing his scalp, and two enormous protrusions of pure rock and rough diamond pierced his frontal bone, emerging as blunt, crushing horns. Magnus drooled wet earth, crushed minerals, and liquid metal from his mouth, enduring in titanic silence the horrifying agony of literally being buried alive and crushed inside his own body, consolidating his [Liquid Vajra Skeleton] as he violently and overwhelmingly ascended to the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
Beside him, the anatomical torture of Cassius (Rank 10 - The Jade Lancer) was of an extremely macabre, poetic, and disturbing beauty.
The quiet man, the stoic healer of the vanguard whose Qi always brought peace, arched backward, opening both arms in the shape of a cross as if receiving a holy martyrdom. His straight hair, normally a healthy dark green, quickly turned a necrotic, sickly black, before bursting into a phosphorescent, toxic, and radioactive green.
The Ironwood Guardian Dragon's bloodline was not a benevolent elemental force or a protective entity; it was, in its purest conception, a gigantic and insatiable divine parasite.
"Gaaahhh!" Cassius groaned, a guttural sound denoting a desperate internal war.
Beneath the pale skin of his arms, neck, and chest, dozens of thick veins began to bulge and writhe horribly, looking like black snakes moving beneath his epidermis. They were branches. Branches of dark, petrified wood, sharp as obsidian spears, that began to sprout and pierce from inside his pores, tearing his skin in a bloodbath that was quickly replaced by a thick, luminescent green sap.
His Life Qi had become so dense, uncontrollable, and aggressive that the draconic parasite was attempting to germinate and create a murderous forest using Cassius's own human nervous system as seeds and fertilizer. Cassius was being devoured alive by his own immense, boundless life force. His organs were being pierced by roots.
But to survive, his hyper-analytical and disciplined mind had to intervene. Cassius didn't fight the physical pain of the wood tearing his flesh; he waged a thermonuclear war in his own Spiritual Sea. Using his powerful will, he grabbed the parasite dragon by the conceptual throat and began to strangle it with his own Qi, forcing the beast to submit to his human command. He forced the deadly branches to halt their outward growth and painfully retract back into the open flesh, forcing them to intertwine and fuse with his veins, capillaries, and arteries, turning his circulatory system into indestructible ironwood fibers.
His apple-green eyes, always serene, became bloodshot with glowing sap and transformed into cold, calculating vertical pupils of ancient amber: the [Eyes of Divine Chlorophyll]. When the Dantesque parasitic process ended, his aura burst into the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9), emanating an intoxicating, fresh, and peaceful scent of damp pine that perfectly concealed the absolute, cold, and parasitic death now coursing through his veins of [Jade Bark].
While Magnus's unbreakable earth and Cassius's parasitic wood fought for material supremacy, the very climate inside the containment matrices abruptly collapsed.
Eira (Rank 8 - The White Witch), the dazzling beauty of the north, simply stopped breathing.
Literally, the expanding movement of her chest halted. The Permafrost Emperor Dragon's bloodline wasn't simply the element of ice; it was the universal decree demanding that heat cease to exist. Her fragile human heart, which already beat slowly due to her Frost Yin Body, stopped completely. Frozen solid.
"Cold..." Eira whispered. It was a broken, hollow sound. And it was the last articulate, human word she would speak in that hour.
The warm oxygen she tried to exhale didn't come out as vapor; it turned into solid nitrogen in her lungs and fell from her parted lips like fine shards of broken glass that tinkled against the floor. Her skin, already pale as snow, lost all trace of humanity and became completely translucent, identical to cut crystal. The fine capillaries beneath her skin glowed with a dark, dead, and lethal blue. Frost didn't form around her; the effect was far more terrifying. The physical space a millimeter from her skin began to tear and crack, unable to withstand the imposition of Absolute Zero.
Her internal meridians froze to such a degree that they shattered inside her body like brittle glass, only to be painfully replaced by a conductive structure of glacial diamond dust. Tears of pure dark blue blood fell from her beautiful amber eyes, but they didn't even manage to slide down her cheeks; they froze instantly upon welling up, forming two sapphire tear marks beneath her eyes.
