Chapter 100: The Broken Vessel and the Oath of the Wolves
The silence in the highest chamber of the Dragon Tower was heavier than gravity itself.
Samael Morningstar stood before the immense obsidian window, gazing toward the northern desert. The System notifications, with their promises of continental power and bloodline fortune, had faded from his retinas. The rush of divine adrenaline—the homicidal euphoria of having slain Great Ancestor Valerius and split the sky in two—began to evaporate.
And as the divine euphoria receded, human biology reclaimed its toll.
The first symptom was not pain, but an aberrant cognitive dissonance. Samael looked at his own right hand, still stained with the red blood of the Saint enemy, and for a microsecond, he saw the fabric of space unraveling between his fingers. His hearing caught a dull hum—the roar of the River of Time that his mind had forcibly sealed, now attempting to pierce the barriers of his sanity.
Then came the physical collapse.
His meridians—the spiritual channels that had been forced to expand and temper during the ritual of the Altar of the Lost Origin—began to burn with impossible friction. Containing the Law of Space, the Law of the Void, the Law of Blood, and the Law of Crimson Destiny simultaneously within a body of flesh and bone was an architectural aberration. It was like trying to contain the explosion of four stars in a glass jar.
The Crown of Eternal Aurora, floating above his head, flashed with erratic blue light, its Inflexible Mind property pushed to the absolute limit, trying to prevent the Patriarch's brain from lobotomizing itself under the data overload of the Supreme Laws.
Samael took a step back. A violent spasm shook his ribcage, where the six ribs fractured by the battleship's explosion were barely knitting together thanks to Livia's alchemy. His breath became a ragged, wet whistle. The violet runes of his shattered armor ceased to glow.
Instinctively, dragging his feet with deathly heaviness, he left his study and walked down the shadowed corridor. He needed to see her. He needed to anchor himself to the only reason he had defied the cosmic vastness.
He pushed open the heavy door to the private quarters.
Seraphina was there. The Empress of Ice, still with her own Semi-Saint aura fluctuating from the exhaustion of battle, was sitting on the edge of a crib carved from petrified lotus wood. She held little Celeste, cradling her in silence, singing an ancient northern melody to chase away the echoes of war.
Hearing the door, Seraphina looked up. The warm smile of a mother died on her lips instantly at the sight of her husband.
Samael could barely stand. His skin, usually an aristocratic pale, had acquired a translucent, grayish tone. From his pores, it wasn't sweat that emanated, but wisps of black smoke and drops of thick, red blood. His violet eyes were unfocused, the dragon pupils dilated to the maximum, struggling against blindness.
—"Samael?" —Seraphina stood up abruptly, alarm shattering her usual imperial serenity—. "Guards! Healers!"
Samael ignored the panic in his consort's voice. He took two stumbling steps forward, crossing the room with the determination of a man walking to the scaffold. He reached Seraphina and looked down at the small bundle wrapped in dark silks.
Celeste, with her immense heterochromatic eyes—one icy blue, the other stellar violet—stared back at him. The baby did not cry. Her tiny hands gripped the blankets.
The Patriarch raised his right hand—the one that had just ripped a soul from the world—and placed it with extreme, almost reverential gentleness against his daughter's soft cheek.
He left a faint smear of his own red blood on Celeste's immaculate skin. It was a warm touch, a silent baptism. A transmission of pure devotion and tyranny. Survive, that touch seemed to tell her.
Samael tried to form a smile, tried to articulate a word to calm the terror he now saw in Seraphina's eyes.
He could not.
The moment his hand pulled away from the girl's cheek, the glass jar shattered.
The Void devoured the air in his lungs; Space crushed his sense of balance; Blood boiled in his veins with a lethal temperature, and Destiny darkened his mind.
Samael Morningstar collapsed.
He fell forward like a felled tree. Seraphina, reacting with the speed of a Semi-Saint, managed to catch his immense armored body before his face hit the obsidian floor, but Samael's dead weight dragged her to her knees.
The Patriarch convulsed violently in his wife's arms, vomiting a ghastly, dark tide of red blood that soaked the Empress's robes. And then, his body went completely limp. His Stage 1 True Saint aura imploded, hiding in the depths of his core to avoid total disintegration. The Crown of Eternal Aurora above his head stopped spinning, vanishing into particles of light.
