Chapter 105: The Swamp of Oblivion and the Awakening of Ruin
The dimensional jump was not a journey; it was a car crash against the barrier of reality.
When Violeta's unstable portal spat them out, there was no solid ground waiting for them. They were thrown into a free fall toward a thick, toxic darkness. The drastic change in pressure made Kael's eardrums ring loudly.
The impact was wet and repulsive.
They did not fall onto rock, but into a viscous mud that reeked of sulfur, rotting meat, and ammonia. The sludge was so dense that it cushioned the fatal fall, but it immediately tried to swallow them like hungry quicksand.
Kael leapt to his feet, ripping his boots from the mud with a sickening squelch. The Whisper of the North was already in his hand.
—"Report!" —he bellowed, coughing from the acidity of the air.
—"Alive!" —Bren grunted, emerging from the mud a few meters away, his heavy armor covered in pale leeches the size of human forearms that the giant crushed instantly.
—"Up here!" —Varian's voice rang out from above. The sniper had managed to maneuver in mid-air and land on the withered branch of a titanic, petrified tree, whose wood looked like rotted bone.
Elara appeared next to Kael, dispelling the mist around her. She was pale, but unharmed.
Ten meters away from them, Violeta fell to her knees, vomiting a mixture of bile and dark blood. Her single blue eye blinked erratically, and the silver veins on her face throbbed from the overexertion of tearing space without coordinates under the pressure of three True Saints.
Eris landed beside her, holding her up immediately.
—"Violeta, breathe..." —Eris murmured, her usual mocking tone replaced by pure murderous tension—. "Where the hell are we?"
Violeta looked at her spiritual compass. The crystal was fractured, and the needle spun wildly—no north, no south, drawn by invisible anomalies.
—"There are no... coordinates," —Violeta panted—. "Gravity here... fluctuates. The ambient Qi is dead. It's a graveyard."
Kael looked around. Light did not exist. A thick, toxic, yellowish-green mist covered everything. The twisted tree trunks looked like the ribs of dead titans. They were at the bottom of a basin forgotten by the gods.
Varian, from above, activated his [Eagle Vision]. His yellow eyes filtered through the toxic mist. Suddenly, his breath hitched.
—"Kael! Defensive formation, now!" —the sniper yelled, drawing his bow in desperation—. "The ground isn't mud! It's alive!"
The Swamp of Oblivion gave them no time to react.
The sludge bubbled violently around Kael and Bren. In the blink of an eye, thousands of tons of acidic mud, rotting roots, and bones of assimilated beasts rose up like a tidal wave. The viscous mass condensed in front of them, reaching twenty meters in height.
It had no face. It had no defined limbs. It was a Putrid Sludge Abomination, a monster born from the decomposition of millions of corpses in the Sea of Beasts, which had just assimilated enough Qi to ascend to Stage 1 of Semi-Saint.
The smell of putrefaction became solid, crushing the team's lungs.
Two immense tendrils of black mud shot toward Kael and Bren like siege whips.
—"[Core Anchoring]," —Bren bellowed, sinking his basilisk shield into the ground, his body turning metallic gray.
The tendril impacted against the shield. The brute force was immense, but what terrified Bren was the hiss. The mud was an acid so corrosive that it began to melt the Earth-grade basilisk scales instantly.
Kael did not block; he attacked. His Sword Heart pumped pure fury.
—"[Sovereign's Slash]."
The immense dark sword, laden with indomitable will, launched a massive vertical slash. The attack cut the mud abomination cleanly in half.
But there was no blood. The two halves of the monster simply fused back together in less than a second, absorbing more mud from the ground to heal.
The abomination emitted an ultrasonic shriek, a cacophony of thousands of digested souls. A third tendril surged from the mud beneath Kael's feet, trapping his right leg and hoisting him into the air with the intention of submerging him in its acidic mass to digest him alive.
Varian released three arrows of radiant void toward the center of the mass, searching for a solid core. The arrows pierced the sludge, detonating inside, scattering toxic mud, but the monster simply filled in the gaps without flinching.
It was an amorphous enemy. Brute force and precision were useless against something that had no anatomy.
Eris Morningstar saw everything from the rearguard. She saw Kael being dragged toward the acid. She saw Violeta agonizing on the ground from exhaustion.
The fire in Eris's chest didn't burn; it became a cold abyss. Her eyes lost the white color of their sclerae, turning into two pools of absolute darkness. The existential pressure of the Swamp of Oblivion was crushed by a much older and more hostile pressure.
—"Step aside," —Eris whispered. Her voice wasn't loud, but it resonated in the minds of the Pillars.
Eris took a step forward. Her hands were engulfed in flames. But it was no longer the unstable Ruin Fire from before. It was the maturation of her bloodline of destruction in the face of the threat of imminent death.
The mud abomination prepared to launch a tsunami of acidic sludge over the entire group.
