Chapter 178: Nine Paths to Hell: The Division of the Sequences
In the suffocating gloom of the collapsed Secret Realm, the Demonic Saint King savored the anticipation. Hidden in the depths of his ruined palace, inhabiting the putrefying body of Great Saint Li, he wove his first trap.
He didn't need to send beasts or launch meteors just yet. During the Primordial Era, his title of Demon King had not been earned by brute force, but by his ability to devour the sanity of entire empires before a single sword was drawn. With a flick of his gray, cracked fingers, he channeled his most insidious technique through the dense red mist covering the labyrinth.
The [Miasma of Eternal Doubt].
The mist around the Forty-Five Sequences thickened, becoming almost liquid. Tendrils of crimson smoke slithered stealthily, seeking to enter through the noses, mouths, and pores of the young warriors. The Demon King's goal was simple: infect their Spiritual Seas. He wanted to make them see illusions of their worst traumas, convince them that their comrades were going to betray them, and force them into homicidal paranoia so they would kill each other.
The crimson smoke penetrated Kael, Dante, Violeta, and Eris. The Demon King smiled, waiting to hear the first scream of madness.
But the scream never came.
At the exact moment the demonic miasma attempted to touch the geniuses' souls, it hit a wall. It wasn't a Qi barrier. It wasn't a Divine-Grade defensive artifact. It was an incomprehensible architecture, an absolute code embedded into the very foundation of their existences by an entity above both Heavens and Demons.
The [Soul Nexus].
For the Demon King, it was as if he had tried to push an ocean with his bare hands, only to discover the ocean was a solid block of impregnable steel. The Soul Nexus, a pure and direct function of the System, was not magic; it was an absolute law. It was a perfect firewall.
The feedback from his own mental attack rebounded violently against Elder Li's body. The Demon King spat a mouthful of black, corrosive blood, falling to his knees in front of his rusted throne of swords, his eyes bloodshot with pure stupefaction.
"What... what is that barrier?" the Demon King whispered, his voice trembling for the first time in millennia. "It has no matrix, no energy flow... It's as if their minds are sealed by the hands of the universe itself!"
On the front lines, the geniuses didn't even flinch. They felt a slight buzzing in their ears, like an annoying mosquito, and the Soul Nexus instantly purged it.
Kael Morningstar, with his crimson Dragon Bloodline boiling in his veins, shook his head to clear the last wisp of red smoke trying to cling to his face. His glowing eyes locked onto the darkness. He knew exactly what the entity had just attempted.
He turned toward the forty-four warriors holding the crescent moon formation behind him. The temperature rose around him as he raised Magma Fang.
"Listen to me well, vanguard," Kael's voice cut through the labyrinth's deathly silence, projecting both into the air and through the Soul Nexus. "That ancient bastard just tried to get into our heads. The Nexus blocked it. Our will and our communication are untouchable."
The geniuses nodded, their weapons drawn, their auras ready. But Kael didn't smile. His face was made of stone.
"But don't you dare get overconfident," Kael continued, and his tone became so deathly serious it chilled the blood of everyone present. "This is not the Infinite Mirror dimension. Sienna is not monitoring our vital signs. We cannot revive here; there is no crystal bed waiting for us if we make a fatal mistake. If your hearts stop in this pit... you stay here forever."
The silence was absolute. Dante, the Slaughter Dragon, adjusted the grip on his dagger, his Gray Interface Pupils processing the weight of those words. Eira clenched her fists, frost crystallizing on her knuckles.
"We have died a thousand times for the Patriarch," Kael said, raising his sword. "Today, we fight for our own lives! Secure your flanks!"
"YES, COMMANDER!" the hive roared.
Kilometers away, in the dark, the Demon King's frustration morphed into an icy, murderous rage. If he couldn't break their minds from the inside, he would break their formation from the outside. The mental Nexus was invincible, but their flesh-and-blood bodies were still subject to the physical laws of the Secret Realm, a place where he was the absolute master.
"If I can't drive them mad... I will crush them one by one in the solitude of despair," the Demon hissed.
The Saint King raised both arms, channeling the remnant of his Qi into the master matrices of the collapsed labyrinth.
Suddenly, the land of bones and ash beneath the Sequences' feet began to vibrate with a sickly frequency.
Iris, in the center of the formation, snapped her eyes open. Her Bloodline was hyper-connected to the environment's coordinates.