The silence that followed was the sound of the end of the world for the Morningstar clan. The tyrant had fallen.
The entire Citadel entered a state of contained military hysteria. The obsidian bells in the defensive towers tolled with a deep, urgent tone—a code only the leaders understood: Red Alert. The core is wounded.
Three hundred meters below the fortress surface, in the bowels of the mountain, lay the Pool of Origin. It was a circular cavern dominated by a spring of thermal waters that glowed with an intense emerald green, saturated with pure vital Qi and liquid lotus essences cultivated for months by the Fourth Elder.
Samael's lifeless body floated in the center of the pool.
He had been stripped of his armor. His bare torso revealed a canvas of agony. His skin was crisscrossed by luminous cracks; from some emanated a black, static light that absorbed the cavern's glow, from others erupted a crimson heat that made the medicinal water boil around him. The emerald water tried to penetrate his pores to heal him, but the Supreme Laws within him rejected the external energy, deeming it inferior.
At the edge of the pool, the Council of Elders was gathered. Tension was a knife at each of their throats.
Livia, the Elder of Life, had her hands submerged in the water, desperately channeling her Parasitic Genesis Law. Not to steal life, but in a reverse attempt to force her own vitality and that of the pool into Samael's body, acting as a spiritual pacemaker for his collapsed core. Her beautiful face was beaded with sweat, and her green hair had lost its characteristic luster from the superhuman effort.
Seraphina was at her side, her face paler than the snow she commanded, injecting controlled bursts of Yin Ice Qi to lower the temperature of her husband's boiling blood and prevent his organs from roasting from the inside.
Lilith, Torian, Marcus, and Astrion watched from the cave's shadows, helpless before a biological battle they could not fight with weapons or brute force.
—"Livia, speak!" —Lilith demanded, striking the stone floor with her blackened wooden staff, the spark of ash in her eyes betraying her desperation—. "The battle ended hours ago! Why won't he wake? Why does he reject the healing?"
Livia withdrew her hands from the water, gasping, the emerald water dripping from her trembling fingers. She looked up at the Council, her eyes reflecting a terrifying diagnosis.
—"It is not a battle wound, Great Elder," —Livia replied, her voice cracked from the effort—. "The fractured ribs and external burns from the battleship explosion have already been stabilized. The problem is his core. His soul."
Livia pointed to Samael's body, specifically the cracks emanating black light and crimson vapor.
—"The Patriarch didn't just ascend to True Saint. He... he assimilated four Supreme Laws simultaneously. Space, Blood, Void, and a fourth that my perception of Life cannot even comprehend—something that smells of pure causality. That is heresy against the universe, Lilith. His human body... his mortal vessel is tearing apart. Human flesh was not designed by the gods to house so much infinity. The laws are fighting for dominance over his body, and they are shredding him at a molecular level."
Seraphina clenched her fists, instantly freezing the stone edge of the pool beneath her hands.
—"What is the solution?" —the Empress asked, her voice devoid of warmth, pure authority and urgency—. "You are the Supreme of Alchemy, Livia. Tell me what he needs. I will pillage the continent if necessary."
Livia swallowed hard, looking at the consort's impassive face.
—"The Pool of Origin can only sedate him and delay the collapse. We need an anchor. Something to temper his flesh and bone, to elevate them to a near-divine level so they can withstand the weight of the Supreme Laws without fracturing. No pill, no matter how legendary, can do this. We need a primordial material. We need the Star Dragon Root."
A tense, sepulchral murmur ran through the cavern. Even Torian, the stoic Elder of Steel, frowned.
—"The Star Dragon Root..." —Marcus repeated, his volcanic voice sounding muted—. "Livia, that is a myth for mad alchemists. A plant that supposedly grows on the corpses of petrified true dragons... in the center of the Sea of Beasts."
The "Sea of Beasts" was not an ocean of water. It was the vast, unexplored, and deadly expanse of wild lands stretching west of the northern continent. A territory where empires had no jurisdiction, where Stage 2 and 3 Saint-level mutated beasts roamed as alpha predators, and where the very geography shifted due to gravitational anomalies.
