Note from Void_Scribe: đ
Good morning, afternoon, or evening to the entire sect! đ€
Today, fate only allowed us to release two chapters. Do not despair, for the storm of ash and rust continues its course tomorrow.
Many thanks to Julius_Caesar_3036 for the runic stones bestowed upon the clan. If the rest of you mortals want your own shout-outs in the firmament of these notes, you know what to do: drop your stones and leave your theories in the comments! Hahahaha.
Enjoy the chapter. I know you wanted more blood, but the third fragment is not yet finished and this humble writer has to head out into the outside world today. I am truly sorry for that, hehehe. I promise to align my meridians and organize myself well to bring you the 6-chapter marathon I promised and stick to the 3 daily chapters. Thanks for reading! â
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CHAPTER 199: The Roar of the Primordial Phoenix (Part 2)
Vargas "The Butcher" watched with a frozen heart as his ultimate attack, the [Collapse of the Iron Horizon], vanished harmlessly into the dense smoke of Lilith's veil. Frustration and a primal, ancient, and icy fear clashed violently in his chest. He knew, with the absolute certainty of a veteran who had survived a thousand battles, that he could not allow that woman's gray aura to touch him even one more time. If that damn entropy withered his flesh fused with runic metal, the agony would be infinitely worse than death.
"Damn bitch! I'm going to turn you into my slave and then into a pool of blood! Hehehe!" Vargas roared, spitting on the volcanic floor as desperation tinged his bravado.
Lilith didn't even flinch. She simply narrowed her gray eyes, which began to glow dangerously. Her scarlet and ashen hair began to float, defying gravity. And without saying a single word, she attacked.
With a single, majestic flap of her [Wings of the Ashen Calamity Phoenix], the space around her warped. The thirty-meter wings, forged in gray fire and black smoke, suppressed the Dao of the surroundings. Lilith disappeared, crossing the distance in an instant to reappear directly behind Vargas at an imperceptible speed.
Instead of throwing her fire from a distance, Lilith concentrated the [Embrace of Entropy] in her hands, forging a physical spear of condensed fire. With the lethal grace of her bloodline, she executed the [Heaven-Piercing Phoenix Spear].
Lilith launched herself into the air, and as she dove, the tremendous friction of her energy condensed a majestic crimson and gold Phoenix around her body. The extreme heat distorted space, threatening to melt Vargas's armor from the inside through the [Setting Sun Thrust]. Three orbs of white light, miniature suns, appeared around the Butcher, ready to detonate and incinerate his vital organs.
But Vargas was a monster of survival. Sensing the imminent danger and knowing that dodging was biologically impossible against that woman's monstrous speed, he raised his immense axe in a desperate attempt to defend himself.
[Shattered Dao Shear].
Vargas unleashed invisible threads of pure [Tearing Iron Intent]. These planes of void clashed head-on against Lilith's fire spear and detonations. A tremendous, violent explosion of destabilized energy erupted between them.
It was Vargas who was sent flying by the colossal impact. The immense Butcher flew through the air like a heavy ragdoll, crashing violently against the steep walls of the canyon. The obsidian rock fractured around him, burying him beneath the rubble.
Vargas slowly emerged from the cloud of smoking dust. His impenetrable flesh armor had given way; his arms were bruised and covered in lacerations, and a deep gash bled profusely at his waist. He raised his free hand, wiped the blood dripping from his mouth, and spat a thick clot onto the ground. He opened and closed his thick fingers to check his nerves. Realizing that his arm only suffered a slight tremor due to the overwhelming magnitude of the shockwave and that there was no paralyzing damage, he turned his gaze back to Lilith, who remained floating with untouchable superiority.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Vargas's hoarse laugh echoed off the obsidian walls. "I changed my mind! I won't kill you! I'll chop off your legs and arms and you will be my damn wife! You are strong, woman, but...
Vargas's gaze suddenly changed. The sadistic madness was replaced by an absolute martial coldness. A thick, suffocating aura of slaughter erupted around him, condensing the spectral figure of a colossal ancient barbarian with an axe on his back.
"...THIS IS AS FAR AS YOU GO, SWEETHEART."