Eira didn't scream, because her vocal cords had become so fragile and brittle from the cold that the slightest attempt to vibrate them would have reduced them to ice dust. Eira's true pain wasn't physical; it was the existential psychological terror of feeling no heat, absolute entropy and the thermal void devouring her sense of "self." She plunged into assimilation until being catapulted to Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm. Before Samael's eyes, she became an immaculate statue of white death, possessing the [Icy Porcelain Skin], with fine, elegant scales of eternal ice covering the base of her slender neck.
Against the sepulchral, absolute, and dead silence of the ice, the tearing roar of the heavens' wrath erupted.
Voltar (Rank 7 - The Walking Storm) raised his face to the ceiling of the containment cube and began to laugh. It was a manic, unhinged laugh, the desperate defense mechanism of a human mind trying not to fracture while being electrocuted by cosmic judgment.
But his laughter was violently interrupted when a purple lightning bolt, thick as a pillar, didn't fall from the sky, but was generated from inside his own mutated heart, traveling rapidly up his throat to escape his mouth.
The Purple Tribulation Dragon's bloodline is not a mere atmospheric element; it is the Punishment of God. Upon successfully assimilating this bloodline into his DNA, Voltar's body was immediately identified by the world's Karma as a disgusting aberration, an unforgivable "Anomaly," and his own vital Qi attempted to execute him from the inside to restore balance.
KRA-KOOOM!
A deafening thunderclap that shook the marrow of those present erupted. Electrical arcs of a blinding violet color, charged with millions of volts of karmic energy, ripped the skin off his arms and chest in smoking strips. His human muscles fried instantly, filling the dais area with the unmistakable, nauseating smell of roasted meat and pure ozone.
Voltar writhed in pain in the air, his feet off the ground, held a meter above the floor by the sheer magnetic repulsive force of his own cellular destruction. His electric blue hair turned dazzlingly white from the overload and then mutated into a dark, untamable violet. His eyes exploded in a flash of annihilating light; there was no longer a sclera, iris, or pupil, just two spinning beacons of crystal storm.
The pain of being electrocuted, flayed, and burned at the cellular level made him howl, and the sound of his voice blended and perfectly confused itself with the thunder tearing at his soul. His famous [Lichtenberg Figures] didn't appear as a soft tattoo; they were branded with fire and plasma, burning his flesh down to the blackened bone, smoking violently through the branching scars.
When his feet finally touched the melted marble again, the storm had rebuilt him. His lean, burned body healed in a millisecond via ionized plasma, leaving him rooted in the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9). Jagged, lightning-shaped scales shone dangerously beneath the skin of his strong jaw, beating in unison with a heart that was now a tribulation reactor.
Samael observed every detail with imperial coldness, his hands clasped behind his back beneath his heavy cloak. The supreme divine containment matrices hummed around him, on the verge of cracking under the immense combined pressure of extreme gravity, absolute zero, and celestial punishment. And then, the most abstract and dangerous elements began their own unspeakable blood baptism.
Ciro (Rank 6 - The Wind Phantom) simply disappeared.
It wasn't that he moved too fast for the human eye. Simply, and terrifyingly, he ceased to have physical mass in the universe. The Hurricane Specter Dragon's bloodline sharply and aggressively severed his biological anchor to the three-dimensional physical plane.
"H...elp!" Ciro's distorted and fragmented voice echoed, not from a fixed point, but from absolutely every corner and air current of the immense containment cube at the same time.
He was experiencing the absolute, existential terror of atomic dissolution. His consciousness, his human mind, was scattering through every molecule of air and gas in the room. It was a formless pain. Ciro felt his left arm floating like gas three meters away from his right leg. Worse still, being part of the atmosphere, he felt the scorching, annihilating heat of Voltar's tribulation and the microscopically sharp, deadly cold of Eira violently piercing the scattered molecules of his soul. All the chaos of the room passed through him, tearing his spirit into a million invisible pieces.
To avoid dying evaporated and ceasing to exist as an individual, Ciro had to execute an act of divine concentration. He had to sew his own body, his own spirit, using the howling wind as a needle and his own will as thread.
