Chapter 128: The Twilight of the Crystal and the Shattered Star (Part 3)
While at the southern end of the shattered wall Grand Elder Lilith reduced the colossal Bicephalous Chimera to a mountain of gray dust, altering the laws of entropy with her immense wings of smoke, a completely different kind of hell was unleashed in the northern sector of the Morningstar Imperial Capital.
It wasn't a hell of heat, flames, or ash. It was a hell of pure sound, vibration, and speed.
The second Stage 3 Saint Realm beast that General Krow had released from the containment pits of his orbital Destroyer was not a slow mastodon designed to demolish walls through sheer weight. It was a biological assassin designed to shred armies before they could even draw their weapons.
From the thick curtain of the black snowstorm emerged the Leviathan of Sonic Friction.
It was a terrifying insectoid abomination, an armored centipede over eighty meters long, whose segmented body levitated mere centimeters above the ground, sustained by the repulsion of ultra-high frequency sound waves. Its exoskeleton was not composed of chitin or ice, but of hundreds of overlapping plates made of a biological alloy of Stellar Steel and vibrating cartilage. It had no eyes. Its head was a sharp cone of rotating blades and acoustic sensory organs that pulsated grotesquely.
The Leviathan didn't need to roar. Its simple and mere movement across the battlefield generated a maddening noise.
Its body plates vibrated at tens of thousands of hertz per second. This extreme kinetic friction not only melted the snow around it, turning it into boiling plasma, but also generated a sharp, piercing, and omnidirectional hum.
The Morningstar clan disciples who were hundreds of meters away, even those protected behind the inner walls, fell to their knees screaming in agony. The sound didn't attack their ears; it attacked the water inside their cells. Their eardrums burst, their eyeballs filled with popped capillaries, and their blood literally began to boil inside their veins due to the molecular vibration.
The monster moved erratically, tracing zigzags at near-supersonic speeds. Its target was the main breach of the northern wall, where dozens of wounded blacksmiths and apprentices were trying to evacuate. If the Leviathan crossed the gates, it wouldn't need to attack anyone; its mere vibration while passing through the citadel's narrow streets would liquefy the internal organs of thousands of mortals within a two-kilometer radius.
But the path to the city was not empty.
Standing alone in the absolute center of the immense plain of cracked crystal separating the beast from the gates, was a solitary figure. She didn't wear heavy armor like Kael, nor did she exude Draven's raw violence.
Seraphina Morningstar.
The Empress of the family wore exquisite, long silk robes of a blue so deep it seemed to absorb the little light in the sky, embroidered with silver threads forming intricate patterns of closed lotuses. Her long hair, a beautiful silvery-blue, cascaded down her back, swaying in an unnatural breeze that only she seemed to control.
Her slender and regal figure radiated an absolute calm and authority that diametrically clashed with the sonic chaos of the environment.
Upon her head rested the Ice Crown of the Blue Phoenix, a High Heaven Grade divine artifact. The crown was carved entirely from millennial glacier crystal, with two phoenix wings rising from her temples and meeting in the center of her forehead. At the heart of the diadem, a Blue Phoenix Tear pulsed softly with a liquid flame trapped inside. A cold mist, like veils of white silk, constantly cascaded down the sides of her beautiful, pale face.
Her eyes, a deep and translucent blue, contained a perfect silver ring spinning slowly and calmly around her pupils. She looked at the immense sonic calamity approaching at the speed of a missile, and her expression didn't show the slightest trace of fear.
For Seraphina, that beast wasn't an insurmountable terror. It was simply a noisy insect interrupting her daughter Celeste's sleep.
"Your noise... is of an unacceptable vulgarity," Seraphina pronounced.
Her voice, of lethal calm and diplomacy, did not compete with the Leviathan's deafening noise; instead, the frequency of her words seemed to freeze the sound waves in the air.
