Chapter 101: The Blood of the Cradle and the Ambush of the Kings
The early morning mist clung to the Morningstar Citadel like an ancient shroud. The pale, anemic light of the rising sun grazed the colossal crimson marble and obsidian walls, casting long, silent shadows that seemed to have a life of their own.
The echo of immense iron gears rumbled through the valley as the Gate of Silence, facing the northern abyss, began to open. Its ancestral groan was a sound the mountain only exhaled on days when heroes departed to forge legends, or the condemned to find their graves.
On the threshold, flanked by the blackness of the stone, waited the six Pillars selected for the expedition. The vanguard of the Golden Generation.
Kael Morningstar, Rank 1, stood tall in the center. He wore his earth dragon scale armor, black and opaque. The Whisper of the North, his immense greatsword, was wrapped in dark cloths on his back, but the Sword Heart in his chest beat with a slow, heavy cadence, synchronized with the breathing of the world. His golden gaze was fixed on the horizon, there where the desert twisted and devoured the known world to make way for the unexplored.
On his right side, Violeta and Eris, the twins of distortion and ruin, checked their equipment in tactical silence. Violeta adjusted the spatial rings on her fingers, her exposed eye shining with the promise of dimensional tears. Eris, with her short spear at her waist, let small sparks of black Ruin Fire die on her knuckles, impatient to burn something other than air.
To Kael's left, the formation was completed by the three new members of the divine hunt.
Elara, the Flower of Mist (Rank 6), kept her hands on the hilts of her twin daggers. Her breath exhaled small clouds of frost. She was already passively channeling her Qi, weaving a mantle of cold mist that began to envelop the six of them, erasing their thermal and spiritual signatures from the surroundings.
Behind her, perched on a wall ledge like a gargoyle of flesh and bone, was Varian (Rank 21). The clan's sniper was a young man of lean, sinewy build, with a sharp face framed by messy dark green hair, and bright emerald eyes that did not blink. In his hand he held an immense longbow carved from the femur of a Calamity Beast, its string drawn with wyrm sinews. Varian didn't look at the group; his sight was fixed on the dunes kilometers away, calculating the wind, humidity, and the curvature of the terrain.
And closing the rearguard, a true living wall.
Bren (Rank 19).
The youth was massive, a mountain of muscle wrapped in heavy armor forged with desert basilisk scale plates. On his left arm rested a rectangular tower shield, as tall and wide as a fortress door, forged with an alloy of stellar steel and lead. His Iron Mountain bloodline made the ground crunch under his boots with every micro-movement. He was the anvil upon which the jaws of monsters would break.
The silence of the citadel was absolute, but it was laden with a suffocating pressure. Thousands of disciples and elders watched hidden behind the battlements and inner courtyards. There were no cheers. There were no loud farewells. In Morningstar doctrine, noise attracted death; silence was the only valid armor before marching into hell.
A crackle of ice broke the stillness.
Seraphina Morningstar, the Matriarch and current Regent, descended the wall stairs. She did not wear her imperial silk robes. She wore bone-white plate armor and a gray wolf-fur cloak. Her eyes were winter itself, devoid of the maternal warmth she reserved solely for Celeste and Samael. With every step she took, the courtyard's temperature plummeted, and the will of imperial blood pressed upon the shoulders of those present.
She stopped in front of Kael.
—"The Sea of Beasts respects no laws, no titles, and no bloodlines," —Seraphina said, her voice cutting the mist like sharp crystal—. "There, the only force that counts is the brutality you are capable of exerting and the territory you are capable of claiming. You are Samael's sword. If beasts of antiquity or heirs of foreign empires cross your path toward the Star Dragon Root... do not hesitate. No mercy, no honor, no glory. Only survival."
Kael nodded, his deep voice resonating in his chest.
—"We will bury in the mud everyone who breathes in front of us. The Root will return to the cradle."
Seraphina stared at him.
—"Return with the cure. Or do not return at all. The mountain does not need martyrs, it needs results."
The weight of the military order was absolute. But the Golden Generation, forged in the tyranny and twisted love of their family, did not cower.
