Chapter 179: The Law of the Immovable and the Requiem of the Singularity Part 1
The fall through the spatial fracture was like being chewed by the gears of a rusted cosmic clock. The laws of physics twisted, stretching the bodies of the five geniuses before violently spitting them out onto a landscape that shouldn't exist.
Kael Morningstar landed on his feet, his boots sinking into a blanket of grayish-white dust. Around him, Tormund, Vania, Ignis, and Sylas quickly got up, adopting a defensive circular formation.
The setting was geometric madness. They found themselves on an immense plain composed entirely of crushed bones, a calcium ocean that stretched until it vanished into an ocher-colored mist. The most disturbing thing wasn't the ground, but the oscillating gravity. At times, they felt like they weighed tons, forcing them to bend their knees; the next second, gravity inverted slightly, causing fragments of femurs and skulls to float around them like macabre snowflakes.
"Maintain the balance of your Qi," Kael ordered, his eyes scanning the mist. "Space here has collapsed. Any sudden movement under this gravity could tear a muscle."
Before Sylas could use his Hawkeye to chart a route, the bone ocean beneath their feet began to vibrate. It wasn't an earthquake; it was the sound of something ancient and colossal awakening from a millennial slumber.
A hundred meters to their left, a mountain of crushed bones collapsed inward, revealing a fissure in the earth from which a column of thick, dark smoke erupted. The volcanic ash swirled, quickly condensing to form a giant twenty meters tall. It had no face, only a vaguely humanoid body composed entirely of living ash, burning embers, and primordial hatred. It was the Living Ash Titan.
Almost simultaneously, to the right of the formation, the sound of rusted metal dragging against calcium broke the silence. From the mist emerged a figure exuding terrifying pressure. It was a knight clad in Saint-grade plate armor, but the metal was corroded and stained. Through the cracks in the visor and the joints of the armor oozed neither light nor darkness, but black, thick, and completely coagulated blood that seemed to defy movement. It was the Knight of Stagnant Blood.
The Soul Nexus vibrated with Kael's voice. "We divide our forces. Ignis and I will take the Titan; fire is our domain. Tormund, Vania, Sylas, hold off the Knight. Don't look to kill them immediately, analyze their Laws first."
Kael and Ignis shot forward like two meteors, leaving trails of crimson and white fire in the air. The Living Ash Titan let out a roar that sounded like an erupting volcano and launched an immense fist of burning dust at them.
"Too slow!" Ignis shouted, his eyes gleaming with the madness of battle. The Volcanic Dragon channeled his pure Yang Fire, a heat so absolute it vaporized the air. He launched a torrent of white fire directly against the giant's torso.
At the same time, Kael slid past the Titan's flank. The heavy stellar obsidian blade of his sword glowed with the atomic friction of his bloodline. With a flawless horizontal slash, Kael executed a crescent of fire and blade that cleanly severed the ash giant's legs.
The combined attack was devastating. The Titan's torso was pierced by Ignis's Yang fire, and its legs were severed by Kael's sword. The giant collapsed, its physical form losing cohesion and bursting into a cloud of dark dust that covered a radius of two hundred meters.
Ignis smiled, landing next to Kael. "That was too easy. This is a monster of the Primordial Era?"
Kael, however, frowned. His instincts screamed that something was terribly wrong. He hadn't felt any resistance when cutting. There was no core.
Suddenly, Kael coughed. A sharp pang of pain pierced his chest. Ignis also brought a hand to his throat, his eyes widening in surprise.
The dense ash cloud the Titan had become was not dissipating. It was suspended in the air, and with every breath, they were drawing it into their bodies. The Titan hadn't died; it had simply activated its Law: the [Asphyxiating Smoke Entropy].
The living ash, once inside the geniuses' lungs, took on a will of its own. Kael felt hundreds of tiny embers clinging to his alveoli. The ash began to voraciously absorb the fire Qi from his meridians, using it to multiply and regenerate the Titan's mass from inside their own bodies.
"Don't breathe!" Kael ordered through the Nexus, coughing up blood that instantly evaporated. "Seal your airways! If we attack it with pure fire or physical force, we'll only disperse it more!"
While Kael and Ignis dealt with the suffocating trap, the other battlefront experienced its own hell of frustration.
Tormund, the Wall of Flesh, planted himself in front of the Knight of Stagnant Blood. His basalt scales gleamed. The Knight raised a broad, rusted sword, moving with deceptive slowness, and launched a downward slash.