The beast, blind but immensely perceptive to sound and heat, detected the only living figure in its trajectory. The Friction Leviathan altered its course, its body plates buzzing with such violence that the air itself seemed to catch fire around it. It launched itself straight toward the fragile woman standing in the snow, intending to run her through, shred her, and liquefy her in a tenth of a second.
Seraphina did not unsheathe any flashy weapon. She brought her delicate right hand to the hilt of her slender, elegant curved crystal sword, sheathed in white jade.
She inhaled softly.
The [Imperial Lotus Sutra – Vol. 1: The Sovereign's Awakening] began to circulate through her recently expanded Stage 3 Saint meridians.
Instantly, her Sutra's fundamental passive, the [Aura of the Mother-of-Pearl Lotus], silently unfurled.
A mystical fragrance, immensely intoxicating and pure, similar to the scent of frozen dew on white jade petals, emanated from her body and expanded in a perfect 100-meter spherical radius. It wasn't a physical attack. It was a projection of her pure and absolute Empress's Aura, an invisible pressure dictating who had the right to raise their weapon and who should kneel.
When the head of the gigantic Leviathan crossed the hundred-meter mark, the beast suffered an instinctive collapse.
Despite being a biological monster designed to kill mercilessly, its primitive Sea of Consciousness was struck by a crushing "heaviness of conscience." Its murderous instincts clouded over. An invisible, divine force whispered to its rudimentary soul that attacking the deity before it was the worst of sacrileges. The monster hesitated, its supersonic speed dropping drastically, its movements momentarily becoming clumsy and erratic as its body physically resisted harming someone exuding such majesty.
That millisecond of hesitation was all an imperial assassin needed.
Seraphina unsheathed.
The Qi around her violently shifted to a pale cyan dotted with streaks of silver and deep black. She applied the doctrines of the Blue Jade Manual: [Waltz of the Lunar Frost].
"[Reflection of the Moon on Ice]."
Seraphina took a graceful and immensely swift step to the left, gliding over the snow like a skater on a pristine lake. Around her small feet, there were no vulgar explosions of energy; instead, the ground crystallized into beautiful, perfect ice lotus flower patterns with every brush of her steps.
As she moved, her body seemed to visually "flake." Three figures exactly identical to her were left behind in her original position, made of dark, translucent ice that refracted the scarce light of the grayish sun like an antique jade mirror. They weren't cheap illusions made of simple mist; they emitted a faint lunar glow that confused the Leviathan's already altered sonic radar.
The giant centipede, desperate to shake off the mystical terror of the Lotus Aura, blindly attacked the first figure its sensors detected. Its frontal blades and its inertia of thousands of tons crashed into the dark ice figure.
But the copy didn't shatter like common glass.
It imploded. Silently.
The figure instantly turned into a dense cloud of billions of razor-sharp needles of condensed frost that embedded themselves deeply into the jaws, acoustic sensors, and frontal plates of the Stage 3 beast. The trap didn't inflict massive physical damage, but it covered the monster's sensitive organs in a thick, restrictive layer of instant black ice.
The Leviathan let out an agonizing screech. The ice in its vibrating joints halted the friction, causing it immense mechanical pain and exposing its vital core, which glowed orange-red beneath its scales.
From the right flank, the real Seraphina emerged, moving with an unreal fluidity. The air around her had grown heavy, and the deafening sound of the battlefield had been drastically muffled, as if the entire area were submerged in a heavy, serene nocturnal snowfall.
Her eyes shone with a flash of blue will-o'-the-wisp, emphasizing her mastery in the High Earth grade of the Blue Jade.
She raised her sword, which, bathed in her Qi, became completely invisible, leaving only the ephemeral reflection of a waning moon shining where the deadly steel should be.
"[Slash of the Frigid Midnight]."
Seraphina executed a wide, graceful horizontal slash. There was no noise of metal tearing the wind, only an incredibly fine, elegant whistle, like a spider's silk cutting through a dewdrop.