Eris stepped forward, resting a soot-stained hand on the shoulder pad of Seraphina's white armor. A lopsided, arrogant, and fierce smile drew on her face.
—"Relax, sister-in-law," —Eris said, her tone momentarily breaking the formality of the ice—. "We won't let our foolish big brother die just yet."
Violeta, adjusting her gloves, nodded with a cosmic coldness that hid an identical fire.
—"Even if we have to go down to hell and drag Samael back by the hair, we will do it, Matriarch. Keep the cradle safe. We will bring the sky back."
Seraphina did not smile, but the ice in her eyes yielded a fraction of a millimeter—a mute acknowledgment of the devotion of the tyrant's sisters.
—"So be it."
No one noticed the anomaly that occurred next. In the split second Kael turned to lead the march, the gigantic shadow cast by the frame of the Gate of Silence twisted. A drop of absolute darkness, dense as tar, separated from the wall and slid across the ground, blending perfectly—without leaving a single spiritual or magical trace—with Kael Morningstar's own shadow.
Malak, the Sovereign of the Scythe, the True Saint of Death, had just embedded himself in the expedition. The final safety net was in place, and his countdown for the purge in Golden Oasis had begun.
—"Move out," —Kael ordered.
Elara expanded the mist, Varian leapt from the ledge, falling silently into the rearguard next to Bren, and the six Pillars crossed the threshold. The black iron and obsidian gate closed behind them with a definitive crash.
The Golden Generation had entered the territory of death.
As the Pillars advanced westward, the sun reached its zenith and then sank, giving way to a dark, starless night over the mountain range.
In the Morningstar Citadel, torches burned with dim light. To an untrained eye, the silence reigning on the walls wounded by Valerius's orbital cataclysm seemed the silence of weakness. The silence of a dying dragon.
That was the exact assumption the Alliance vultures made.
On the southern perimeter of the fortress, where the outer mountain walls met the rocky desert, the air vibrated subtly. Twelve hooded figures slithered down the living rock like human spiders. They were "The Wraiths of the Sand," a unit of elite mercenary assassins paid with Lord Ye Hao's gold and the resources of the Northern Alliance.
They were not simple thugs. They were led by three experts at Stage 9 of the Origin Realm, and the rest at Stages 7 and 8. They wore robes that refracted light, Qi concealment talismans that erased their thermal signatures, and weapons coated in manticore venom, capable of paralyzing a Semi-Saint in seconds.
The leader, a thin man with a leather mask that only revealed a bloodshot eye, communicated by telepathy with his subordinates.
"Lord Ye Hao's information is correct. The runic barrier in the southern sector is at thirty percent capacity after the battleship explosion. Samael Morningstar is in a coma. The elite guard left this morning. The nest is unprotected. Our objective: deep infiltration, capture the girl with heterochromia, assassinate Seraphina if she interferes, and escape through the mine ventilation shafts. Move."
They breached the first crack in the barrier. Their talismans nullified the pressure alarms.
They crossed the outer gardens and scaled the first inner wall. Zero resistance.
The leader smiled under his mask. They are arrogant idiots. They think the fear of their name will protect them forever.
They reached the inner courtyard, a labyrinth of obsidian corridors leading to the subterranean chambers. The silence here was absolute. Not the chirp of a cricket, nor the rustle of the wind. A sepulchral void.
Too sepulchral.
The leader of the assassins raised a hand, ordering his men to halt. His Origin Realm Stage 9 instinct screamed at him that something was wrong. The air had stopped flowing.
—"Do you think that, because the dragon sleeps, the mountain is yours?"
The voice did not come from a guard. It came from the shadows themselves. A melodic, soft voice, but so devoid of empathy that it chilled the blood.
The leader spun on his heels, unsheathing two poisoned daggers.
Ten meters away, sitting languidly on a black stone bench, was Sela, the clan's Third Elder. The Watcher of the Void wore no armor, only her tight, shadowy spider-silk suit. On her lap, she stroked a black cat that was not an animal, but a form made of purely condensed living shadow.
"Contact! Eliminate her and advance!" the leader shouted via telepathy.
The twelve assassins released their Qi simultaneously. Killing intent filled the corridor. They lunged at Sela with breakneck speed, ready to cut her to pieces.
