Chapter 120: The Blood Baptism and the Awakening of Ash
Chaos did not begin with a war cry, nor with the clash of steel, nor with the roar of a magical beast. It began with a simple gesture in the silence of VIP box number three.
Samael Morningstar, the Sovereign of the Void and Patriarch of the Primordial Dragon, finished his glass of red wine. He watched how the red liquid left a scarlet trail on the carved crystal, similar to the blood he was about to spill. With a chilling calm that froze the soul, he placed the glass on the small velvet table and, without looking away from the stage where Altair had just disappeared toward his destiny, raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
That sound, a sharp, dry clack, was the trigger that fractured the reality of the Abyssal Auction House.
It was not a mechanical failure. It was a synchronized and absolute execution. The thousand spiritual crystal lamps hanging from the immense vaulted ceiling, illuminating the auditorium with their amber glow, did not slowly dim; they shattered simultaneously in a rain of sharp shards. On the upper level, hidden among the iron beams and rock stalactites, Malak's Hundred Shadows had been slipping around for the last twenty minutes. Hearing the acoustic signal from their Patriarch, the hundred daggers of the Eternal Night cut the thick light Qi cables in unison.
Total darkness swallowed the amphitheater in a fraction of a second.
"Let the harvest begin," Samael murmured. His voice, amplified and distorted by the Law of the Void, did not come from the box, but seemed to emanate from the stone walls themselves, resonating in the eardrums of those present like the final judgment of an ancient god. "I want no survivors who can tell what the face of an enraged Morningstar looks like."
Panic erupted in the stands like a fire in a tar pit.
Hundreds of corrupt nobles, minor sect leaders, slave merchants, and hired assassins screamed, desperately activating their defensive auras and light talismans. The gigantic auditorium instantly turned into a nauseating kaleidoscope of chaotic, colored lights. Flashes of red, blue, green, and golden Qi briefly illuminated the darkness, revealing scenes of absolute nightmare.
On the periphery of the room, the elite auction guards, hardened men in the Origin Realm, tried to draw their weapons. But before the steel left their sheaths, shadows without physical thickness peeled themselves from the floor and walls. The Hundred Shadows made no sound. The flat white porcelain masks with the violet rune of "Silence" shone macabrely in the light of the failed attacks. Dark metal daggers tipped with green poison drove into throats, severing vocal cords before piercing carotid arteries. Armored bodies fell to the ground with a wet thud, drowning in their own blood.
Three floors above, oblivious to the indiscriminate slaughter on the ground floor, the sound of the chaos was only a dull rumble that managed to filter through the heavy, soundproofed walls of mahogany, iron, and gold of the Auction Master's office.
Gorno sat behind his immense petrified wood desk. He was a titanic man, a cultivator who had reached Stage 2 of the Origin Realm not through meditation and understanding of the laws, but by devouring resources, stolen elixirs, and the blood of slaves. His body had grown fat on luxuries in Golden City, but beneath the layer of fat still resided the brute strength of a monster capable of crushing boulders with his bare hands. He was tallying the auction ledgers, annoyed by the sudden blackout, but feeling no real fear in his personal fortress.
The heavy oak door of his office did not open. It exploded inward in a storm of spear-sized splinters.
Gorno didn't even rise from his manticore-skin chair. He looked up, his scar-lined face showing more annoyance than surprise. His fat, jeweled hand instinctively closed around the leather grip of a colossal steel warhammer resting against the desk.
In the shattered threshold, enveloped in the dust and smoke of the broken wood, stood Altair Ashborne.
The nineteen-year-old slave breathed with agonizing difficulty. His right hand dragged the immense black sword Samael had given him, the tip of the heavy blade leaving a deep black groove in the luxurious crimson carpet. His body, barely covered by gray rags, was a map of pain: acid burn marks, infected cuts, and rusted shackles that had left chronic grooves on his wrists. His cultivation was brutally suppressed and degraded; his meridians were so dry and fractured by torture that he could barely channel the strength of a mortal in peak physical condition.
"Well, well," Gorno chuckled, his voice rumbling like gravel being ground in a steel barrel. "The malnourished little pup of the Silver Ash Clan has slipped his leash. Did that idiot in the box buy you for two hundred thousand stones just to send you to die at my door? What a tragic waste of money."
Altair did not speak. He had no air in his lungs to waste on empty words. All that dwelled inside him was a hatred so pure, so dense and solidified, that it kept his spine straight when medically he should have been in a coma.
He clenched his jaw until his gums bled, raised the heavy black sword with both hands, and with a hoarse, guttural, heart-rending scream that tore his own wounded throat, he lunged forward, using the momentum of his entire body weight to try to split the giant's skull.
Gorno sighed, bored. He didn't even bother to stand up. With a lazy, fluid flick of his immense wrist, he lifted the solid steel warhammer and swung it in an upward arc.
CLANG!
The acoustic impact rattled the paintings on the walls. The difference in strength was an unbridgeable abyss. Gorno's steel hammer slammed into the center of the blade of Altair's black sword. The transfer of kinetic energy was devastating. The sword vibrated with such a violent frequency that the skin on Altair's palms tore instantly, spraying blood over the dark metal. The impact traveled up his arms, brutally dislocating his left shoulder with a wet snap.
The force of the blow lifted the young slave off the ground. Altair was sent flying backward like a ragdoll, flying across the office until he violently crashed into a massive trophy display case made of glass and ebony wood. The display case collapsed on top of him. Sharp glass, ancient porcelain, and heavy artifacts rained down on his body, cutting his face, piercing his thighs, and shredding his right arm.
The sound of three ribs fracturing as he hit the stone wall behind the display case was sickening.
"Pathetic," Gorno spat, slowly rising from his chair. The wooden floor creaked beneath his immense weight. His yellow aura, dense and heavy as mud, filled the room, increasing the gravity and making the simple act of breathing a torture for Altair. "I expected a bit more entertainment. Your damn father screamed much louder when I peeled the skin off his back strip by strip on this very carpet. I thought his blood would make you last at least a minute."
Altair coughed. A mouthful of dark, thick blood stained the floor around him. His lungs burned; one of his broken ribs threatened to puncture his lung tissue. He tried to prop himself up on his left arm, but the searing pain from his dislocated shoulder made him collapse back onto the broken glass. He was losing his vision. The coldness of death, that black and dark blue abyss Samael had seen in the weave of destiny, was beginning to devour his consciousness.
But as he lay there, bleeding and humiliated, his gray eyes, unfocused by agony, locked onto the large stone fireplace burning on the other side of the opulent room. The fire roared, consuming spiritual wood logs, leaving a bed of burning coals and gray ash at the bottom.
The fire. The ash.
The echo of Samael Morningstar's voice resonated in the dark recesses of his broken mind. "Do you want to flee while all hell breaks loose, or do you want to collect the debt you are owed?"
Altair gritted his teeth, forcing his shattered body to move. His fingers dug into the carpet.
"I am not my father," Altair growled, spitting out a broken tooth along with a blood clot. His voice was barely a wet whisper, but it vibrated at a frequency that made the fire in the fireplace tremble. "He... had honor. He believed in mercy. I just... have hunger."
While Altair crawled toward the fire in the office, in the main auditorium, the massacre was not a fight; it was a work of art painted in red and black.
Lorian, the arrogant Young Master of the Cryon Family of the Stellar Ice Empire, stood in his VIP box, trembling uncontrollably, as pale as a corpse drained of every last drop of blood. The screams of nobles being slaughtered by the shadows in the darkness below filled his ears. He had tried to launch an Ice Spear Frost technique toward Samael's box in an act of pure panic, but his Stage 5 Origin technique had dissolved into particles of steam before crossing half the abyss separating them, devoured by the passive pressure of the Laws governing the room.
Suddenly, an imposing figure blocked Lorian's view.
Before him, suspended in the air thanks to his advanced mastery of gravity, was Kael Morningstar. The Vanguard Commander was no longer suppressing his aura. The crimson Magma Dragon roared and swirled around his dense, armored body. In his right hand, he held the immense High Origin Grade claymore, the Magma Fang. The red blade throbbed with veins of extreme heat, dripping virtual lava that hissed upon contact with the magically air-conditioned air of Lorian's box.
"Are you going to go down to the slaughterhouse, little ice cube?" Kael asked, his smile showing a savage, predatory violence. "Or do I have to come up and explain to you personally why, in this world, no one insults my older brother?"
Terror collapsed Lorian's mind.
"Kill him! Heavens, tear him apart right now!" Lorian shrieked, backing away and tripping over the silk cushions of his chair as he ordered his two elite guards.
The two bodyguards of the Cryon Family, both Stage 6 Origin experts, did not hesitate. They knew that if their young master died, their entire families would be exterminated. They drew their dual swords, wrapping the blades in a lethal frost that dropped the temperature of the box below zero in a blink. They leaped simultaneously toward Kael, aiming for the neck and heart with lethal coordination.
Kael didn't even adopt a classic defensive stance.
Instead, he gripped the immense dragon-bone hilt of his claymore and applied an absolute principle of combat he had perfected under the tutelage of Samael's Void.
[Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash]
Grade: Evolutionary (Adaptive from Mortal Realm to Grand Saint). Core Concept: "Sound is slower than intent." Mechanics: Kael didn't just channel his fiery power; he channeled his Sovereign's Will to create a thin bubble of acoustic vacuum around his sword's blade. By drawing and slashing, he eliminated the atomic friction that produces sound. There was no classic whistle of steel cutting the wind. There was no warning.
Kael twisted his torso with explosive speed, unleashing a horizontal sweep with the immense mass of the Magma Fang.
The movement was beautiful, fast, and absolutely silent.
The Stellar Ice guards only saw an incandescent red flash in the darkness. Their brains lacked the auditory stimulus of the incoming attack, causing a fatal millisecond delay in their blocking reflexes. By the time the sound of the air being torn by magma should have reached their ears, the immense blade had already passed through their rib cages.
BOOM!
The silent impact was followed by a volcanic detonation. The shockwave of red Qi shattered the guards' defensive ice barriers as if they were sheets of cheap glass. The heat of the sword evaporated the blood in their hearts before they even fell. Their bisected bodies were thrown against the back wall of the box with such force that they became embedded in the obsidian masonry, leaving craters stained with soot and vaporized blood.
Lorian fell to his knees, sobbing, the smell of his protectors' burned flesh suffocating him. He tried to babble a plea, a promise of riches, but Kael was already in front of him.
"Save your tongue for screaming," Kael growled. He didn't use the sword. He clenched his left fist, wrapping it in hardened Qi, and threw a devastating uppercut straight to the noble's jaw.
The impact shattered Lorian's lower maxilla into dozens of bone fragments. Teeth flew through the air wrapped in blood, and the Young Master spun in the air before falling unconscious and convulsing on the carpet.
Kael raised the sword, ready to skewer the boy's heart and finish the job. However, the instant Lorian lost consciousness and his pulse dropped to critical levels, the silver necklace hanging from his neck burst into blinding light.
An extremely high-grade lifesaving talisman.
In the shadows of the amphitheater ceiling, Malak, the General of Shadows, detected the spatial disturbance. Without needing a verbal command, Malak extended his mantle of liquid darkness, activating his domain.
[Shadow Domain: Veil of the Eclipse]
Effect: Seals and solidifies the space in the area, instantly shattering any teleportation talisman or spatial escape technique below the Grand Saint grade. Within the Veil, enemies lose their connection to the spatial network of the natural world.
Malak's darkness descended upon Lorian's box like a tsunami of black ink, attempting to crush the spatial light portal forming around the unconscious noble's body. Space cracked, groaning audibly.
But the talisman Lorian wore was no ordinary defensive item bought at an auction. It was a relic forged with the lifeblood of the Patriarch of the Cryon family himself, a Grand Saint rank artifact.
The talisman's light collided violently with Malak's Veil of the Eclipse. For a millisecond, both powers wrestled. Malak's darkness managed to crack the ice portal, but the brute force of the Grand Saint seal punched a small, chaotic hole through the fabric of the isolated reality. The portal violently sucked in Lorian's shattered, unconscious body, dragging him thousands of kilometers away toward his home empire, just before Malak's domain collapsed the hole with a dull snap.
Kael cursed under his breath, sheathing the Magma Fang and spitting on the blood left on the floor.
"That worm had a Grand Saint shield. He slipped away, Patriarch."
From the center of the main stage on the ground floor, Samael Morningstar communicated through the telepathic link, his voice as serene as a frozen lake.
"It doesn't matter, Kael. Let him return to his father's arms in a coma and without a jaw. Let his family see what happens when someone dares to look down on our fire. When they come seeking revenge, we will already be ready to freeze their hearts."
Samael walked calmly through the chaos of the main stage. Around him, the mercenary elite of Golden City, the gang leaders and assassins who had bid on slaves, were being systematically slaughtered by Elara, Violeta, and the Shadows.
A group of five elite mercenaries, desperate upon seeing the exits blocked by unbreakable spatial walls, recognized Samael as the leader of the raid. Their bloodshot eyes filled with the bravery of a dead man.
"It's him! He's the one who started all this! Kill him and let's use his corpse as a hostage to break the barrier!" roared their leader, a Stage 8 Origin swordsman, charging forward with a blade imbued in piercing wind Qi.
Samael halted his calm pace. His violet and crimson eyes showed no anger, only an absolute, crushing disdain. He slid his hand to his waist and unsheathed his personal weapon. It was not an orthodox straight sword; it was the immense, curved, and lethal Odachi of the Ravenous Eclipse.
Samael didn't adopt a guard stance. He simply raised his right arm, relaxed, letting the long blade of the Odachi rest parallel to the ground. He invoked the Law of Blood and merged it with his Sword Intent.
[Hybrid Technique (Laws of Blood and Space): Crimson Moon Slash]
Mechanics: A 360-degree slash executed with a speed that mocks visual perception. The edge of the attack is as fine as a spatial fault, but carries the physical weight of an ocean of highly pressurized blood. Additional Effect: Infects the incision with "Slaughter Poison," an energy that actively corrodes meridians and prevents any magical or natural healing.
Samael spun on his heel in a fluid, lazy motion. The blade of the Odachi sliced through the air.
A blackish-red shockwave, perfectly shaped like a crescent moon, expanded horizontally in a twenty-meter radius at chest height.
The five charging mercenaries stopped dead in their tracks, their battle cries choking in their throats. Their weapons, raised to block, snapped in two without any resistance, as if made of wet paper. The spatial slash cut through their Earth-grade armors, their skin, their ribs, and their hearts.
For a terrifying second, the mercenaries remained standing, blinking, not understanding why their bodies wouldn't respond. Then, the upper halves of their torsos slid off cleanly, falling to the ground with a dull thud. Blood did not spurt from the wounds; it was vaporized by the "Slaughter Poison" that blackened the exposed flesh in microseconds.
Samael flicked the Odachi in the void, cleaning the non-existent blood from the flawless blade, and sheathed it with a dry click. A literal carpet of corpses was forming at his feet.
"Boring," Samael whispered, looking up at the ornate ceiling, his vision piercing the thick beams to focus on the golden thread in the upper office. "Malak."
"At your service, Master," resonated the voice of the Sovereign of the Scythe from the shadow cast by a nearby blood-soaked pillar.
"Keep the leaders and financiers in the upper boxes alive a little longer. Eris will interrogate them first. I want their vault keys and their sects' transfer codes. Squeeze every drop of wealth out of this rat pit. The rest of the auditorium... is food for the Legion."
In the upper-floor office, the one-sided torture was about to end.
Altair was shattered. His left arm hung useless at his side. His face was a grotesque mask of blood, sweat, and soot. Gorno laughed uproariously, kicking the young man's chest over and over against the masonry wall.
"Is that it?" Gorno spat, raising the steel hammer above his head, ready to crush Altair's skull. "Is that the great hatred you were talking about in the cage? You're weak trash, boy. You're useless ash. You will die exactly like your father, begging for a quick death I won't give you."
Altair, curled up on the floor, saw the immense head of the hammer swing in the air, blocking the light from the lamps. But his peripheral vision also caught something else.
Gorno's last kick had pushed him right to the edge of the office's large stone fireplace. The spiritual wood embers burned at the bottom, emitting a suffocating heat and a dark red glow. The pain in his shattered body was an unbearable cacophony, but in the exact center of that agony, something ancient, dense, and dormant in his DNA began to vibrate.
The Monarch of Ashes Physique.
A cursed lineage that did not feed on peaceful meditation or the gathering of ambient Qi like orthodox cultivators. It fed on calamity. It fed on destruction, structural wear, and the assimilation of dead fire.
Altair didn't think. His primordial survival instincts took control of his broken body.
He stretched out his good right hand and, with a dull cry that didn't sound human but like the scraping of two colliding tectonic plates, plunged his arm directly into the fireplace, grabbing a handful of red-hot spiritual coals.
The flesh of his palm should have instantly melted and charred to the bone.
Instead, the extreme heat triggered his dormant lineage's evolutionary response. The moment the embers touched his nerves, the pain transformed into a catalyst for energy. The pale skin of his arm and hand suddenly turned matte gray, hardening at a terrifying cellular rate until it acquired the porous, indestructible texture of cooled volcanic rock.
The fire didn't burn him. It penetrated his meridians, filling the empty channels with a heavy, toxic, and searing energy.
[Core System: Subject Resonance Alert]
[Potential Subject (Altair Ashborne) has instinctively activated the state: "Calamity Absorption".]
[Physiological State: Ash Frenzy. Transforming critical physical damage into short-term Qi density.]
Gorno halted the hammer's descent mid-arc, his eyes widening at the aberration he was witnessing.
"What the...?" he managed to murmur.
Altair stood up.
He didn't do it slowly. He launched himself upward with explosive force. His left arm, the one with the dislocated shoulder, emitted a series of horrifying cracks. The muscles and tendons contracted violently by force, popping the bone back into its joint socket. The limb was welded internally by a thick, grayish Qi tissue that oozed smoke through the pores of his skin.
His eyes were no longer a stormy gray. They were two deep pools of incandescent ember, casting an orange glare in the gloom of the room.
"You're right, scum," Altair whispered. His voice was no longer that of a broken youth; it sounded like the wind howling through a barren canyon. "I am ash."
He took a step toward the giant. The luxurious carpet under his boot blackened and disintegrated into smoke instantly due to the heat emanating from his body.
"But ash chokes... and blinds," he declared.
With a brutal sweep of his right arm transformed into volcanic rock, Altair threw the crushed coal dust and super-heated spiritual ash he had squeezed in his fist directly into Gorno's face.
The Auction Master had no time to close his eyelids. The microscopic embers impacted his corneas, melting them instantly.
Gorno let out a deafening, high-pitched roar, a mix of pure pain and terror, dropping the heavy warhammer and bringing his massive hands to his scorched eyes.
"Damn rat! I'll kill you! I'm going to tear you to pieces!"
Blind, in agony, and furious beyond reason, the giant began to punch the air around him with his Qi-wrapped fists, smashing the heavy desk, breaking the support columns, and pulverizing the masonry walls. The office became a deadly blender of flying debris and out-of-control brute force.
Altair did not flee the path of the blows. He moved into the center of the danger. His body, hyper-reinforced by the caloric absorption from the fireplace and anesthetized by the adrenaline of his lineage, was denser, harder, and deadlier than ever in his life.
He dodged a blind punch from Gorno that would have crushed a building's facade, sliding under the giant's immense guard. As he moved, he kicked the broken fragment of the heavy black sword Samael had given him, which lay discarded on the floor, flipping it up with his foot and catching it in mid-air with his left hand.
But Altair didn't attack with an elegant fencing technique. He attacked with the pure instinct of a cornered predator.
Taking advantage of Gorno's disorientation, Altair jumped, using the shattered desk as a platform, and launched himself onto the Auction Master's massive back. With a brutal downward strike, he drove the broken blade of the black sword into the vulnerable joint between the shoulder plate and the neck of Gorno's armor.
The giant howled in pain, but Altair wasn't finished.
Using his free right hand—the hand transformed into a gray volcanic rock claw—he violently latched onto the front of Gorno's exposed throat.
"BURN!" Altair roared with all the fury of his shattered soul.
He channeled all the extreme heat his body had absorbed from the fireplace, all the energy generated by his broken bones, and injected it all at once through the tips of his volcanic stone fingers directly into Gorno's skin and respiratory tracts.
The effect was devastating. The skin of the giant's neck, the flesh of his esophagus, and the jugular veins began to boil and carbonize internally within seconds. Gorno tried to scream, but his vocal cords turned to charcoal. He began to suffocate, thrashing violently like a rabid bear, slamming his own back against the remaining walls of the office, trying to crush Altair to make him let go.
The impact against the stone broke two more ribs in Altair's body. He tasted blood flooding his throat, but his ashen grip was unbreakable. He clung to Gorno's neck like a tick from hell, injecting more and more destructive fire.
The struggle lasted barely a minute that felt like an eternity. Slowly, the giant's immense strength waned. His knees buckled. Gorno fell face-first onto the rubble of his office, trembling in agonizing spasms as his throat finished cooking from the inside, until finally, he exhaled his last choked breath and stopped moving.
The sepulchral silence, broken only by the crackle of small fires in the curtains, descended upon the destroyed room.
Altair let go, falling heavily onto the back of the immense corpse. He sat straddling his executioner. He coughed violently, staining Gorno's armor with blood and black saliva.
He raised his hands. The gray volcanic stone skin was cracking and fading, turning back into pale, human flesh covered in red scars. The pain, which had been suppressed by the Ash Frenzy, returned with a fury multiplied by ten. His entire body was a symphony of anatomical agony. He was sure he would die of internal bleeding if he didn't receive Saint Grade medical attention in less than twenty minutes.
But in the absolute center of his destroyed Dantian, something had changed. He felt a minuscule seed. A small flame of dense, consuming gray fire, spinning slowly, anchoring his soul to life.
The Ash Fire. It had been born.
Altair forced himself to stand. His legs faltered, but he didn't fall. He grabbed the handle of the broken piece of the black sword that was still lodged in Gorno's collarbone and yanked it out with a strong pull. He positioned himself over the giant's burned neck, raised the blade, and, with three dull, tearing strikes, severed the immense head from the inert body of his enemy.
Dragging his bloodstained feet, Altair exited the ruined office. He walked slowly down the long, carpeted hallway that was now filled with smoke from the burning rugs, leaving a trail of red drops, until he reached the marble railing of the balcony overlooking the main auction auditorium.
Below, the Morningstars' tactical massacre had concluded.
Golden City's mercenary elite, the arrogant sect leaders, and the slave traders lay on the ground, turned into a grim carpet of scattered body parts. Not a single enemy was left alive in the stands. The building reeked of void ozone and vaporized blood.
Malak's Legion of Shadows held firm on the perimeters, guarding the locked iron doors. Eris walked among the lower-level boxes, interrogating and incinerating the corpses of the financiers to extract their spatial rings. Kael was leaning casually against a mountain of dismembered guards, wiping the evaporated blood from his immense sword with a rag, while looking up.
And in the exact center of the main stage, surrounded by destruction, but completely immaculate, without a single bloodstain on his elegant shadow robe, was Samael Morningstar.
Altair leaned against the upper balcony railing. His knees finally gave out, and he fell heavily, unable to stay standing a second longer. With his last breath of conscious energy, he hoisted Gorno's heavy, burned head over the railing and simply let it fall.
The severed head plummeted through the abyss of the auditorium. It struck the wooden stage with a wet thud and rolled several meters, leaving a crimson trail, until it came to a halt exactly one meter from the tip of Samael's black boot.
Samael looked at the Auction Master's mutilated head, evaluating the chemical burn damage to the flesh. Then, he raised his golden and violet gaze to the upper balcony, meeting Altair's half-closed gray eyes.
The gears of the universe clicked in the Sovereign's mind.
[System: Recruitment Mission COMPLETED]
Target: Altair Ashborne. Evaluation: Critical Success. The subject demonstrated an indomitable will far exceeding the baseline estimate. Special Bonus: The subject has awakened the core of the "Ash Fire" (Flame of Assimilation) through his own means and severe physical trauma, exponentially increasing his future growth potential. Final Status: Karmic Debt Fulfilled. Absolute lineage loyalty secured. Reward Granted: Promotion awarded. The subject is officially recognized as the TENTH SEQUENCE of the Morningstar Family.
Samael smiled. It was not a mocking smile, but one of genuine predatory recognition. The boy had been through hell and emerged with fire in his hands.
"Kael," Samael said, his voice crossing the great hall with a chilling stillness. "Go up to the balcony and collect our new monster. He has earned his title with blood."
"At your command, Patriarch," Kael replied, sheathing his Magma Fang and flexing his legs. With a single explosive leap, channeling his fire Qi into the soles of his feet, he vertically crossed the thirty meters separating the stage from the VIP balcony, landing softly next to Altair's unconscious body.
Kael looked at the shattered body, the broken bones and scars, and felt a deep martial respect. He carefully hefted him onto his broad, armored shoulder.
"He's shattered on an atomic level, boy," Kael reported from above, observing the young man's pitiful state. "But his Qi core... feels heavy. Dense, like burning lead. I've never felt an energy like it."
"He is a King forged in scum, Kael," Samael replied, holding his hand over Gorno's severed head. The Laws of Space and Void converged in his palm, and the head disintegrated into fine dust, erased from reality without leaving a biological trace. "Let's take him home. Elder Marcus and Livia will have a lot of work to do to rebuild his body and forge his sword."
Samael turned to face the devastated auditorium.
"Violeta, Elara, vault status?" he asked mentally.
"Security chambers looted entirely, Patriarch," Elara's cold voice responded. "We have recovered ancient manuals, a Heaven Grade arsenal, and enough high-purity spiritual stones to fund the Sequences' training for a decade. In addition, we have secured the eleven surviving members of the Silver Ash Clan. They are safe in an underground spatial bubble prepared by Violeta, awaiting extraction."
"Excellent. Prepare the coordinates for mass translocation. We are withdrawing."
Samael looked at the hundreds of corpses of nobles and mercenaries filling the stands and aisles. Rich men from foreign empires, thieves from minor sects, assassins, and slave lords. All those who had laughed, bid, and celebrated the misery of his blood. Not a single one was left alive. The mandate had been fulfilled to perfection.
"Malak," Samael ordered, and the immense Sovereign of the Scythe descended from the shadows of the ceiling to float by his side.
"Your command, Master."
"Recall the Hundred Shadows. Seal the doors of this building with your chains of darkness and make sure nothing can open them from the outside for the next twelve hours."
Samael raised his hand toward the ceiling. He did not channel bright Qi, stellar light, or magma. He channeled pure Void. A small spark of gray and black fire, barely a few centimeters in diameter, formed at the tip of his finger. It emitted no ambient heat, but the light around the spark seemed to bend, devoured by the density of its destructive power.
"Let Golden City learn the cost of dealing with the blood of our lineage," Samael whispered, dropping the spark of gray and black fire into the center of the wooden stage and corpses.
The instant the void fire touched the dried blood on the floor, it didn't erupt like a gunpowder explosion. It expanded silently, devouring organic matter, gold, iron, and masonry at a terrifying speed. The walls of the immense Abyssal Auction House began to burn in gray flames, which emitted no smoke but reduced everything to structural ash.
Samael turned around, and as Violeta opened a spatial rift portal behind him, the Sovereign of the Void crossed the threshold along with Kael, who carried the unconscious Tenth Sequence on his shoulder.
Minutes later, deep within the canyon, the great Auction House burned in a silent, gray inferno. When the void flames finally consumed themselves hours later, there would be no ruins or salvageable rubble left, only an immense mass grave covered in pearl-gray dust. A mountain of corpses fused with the ground that would serve as a mute, indelible monument.
The Morningstar Family's first blow had been struck, and the hunt of the gods was just beginning.