—"It is not a myth, Marcus," —Livia countered, standing up with difficulty—. "It exists. I know because the Patriarch himself showed me Valois scrolls during the pillage of the minor archives months ago. It grows in the Valley of the Eclipse, deep within the Sea. If we get him that root, I can distill it into his blood. It will reinforce his mortal vessel to the point where the four laws settle peacefully. But..."
—"But?" —Seraphina pressed, her blue eyes locked onto the alchemist.
—"But we are talking about a territory where humans are the lowest rung of the food chain," —Livia warned—. "The Patriarch... at the rate his vessel is cracking, the pool can only keep his core together for fourteen days. If he doesn't have that root in his bloodstream in fourteen days, the laws will disintegrate him from within, and the Void will devour his soul."
Fourteen days. The silence dictated the sentence.
Seraphina turned abruptly, turning her back to the pool. Her Supreme Yin Lotus aura erupted in a controlled tempest that frosted the walls of the subterranean cavern. Samael was incapacitated. As Matriarch and consort, the absolute regency of the Morningstar clan, with its five thousand assassins and newborn continental ambitions, fell upon her at that exact moment.
She did not cry. Tears were a luxury that war did not allow.
—"Call the Golden Generation," —Seraphina ordered with a voice that made those present tremble—. "To the War Room. Immediately."
The War Room—the massive stone amphitheater where Samael had dictated the ambush hours earlier—smelled of incense, dried blood, and an overwhelming mixture of killing intent.
The twenty prodigies of the Golden Generation, the Twenty Pillars who had slaughtered the Purple Light elite on the enemy battleship's deck, were present. Their black clothes were torn, their faces stained with soot and blood, and their auras hummed with the instability of post-battle adrenaline and recent breakthroughs.
Seraphina Morningstar stood at the head of the immense obsidian table, with Lilith and Cedric at her sides. The Empress did not waste time with diplomatic fluff. She explained Samael's lethal state, the diagnosis of the broken vessel, the fourteen-day limit, and the madness of the Star Dragon Root in the Sea of Beasts.
When Seraphina finished speaking, the silence in the room was not one of doubt. It was the prelude to an avalanche.
Kael Morningstar, Rank 1 and King of the Vanguard, took a single step forward. His armor was scratched, and his immense sword rested on his back. His golden eyes, usually calmed by the Sword Heart, burned with a fanatical loyalty bordering on madness.
—"We will send an expedition," —Kael stated, not as a suggestion, but as an absolute fact, staring at the Matriarca—. "The clan cannot march in mass to the Sea of Beasts; we would draw the attention of every Saint-level aberration in the forest, and the citadel would be left exposed. We will go in a small, fast, and lethal assault group. I will lead."
No one questioned Kael's leadership. It was the will of the Patriarch's sword.
Violeta (Rank 2) walked up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Kael. Her single exposed eye shone with cosmic coldness.
—"The Sea of Beasts distorts traditional navigation. My eyes and my Space manipulation will ensure the group isn't devoured by the forest's dimensional cracks. I am going."
Eris (Rank 3) chuckled low—a raspy, dangerous laugh as black Ruin Fire crackled on her bloodied knuckles.
—"We'll need someone to burn the path if the beasts decide not to let us through. Destruction is my signature. I'm with you."
Elara (Rank 6), the Flower of Frost, stepped forward in silence. Her aura of cold mist caressed the stone floor.
—"Stealth will be more important than brute force in a forest of Saints. My control over mist and frost will hide our thermal and spiritual tracks. I will keep you invisible."
From the shadows at the back, Rowan (Rank 12), a tall, lean youth with eyes sharp as blades, silently unsheathed his dark bone longbow.
—"In hostile terrain, melee is an invitation to death by ambush," —Rowan said, his voice calm and analytical—. "You need eyes in the distance—a hunter who can assassinate from the shadows before the beast even knows we're there. My arrows will cover the blind spots."
Finally, a massive youth, nearly as broad as Elder Marcus, stepped forward with a heavy gait. Bren (Rank 19). His body was covered in heavy basilisk-scale armor, and he carried a rectangular tower shield larger than a man.
—"Kael and Eris can't attack if they're worried about defending against claws the size of trees," —Bren grunted, striking his armored chest with a fist like a mallet—. "My bloodline is the Iron Mountain. My body will absorb the impacts. I will be the wall upon which the beasts break."