Slowly, agonizingly, a violent vortex of dense emerald green wind formed in the center of the room. Inside the tornado, Ciro's body began to "recrystallize." The process was horrifying to watch; layers of bare muscle floated in the air, crashing into and attaching to floating bone, violently weaving themselves together before the skin managed to close, dripping blood profusely from the instability of the spatial relocation. When the vortex finally subsided, Ciro fell to his knees, panting hurricane breezes, his [Intangible Breeze Body] complete. Fine, sharp translucent scales of solid air adorned his sharp cheekbones. He had reached the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9). He had faced and conquered death by molecular dispersion.
Just meters from Ciro's storm, Vania (Rank 5 - The War Siren) clutched her delicate throat with both hands, kneeling and trembling violently. Her torture wasn't external; there were no wild elements battering her body.
The majestic and authoritative Sovereign Echo Leviathan Dragon's bloodline ignored her muscles and attacked the core of her commanding capacity: it brutally mutated her vocal cords, tearing out human biology to transform them into a Divine Grade biological sonic organ.
The immense cellular friction of that internal rewrite was so extreme that Vania choked. She coughed and vomited glowing golden blood onto the floor, but it wasn't just blood; amidst the metallic sap, she expelled shredded, burned pieces of her original human larynx, destroyed from the inside to make room for her new anatomy.
Every time she coughed, the mere sound of her muffled suffering created immense acoustic shockwaves that struck the air like siege hammers. These waves not only finished fracturing the marble floor liquefied by Magnus but also made the ears of Voltar, Ciro, and the other warriors in the room bleed profusely. The sonic waves struck Samael's Divine Grade suppression matrices so violently that the golden cube vibrated dangerously, threatening to splinter, demonstrating the raw monstrosity of her Asura Class bloodline.
To seal the biological pact, the intricate golden runic tattoos that already adorned her delicate neck suddenly flared like red-hot pure iron. Vania closed her eyes, unable to scream as the runes burned her skin, sinking deep into her flesh, penetrating the muscle until anchoring themselves permanently to her jawbone and collarbones. The incandescent marks spread to her cheeks, forming beautiful yet terrifying runic gills of [Vibratory Sapphire Scales] that pulsed and glowed with the same lethal rhythm as her heart.
She was order incarnate, the voice that dictated the life and death of armies. She stood up with difficulty, her throat throbbing with [Crimson Gold Vocal Cords], ascending majestically to Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm. Her presence in the room imposed a strange heaviness, as if reality itself were awaiting her first command.
Samael nodded slightly from his elevated position. Six absolute monsters had been forged on the anvil of suffering. Their minds had resisted collapse, and their bodies had survived extinction.
But the game was not over yet. Samael shifted his gaze to the final four figures left standing, unperturbed by the biological carnage that had just unfolded. Orion, the paradox twins Aia and Aion, and the relentless Dante.
If the Imperial and Asura class bloodlines had almost destroyed the divine barrier containing them... Samael couldn't help but feel a deep, unsettling curiosity to see how the world would attempt to punish the four remaining absolute concepts.
While Samael was lost in his thoughts, a scream rang out.
But the most disturbing sound, the one that chilled the blood of the fourteen warriors on the flanks, wasn't Vania's bloody cough or Voltar's thunder, but the unhinged laughter of Orion (Rank 4 - The Puppeteer).
While the others fought desperately against the physical and elemental environment, the Soul Weaver Dragon operated on a purely psychic and sadistic level. The fingernails on Orion's hands grotesquely elongated, and suddenly, they split and frayed into thousands of microscopic spiritual threads of a sickly silver-gray color. These [Void Crystal Fingertips] didn't shoot the threads outward; in an act of biological self-flagellation, the threads turned inward, violently piercing the skin of his own arms, drilling into his skull, piercing his chest to tangle in his lungs, and sinking like fishhooks deep into his Dantian.
Orion was literally weaving his own soul to his physical body, forcefully tying himself to material reality so as not to be consumed and erased by the dragon's voracious hunger.
"How fun! Gods, how fun it is to be taken apart!" Orion laughed hysterically, a cackle that tore through the air, while thick tears of silver blood fell from his eyes and stained his face.