Eris brought her hands together and compressed an immense amount of black fire into a sphere the size of a marble. The white core of the sphere throbbed like a diseased heart, emitting a hum that made reality crack around it.
—"[Decaying Core Explosion]."
Eris threw the small sphere directly toward the central mass of the Semi-Saint beast.
When the sphere burst, there was no traditional fireball. It was a shockwave of accelerated entropy, ash-gray and dark crimson in color. The wave swept the clearing. The instant it touched the toxic mist and acidic mud of the monster, the beast's Qi was corrupted.
The "old television" static distorted the monster's mass. Its tendrils became brittle as dry sand. The technique abruptly suppressed the Semi-Saint aura of the sludge, reducing its density and forcing it to release Kael, who fell to the ground coughing violently.
But the abomination was furious. Feeling its power suppressed, it tried to sink into the swamp to escape through subterranean dimensions and attack from behind.
Eris did not allow it.
Her body blurred, becoming a ray of pure black light.
—"[Incandescent Dance of Judgment]."
Eris moved at a speed that defied sight, tracing a web of erratic and violent dashes around the hundred-ton mass of mud. With every change of direction, the Pillar of Ruin left a "scar" of white fire permanently suspended in the air.
The lines of fire tattooed space. When the abomination tried to liquefy and flow into the earth, the floating scars cut its mass from the spiritual plane. The wounds did not close. The monster howled in true pain as the scars burned its Semi-Saint stamina from the inside out, chasing it through the moisture itself.
Cornered and spiritually burned, the sludge beast gathered all the muck from the swamp around it in a desperate attempt to regenerate its shattered mass and crush Eris through sheer superiority of size.
Eris stopped dead in front of the mud mountain. She raised her right arm. The black fire covering it was viscous like tar, but the core in her palm emitted a blinding white light, so absolute that it erased the shadows in the toxic swamp.
—"To create something new, first I erase you," —Eris declared.
"[Flame of Eternal Ruin]."
A stream of dense fire, acting as a universal acid, shot from her hand and smashed into the center of the abomination.
The impact was a roar of absolute vacuum, the sound of air being sucked away. The black flame spread across the entire surface of the mud like a viral plague, devouring the defensive Qi of the Semi-Saint beast.
But the true terror was the white core. The fire bit into the atomic structure of the mud.
The beast tried to heal, tried to bind new sludge to the wound, but the Flame of Eternal Ruin prevented the atoms from reconnecting. Regeneration, the monster's trump card, was nullified from existence.
The abomination shrieked, an agonizing sound of disintegration. The tons of mud rotted, turning into a sterile gray dust that fell like dead rain as Eris's flame devoured its existence layer by layer.
Knowing it was being eradicated, the Semi-Saint beast entered a terminal frenzy.
If it was going to die, it would take these mortals with it.
The monster condensed thirty percent of its remaining mass, solidifying the highly toxic mud into tens of thousands of lethal needles. At the same time, its spiritual core deliberately collapsed, generating a wave of gravitational distortion designed to crush the internal organs of everyone within a hundred-meter radius, preventing them from dodging the rain of poisonous spikes.
Elara choked, falling to her knees as she felt gravity multiply by ten. Bren drove his shield down, but the pressure sank him waist-deep into the mud. Varian was ripped from his tree, crashing into the sludge.
The rain of ten thousand solidified mud needles, capable of piercing stellar steel, plummeted toward the gravity-immobilized squad.
Eris tried to raise a wall of black fire, but her Qi was drained by the Eternal Ruin.
—"Not on my watch!" —a ragged, blood-soaked voice cut through the chaos.
Violeta (Rank 2) had gotten to her feet. Her single eye was completely bloodshot, and red tears ran down her cheek. Her brain was being hammered by spatial calculations that defied her cultivation realm, but the Morningstar will knew no physical limits.
Violeta raised both hands toward the rain of death.
—"[Mirror of Dimensional Fracture]."
Dozens of sheets of floating ice, thin as paper and with no defined physical thickness, manifested in the air above their heads. The ten thousand needles of toxic mud didn't crash against the ice; they slid into the spatial cracks contained within the crystals with the sound of glass breaking in another dimension.
Instantly, Violeta connected the mirrors. Above the beast itself, dozens of exit mirrors opened. The same ten thousand lethal needles shot downward with the same kinetic force, riddling the mud abomination with its own ultimate attack, shattering its physical form.
The monster bellowed, shattered by Eris's ruin and riddled by Violeta. Its core, a viscous sphere of pure poison the size of a wagon, was exposed. The beast, in its dying breath, began to glow with a sickly green light. It was going to detonate its own Semi-Saint core. A point-blank explosion that would vaporize the entire Swamp of Oblivion.
Violeta did not retreat. She drove her sword directly into the mud.
—"[Prison of Astral Frost]."