The instant the last words left his mouth, Vargas furiously planted his right boot into the ground and roared from the very depths of his Dantian. The sound was not human; it was the tectonic crunch of a continent splitting in half.
"DOMAIN EXPANSION: THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF TYRANNICAL IRON!"
A Qi pulse the color of rust and as thick as stagnant blood erupted from his body, sweeping the plateau at lightning speed in an exact two-kilometer radius.
The transition to the reality of his Law was brutal. The sky lost its light, tinged by a coppery glow and a suffocating stench of sulfur and rust. Instantly, the [Pressure of the Bloody Anvil] fell upon the battlefield. The ambient Qi transformed into a mass of absolute heaviness. It was the literal weight of One Hundred Ancient Mountains. On the periphery, the few slaves and lesser cultivators who still breathed were instantly crushed against the ground, their organs bursting from the overwhelming gravity.
The air became so dense that breathing lead would have been smoother. Lilith felt the pressure trying to collapse her lungs. Moving her wings or maintaining her balance consumed her original Qi at a destructive rate. Space itself felt as if she were buried alive in dry mud.
In the center of this labyrinth, Vargas stood at his full colossal height. The trembling in his arms had vanished, stabilized by the law of his territory. He rested the enormous executioner's axe on his armored shoulder, looking at Lilith with the sadistic gleam of a god in his own slaughterhouse.
Lilith, feeling the titanic weight on her shoulders, weighed whether to activate her own domain, but her pride demanded she first test the physical limits of her enemy. She tried to rise, but the effort was colossal.
Vargas gave her no time to think.
[Blood Mountain Charge].
Using the hundred mountains of gravity in his favor, Vargas altered the polarity, compressed the heaviness into his own body, and let himself "fall" horizontally toward her. Multiplying his mass, he became an unstoppable projectile.
Lilith could barely raise her fire spear to block, but the impact disintegrated it. In the last millisecond before being crushed, she activated the [Dust Bird Stride].
Her physical body crumbled from top to bottom, molecularly reconfiguring into a cloud of burning ashes that dodged the crushing collision and reappeared in the nearby sky. Lilith materialized breathing heavily, her forehead beaded with sweat from the domain's pressure.
Vargas turned around, smiling mockingly.
"What's wrong, sweetheart? Can't handle the pressure anymore? Don't make it so easy for me."
Ignoring the provocation, Lilith beat her wings and once again unleashed the [Starfall Dusk Feather Rain]. Thousands of karmic extinction seals, camouflaged as black snow and cold fire, floated magnetically toward the Butcher.
Vargas shook his head, disappointed.
"This again. Unfortunately for you, it's not going to work."
Burying the edges of his axe deep into the earth, Vargas assumed the [Stance of the Anvil's Immovable Stele]. His body and his flesh armor shone with a dull crimson glow, raising his cellular density to the level of a celestial meteorite.
The karmic ash feathers struck him with a dull, metallic Ting-Ting, failing to penetrate or rust his aura. Vargas laughed uproariously, taking the harmless bombardment. However, he knew he was reaching the limit of what his body could passively store.
Deactivating the stance with a burst of Qi, Vargas altered the laws of his own weight: [Earthly Weight Displacement Step].
Vargas didn't run. He was magnetically sucked forward. The solid rock of the plateau sank a meter deep beneath his boots with every stride, creating a tectonic furrow of pure destruction.
Lilith swept the area with her divine sense, but by the time she found him, the Butcher was already right behind her.
With relentless brutality, Vargas unleashed a downward slash imbued with his [Tearing Intent]. The axe crossed the air and cut cleanly through Lilith's colossal gray fire wings, severing them from the root. The sonic impact sent her flying, making her crash like a dead comet, opening a massive crater in the volcanic stone.
Lilith crawled out of the hole, completely bloodied. The horrific wound on her back oozed Qi unstably. The gravity of a hundred mountains crushed her collarbones, forcing her to hunch over. She wiped her dust- and blood-covered face, looking at the colossus walking toward her, laughing arrogantly.
It was time to stop playing.
Lilith forced the flow of her Dantian. She injected every last drop of her imperial heritage into the fabric of reality and looked up. Her eyes, now a dull dark red and laden with a lethal coldness, locked onto Vargas. Her voice, though low, resonated clearly over the volcano's roar:
"DOMAIN EXPANSION: THE THRONE OF THE ASHEN CRUCIBLE!"