The pain of feeling millions of spiritual needles piercing and sewing the very fabric of his sanity was indescribable, capable of reducing a King to a drooling vegetable, but Orion's inherent sadism was infinitely greater. He enjoyed the violation of his own psyche. His fingers had become long, thin, inhuman claws, and his [Silver Mirror Eyes] had mutated; his pupils were now cross-shaped, mechanically spinning, capable of seeing the threads of destiny and the nervous systems of any mortal around him. Through the dementia and ecstasy of pain, he broke through his bottlenecks and stabilized in the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
Only three remained standing who had not yet succumbed to the crimson light. Samael leaned slightly forward on the dais. This was where the immutable laws of physics would begin to weep.
Aion (Rank 3) and Aia (Rank 2) turned their heads and looked into each other's eyes. They said absolutely nothing to one another; their synchrony exceeded language. With desperate strength, knowing what was coming, they clasped hands the exact millisecond the apocalyptic bloodline of the Binary Eclipse Stellar Dragon violently slammed into their vital cores.
What happened next inside the containment cube defied all logic and existential reason.
Aion, the Immovable Hammer, the avatar of Dark Matter, collapsed in on himself. His body became so overwhelmingly heavy, of such an infinite and absurd density, that an actual, microscopic black hole, the size of an obsidian marble, appeared literally floating in the exact center of his torn chest. His human flesh tore, dragged gravitationally toward his own oppressive core. The pain wasn't organic; it was the astronomical equivalent of having the mass of an entire planet crushing, compressing, and destroying every cell of his body down to the subatomic level.
At the same time, Aia, the Fluid Mirror, the avatar of Starlight, suffered exactly the opposite. Her body began to uncontrollably expand, turning into pure, blinding, scorching radiation. She shone with a light so blinding and intense that her skin became transparent, and her human bones became clearly visible through her incandescent flesh. She was violently disintegrating from an internal nuclear explosion.
If they let go of each other's hands for a microsecond, Aion would implode, consuming the palace, and Aia would explode in a supernova that would vaporize the other half of the palace.
"Don't let go of me!" Aia cried, her beautiful voice distorted by the frequency of light, her plasma tears evaporating before they even formed.
"Never!" Aion roared, the absolute darkness in his eyes frantically devouring the lethal light emanating from his sister.
The quantum and biological bridge between them, the Singularity Bond, activated. Aion's infinite destructive gravity began to mercilessly suck in Aia's infinite disintegrating light, stabilizing his sister's fission. And, in turn, Aia's infinite and expanding light began to fill the insatiable abyss of Aion's chest, preventing him from collapsing out of existence. They fed mutually on each other's pain. A perfect, closed loop of life and death.
At the exact epicenter of the clash, their auras did not mix, but orbited violently, creating a disturbing Gray Halo of Negation. Aion's pupils became blind white suns, and Aia's became absolute black holes. Their backs arched under the torment and, beneath their skin, majestic translucent scales reflecting entire galaxies appeared and disappeared. The monstrous momentum of the Paradox shot them beyond any logic of cultivation. They shattered Stage 4 in one blow, Stage 5 was annihilated, and they stopped abruptly, levitating centimeters off the ground, at the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9 - Peak).
Samael nodded, genuinely impressed. The Eclipse is born.
The Divine Grade containment cube was full of groaning monsters, recrystallizing and catching their breath after brushing death. Magnitudes of Qi that could have leveled an entire region of the outside world clashed furiously against the golden walls placed by Samael.
But one was missing.
Dante Morningstar (Rank 1).
He stood, immovable, in the exact same spot as always. His cultivation level was, objectively, laughable: Qi Sea Realm (Stage 3). Amidst that hellscape populated by Vajra Titans, Permafrost Witches, Abyss Inquisitors, and walking Black Holes, Dante looked like a fragile, malnourished boy armed with a rusted dagger.
However, Samael stared intently at him from the throne. The [Eye of Destiny] warned him, throbbing intensely, that Dante's column of light wasn't rising to the sky like the others. It was... devouring the light around it. It acted as a karmic sinkhole.
Dante simply closed his gray eyes when the inscrutable bloodline of the Slaughter Demon Dragon (Asura Variant) entered his bloodstream like a lethal virus.