Tormund raised his immense shield, the [Golem's Shell]. Squeezing the trigger on the internal grip, he activated the pneumatic retraction mechanism. The metal plates slid over each other, collapsing toward his forearm in less than half a second to leave his fist free, protected by an impact gauntlet. Immediately after, he fully deployed the shield, activating the Tectonic Stability Anchor; a small gravitational field bound him to the ground, ensuring no charge would knock him down. He prepared to absorb the energy in the Inertia Accumulator of his runes.
The moment the rusted sword touched the shield's surface, there was no metallic crash. There was no shockwave. Sound simply ceased to exist.
Tormund's eyes widened. The runes on his shield didn't glow. The kinetic force of the blow wasn't transferred to his body. Instead, he felt the motion vector of his entire being canceled out. The Knight's [Law of Absolute Inertia] activated. The instant of contact, the Qi flow in Tormund's left arm stopped dead, as if it had crashed into an impenetrable diamond wall. The blood in his veins stopped flowing, causing temporary paralysis and a dull, terrifying pain that shot up to his shoulder.
Tormund roared, forcing his Dantian to spin in reverse to regain mobility, and leaped backward, his arm hanging uselessly at his side.
"Don't touch him physically!" Tormund yelled through the Nexus, his voice heavy with warning. "He nullifies movement! If his weapon or his armor makes contact with us, our Qi goes into spiritual arrest. It's the Law of Inertia!"
From a safe distance, Sylas, the Hawkeye, had already drawn his bow, the [Vortex of the Ethereal Horizon]. Crafted from Lightning Tree Wood and reinforced with Winged Platinum, the weapon was incredibly light, but the crystal core in its grip generated a constant micro-vacuum. Upon drawing the string woven with zephyr Qi, the bow sucked in the surrounding air, compressing it to liquid levels.
Sylas didn't load physical arrows; he released the [Arrow of Inevitable Destiny: The Thread of the End]. Three hyper-dense wind projectiles shot out at hypersonic speed, splitting in reality to travel along multiple simultaneous trajectories, guaranteeing impact in the blind spots of the Knight's helm.
But the monster's Law was absolute. A centimeter from touching the armor, the arrows instantly lost all their kinetic energy. They fell harmlessly to the bone-covered ground, as if they had struck a barrier that stopped the very concept of motion.
Vania frowned, her runic tattoos glowing faintly. "A perfect defense against mass? Interesting."
Hours bled slowly on the eternity clock of the Secret Realm.
What began as a violent clash transformed into an agonizing and desperate war of attrition. The plain of crushed bones became a purgatory for the five geniuses of the Morningstar Clan. Unable to use their ten percent bloodline transformation—strictly reserved for imminent annihilation situations—they were forced to rely exclusively on the purity of their Saint Realm cultivation bases and their tactical ingenuity.
For Kael and Ignis, every second was torture. They had sealed their airways, circulating the remaining oxygen in their blood through retention techniques, but the ash they had already inhaled continued to devour their Qi from the inside. The pain in their chests was like a thousand red-hot needles piercing their lungs.
The Living Ash Titan reformed again and again. Kael tried to cut it, and the giant simply separated its limbs to let the sword pass. Ignis unleashed seas of Yang flames, and the Titan delighted in absorbing the heat to expand its toxic cloud. They were fighting against the air itself.
A few hundred meters away, Tormund's situation was a humiliation to his very nature. He, who had been trained to be the immovable shield of the vanguard, was forced to play a game of cat and mouse. He couldn't block. He couldn't charge. Every time the Knight of Stagnant Blood approached, Tormund had to use erratic footwork to dodge the heavy rusted sword. Vania and Sylas supported him, launching attacks from multiple angles to divert the Knight's attention, but the monster simply advanced, a colossus of coagulation and death that knew no exhaustion.
Kael slid across the calcareous ground, dodging a swipe of condensed ash from the Titan. His vision was blurring. The Qi in his Dantian was dropping to dangerous levels.
Pure fire is useless, Kael thought, his analytical mind forcing itself to work despite the hypoxia and pain. Fire feeds the ash. It makes it lighter, more volatile. I need something to sink it. Ash hates weight. It hates moisture and density.
The problem was that the Titan was a diffuse cloud spanning dozens of meters. He needed the giant's entire mass concentrated in a single point, forced to adopt a solid physical form, even if just for a second.
Kael connected to the Soul Nexus, his mental voice raspy but laden with determination. "Sylas. I need your eyes and your wind."
Across the battlefield, Sylas, who had just fired an arrow to deflect the Knight's arm away from Tormund, responded without missing a beat. "Tell me the plan, Commander."