But before they could take the third step, the physical world reminded them why the Morningstars were the nightmare of the continent.
The gravity in the corridor did not increase; it deformed.
An abyssal, dense, damp, and crushing pressure fell upon them as if an entire ocean had been dropped on their heads.
CRACK!
Five of the Stage 7 assassins fell to their knees immediately, the stone crunching under their splintered kneecaps. The others hunched over, coughing up blood, unable to raise their weapons.
From the darkness of the opposite corridor, Thalassa glided into the torchlight. The Sixth Elder of the clan, the Supreme of Aquatic Prisons, walked with a hypnotic cadence. Her voluptuous body was sheathed in black sea silk, and her bioluminescent cyan eyes shone with an intoxicating sadism. She was a Semi-Saint Stage 2.
To Origin Realm experts, her mere presence was annihilation.
—"You are in a hurry to die," —Thalassa murmured, her voice deep and resonant like the bottom of the sea—. "But a quick death is a privilege I do not grant to thieves."
The assassin leader, trembling under Thalassa's Law of the Crushing Abyss, tried to force his Qi to use a teleportation scroll.
Sela sighed from her seat.
[Needle of Deprivation].
Sela didn't even stand up. She raised a single finger. A thread of absolute blackness, two-dimensional and unavoidable, pierced the chest of the assassin leader.
The man did not bleed. But his world disappeared.
The injected darkness devoured his sight. He went completely blind. A second later, it devoured his hearing; absolute silence enveloped him. He lost his sense of balance and fell face-first onto the stone, drooling and screaming in a sensory void where he couldn't even hear his own voice.
Thalassa smiled, showing slightly sharpened teeth. She raised an elegant hand and curled her fingers into a claw shape.
[Fluid Molecular Control].
She didn't attack with water jets. Her Law attacked the water inside the bodies of the remaining assassins.
The screams that filled the corridor were inhuman. Thalassa took direct control of the blood flow, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the moisture in the lungs of the eleven men.
She forced their blood to flow in the opposite direction.
The assassins' veins bulged until they burst under the skin. Their eyes filled with blood, bursting in small capillary hemorrhages. They felt their own bodily fluids boiling and tearing them apart from the inside.
—"Who sent you?" —Thalassa asked softly, while she extracted the moisture from their vocal cords so their screams were only dry death rattles—. "You have five seconds before I boil the fluid in your brains."
The pain was so astronomically unbearable that mercenary loyalty evaporated in a heartbeat.
One of the Stage 8 elites, eyes weeping blood, managed to articulate through the choking:
—"Golden... Golden Oasis! Lord Ye Hao! The Alliance! They want the girl... and the Matriarch! Mercy! Mercy!"
Thalassa tilted her head, bored.
—"Mercy dried up in this desert centuries ago."
She closed her fist completely.
The eleven assassins suffered simultaneous massive aneurysms. Their hearts burst in their own chests, the blood liquefying and solidifying at the same time from the hyper-dense pressure. They died drowning in their own bodies, falling like marionettes whose strings had been cut.
Only the leader, trapped in Sela's sensory prison, kept writhing on the floor, mad with terror.
The sound of white armored footsteps echoed in the corridor.
Seraphina Morningstar appeared. She had heard the confession. Her face was a mask of inscrutable frost.
—"So the alchemists confirmed their plans," —Seraphina said, looking with disgust at the bloated corpses.
—"They confessed immediately, Matriarch," —Thalassa reported, bowing slightly—. "Lord Ye Hao of the Star Ice Empire and the scum of the Alliance."
Seraphina looked at the blind and deaf leader on the floor.
The Empress raised her foot and stepped firmly on the mercenary leader's skull. The Law of Static Ice flowed through her boot. Black ice froze the man's brain in a millisecond, killing him without him ever knowing it.
—"Ye Hao is already a dead man. Malak has his orders." —Seraphina turned to the two elders—. "Cut off the heads of these twelve insects. Freeze them so they don't rot, and mount them on the pikes of the south wall facing Golden Oasis. Let the next Alliance scouting party that uses their spyglasses see exactly what kind of winter awaits them if they cross our border. The citadel is not unprotected. It is a graveyard for fools."