For the other twenty-three warriors, the pain was physical, elemental, or spiritual. For Dante, the pain was cybernetic, algorithmic, and existential. In his internal vision, the cold, calculating blue interface of his [Slaughter System] began to glitch, filling with static before flashing violently in an alarming blood red.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL EXTERNAL DATA INVASION]
[Malicious Code Detected:] Primordial Asura Genome.
[Fatal Error:] Host's biological and moral structure is insufficient to house the file.
[Survival Protocol Initiated:] Deleting useless data to free up space... Deleting fear instinct... Deleting residual empathy... Deleting neurological pain limiters... Deleting basic humanity...
Dante fell heavily to his knees against the marble, but didn't let out a single scream. He clutched his head with both hands while his brain was literally rewired, his synapses destroyed and reforged through the code to process the world not as a human youth, but as an incarnate mathematical concept of slaughter. The veins popped in his neck and arms, swollen and throbbing, but the blood coursing through them beneath his translucent skin was no longer red. It was black, cold, and thick as boiling tar.
[FATAL ERROR: ABSOLUTE SYSTEM CONFLICT]
The Asura Dragon's blood demands biological submission. The Slaughter System demands Host autonomy.
[Conflict Resolution:] FORCED FUSION.
SLASH!
The sound of tearing flesh echoed dryly. Six deep, invisible, perfectly symmetrical cuts suddenly appeared on Dante's back, tearing his shirt and opening his skin down to the bone of his shoulder blades. Black blood gushed out, but didn't fall to the floor following gravity. It levitated, floating in the air behind him, condensing and crystallizing to form the imposing silhouette of six jagged, pure shadow wings, like the limbs of a mythological Asura. These wings of pure liquid violence folded and violently melted back into his lacerated back, embedding themselves beneath the flesh in the form of painful, charcoal-colored scaly tattoos. His [Asura Obsidian Scales].
Dante's cultivation level began to rise, but not in the traditional way. He didn't absorb the thick spiritual Qi from the surroundings. The Slaughter bloodline cannibalized his own neurological pain and voraciously absorbed the residual energy of the immense trauma, agony, and fear from the other nine warriors scattered in the room.
Qi Sea Stage 4... Stage 7... Stage 9... Breakthrough! Transcendent Realm Stage 1... Stage 5... Stage 9... Breakthrough!
The imposing initial barrier of the Transcendent Realm shattered before the Asura's algorithmic hunger. Dante stopped, nailed like a stake at the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9). It was, technically, the cultivation level everyone in the Top 10 had just reached. But the quality of his Qi was inherently repulsive. It darkened the room. It smelled of an open graveyard in the rain, of iron rusted by old blood, and of inevitable death.
Dante slowly raised his head. His dull gray eyes were no longer empty. The mutation was complete. His left pupil had torn vertically and was now a lethal crimson red, bloodshot with scarlet light—his [Gray Interface Pupil and Death Line Vision]—while his right remained the cold, calculating gray of an empty human. In his altered field of vision, the "Slaughter Points" and lines of molecular weakness of every person and object in the room had multiplied a thousandfold, glowing red. His dagger, the Fang of the Fallen Asura, vibrated frantically at his waist, passively assimilating its master's aura of death and dyeing itself an absolute black.
Dante wasn't suffering. Dante, with black blood dripping from his lips, was smiling.
He had found the ultimate shortcut.
The restrictive light of Samael's master System slowly faded. The immense Divine Grade containment cube, having served its purpose, dissolved into motes of harmless golden light that fell like snow.
The Throne Room looked as if it had survived a siege by a demon army. The marble was shattered, melted, vitrified, and frozen. The air in one corner cut the skin, while in another it created suffocating mini-tornadoes. The ten monsters stood or knelt, panting wildly. Magnus with his brutal rock horns; Cassius with his twisted veins of parasitic wood; Eira turned into frosted crystal; Vania with her imposing crimson-gold runic gills; the twins with galaxies and voids in their eyes; and Dante with his asymmetrical Asura gaze and his soulless smile. Their forms were grotesque, terrifying, beautiful, and profoundly divine.
Samael descended from the dais with a measured step, walking slowly among them. His peaceful presence and his impeccable armor contrasted violently with the absolute chaos of the room.