Six Pillars. Six prodigies at the peak of Origin Realm Stage 7 and 8, forming a perfect tactical amalgam: vanguard, spatial assassination, mass destruction, camouflage, ranged attack, and extreme heavy defense.
Seraphina looked at the six of them. She saw in their eyes the reflection of the ambition and brutality that Samael had cultivated in them with such dedication. They were his wolves, and they were willing to step into hell for their master.
—"You six will be the expedition," —Seraphina decreed, her voice echoing with the weight of destiny—. "You have fourteen days. If you fail... the world will burn under our mourning. Go, arm yourselves. You depart at dawn."
While the selected Pillars rushed to check their spatial rings, load talismans, and sharpen steel, the outside world did not stop to mourn a tyrant's agony. Sharks smell blood in the water from miles away.
On the outskirts of the Morningstar domains, in the heart of the opulent and noisy commercial city of Golden Oasis, conspiracy was brewing.
In the most luxurious private room of the Black Marble Inn, protected by three layers of soundproofing runic arrays, three figures sat around a table carved from rare wood, illuminated by the golden light of lux crystals.
The leader of the meeting was Lord Ye Hao, the Chief Master of the region's Alchemists Guild. He was a middle-aged man dressed in extravagant silks encrusted with protective jewels, with a shrewd, greedy gaze that betrayed him not as a warrior, but as a merchant of life and death. His connections to the vast Star Ice Empire (Valerius's homeland) were deep and lucrative.
Opposite him sat a Beastial Emissary—a humanoid with skin covered in coarse fur, prominent fangs, and slit yellow eyes, representing the barbaric tribes that prowled the desert's edges. The third figure was a high-ranking alchemist from the recently humiliated Northern Alliance, his face hidden under a gray hood.
—"My spies embedded in the trade routes are clear," —Ye Hao said, swirling a glass of spiced wine in his hands, his voice dripping with cold satisfaction—. "The Purple Light fleet was destroyed. An absolute military disaster. But... Patriarch Morningstar paid the price for facing Great Ancestor Valerius. Sources near the Citadel entrance confirm the legion returned carrying their leader's body. Samael Morningstar is dying, if not dead."
The Beastial Emissary snorted, a guttural sound that made the glasses on the table vibrate.
—"The tiger is wounded in its cave. The mountain's defenses, according to our readings, are at forty-five percent after the battleship shockwave. The barrier is weakened. It is time for the pack to strike."
The Alliance alchemist leaned forward, his eyes gleaming under his hood.
—"If the Patriarch dies, the Morningstar clan will be a headless chicken. Only the Matriarch, Seraphina, and the child will remain... Celeste. It is said that child's blood contains primordial secrets. Imagine the value of that blood on the imperial black market. If we attack Golden Oasis now, we cut their supply routes, isolate the mountain, and force the Matriarch out."
Ye Hao smiled, showing perfect white teeth.
—"Exactly. The Alliance will pay an astronomical fortune for Seraphina's head and the capture of the child as war booty to avenge Valerius. The Alchemists Guild is willing to finance mercenaries and weaponry for your tribes, Emissary. We will test their defenses. We will break the citadel from the economy, and then with the sword."
What the three men, in their arrogance and greed, did not know, was that their runic soundproofing was child's play for true shadows.
In the darkest corner of the luxurious room, a young servant who had been pouring their wine minutes before stood still, almost merged with the wall tapestry. His eyes lacked human luster; they were pools of grayish mist. Under the sleeve of his humble servant's robe, on his forearm, was a tattoo of a black-blue lotus.
He was one of the direct apprentices of Sela, the Watcher of the Void. His presence had been "omitted" from reality by the arts of the Third Elder. He was standing in the same room as the conspirators, and they were biologically incapable of registering his existence.
The young spy memorized every word, every face, every detail of the mountain siege plan. With an imperceptible movement of his fingers, he wrote a message encrypted with Qi on a small parchment hidden in his sleeve, infusing it with an instant transmission technique linked directly to Sela's core in the Citadel.
The message flew through the shadows, faster than thought.
In the command room of the Morningstar Citadel, Sela opened her eyes. The black galaxies in her pupils spun.
The Watcher turned toward Seraphina, who was feverishly reviewing logistical fortification maps alongside Cedric.