"Kael, space is folding!" Iris yelled, panic tingeing her voice. "The vectors are collapsing inward! It's non-Euclidean geometry, we can't dodge it by running!"
Before Kael could issue an order to retreat, the world broke.
There was no explosion, no earthquake. It was as if a giant child had taken a Rubik's cube and twisted all its faces at once. The ground fragmented into dozens of floating islands. Gravity instantly changed direction.
For Kael, the ground he stood on became a vertical wall. He fell toward the black "sky," while, beside him, Eris was dragged into a spatial rift that opened out of nowhere, like a hungry mouth. Violeta, despite her affinity with the Space Dragon, could not stabilize such a sudden Saint King-grade fracture and was swallowed by a luminous distortion along with three of her companions.
Dante tried to cling to the shadows, but the darkness itself shattered into pieces, dragging him into an obsidian corridor that wasn't there a second before.
The invincible formation of forty-five warriors was dismantled in the blink of an eye.
When the violent dimensional rearrangement stopped, silence fell over the millennial tomb once again.
Kael Morningstar slowly sat up. He was on a floating platform of black marble, surrounded by rivers of a viscous, glowing liquid flowing upward. The atomic heat of his body evaporated the moisture from his clothes.
He gritted his teeth and immediately connected his mind to the system.
"Report! Iris, Cedric, report immediately!"
For a terrible second, he feared silence would be the only answer. But then, Iris's crisp, analytical voice echoed in his skull.
"I am alive, Commander. Cedric is with me."
"Violeta here," interrupted the young woman of space, sounding breathless. "Space swallowed us and spat us out. I am with Jareth, Voltar, and two others. We are... in some kind of catacomb filled with giant burial niches."
"Dante speaking," whispered the Slaughter Dragon. "I fell into a dense fog zone. My team is secure."
Kael let out a sigh that was half fire, half relief. The Demon King had managed to fracture the dimension and physically separate them, tossing them into the dark. The ancient entity probably believed he had isolated them, leaving them deaf and blind to each other. He didn't know that the Soul Nexus was a bridge not even the laws of space-time could sever. They were blind, but they were not alone.
"Iris, give me the numbers," Kael ordered.
"The labyrinth divided us exactly. We are forty-five... It has separated us into nine squads of five people," Iris reported rapidly. "The spatial coordinates are absolute chaos. The physical distance between squads could be ten meters or a hundred kilometers; space here is folded like crumpled paper. I can't chart a visual route yet."
"Cedric," Kael called.
"Here," replied the Runic Architect. "My [Eye of Architectural Truth] is still active. The entire labyrinth is immense machinery. If you give me time and if Iris processes the data, I can find the structural 'knots' sustaining this non-Euclidean illusion. If we destroy those knots, the collapsed space will untangle, and we can regroup."
"Make it your absolute priority. All squads, hold defensive positions and explore with extreme caution. This demon separated us for a reason. He's going to try and hunt us in small groups."
Kael looked at the four warriors who had remained with him in his squad. By his side were Tormund, the Wall of Flesh; Vania, the War Siren; Ignis, the Volcanic Dragon; and Sylas, the Hawkeye. A balanced setup.
"Keep the Nexus open," Kael finished. "If a squad enters combat, we will know instantly. No one dies today."
Far from there, in another shattered corner of the tomb, Violeta dusted off her shoulders. She was in a monumental corridor, supported by pillars made of gigantic ribs. By her side, Jareth was already exhaling a defensive miasma, while Voltar illuminated the darkness with sparks of purple plasma. The other two members of her squad, Lirael and Ciro, covered the rear.
Violeta didn't know it, but through the dense red mist filling the end of the corridor, a pair of rotten yellow eyes was watching her.
The Demon King had locked onto his first target.
"That girl... her body has a Space Dragon Bloodline," the Demon King thought, his soul salivating inside Elder Li's dying body. "A perfect Yin vessel, blessed with the laws of space. If I take her body, the collapse of this Secret Realm won't be a problem... I myself will be space."
With a silent order of his will, the Demon King did not attack head-on. He awakened the ancient guards sleeping in that corridor.
The ground began to tremble, but it wasn't an earthquake. Split skulls, femurs, and millennial ribs began to assemble in the gloom with a wet, grotesque sound, fusing to form five-meter-tall bone chimeras, armed with rusted marrow claws and eyes burning with will-o'-the-wisp fire.
The Chapter of the Demon King's Hunt had begun, and the Morningstar Clan was about to discover the forgotten terrors of the Primordial Era.