An immense arc of energy unleashed a shockwave resembling a huge crescent moon made of liquid crystal. The arc traveled and cleaved through the middle of the Leviathan's thick, eighty-meter-long body.
The attack didn't physically destroy the monster's plates; the beast was Stage 3 and its defense was immense. But the arc of light turned the thick scales of biological steel "transparent" and rigid upon contact.
The monster didn't spill a single drop of blood. At the exact spot of the immense horizontal cut, the beast's dark skin and plates turned a sickly, pale porcelain white. From that invisible wound, beautiful and lethal "frost flowers" began to grow and rapidly branch out toward the rest of the creature's lower body.
The centipede's liquid, superheated blood froze instantly. Its muscles and hundreds of hind legs were halted in an eternal pose, completely paralyzed by the piercing ice. Half of its gigantic body was turned into a useless, immovable crystal statue.
The Leviathan, terrified and incapacitated in its lower half, began to thrash wildly with its upper half, crawling and tearing up the ground in a desperate attempt to free itself. It understood that the small creature before it was not prey, but an executioner.
Desperate, the monster resorted to its most devastating area-of-effect attack.
It opened its shattered jaws and activated its vibratory core to the absolute limit of Stage 3, surpassing its own biological limits. It was going to unleash a "Seismic Rupture Scream," an ultrasonic attack that would not only shatter Seraphina but pulverize the atomic structure of the walls behind her. The air in front of the beast warped and turned black due to the accumulating destructive pressure.
Seraphina didn't run. She didn't try to dodge it. She was the Empress. She did not flee from her own domain.
She elegantly closed her eyes and allowed the [Ice Crown of the Blue Phoenix] on her head to do the job it was designed for.
The divine diadem recognized the immense hostility and impending attack. The artifact activated its second major ability: the [Song of the Winter Phoenix].
The Phoenix Tear gem on Seraphina's forehead shone with a blinding stellar blue. The crown emitted, only once in the entire battle, an ultrasonic and majestic screech. It was a sound evoking an ice deity resurrecting from a frozen lake.
The Phoenix's song crashed directly against the sonic wave the Leviathan was trying to expel. But the artifact didn't compete in brute force; the Phoenix's Song was an attack of pure spiritual and mental control. The divine sound penetrated through the beast's frequencies and struck its core directly.
Instantly, the flow of boiling Qi in the monster's massive meridians froze solid. The beast's seismic attack crumbled pathetically in the air before being fired. The Leviathan fell mute, its vibrating body paralyzed by a nervous system shock for five precious, long seconds, completely vulnerable.
Seraphina opened her deep translucent eyes.
«For the empire we will forge... and for my daughter's peace. You will die here.»
Her connection to the White Jade Ring on her finger detonated her reincarnation memories. For a second, Seraphina didn't see the desolate crystal sand desert. She saw flashes of her past life. She saw immense, opulent jade thrones. She saw entire armies of gods and primordial cultivators bowing in terror at her mere presence.
The ring acted as an anchor, allowing her to assimilate that cosmic majesty and channel it into her current body. Her elegance and imperial coldness solidified into something almost palpable.
She raised her pale left hand and fixed her blue gaze directly on the paralyzed beast's visible core.
"[Mandate of the Fragmented Will]."
Seraphina forcefully "planted" a lotus seed of pure mental power into the Stage 3 beast's collapsed Sea of Consciousness. She didn't try to control it like a puppet to fight for her; the beast's mind was too chaotic and wild for fine, sustained control. Instead, she used the absolute suggestion of a divine sovereign punishing a rebellious vassal.
"Bow your filthy head before me," Seraphina ordered, her voice echoing in the monster's mind. "Surrender and die."
The monster fought back. The savage survival instinct of a Saint Realm beast was immense. The Leviathan growled, the boiling blood in its brain trying to repel the mental control, but the Imperial Lotus seed quickly took root in its primal fears. The monster's body, betraying its own will to live, obeyed out of pure instinctual subordination to a hierarchically superior being.