"This pile of smoke is immune to dispersion. If I can't scatter it, I'm going to concentrate it. I need you to create a suction vortex. A concentrated wind tornado that traps the entire ash cloud and forces it to gather in the center. When it's compacted and unable to fly, I'll use the Nirvana's gravity to crush it."
Sylas evaluated the distance and mass of the Ash Titan with his Hawkeye. "Understood. It will be a maximum-tension shot. It'll require three seconds of charging. Lead it toward the coordinates of the twisted bone stalagmite, fifty meters from your position."
"Ignis," Kael ordered. "Break formation. Leave the Titan to me and go help Tormund and Vania. Don't touch the Knight, just use your fire to create walls and keep him cornered. I will end this."
Ignis nodded, spitting out a clot of blood mixed with black ash. With a burst of speed, the Volcanic Dragon crossed the battlefield, landing heavily between the Knight and Tormund, immediately raising pillars of Yang fire that, while not damaging the Knight due to his Law of Inertia, created a thermal prison that limited his movements.
Kael stood alone facing the Living Ash Titan. The monster, seeing its isolated prey, rose to its full colossal height, opening a faceless maw from which a suffocating wind erupted.
Kael did not retreat. He channeled the last twenty percent of his Saint Realm Qi directly into his weapon's frost salamander leather-wrapped hilt. [Magma Fang] reacted immediately. The stellar obsidian scales covering the blade opened slightly, releasing a dense, black vapor, revealing the vein of liquid ruby crystal that pulsed inside with an incandescent white glow.
The instant Kael unleashed his [Nirvana Magma Sword Intent], the world around him abruptly lost its saturation, turning a pale gray. The blood in his veins glowed like black magma beneath his skin, assuming the Biological Fusion of liquid metal. The roar of battle faded, replaced by an absolute acoustic void where only the echo of a distant zen bell resonated. Crimson ash lotus petals began to fall around him, distorting the light.
Kael ran toward the twisted bone stalagmite, drawing the Titan's attention, which transformed into an immense cloud of ash to pursue him at greater speed.
"Now, Sylas!"
A hundred meters away, Sylas released his bowstring. He hadn't aimed at the Titan, but at the empty space right above the agreed coordinate.
The arrow didn't glow. It was completely dark. Sylas had executed the [Cyclonic Vortex Arrow: The Eye of the Storm]. When the projectile reached the blind spot in the air, it detonated in a brutal implosion. A massive suction tornado formed in a fraction of a second. The wind spun with apocalyptic category hurricane force, creating a vacuum in the center.
The immense cloud of living ash pursuing Kael was caught by the current. The Titan emitted a sound akin to the shriek of grinding rocks. It tried to divide further, but the centripetal force of the vortex was overwhelming. The cloud was dragged toward the center, violently sucked in until the billions of ash particles were forced to collide and fuse.
In less than two seconds, the Titan of air and smoke was forcibly compacted into a solid sphere of compressed ash the size of a carriage. It was defenseless, forced to maintain a physical form.
Kael Morningstar was already in the air. He absorbed what little light and heat remained in the crater, leaving the field in a freezing gloom. All that energy compressed into the hyper-dense edge of Magma Fang, creating a "Black Sun." Behind him appeared the colossal silhouette of a six-armed Infernal King wielding the same blade.
"Drown in the earth!" roared Kael, unleashing his [Solar Slash: Judgment Day].
The slash wasn't an arc of fire; it was a vertical column of golden-black plasma that fell from the sky. The impact generated an inescapable zone of solar gravity. The immense force and stellar heat didn't scatter the ash; they crushed it against the ground beneath the weight of a collapsing star. The bone ground didn't burn, it vitrified, turning into smooth, dark crystal. The Living Ash Titan was sealed forever inside that tomb of static glass, its vitality consumed by the Causality Sublimation of Kael's sword.
A coughing fit shook Kael, and he spat out a large amount of inert ash. With the Titan's consciousness dead, the suffocating dust in his lungs had lost its magical will, becoming simple dirt that his Saint-level biology rapidly began to expel.
"One down..." Kael panted, leaning on his sword. "Tormund, Vania... it's your turn."
On the other end of the bone plain, Ignis's arrival had changed the pace of the battle, but it hadn't solved the enigma of the Knight of Stagnant Blood.
The rusted armor colossus was cornered inside a circle of Yang Fire pillars. Ignis maintained the thermal pressure, while Tormund caught his breath, his left arm finally feeling the flow of Qi again.