Far from the ice and bloody politics of the cradle, the expedition advanced into the green hell.
The golden desert dunes were left behind, abruptly swallowed by a geography that seemed to belong to another planet. The group crossed the threshold of the Sea of Beasts.
It was not an ordinary forest. The trees here were titanic entities; trunks the width of siege towers rose hundreds of meters toward a sky perpetually blocked by a canopy of leaves the size of battle tanks. The roots protruding from the black earth looked like scaly, petrified snakes.
The air was suffocatingly dense, damp, and vibrated with a miasma of ancient, wild Qi that irritated human lungs. Gravity itself felt hostile, as if the planet itself was trying to crush them for daring to enter.
The six Pillars advanced in impeccable tactical formation, dictated by instinct and training.
Bren marched at the front, his basilisk-scale tower shield held high, his Iron Mountain senses connected to the vibrations of the ground. Kael, Eris, and Violeta formed the offensive core in the center. Elara closed the immediate rearguard, weaving a constant layer of Frost Mist that cooled their thermal signatures and diluted their scent in the rotting atmosphere of the jungle.
Varian was not on the ground. The sniper moved fifty meters high, leaping silently from colossal branch to colossal branch. His gray eyes were imbued with wind Qi, piercing the gloom of the undergrowth.
They had advanced for three hours in tense silence.
Suddenly, through the squad's telepathic connection, Varian's voice echoed, cold and urgent.
"Halt. Turtle formation. Now."
Bren, without questioning, drove the base of his immense shield into the damp earth, sinking his boots and activating his rooting technique. Kael, Violeta, and Eris grouped behind him, weapons drawn. Elara condensed the mist around them to create visual confusion.
"What do you see, Varian?" Kael asked telepathically, his Sword Heart pumping controlled adrenaline.
From the heights, Varian drew his bone bow, placing three black arrows on the string.
"It's not what I see. It's what I don't hear. There are no insects. There are no birds. The micro-ecosystem within a kilometer radius just shut down. We are surrounded. And they are not wild beasts. It's a military maneuver."
Varian's words chilled the blood, but not with fear, but anticipation.
Tier II of the Beastial Hierarchy: The Royalty.
Grade 4 beasts (Origin Realm). Monsters that developed human intelligence, telepathic capabilities, and claimed territories by subjugating thousands of Grade 1 to 3 beasts to use as private armies.
The thicket of the forest came alive.
Thousands of pairs of eyes ignited in the darkness of the foliage in front of them, to the sides, and in the trees. It was not a disorderly roar; it was a coordinated advance.
Entire packs of Grade 1 and 2 Spiritual Beasts. Iron Wolves with fur sharp as blades, Elemental Rock Bears with earth cores beating in their chests, and Wind Panthers moving through the shadows. There were hundreds. Thousands. The cannon fodder of the food chain, sent to exhaust the prey.
But what was truly terrifying was not the tide of minor monsters. It was the spiritual pressure that rose behind them.
Three massive, dark, heavy auras erupted in the rear of the pack.
Three Grade 4 Beast Kings. Two at Stage 8 of the Origin Realm, and one at Stage 9, at the pinnacle before becoming Semi-Saints.
A voice resonated directly into the brains of the six Pillars. A guttural, raspy telepathy, drooling with hunger.
"Human flesh... dense in Qi. Pure flesh. Children of the Law... Your blood will be the tribute for our evolution."
The undergrowth parted like the Red Sea.
The alpha Beast King revealed itself. An Ironwood Chameleon Predator. It was not a tiger; it was a reptilian aberration the size of a two-story house. Its skin was composed of petrified wood bark that changed color to camouflage with the environment. Its six legs ended in obsidian claws, and venomous spines sprouted from its back. It was at Stage 9 of the Origin Realm.
Flanking the reptile, the leaders of the Shadow Plague Packs emerged: two immense deformed Grade 4 wolves (Stage 8), whose bodies exuded a black smoke that withered plants in their path.
—"Fuck," —Bren whispered, resting his shoulder against the inside of his tower shield—. "It's an alliance of Kings. They've united three packs just for us."