A net of pure frost expanded at the speed of light, rising to form a dome that enveloped only the monster's exposed core. The walls of the dome weren't just ice; they were solid space.
Inside the prison, the laws of physics collapsed. The beast's core, about to explode, slowed down dramatically. The light of the detonation traveled as if submerged in thick syrup. Space had become so dense that the shockwave could not advance.
But the energy of a Semi-Saint seeking to burst was immense. The frost dome began to crack.
The veins in Violeta's neck looked about to burst. Her internal organs groaned under the dimensional friction.
—"Die already!" —Violeta roared, pointing her bloody hand at the dome.
She condensed all the remaining Qi in her body, her vitality, and her comprehension of space into a single mathematical point.
—"[Lotus of Absolute Zero]."
Inside the Astral Frost dome, a flawless, transparent crystal lotus materialized out of nothing, settling directly onto the detonating core of the beast.
The lotus bloomed.
There was no cold wind. There was a pulse of conceptual cold.
The lotus did not seek to kill by temperature; it anchored space itself. When the petals opened, a white mist erased the color from inside the prison. Space "solidified" permanently.
The Semi-Saint's massive explosion, which had already begun to crack the core's shell, stopped dead. The toxic flames, the shockwave, the light itself... everything was petrified in mid-air. The monster's existence was frozen at absolute zero, turning the terrifying final attack into an inert and deadly silent crystal statue.
The Swamp of Oblivion plunged into absolute silence.
The threat had been eradicated. The Semi-Saint beast was now a monument of dimensional ice and gray ash—no capacity for regeneration, lifeless, erased from the food chain.
The adrenaline keeping the Pillars on their feet vanished all at once.
Violeta let out a weak sigh, her eyes rolled back, and her body gave out. Kael moved faster than the wind, catching his sister before her face hit the mud.
—"Violeta...!" —Kael held her, his voice betraying panic for the first time in the entire expedition.
Elara ran toward them, falling to her knees. She ignored the toxic mud burning her clothes and checked Violeta's pulse and dantian with trembling fingers.
—"She's alive..." —Elara babbled, shedding tears of relief and terror—. "But her spiritual core is completely empty. Forcing spatial singularity and ice to that level destroyed her reserves. She has entered a self-protective coma. She won't wake up anytime soon."
Eris approached slowly. She was still wreathed in the last remnants of white fire, evaporating the moisture from her clothes. She saw her twin sister, pale and unconscious in Kael's arms.
The swamp air was still heavy with residual toxins and poison the beast had scattered before dying. Bren and Varian were coughing, their skin showing severe chemical burns.
Eris raised her hands. Her palms didn't emit fire, but a mist of gray particles.
—"[Ash of Oblivion]."
The technique of purification through destruction. The pale, silvery ash floated toward Kael, Bren, Varian, Elara, and Violeta. Upon touching their skin, the ash actively sought out the venom and toxic curses of the beast and disintegrated them, erasing them from existence. The chemical wounds were cleansed, leaving the air empty and pure around the squad.
But Kael noticed the change in Eris.
When the ash did its work, Eris's hands turned gray and dry as grave dust. Her eyes, previously full of fire and mockery, were hollow. An icy emotional apathy—the aftermath of channeling pure Ruin—paralyzed her features. Eris knelt beside Violeta without a word, hugging her unconscious twin, unable to cry because the power of destruction had temporarily stripped away her empathy.
Kael quickly checked his spatial ring. He pulled out the jade box and verified the seals.
The Star Dragon Root was still there, intact, pulsing with its pure, silver light, oblivious to the slaughter and suffering it had cost to obtain it.
Kael sighed, slumping back against the withered root of a colossal tree, looking up at the dark canopy of the swamp where a sickly green mist filtered through.
—"We did it..." —Kael whispered, a dry, pained laugh, on the verge of breaking, escaping his lips—. "We have the cure for the Patriarch."
Varian limped over, leaning on his bow, and picked up the pieces of Violeta's compass from the mud. The crystal was shattered.
—"But we don't know where we are," —the sniper murmured, staring into the infinite darkness of the swamp—. "And without Violeta, we have no teleportation array for the return."
Elara looked at her companions—wounded, bloodied—and at the unbeatable Violeta broken in the arms of the apathetic Eris.
They were lost in the deepest depths of hell, surrounded by unknown predators. But they had won. They held the future of the Morningstar Citadel in a jade box.
And in the toxic wind of the swamp, the words they had once heard in clan stories echoed like a curse in their minds:
"The price of the root has not yet been paid. Winter and the void will fall upon the Morningstar bloodline."
The group, exhausted beyond human comprehension, could only move forward. But that night, under a purple moon they could not see and a mist that promised oblivion, the six Pillars made a silent oath.
Neither mud, nor beasts, nor ice, nor fire, nor the very ruin of space would separate them. They would return to the cradle. Or the Swamp of Oblivion would burn to its foundations right alongside them.