From the epicenter of her stance, a sphere of absolute gray Qi erupted violently, colliding head-on against Vargas's coppery territory. The space between them cracked and fragmented like broken glass as two Grand Saint Laws clashed. But Lilith's primordial bloodline was absolute: it forced reality to obey her law within a one-kilometer radius.
The battlefield underwent a gloomy mutation. The vivid colors died, plunging the canyon into a monochromatic palette of mortuary grays and dull blood-red. Lilith sat, invisibly, upon the cycle of life and death.
The phenomenon of [Universal Aging] hit Vargas like a wall. His iron plates and his axe suffered an accelerated decrepitude. The gravitational pull that he previously handled like a toy now weighed on his own meridians, forcing him to expend triple the Qi just to maintain his stance.
At the same time, the [Ash Wound] activated in the sterile air. The grayish miasma infiltrated the cuts Vargas already had on his arms and waist. His flesh began to rot on contact, neutralizing any regeneration or pill he could use. Breathing was like swallowing ground glass.
In the center of this entropic storm, Lilith brought her mutation to ten percent. Her [Heart of Eternal Embers] ceased to beat like a human organ, pulsing with the inexhaustible glow of a primordial ember that granted her infinite stamina. Her [Gray Scale Feathers] tensed, combining the flexibility of the phoenix with the toughness of a dragon.
Enduring the torture of her own medical technique, the [Ashen Bone Remodeling Flame], Lilith enveloped her mutilated back in gray fire. She calcined her broken meridians and, in seconds, transmuted the ash to force the rebirth of her wings, now imbued with the bone density of a Saint-Grade treasure.
Both titans stared at each other across the kill zone where Absolute Gravity clashed against Accelerated Entropy, disintegrating the rock into floating black sand.
And then, they clashed.
Lilith beat her regenerated wings and launched an incessant storm of entropy javelins. Vargas responded by striking the air, firing dozens of singular Tectonic Compression Spheres. But Vargas's gravity dragged the spears to the ground, and Lilith's entropy aged the spheres until they extinguished before they could even graze her. They shredded the landscape, evaporating rivers of magma in an apocalyptic war of attrition.
Sensing his immense Qi reserve beginning to falter under the curse of aging, Vargas decided to bet his entire life on a single strike.
He let himself fall laterally toward her, using the Blood Mountain Charge. He broke the sound barrier, turning into a projectile of infinite mass.
As he flew toward Lilith, Vargas opened his bloody maw and unleashed the [Bellow of the Executor Asura].
The roar, imbued with pure mercenary terror, penetrated Lilith's Soul Sea. The sonic wave generated a brutal Qi deviation in her veins. For a critical fraction of a second, the Phoenix's energy circulated in reverse, causing the density of her Crucible Throne to drop by half.
That fraction of a second was her doom.
Vargas appeared in front of her. Lilith barely managed to cross her arms in an 'X' shape, expecting the crushing blow of the axe. But the Butcher did not strike with the metal.
[Reality Shear].
Vargas swung the axe in front of her, creating an absolute void plane at point-blank range. The plane did not seek to cut her skin; it pierced through Lilith's very existence, atomically misaligning her cells.
There was no sound. Simply put, the right half of Lilith's body ceased to exist as a solid structure. Her arm, her side, her bones, and her robes instantly dissolved into a sickening mist of red blood and gray dust.
The residual impact sent her flying like a shattered ragdoll, crashing into the bottom of the canyon and kicking up an immense column of sterile dust and liquid magma.
Vargas landed heavily, the axe slipping slightly in his trembling hands. His lungs demanded oxygen, having emptied almost all his power into that ultimate combo. But upon seeing the blood mist settle, the Butcher raised his soot-stained face and let out a guttural, hoarse, and ecstatic laugh.
"Hahahaha! No one survives that attack head-on! Absolutely no one!" he yelled at the blackened sky.
He was convinced. No matter how heretical that woman or her damn gray fire was, it was biologically impossible to survive the atomic-level disintegration of half a torso and vital organs.