The Knight, impassive before the flames, simply walked toward one of the fire pillars. He raised his sword and struck the flames. The Law of Inertia applied even to caloric energy: the fire in that section stopped, freezing in time and space, allowing the monster to slowly make his way through.
Vania observed the scene from a distance, her blue eyes fixed on the dripping black, coagulated blood oozing from the armor. Her mind reviewed the data collected during the last hours of torture.
Swords stop. Arrows lose force. Fire freezes, Vania thought. His Law of Inertia is an absolute brake. It cancels the motion vector of any object or energy that possesses physical mass or a magical structure that applies kinetic force.
Vania smiled, a cold, sharp smile that showed the influence of her training with Sienna.
But Inertia requires mass to exist. You can't stop something that has no weight. You can't brake something that doesn't occupy physical space.
Vania raised her staff, the [Sovereign's Tuning Fork]. The weapon, forged from Depths Silver, had organic curves decorated with leviathan engravings. At its peak, three indigo-blue Stellar Song Pearls began to orbit each other at breakneck speed.
"Ignis, Tormund. I need you to keep his attention fixed on you. Make him believe you're still trying to attack him physically. Sylas, do you have energy for a conceptual shot?"
Sylas, who had just regrouped with Kael in the distance, closed his eyes for a second. "My Dantian is at forty percent. It's enough for a single Thread of the End. But it has to be a perfectly still target."
"An instant is all I need," Vania said, walking slowly toward the Knight. Before singing, she struck the quartz crystal base of her staff against the ground. A pale violet wave expanded rapidly: the [Empress's Silence]. Her weapon's Qi recognition filter identified Tormund and Ignis's signatures, creating safety nodes around them that would attenuate the destructive impact of her voice.
Tormund and Ignis went on the tactical offensive. Tormund began hurling large bone boulders, forcing the Knight to repeatedly raise his sword to activate his Law of Inertia. Ignis wove fire whips around him, blinding the visor of the rusted helm.
The Knight, believing the invaders were still playing their useless game of physical attrition, paid no attention to the blue-haired girl taking a deep breath fifty meters away.
Through the Nexus, Vania gave the signal. "Sylas, now!"
From a distance, Sylas didn't aim at the armor. He released the shot. The [Arrow of Inevitable Destiny: The Thread of the End] didn't travel through the air; it materialized directly into the concept of the Knight's existence. The monster was paralyzed, anchored in space-time by the invisible thread of destiny, unable to brake an attack that had no kinetic mass.
It was Vania's moment.
The War Siren parted her lips, aligning the staff in front of her mouth. She channeled the entirety of her Qi into a single, perfect note: the [Song of the End of the World: Requiem of the Singularity]. The Harmonic Confinement Chamber of her staff trapped the expansive sound wave and stabilized it in a gravitational field. There was no radial shockwave; from the stellar pearls shot a straight, ultra-compressed beam of bluish-white light that made space vibrate in concentric circles.
The sonic beam struck the immobilized Knight. The plate armor didn't suffer a scratch. The Law of Inertia desperately tried to find mass to stop, but there was nothing. The sound wave passed through the rusted steel without meeting resistance and penetrated directly into the coagulated black blood.
The Knight let out a spectral shriek. Inside the armor, the blood was acoustically boiled. In less than three seconds, it vaporized, and the soul clinging to it was shredded by the sonic resonance, turning into echoes that vanished into nothingness.
Sylas's Thread broke from the strain. The Knight remained standing for a moment, before collapsing onto the bone plain with a dull thud, his armor completely empty inside.
Vania fell to her knees, coughing and rubbing her sore throat, but with a triumphant smile drawn on her pale face.
Tormund dropped his shield and fell flat on his back onto the bones, letting out a long sigh of relief. Ignis approached Vania, offering her a hand up.
In the distance, Kael and Sylas began walking toward them. The first squad had survived its first encounter in the Cemetery of False Gods, overcoming Primordial Laws through sheer force of analysis and synergy.
Kael sheathed his magmatic sword, his breathing still slightly raspy. He looked up at the fake black sky of the collapsed labyrinth.
"First platoon, threat neutralized," Kael reported through the Soul Nexus, his voice echoing in the minds of the other forty warriors scattered across the fragmented dimension. "What's the status of the rest?"
The hum of the Nexus was the only answer for a second, before a cold, merciless voice cut through the mental static.
"Dante speaking," whispered the assassin from the depths of absolute blindness. "We're dancing with our own shadows in the dark. Hold the line. No one is going to die here today."