"The power I have given you has deformed you," Samael said, his tone calm, but loaded with an authority that admitted no reply. "Your fragile human flesh yielded, as was to be expected, to the greatness and selfishness of your new blood. But listen to me well: if you walk through my world looking like this, you are nothing but sideshow beasts. And beasts, eventually, are always hunted and slaughtered by smarter men."
Samael stopped in front of Dante, fixing his Emperor's gaze on the young assassin's crimson eye.
"If you cannot master the monster and hide it beneath the skin, you are not worthy of belonging to the Void." Samael's voice became a spiritual whip that crushed their auras. "Retract your power. Forcefully compress the dragon inside the human heart. Now."
It was a titanic and harrowing clash of wills. They had just obtained absolute power, the ecstasy of deity, and their new primordial instinct screamed at them to show it, use it, destroy the room. But the Patriarch's order was unbreakable Law.
Magnus growled like a wounded animal, gritting his teeth until they splintered, and painfully forced the calcification of his horns to recede, sinking beneath the bone of his skull. Cassius took a deep breath, trembling as his peaceful pine scent faded, forcing the ironwood to hide and beat again like blue veins and human blood. Eira's immaculate frost melted into a warm sigh, returning her perfect pallor and deceptive fragility. Aia's expanding nuclear light and Aion's consuming abyss extinguished simultaneously, hiding the apocalypse deep within their binary Dantian. And Dante, with a simple, cold blink of his mental interface, forced his vertical Asura pupil to contract and return to its dull, lifeless gray, hiding his shadow wings in his back.
In less than three agonizing minutes, the ten supreme warriors once again looked like a group of normal human youths. Clean, with no visible scales, no destructive auras, no fire, no ice. But the abyss of their power was there, latent, waiting patiently a single thought away from being unleashed to devour the world.
Samael nodded, satisfied. He returned to the dais, climbed the stairs to the obsidian Dragon Throne, and sat down majestically, crossing one leg over the other. He raised his goblet of Dragon Blood Wine, which had survived the storm intact on a side table protected by his Qi. He looked at the twenty-four warriors who now occupied his hall, from Borg, the colossus at Rank 24, to Dante, the silent Asura at Rank 1.
"You have survived the baptism," Samael announced. His voice wasn't a shout, but it resonated with absolute clarity in every corner, pillar, and shadow of the new Realm of the Eternal Dawn. "From this exact second, you cease to be apprentices. You cease to be promises and cannon fodder."
Samael raised the obsidian goblet toward them.
"You are the Void Sequences. You are my Shadow. You are the rusted dagger at the throat of destiny."
The twenty-four looked at him with feverish devotion, their human auras trembling with a newly forged fanaticism.
"For the next six relative years, this Realm will be hermetically sealed," the Patriarch continued, his words sealing their fate. "You will not see the sun of the outside world. You will not know rest. You will train with Guardian Sienna in the labyrinths of the Infinite Mirror, and you will be broken by her every day, until the reflection in the glass is your only friend and your worst enemy."
Samael took a long drink of the dragon blood. His violet eyes were fixed on them with fierce, sadistic, dark pride.
"When the immense gates of this Citadel open again for the Tournament, the arrogant Emperors of this continent will believe they are coming to hunt and trample a group of frightened survivors."
Samael smiled sideways, showing the unmistakable edge of his own fangs.
"You will teach them that, in reality, they have made the stupid mistake of entering the monsters' cage."
As if they were a single organism controlled by a hive mind, the twenty-four Void Sequences fell to their right knee in unison. Their twenty-four fists struck the shattered marble of the floor in an absolute, perfectly synchronized bow.
"OUR LIVES ARE YOURS, PATRIARCH! UNTIL THE WORLD IS ASH!"
And with that deafening roar, which shook every last crystal leaf of the immense Stellar World Tree, the enormous gears of the Citadel's Great Gate turned and closed with a definitive crash.
The relentless clock of absolute isolation began to tick. The outside world, with its ignorant sects and arrogant empires, continued turning slowly under the sun, completely unaware of the apocalyptic terror being forged, behind closed doors, in the darkness of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn.