Chapter 121: The Wrinkled Space and the New Blood
The silence in the immense abyss of the Golden City canyon was not peace; it was the void left by pure destruction. Deep within the pit, the Abyssal Auction House burned with the gray fire of the Void, consuming itself in a sepulchral silence that was far more terrifying than any roaring fire.
Two kilometers above the ground, on the flat obsidian roof of a commercial watchtower embedded in the canyon wall, Samael Morningstar and his assault squad prepared for extraction.
Kael held the shattered and unconscious body of Altair Ashborne over his armored shoulder, the young man's breathing an agonizing, shallow wheeze. Behind them, Violeta and Elara kept the eleven survivors of the Silver Ash Clan inside a protective spatial force field, the faces of the former slaves illuminated by terror and awe. Malak, the General of Shadows, floated on the perimeter, his black mantle billowing with the residual energy of the massacre.
"The array coordinates in the Citadel are locked, Patriarch," Violeta communicated telepathically. Her right eye, a diamond blue, shone intensely as she calculated the curvature of space. "Stabilization for a mass jump with thirteen people, eleven of them with damaged Qi channels, requires perfect synchronization. If the spatial tunnel oscillates, the pressure will blow them apart."
Samael nodded, his inscrutable face illuminated by the faint stellar glow. He was the undisputed master of the Laws of Space in the family, but the delicacy required to transport injured mortals required focus. He raised his right hand, his fingers drawing invisible arcs in the night air. The fabric of reality began to ripple before him, tearing slowly to reveal a violet and platinum void speckled with static stars.
"Keep them in the center of the tunnel, Violeta," Samael ordered. "I will be the anchor..."
Samael did not finish the sentence.
Suddenly, the gravity on the roof multiplied tenfold. The air, which seconds before was biting and cold, became as dense as liquid mercury. The members of the Silver Ash Clan fell to their knees, groaning in pain, while Kael grunted, bending his legs to support the combined weight of Altair and the external pressure.
The spatial portal Samael was opening flickered violently and shrank to half its size, contained by a massive external force.
An aura of golden, oppressive light descended from the sky, illuminating the entire canyon as if a second sun had been born at midnight. The light was not warm; it burned with a despotic authority.
"RATS!"
The shout was not a physical sound. It was a projection of Divine Sense so dense that it made the canyon rocks tremble.
A hundred meters above the watchtower, floating in the air surrounded by a ring of golden runic seals that blocked the stars, a man appeared. He wore imperial armor of solid gold and a red cape that billowed fiercely. His eyes burned with a fury that distorted the space around him. Behind him, descending like meteors, appeared a phalanx of fifty elite city guards, all in the Transcendence Realm, mounted on wind Wyvern Beasts.
It was the Lord of Golden City. A cultivator who had ruled the continent's mercenary cesspool for a century. A true expert in the Saint Realm (Stage 5).
The City Lord had sensed the annihilation of the Auction House. His main source of income, the black market that funded his private empire, had been reduced to gray ash in a matter of minutes. And now, he looked at those responsible.
"You have destroyed my property! You have desecrated my soil!" roared the City Lord, pointing a heavy gold spear at the roof. "Do you think you can come to Golden City, cause a massacre, and flee using a simple spatial tunnel! I know the Law of Spatial Lockdown! No one enters or leaves this canyon without my permission!"
With a flick of his spear, the golden seals in the sky expanded, forming an immense dome of energy that covered the upper half of the canyon. The pressure on the roof increased again. Violeta and Samael's portal creaked audibly, the violet edges trembling, threatening to collapse and crush whoever was inside.
Kael half-drew his immense claymore, magma bubbling on the blade.
"Patriarch, let me go up and clip his wings! I can buy time!"
"No, Kael," Samael said, his serene and cold voice cutting through the panic like a scalpel. "You have a critical patient on your shoulder. Every second the boy spends exposed to this pressure, his organs will liquefy. Drop him and we will lose the Tenth Sequence before he wakes up."
Samael lowered his right arm. He did not attempt to force the portal open against the golden array. Instead, he took a step forward, moving away from the group and approaching the edge of the roof, standing directly exposed to the gaze of the Stage 5 Saint.
The City Lord smiled arrogantly, believing the invader was surrendering to the superiority of his cultivation.
"Surrender, and your death will be swift. I will shatter your soul and use your bones to rebuild my auction house. Guards, kill the minions and bring me that arrogant fool's head!"
The fifty Wyvern riders dive-bombed, their spears shining with deadly Qi, ready to slaughter Violeta, Elara, and the immobilized slaves.
Samael did not unsheathe his Odachi. He didn't even assume a combat stance. He simply looked up at the City Lord, and his eyes—the violet pupil and the crimson one—dilated, shining with the cold mathematics of a collapsing universe.
"Your spatial laws," Samael murmured, his voice projecting directly into the City Lord's mind with terrifying clarity, "are those of an ape playing with threads on a loom he does not understand. You believe walls protect you. You believe distance matters."
Samael raised his right hand toward the sky, his fingers extended. The Crown of Eternal Dawn flickered on his head, calculating thousands of variables in a microsecond.
"[Law of Space: Coordinate Collapse]."
Samael suddenly clenched his fist.
The world folded.
It was not an optical illusion, nor a massive energy attack. The physical and dimensional reality between the watchtower and the sky occupied by the City Lord simply wrinkled, as if a god had taken a piece of paper and joined two diametrically opposed points by pinching the sheet.
The Stage 5 Saint's golden "Seal of Absolute Confinement," designed to block standard teleports and minor tears, faced a structural collapse. The array was not cut; the space in which it existed ceased to exist.
The hundred-meter distance separating Samael from the flying army compressed to zero in a fraction of a millisecond.
The fifty guards on the Wyverns, who were descending in perfect formation, were caught in the apex of the spatial fold. Attempting to move through a space that was now hyper-compressed, physics collapsed. Earth Grade armors, spears, wind beasts, and human bodies were shredded at a molecular level. There was no explosion of blood, because space itself wrinkled them, reducing fifty elite warriors to a cloud of atomic dust that rained silently over the canyon.
The Lord of Golden City, floating in the center of the formation, felt pure terror when the reality around him fractured. The collapsed space opened a bridge of violet and platinum void directly inside the area of his personal barrier.
Unlike his guards, the City Lord was a Stage 5 Saint. His survival instincts reacted a millisecond before his body was shredded. Channeling 100% of his vital energy in an act of absolute desperation, he propelled himself backward, burning years of longevity to force his body out of the coordinates that were being crushed.
But Samael Morningstar was a predator, and his attack was calculated with sadistic precision.
The City Lord managed to dodge total annihilation, but the edge of the spatial "wrinkle"—a plane as sharp as the end of the universe—caught his right side.
There was no resistance. The Saint Grade golden aura shield, the imperial breastplate, and the flesh hardened by millennia of cultivation were completely ignored, because the damage did not come from an external force; the space his body occupied "sank" and disappeared.
SCHLAAK!
A wet, dull sound echoed in the night sky.
The Lord of Golden City let out a bloodcurdling shriek that chilled the blood of any citizen still awake in the depths of the canyon. His entire right arm, his shoulder, and a third of his rib cage, including several vital organs, simply ceased to exist. They had been excised from reality.
The Stage 5 Saint fell from the sky like a bird with a broken wing, enveloped in a geyser of golden blood, landing kilometers away in an impact that shook the city, destroying several buildings in his fall. He would survive, but his cultivation had been horribly mutilated and his pride crushed forever.
Samael lowered his fist. With a dull snap, space unrolled, returning to its original shape.
BOOM!
The displaced air blasted outward to fill the vacuum, creating a deafening shockwave. The golden containment array, deprived of its master and shattered at its core, dissolved into glowing dust.
Samael did not look at where the City Lord had fallen. He spun on his heel, his dark robe immaculate, and walked back toward the violet portal that now throbbed with perfect stability, free of any interference.
"Violeta, Elara," Samael said, his voice returning to absolute calm. "Guide them home."
Violeta nodded, pure admiration shining in her heterochromatic face. She guided the terrified and reverent members of the Silver Ash Clan toward the dimensional rift, quickly followed by Elara and Malak. Kael walked past Samael, carrying Altair, nodding with a fierce, mute smile at his Patriarch before disappearing into the void.
Samael was the last to enter. Before crossing, he took one last look at Golden City. The cesspool of the world was silent, humbled, and burning in gray flames. The message had been delivered.
He took a step into the portal, and the rift closed behind him, erasing any trace of the Morningstars' raid.
Thousands of kilometers away, in the freezing, barren north, the air vibrated on the main reception platform of the Morningstar Citadel.
The transport array erupted in a flash of violet and platinum light. Samael and his squad appeared in a perfect circle on the obsidian floor.
The thermal difference was instantaneous. From the suffocating heat of the canyon, they transitioned to the cold, pure atmosphere of the Dragon Bone Desert.
Samael gave no time to breathe. Before the portal's glow faded completely, his voice was already issuing orders.
"Elder Marcus! Elder Livia!" his voice projected across the inner courtyards, echoing in the lower levels of the fortress. "Come out to the main platform! Red-grade medical emergency!"
The double doors of the great hall swung open violently.
Livia, the Supreme of Alchemy, came running out, her aura of emerald light and life throbbing anxiously. Behind her, the ground shook with the heavy footsteps of Marcus, the Master Blacksmith, his arms stained with soot and a look of alarm on his massive face.
"Patriarch, are we under attack?" bellowed Marcus, his eyes scanning for threats.
Samael shook his head and pointed at Kael, who had just carefully deposited Altair's bloodied and unconscious body on one of the obsidian tactical tables in the courtyard.
"No. I brought you a reconstruction project," Samael said.
Livia approached hurriedly, her hands glowing with green healing energy. As she placed her fingers on Altair's bare, scarred chest, her maternal face contorted into a grimace of pure horror.
"By the Ancient Heavens!" Livia gasped. "He's... he's eighty percent dead. His ribs are splintered and piercing his lungs. His collarbone is shattered. But that's not the worst of it... his meridians. They have been artificially degraded, filled with rustic metallic poison. His Qi channels are literally calcified. How is this boy's heart still beating?"
"Because he's stubborn," Kael grunted, standing next to the table, crossing his thick arms. "And because he's too pissed off to die."
"Don't try to heal his bones the traditional way, Livia," Samael warned, approaching the table, his runic gaze evaluating the faint fluctuation of the boy's core. "This boy possesses the lineage of the Monarch of Ashes Physique. Orthodox medicine will not work on him."
Marcus frowned, his copper beard bristling.
"Monarch of Ashes? I've read about that in the ancient archives of the empire. It's a cursed lineage. It requires destruction to grow stronger. If Livia closes his wounds with wood Qi, his muscles will reject the gentle healing and necrotize."
"Exactly," Samael nodded. "That's why you are here, Marcus. His body is not a garden that needs to be watered; it is a broken sword that needs to be forged anew."
Samael took a small vial from his spatial ring. It was a residue of the gray flames Altair had expelled during his battle with Gorno.
"Livia, I want you to extract the essence of the 'Ash Fire' from this residue and combine it with earth-type beast marrow. Marcus, you will use the Underground Forge facilities and the Seed of the Divine Forge I gave you. You are not going to heal him; you are going to fuse his broken bones with purified spiritual slag at high temperatures."
Livia paled, her healer instincts rebelling at the thought.
"Patriarch... that's not medicine, it's unheard-of torture. If we melt his bone structure with spiritual metals while he's alive, the pain of the process will destroy his mind before his body recovers. It's a gruesome death."
Samael looked at Altair's unconscious face. The young man, even in a coma, had a furrowed brow and clenched fists, holding onto the pain as his only possession.
"If his mind were fragile, Livia, he would have died years ago chained in the darkness of Golden City," Samael said, his voice devoid of pity but full of respect. "This boy threw himself into burning embers to assassinate a giant who outclassed him by six cultivation stages. His mind is already broken; we are only going to provide him with a vessel that can bear the weight of his demons."
Samael turned to face the two Elders.
"Take him to the Underground Forge chambers. If he does not survive the process before dawn, bury him in the garden of heroes with the clan's highest honors. But if he opens his eyes..."
Samael's crimson and violet eyes shone in the darkness of the courtyard.
"If he opens his eyes, Marcus, forge heavy armor and a claymore for him. Because that boy will be invested as the Tenth Sequence of the Morningstar Family."