Feeling like the undisputed master of the slaughterhouse once again, Vargas turned his immense and exhausted body toward the canyon's orbit. He fixed his predatory gaze on the Void Herald. Hiding in there were the little demons who had massacred his empire. He was going to board that ship, rip their hearts out one by one, and make them swallow their own intestines.
But his gaze, and his breath, stopped dead.
On the bow of the ship, floating softly in the empty air without touching the deck, was a woman.
Sienna.
She was of an ethereal, cold, and overwhelmingly ghostly beauty. She wore a tight, immaculate black silk qipao that shone with a spectral light. She was barefoot. Her hair was a tinkling black, cut straight and neat at jaw length. The silk suit hugged dominant curves, projecting a magnetic and terrifying physical presence.
But what paralyzed the Butcher's heart were her eyes. They had no irises or pupils. They were two perfect, smooth, and omniscient silver mirrors that, even from kilometers away, seemed to reflect the tainted soul and every single sin committed in the mercenary's life. On her left wrist, tied with a red thread, a small golden bell softly jingled.
Vargas felt a toxic mix of instinctive terror and visceral hatred. He opened his mouth to scream at her that she would be the next to be dismembered.
But before he could utter a sound, Sienna, who had remained impassive throughout the entire massacre, curved her pale lips.
It was a smile laden with a sadism so refined, ancient, and cruel, that it emulated a cosmic god watching an insect celebrate on a dry leaf milliseconds before being crushed by a boot.
"Do you truly believe..." Sienna's voice was not a shout; it was a spectral whisper that pierced the boiling air and cut through the gravity of Vargas's domain, landing directly in his mind, "...that something as mundane as death can stop a Morningstar?"
Vargas's enormous heart violently skipped a beat. An icy shiver, completely alien to the lava hell surrounding him, ran down his spine.
Slowly, with an indescribable terror creeping up his throat and suffocating him, Vargas turned his heavy neck back toward the immense smoking crater, where Lilith's disintegrated corpse should have been rotting.
What he saw down there stole his breath forever.
At the bottom of the magma abyss, amidst the absolute darkness of the crushed rock, two points of incandescent light abruptly ignited.
They were not human eyes. They were two suns of pure wrath.
Then, the world vibrated.
From the depths erupted a sound that tore the very fabric of spacetime. It wasn't the agonizing scream of a wounded woman. It was a sentence of extinction.
It was the sharp, majestic, and melodic trill of a Phoenix reaching impossible notes in the universe... but that celestial song was enveloped, dominated, and violently corrupted by the guttural, seismic, and tyrannical roar of a Primordial Dragon.
The combination was a terrifying acoustic paradox: the untouchable elegance of rebirth irrevocably fused with the abyssal ferocity of absolute destruction. The shockwaves of that dual cry struck Vargas with such force that the runic armor embedded in his chest vibrated agonizingly, making his very pores bleed.
The fire, liquid rock, and magma of the crater walls did not explode outward; they were brutally sucked toward the center by an aberrant gravitational force, as if the void itself had opened cosmic jaws at the bottom of the abyss.
The inanimate ashes of Lilith's executed body and the mist of blood floating in the air took on a heretical and fierce life. The [Awakening of the Inverse Samsara] had been activated. But her mutated bloodline did not wait patiently to drain the blood of her killer. It devoured the ultimate catalyst: Samael's Will Crystal she carried inside her. The ashes consumed the divine Authority, forcing an instantaneous, violent, and immaculate biological reconstruction.
From that whirlpool of liquid fire and void, Lilith emerged.
Suspended in the air, ascending with a lethal slowness, her mere presence extinguished the divine sense of every living being in the canyon. Her body was intact, immaculate, without a single scratch. The Gray Scale Feathers had compacted over her skin, sealing a Saint-Grade Physiology that radiated pure heresy.
Tearing through the remnants of her back, the true Wings of the Ashen Calamity Phoenix sprouted. They were colossal, infinitely darker than the previous ones, composed of incandescent ash and a death Qi so concentrated that it froze the lava into dead basalt with every flap of the wings.
Above her head, pushing through the strands of hair that now danced in the air like tongues of jet-black fire, the [Horns of Obsidian Majesty] emerged. Imposing, curved backward like the crown of a tyrant, they were carved from black celestial obsidian and engraved with ancient dragon runes. The runes pulsed with a sickly necrotic red, beating in time with her immortal heart, while perennial crimson smoke drifted from the sharp tips of the horns.