—"Matriarch," —Sela whispered. The entire room fell silent at the assassin's mournful tone—. "Ye Hao's Alchemists Guild in Golden Oasis. Mercenaries and beastial emissaries from the Alliance. They plan to take advantage of the Patriarch's coma. Their objective is to isolate the mountain, assassinate you, and capture Lady Celeste to sell her."
The quill Seraphina held in her right hand instantly froze, turning into ice dust under the pressure of her fingers. The room's temperature dropped below freezing in a heartbeat.
The Empress raised her face. The kind woman who cradled her daughter had completely vanished. In her place was the absolute regent of an empire of assassins, a woman who had just helped murder a True Saint.
—"Malak," —her voice cut the air like a crystal whip.
From the immense shadow cast by the tactical table, the Sovereign of the Scythe emerged.
His physical appearance chilled the blood of mortals. His "body" was not flesh, but a conglomeration of jet-black smoke, dense and semi-liquid, twisting like boiling pitch. Under his ragged hood woven with dead stardust, there was no face—only a perfect abyss where two orbs of icy-blue jack-o'-lantern fire floated. In his chest, a rotating vortex of grayish death throbbed like a dark heart. In his hand, the massive scythe of petrified wood and obsidian whispered with the voices of souls trapped in its edge.
—"My Queen," —Malak's voice resonated from everywhere and nowhere, a hollow vibration of absolute obedience.
Seraphina did not flinch before the cosmic horror of her general.
—"Kael and the expedition will depart for the Sea of Beasts at dawn. You will smuggle yourself in Kael's shadow, along with ten of your Silent Shadows."
Malak bowed his smoking form. —"Do you wish for me to escort them through the Sea of Beasts, Your Majesty?"
—"No," —Seraphina replied coldly—. "This is their trial by fire; the Golden Generation must be forged in hell on their own. Your primary mission is to act as a last-resort safety net. You will only intervene and reveal yourself to them if, and only if, the expedition faces certain and inevitable death at the hands of a Saint-level beast they cannot defeat. Protect their lives, but do not do their job."
Malak's blue orbs blinked, understanding the tactical subtlety.
—"And your second order, my Queen..."
Seraphina's blue eyes became twin pools of imperial cruelty.
—"The expedition must cross through Golden Oasis to head west. Once the Pillars have left the city and are on route to the forest... you will separate from Kael's shadow. You will stay in Golden Oasis."
Seraphina placed her hands on the map, freezing the trade routes.
—"I don't want captured spies, Malak. I don't want interrogated prisoners. I want a purge. I want you and your shadows to execute Lord Ye Hao, the beastial emissaries, the conspiring alchemists, and any stray dog that breathes within that Black Marble Inn. A surgical, silent, and absolute massacre. Let the continent know that if the Dragon sleeps, the pack that protects him is thirsty."
—"Silence shall be made," —Malak whispered. The blue flames under his hood glowed intensely before the Sovereign sank back into the floor, merging with the fortress shadows.
Time was running out. It was one hour before dawn and the expedition's departure.
In the depths of the Pool of Origin, the silence was almost sacred. Seraphina, accompanied only by little Celeste, had come down to say goodbye, or perhaps, to seek a final breath of hope.
Celeste, wrapped in warm blankets to counter the subterranean cave's chill, tottered on her little legs, holding onto her mother's hand. The child reached the edge of the emerald pool where the inert, fractured, and burning body of Samael floated suspended in the medicinal water.
The Patriarch's breath was a deathly rattle. The cracks in his skin throbbed dangerously, threatening to tear his chest apart under the pressure of the conflicting Supreme Laws. Livia had warned that if the instability increased, he wouldn't even live the stipulated fourteen days.
Celeste let go of Seraphina's hand. She walked to the very edge of the pool.
She did not cry. Her primordial instinct—that anomalous bloodline that terrified even the gods—recognized the storm in her father's body.
The baby knelt on the damp stone and extended her chubby little hand. She didn't touch Samael's burning skin; instead, she dipped her fingers into the emerald water, right over the Patriarch's chest.
The contact didn't produce an explosion of bright light, or a fairy-tale healing miracle. It was much deeper.