Kael Morningstar smiled. It was a smile identical to his father's, laden with an arrogance that defied death itself. He drew the Whisper of the North from its bandages, and the immense dark blade hummed, hungry.
—"We're not going to run. We're not going to hide. We need Grade 4 material for the cradle's alchemy."
The Ironwood chameleon reptile let out a hiss that shook the earth, and the telepathic order was given.
"Devour them!"
The tide of minor Grade 1, 2, and 3 beasts rushed upon them like a tsunami of claws, fangs, and unstable elemental magic.
Varian was the first to attack.
From the canopy, he released his bowstring. [Rain of the Silent Hunter].
He did not fire piercing arrows. His dark Qi projectiles burst in mid-air, creating blinding flashes and clouds of temporary blindness over the front line of Iron Wolves, breaking the pack's perfect charge.
But the reptilian Beast King was not stupid. Ignoring its own cannon fodder, the Ironwood colossus compressed itself and, with explosive force, leaped over the tide of wolves, shooting like a missile straight toward the center of the Morningstar formation. Its objective was to crush them all with its mass equivalent to hundreds of tons and its venomous spines.
The attack carried the inertia of a Stage 9 beast. It was a blow capable of demolishing a city wall.
—"BREN!" —Kael roared.
—"IRON MOUNTAIN!" —the colossus in the rearguard bellowed.
Bren took a step forward, interposing himself between the free-falling beast and his siblings. He sank the base of his tower shield into the black earth, channeled one hundred percent of his bloodline Qi into his arms and legs, and his muscles bulged, his veins popping like steel cables. His skin acquired a metallic gray tone.
The Chameleon Predator crashed head-on into Bren's shield.
BOOOOOOM!
The impact was seismic. A shockwave swept through the jungle, uprooting nearby trees and pulverizing dozens of minor beasts that were too close.
Bren's boots sank half a meter into the ground. He was pushed backward, leaving two deep trenches in the earth, his bones crunching horribly under the friction of hundreds of tons of pure kinetic force. Blood spurted from his lips and nose, but the Iron Mountain did not break. Bren withstood the charge of a Stage 9 King.
The reptile, stunned by its prey's immovability, hung suspended in the air for a fraction of a second in front of the shield.
That was the plan.
—"NOW!" —Bren shouted, spitting blood.
Violeta appeared to the left of the beast, emerging from the [Step Between Worlds]. Her hand wrapped in spatial energy plunged into the right eye of the reptilian colossus, using a dimensional micro-bridge to rip the eyeball out from the inside, ignoring its armored eyelids.
The monster roared in agony, thrashing around.
Eris appeared on the right. Her fists were engulfed in black Ruin Fire. [Setting Sun Thrust].
With homicidal fury, she connected three consecutive blows to the reptile's neck joint, injecting black flames that began to disintegrate the petrified bark from the inside.
And from the center, using Bren's shield as a jumping ramp, Kael Morningstar soared into the air.
The King of the Vanguard descended with the Whisper of the North raised high. The Sword Heart channeled all his killing intent into a single point, a vertical slash designed to cleave the world.
—"Slash of Doubt!"
The enormous dark blade fell like a black lightning bolt, striking exactly at the point where Eris had melted the armor and Violeta had destroyed the King's perception.
The blade split the thick Ironwood skin, severed the neck muscles, and cut the spinal cord of the Stage 9 colossus. A geyser of thick, green blood erupted into the air, bathing the Golden Generation.
The decapitated body of the King collapsed to the ground, dead before understanding how mere humans had dismantled its invulnerability.
The two Shadow Plague Wolves (Stage 8 Kings) stopped dead in their tracks upon seeing their superior decapitated in less than five seconds. The tide of thousands of minor beasts hesitated, instinctive terror paralyzing their advance.
Kael Morningstar landed on the corpse of the colossus. Green blood dripped from his black armor and his immense sword. His golden eyes shone with the cruelty of his bloodline. He looked at the wolf Kings and the thousands of monsters surrounding them.
—"The expedition has officially entered hostile territory," —Kael announced, his voice echoing through the fear-silenced forest—. "Whoever is hungry, step forward."
The war for survival in the Sea of Beasts had just begun.