The centipede's gigantic front legs buckled. Its immense armored head, which a second earlier had sought to pulverize the city, descended trembling and rested humiliatingly on the snow at Seraphina's feet, exposed and docile. Its animal mind was trapped between the biological desire to attack and the divine command to surrender, leaving it in a state of agonizing paralysis.
But the beast was Stage 3. A Consummate Saint.
Seraphina's mental control at that level, without the aid of Samael's dual cultivation, couldn't permanently subdue a wild deity without suffering fatigue.
The silver ring in Seraphina's pupils began to spin chaotically. Her own meridians started to protest at the herculean effort of bending a being of the same Realm. The beast began to tremble violently, its immense mass preparing to break the mental command. Its frontal blades began to spin again, emitting a shrill sound of protest, ready to launch one last, blind, desperate suicidal attack.
Seraphina knew she couldn't hold it back any longer with mere words. It was time to silence the world.
It was the moment of the Incomplete Awakening. It was time to impose her Law.
Seraphina didn't back down. She walked with slow, determined steps toward the immense, trembling head of the Leviathan struggling to rise. As she advanced, the passive of the Aura of the Lunar Shroud flowed from her, emitting a cold so subtle yet so dense that it violently drained the beast's meager stamina, turning the world in the monster's eyes into a dark, nightmarish blue hue.
Seraphina closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, connecting with the very core of the universe.
"[Law of the Imperial Silence]."
The universe around her stopped responding to traditional physics.
Seraphina didn't manipulate the ambient temperature to freeze the air, as any vulgar ice user would. She imposed her Proto-Law, a Law that manipulated the "Right to Movement." She dictated that, in her presence, nothing had the cosmic authorization to stir.
The Frost of Subjugation formed beneath her feet, expanding toward the Leviathan. This frost didn't freeze the monster's scales; it subdued its will. When the aura of this Semi-Law touched the beast, the cold didn't attack its skin. It directly attacked its spinal cord of energy and its hundreds of legs. The immense monster felt a primitive, dark, and absolute terror. A crushing and colossal gravitational pressure, born from the karmic weight of an ancient imperial throne, forced it to slouch even further against the ground. Its furious will to fight was completely numbed, its brain invaded by a paralyzing cold.
The Friction Leviathan tried to launch a desperate swipe with its vibrating jaws, an attack at a speed that should have cleaved Seraphina in half.
But the Karmic Friction of Seraphina's Law came into play.
In a twenty-meter radius around the Empress, the air became visually dense, rapidly filling with a beautiful yet terrifying, glowing silver mist, similar to crushed lotus dust floating in water.
When the giant centipede's fierce and hyper-fast attack entered this silver mist, it didn't freeze into a block of ice. Its speed simply dropped by a monstrous ninety percent.
The monster, whose very nature was supersonic speed, found itself moving in slow motion, as if its immense body were submerged in thick molasses or trying to swim through hardened resin. The universe itself was aggressively denying it the cosmic right to use its kinetic energy.
However, using a divine-level Proto-Law on a Stage 3 Saint body that was still adapting to its reincarnation came with an immediate cost.
The Instability of the Nascent Lotus manifested brutally in the environment. Seraphina couldn't "turn off" or limit the fine control of the technique. The ambient Qi of the entire northern battlefield collapsed; it literally crystallized and began to fall from the sky like heavy, lead-hard snow, cutting off the external energy supply for everyone.
Worse yet, Seraphina felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her own chest. By forcing the universe's vibration to a halt, her internal meridians slowly began to crystallize. She knew she had mere seconds before her own heart froze from the recoil of the divine technique.
She had to end it with a single absolute strike.
She stopped centimeters from the Leviathan's immense, slow face, which stared at her with a dull terror, unable to move its jaws fast enough to bite her.