The moment Celeste's skin touched the water bathing Samael's core, the Black Destiny latent in her tiny soul acted as a cosmic anchor weight. It was a concept of such abyssal density that it forced the Four Supreme Laws within Samael's body (Void, Space, Blood, and Destiny) to recognize a higher hierarchy and submit.
Samael's body tensed violently for a second, and then, a long sigh of relief escaped his cracked lips.
The luminous cracks on his skin stopped expanding. The black static light and crimson vapor retracted, sinking back inside him, calmed, sedated by the overwhelming presence of his daughter's spiritual aura.
She wasn't healing him; his mortal body was still broken and still needed the Star Dragon Root to reinforce itself. But Celeste had achieved the impossible: she had stopped the hourglass. She had frozen the biological deterioration and stabilized the war of Laws within him. Imminent death had been postponed for exactly fourteen days, guaranteed by the anchor of his own blood.
Celeste withdrew her little hand from the water, shaking off the green drops, and smiled at her father's unconscious face.
Seraphina, watching the scene from behind, felt her heart squeeze painfully. Her daughter was not just a baby; she was the divine lifeline of an empire of assassins.
Dawn broke over the mountains, but the sunlight was hidden behind a mantle of gray, cold clouds.
In the immense Great Courtyard, beneath the towering branches of the Star Tree, the Morningstar clan elite were gathered in sepulchral silence.
The six Pillars selected for the expedition stood before the immense white and crimson trunk: Kael, Violeta, Eris, Elara, Varian, and Bren. They wore travel armor, light but reinforced with defensive arrays. Their spatial rings were loaded with pills, bandages, and portable formations. Their weapons—from Kael's immense sword to Bren's colossal tower shield—gleamed with the desire for blood.
Facing them, Seraphina Morningstar presided. She wore a white wolf-fur cloak over her shoulders, the living image of a Winter Queen sending her best knights to the slaughter in the name of survival.
There were no poetic speeches. There were no public tears. The Morningstars were not given to sentimentality when death was on the table.
Kael Morningstar, the natural leader, unsheathed the Whisper of the North. He didn't raise it to the sky; he drove it deep into the earth, right between the thick roots of the Star Tree, slicing his own palm on the hilt in one fluid motion. Red blood dripped onto the petrified wood.
—"We enter the abyss," —Kael's voice was a dull thunder, deep, echoing off the fortress walls, addressing his five brothers-in-arms—. "We are not going to hunt beasts. We are going to tear from hell's clutches the time our father needs."
Violeta, Eris, Elara, Varian, and Bren unsheathed their weapons in unison and, without a moment's hesitation, imitated their leader, slicing their palms and letting their blood mix with the earth and the roots of the Tree.
—"If the Sea of Beasts stands in our way, we will burn the forest to its foundations," —Eris vowed, the black flame dancing in her eyes.
—"We will return with the Root," —Kael stated, looking directly at Seraphina, a soldier's oath to his regent—. "Or the world will know that the Morningstar Golden Generation died trying to kill destiny itself."
Seraphina nodded—a single, solemn gesture, accepting the weight of the blood oath.
—"The gates of the cradle will be open when you return," —the Matriarch said, her voice echoing with interwoven coldness and hope—. "March, wolves of the dawn. Bring him back the sky."
With a colossal crack that shook the stone, the immense black iron gates of the northern fortress began to open, revealing the dusty wasteland that led toward Golden Oasis and, beyond, toward the unknown and lethal Sea of Beasts.
The six Pillars, partially hidden by the dense frost mist Elara began to deploy passively around them, crossed the threshold. They did not look back. In the shadow cast by Kael's immense figure, an even denser darkness, imperceptible to the morning light, slid alongside them; Malak, the silent executioner, began his undercover hunt.
From atop the walls, thousands of disciples watched the departure in absolute silence, clenching their fists, knowing the future of their empire walked on the shoulders of those six youths.
On the balcony of the Dragon Tower, Seraphina stood alone, watching the expedition vanish into the mist-shrouded horizon. The frigid northern wind ruffled her silvery hair.
The worried mother who wept in the cave was locked away deep in her heart. The loving consort disappeared. When the woman turned to face the legion and rule the besieged mountain, only the tyranny of pure ice remained.
The tyrant slept. The Empress had awakened. And the world, oblivious to the coming storm, was about to discover that the wife of a god of death was no less lethal than her husband.