But what finally broke Vargas's will and mind were her eyes.
The human gray had been completely extinguished. Her eyes had mutated into the [Ocular Art of the Primordial Dusk Phoenix]. The iris was a faceted blood diamond, glowing in neon crimson at the center and fading to an ashen violet at the edges. And replacing the pupil, an asymmetrical four-pointed star of sharp white and platinum light floated. The "Last Ember" of the universe watched him without mercy.
Lilith tilted her neck with a coldly predatory elegance. Her delicate human hands now ended in long, cruel claws of smoking obsidian.
Vargas, the indomitable Butcher who had never known fear, took a clumsy step back, his immense boot slipping on the dead stone. His colossal axe trembled between his fingers. In that microscopic instant, beneath the icy shadow of those ash wings, the great hunter of the Igneous Fault understood a crushing and undeniable truth: faced with this divine heresy, he always, from the very second he was born, was and would be the prey.
Far away. Immensely far from the vulgar massacre on the mortal continent, in the veiled and eternal depths of the Eternal Dawn Mini-World, time seemed to stop.
Inside the silent and sacred immensity of the Primordial Heritage Palace, the air itself crystallized.
Samael Morningstar opened his eyes on his obsidian throne.
A flash of pure crimson violet, laden with an abyssal authority that did not belong to the mortal plane, erupted from his pupils. His gaze swept the immense columns of his palace like a shockwave. Piercing the weak barriers of dimensions, space, and causal laws, his eyes ignored the useless vastness of the universe and locked with chilling precision onto a minuscule point on the outer continent: the bottom of a volcanic crater where his aunt's mortal destiny had just been rewritten.
A slow smile formed on Samael's pale face. It wasn't his usual sadistic, calculating, or bored smile. It was an absolutely genuine smile. It was saturated with a fierce, infinitely possessive affection, and a happiness so overwhelming that it forced the fundamental laws of nature in his own world to vibrate.
Samael let out a laugh.
It wasn't a simple acoustic sound. It was a massive spatial earthquake. The ancient columns of the palace groaned, the fabric of reality around him cracked, and the artificial stars hanging in the sky of his mini-world flickered violently, threatening to extinguish completely under the crushing weight of the Patriarch's joy.
Behind his imposing throne, reality itself tore as if it were old cloth.
A colossal shadow, unfathomable and maddening to the human mind, emerged from the depths of the absolute void. The Primordial Dragon. The embodiment of his true form.
Its immense scales were not forged in vulgar divine metal or celestial bone; they were composed of living galaxies spinning slowly in an eternal vortex of creation and destruction. Its gigantic eyes, exact and terrifying mirrors of Samael's own, shone in the darkness with an insatiable cosmic hunger.
The monstrous shadow of the dragon raised its immense neck toward the vaults of the palace and let out a roar.
The roar was not contained within the limits of his private world. It tore through the fabric of spacetime, traveling relentlessly across dimensions until it intertwined in perfect and terrifying harmony with the resurrection trill of Lilith's Phoenix, far away on the battlefield of the mortal plateau.
It was the dark chorus of the primeval gods. A perfect symphony of inescapable destruction and immaculate rebirth, announcing to the deaf vastness of the universe a single, irrefutable truth: She has returned.
"Welcome back, Aunt..." Samael murmured. His voice, deep and as silky as darkness itself, echoed in every corner of his realm. "It's time you show these pathetic mortals what the Morningstar surname truly means."
The immensity of the palace seemed to expand. Samael's silhouette, sitting languidly with his elbow resting on the armrest of his throne, began to slowly melt into the shadows of the room as the perceived distance increased.
But his piercing crimson-violet eyes and his eternal predator's smile remained sharp, burning in the blackness like dying stars, refusing to disappear. The last thing the silence claimed, before the world melted into total, suffocating darkness, was the icy, boundless, and hungry gaze of the galactic dragon's shadow lurking in the void, claiming the entire universe, and everything that weakly pulsed within it, as its personal hunting ground.
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Note from Void_Scribe: đ
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