Seraphina didn't raise her sword. She simply raised her small, pale left hand. She extended a single index finger, white and immaculate.
Her lips, perfect and cold, parted ever so slightly. Her voice was not a shout, it was a murmur that defied the chaos of war, a sound that even the Void of space itself seemed to stop and listen to with reverence.
"[Forbidden Technique: The Whisper of Absolute Zero]."
An invisible, silent, and definitive wave of strictly conceptual cold expanded from Seraphina's graceful body.
The world, in that corner of the desert, reached Time-Matter Stasis.
The hot blood dripping from the beast's wounds suspended in the air, floating motionless, not as drops of ice, but as static objects that had forgotten their biological concept of gravity, heat, and movement.
Seraphina applied the Execution of Eternal Fragility.
Upon reaching the true and incomprehensible conceptual Absolute Zero, the molecular cohesion holding matter together completely vanished from local physics laws.
The Empress's delicate finger gently touched the thick, impenetrable, armored biological Stellar Steel exoskeleton of the Stage 3 Saint Realm Friction Leviathan.
There was no massive explosion. There was no crunch of breaking ice. There was no blood, no viscera, no final shriek of agony.
It was the "painless death," the death of perfect silence.
The immense eighty-meter-long beast, the calamity that had terrified the northern wall, simply "forgot" how to keep its atoms together.
From the exact point where Seraphina's pale finger touched the scales, the centipede's gigantic body began to disintegrate. It crumbled in absolute silence, peacefully transforming into a mountain of ultra-fine, glowing dust of a translucent diamond color, offering not the slightest physical resistance.
In less than three seconds, the siege beast ceased to exist.
All that remained was an immense dune of crystal dust shining under the dying light of the clouded sun, and the purest, most sepulchral silence the battlefield had ever known.
Seraphina lowered her hand. Her breathing was shallow, a thread of cold vapor escaping her lips.
The technique had been an absolute success, a display of incomprehensible power that equaled or surpassed that of her aunt Lilith in the south. But the recoil damage was real. The Empress stumbled. A harsh fit of coughing shook her, and she brought her hand to her lips. When she pulled it away, there was no red blood; there was a fine white diamond dust she had coughed up from her own partially crystallized lungs.
The intense and unbearable residual cold of Absolute Zero was attacking her own Stage 3 heart. She felt it growing numb, her human emotions freezing over, being replaced by the absolute, divine apathy of her past life.
If she didn't receive her husband's Dragon's Heat soon, through their intimate dual cultivation technique, the Empress ran the real risk of losing her humanity and becoming an immovable statue of eternal ice, isolated from the world she loved.
Seraphina looked up, ignoring the stabbing pain in her chest. Her deep blue eyes searched through the gray snowstorm, guided by the bond of their intertwined souls.
There he was.
Samael Morningstar. Floating high in the sky, wrapped in his majestic, immense dark cape and the aura of the Void. The Dragon King was looking directly at her from a distance, despite the battle looming ahead for him.
Through the unbreakable bond of blood and soul they shared, Seraphina felt the scorching, primal, and immensely comforting heat of Samael's dragon heart beating in her own mind. That simple look was enough to stop her meridians from crystallizing. Her husband's brutal, unconditional love was the perfect anchor that melted the residual ice in her soul, bringing her back from divine silence to the chaotic but beautiful world of mortals.
Seraphina smiled faintly, a smile only her husband could read from kilometers away. A silenced promise: "I have cleared my board, my King. Now, show them why they tremble when you speak your name."
While the Empress stood, majestic and alive in the north, a thunderous explosion of pure dark energy shook the very center of the battlefield.
The third siege beast, the Stage 6 abomination, had emerged from the ice.
And standing before it, Death itself, wrapped in tattered robes and wielding a scythe dripping with darkness, was pulling back its hood.
Malak the Reaper was going to reap.