Livia nodded solemnly. Marcus lifted Altair's body with the same delicacy he would use for a national treasure and, along with the alchemist, disappeared through the massive doors toward the lower levels of the fortress.
As they took Altair away, Seraphina appeared in the shadows of the upper portico. She wore night-silk robes, her silver-blue hair falling freely down her back. The Ice Crown of the Blue Phoenix was not materialized, but her imperial aura was unmistakable. She walked toward Samael with the grace of a deity, followed by Lilith, the Great Elder, whose red eyes scanned the returning group.
Lilith was the first to speak upon seeing the eleven survivors of the Silver Ash Clan, trembling in a corner of the courtyard under Violeta's supervision.
The Great Elder, who rarely showed emotion other than bloodlust, stopped dead in her tracks. Her eyes widened in genuine shock.
"My vassals..." Lilith whispered, approaching them with quick steps. The freed slaves instantly knelt, weeping as they recognized their former sovereign. "I thought... I thought the Valois had exterminated your line down to the last root."
"They were sold like cattle to the southern mercenaries, Aunt," Kael said, disgust evident in his tone. "They were going to be auctioned off in Golden City."
Lilith stroked the ashen hair of one of the kneeling old women. Maternal fury, the deadliest of all the wraths harbored by the Great Elder, began to radiate from her body in waves of smoky heat.
"Golden City..." Lilith hissed, her fangs lengthening imperceptibly. "Patriarch, I demand the mobilization of my division. I will march south and I won't leave a single stone of that disgusting canyon in its place. I will make them regret ever being born."
"We already took care of the redecorating, Aunt," Samael replied calmly, clasping his hands behind his back. "The Abyssal Auction House is gray dust. The Lord of Golden City, a Stage 5 Saint, is mutilated and in a coma. The message that the Morningstars do not forgive debts is written in the southern sky with blood and fire."
Lilith looked at him, her fury giving way to a sadistic, satisfied respect, before turning back to tend to her fallen vassals.
Seraphina arrived beside Samael, intertwining her left arm with his. Her cold, ethereal touch was a perfect contrast to the heat of combat that Samael still exhaled.
"You've been busy, my husband," Seraphina murmured, her diamond-blue eye evaluating him from head to toe, looking for injuries that didn't exist. "A rescue, a recruitment, and a declaration of war in a single night?"
"It was a productive night," Samael conceded, allowing himself to relax the tension in his shoulders in the presence of his empress.
"And it wasn't the only declaration of war," Kael interjected, wiping his armor. "We ran into trash from the Purple Light Sect at the auction. And worse, we had a run-in with Young Master Lorian of the Cryon Family from the Stellar Ice Empire."
Seraphina arched a perfect eyebrow, and the temperature around her dropped a couple of degrees.
"The Cryons? Arrogant governors of the polar north. Their Patriarch is known for being vindictive and overly protective. I assume you were diplomatic, Kael."
Kael smiled, baring his teeth, and touched his jaw.
"I broke his lower maxilla into several pieces, crushed his skull, and was going to skewer him, but his daddy gave him a Grand Saint talisman and he managed to escape, dragging his dead guards with him. I suppose right now he's in his ice palace, babbling our name through a feeding tube."
A heavy silence fell over the obsidian courtyard.
Attacking a young man from a great imperial family, one of the superpowers that rivaled the orthodox sects, was not a simple skirmish; it was the prologue to a full-scale continental invasion. The Cryon Family would not tolerate such humiliation, especially coming from a clan they believed weakened by the recent siege.
Samael looked at the freezing stars of the north, toward where the Ice Empire lay.
He felt no worry. He felt no tactical anxiety. He felt anticipation.
"The infiltration phase is over," Samael said, his voice projecting to those present: Seraphina, Lilith, Kael, and the Sequences watching from the shadows. "We have reclaimed our Tenth Sequence. We have rearmed our forge. And we have humiliated an empire."
Samael turned, his robe billowing in the night breeze, his eyes shining with the ambition of a dragon that has finally emerged from its cave.
"Prepare the Legions. Let the Sequences sleep with their swords drawn. When the Cryons come south seeking revenge for their wounded pup..."
Samael smiled, a smile that promised absolute apocalypse.
"...we will be the ones to freeze their world and shatter their crowns. The Era of Conquest has begun."