Chapter 181: The Genesis Spear and the Sea of the End Times (Part 5)
Violeta continued to float. The grotesque wound in her chest slammed shut, regenerating tissue, bone, and meridians as if the spear had never pierced her. The thick sludge of the Sea of Blood seemed to recede, terrified by the entity that now sustained her.
Slowly, she twitched her pale fingers. With lethal grace, she threw her eyes wide open.
The entire battlefield fell into a deathly silence. Eris, her face stained with tears and blood, opened her mouth to call out to her, but Violeta's figure vanished at an impossible speed, reappearing at the highest point of the black sky, looking down at the Demon King from the apex.
Far away, in the Palace of Primordial Heritage, Samael was breathing heavily, recovering from the brutal cost of having forced the Law of Reality. Sitting down, with Seraphina holding him, he projected his voice directly into his sister's soul.
«Good, Vio. It is time to finish this. I will help you control the power and guide you to use it, but at the same time, learn. Analyze. This will dictate your growth,» the Patriarch ordered. «Let us begin. Do not divide your mind. Instead of dual affinity, focus solely and exclusively on space. Feel your lineage.»
Violeta closed her eyes in mid-air. Her mind fell into a sepulchral silence, lulled only by her brother's whisper. She saw her own soul, felt the flow of her blood, and sought the pure essence of the dragon within. She tried to control it delicately, like a channeler, but Samael's voice interrupted her coldly.
«Peaceful control is useless, Vio. You are a dragon. Dragons are proud, arrogant beasts; they do not allow themselves to be 'controlled'. So dominate it. Force it to obey. You are the one in charge, not your blood.»
Violeta understood. She discarded harmony and embraced the tyranny of her surname. She lunged at the indomitable essence of her lineage and subdued it brutally, like a furious mother ruthlessly disciplining a rebellious infant, forcing the blood to kneel before her will.
When Violeta opened her eyes again, the world froze.
There was no longer an eye of ice and an eye of space. Both eyes had mutated into an imposing, masterful work of art that left the forty-four geniuses breathless. They were the Eyes of the Celestial Abyss. Her irises had transformed into circular jewels of vibrant neon violet, a well of ethereal energy that pulsed to the rhythm of her heart. In the exact center, replacing the pupil, floated the Imperial Seal of Space: a mystical, intricate, and glowing rune that emitted micro-sparks of light, indicating absolute dominion over distance and the void.
The Demon King, looking at that burning rune in the human's eyes, felt the very space around his brain contract. A crushing spiritual oppression blocked his energy channels. The sheer majesty of the Frost Executioner was killing his will to fight.
«Hahahahaha,» Samael's laughter rumbled in Violeta's mind, astounded and delighted by the evolution. «Good, Vio, I didn't expect this. But since you managed to evolve your lineage on your own, your brother won't sit idly by. Come back to your senses. Don't let the power consume you and don't try to chew more than you can swallow. This state won't last long; I will lend you my Spatial Laws and my techniques. Finish him.»
Violeta slowly nodded. As she fixed her gaze on the demon's army of blood avatars, the barriers of the world became translucent. She saw the "heavenly seams", the Ley Lines of space crossing the air, identifying the points where the fabric of reality was so fragile it could be torn with a thought.
She raised her pale, open hand and delivered a direct palm strike against the empty air.
[Domain of a Thousand Shattered Mirrors]
There was no explosion of Qi. A sharp, crystalline crash echoed directly into the soul, identical to the sound of a glass gong shattering into pieces. The air physically cracked. Silver fracture lines propagated at lightning speed.
Suddenly, the entire sky transformed into a three-dimensional sphere of floating shattered mirrors. Each piece of "spatial scum" was a translucent sheet with edges that reflected the outer void, displaying dead stars within. Violeta clenched her fist. The thousands of fragments began to spin erratically, emitting hissing sounds of suction.
Space became a cosmic meat grinder. The Demon King's avatars were sliced into perfect sections, disappearing in a flash of dead blood because the space holding their atoms together had been separated.
The true Demon King barely managed to save himself at the last millisecond by invoking his Black Blood Lotus, an absolute defense that consumed all the boiling blood around him, leaving his decrepit body on the verge of total collapse. He had no time left.
Violeta, descending slowly from the sky, spoke. Her voice was no longer that of a young girl; it was cold, flat, and laden with a chilling divine authority.
"Imperial and Void Sequences, fall back. I will handle this."
Eris, Kael, and Dante wanted to argue, ready to jump to her side, when a deep, arrogant voice swept the battlefield directly from the void.
"Stand down. She will take charge."
Knowing the speaker was the Patriarch, the legion sheathed their weapons and stepped back in absolute silence.
Violeta turned her gaze to the horrified god.
"Now, it is only you."
Before the demon could blink, Violeta used the Bridge Between Dimensions. Folds in reality collapsed, and she appeared instantly behind the monster. With her Absolute Zero Needle in hand, she executed the Collapsed Dimension Slash. The semi-transparent blade, containing nebulas within, didn't cut the King's flesh; rather, it erased the line of space his left shoulder occupied.
The demon roared in agony seeing his arm vanish into nothingness, and instinctively invoked his Sting of the Exiled Throne, folding his spear toward the girl's chest.
Both techniques clashed, generating a dull explosion that forced them back. From then on, the combat became an indecipherable blur to mortals. Violeta moved guided by Samael's voice, dodging lethal thrusts by millimeters, bending space, appearing above, below, and to the sides, launching dimensional slashes that the old man barely blocked with his monstrous vertebrae spear.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The boiling Sea of Blood parted and evaporated under the pressure of the impacts. Two minutes that felt like an eternity of pure annihilation.
«Vio, he is out of time, and so are you,» Samael warned, sensing the limit of the girl's body. «This attack will be the last. I will let you use the strongest strike in existence; I will bear the consequences. Let's end this.»
The Demon King, cornered and crumbling, spat black blood.
"Bitch, die for me!"
The god unleashed his Pantheon Projection, invoking thousands of spears from his own lifeblood, ready to impale her from every possible angle.
But Violeta did not evade. She raised a hand, palm open toward the front.
[Dimensional Exile: The Mirror of Nothingness]
Space bent and inverted, creating a vertical panel of the purest invisible glass. When the thousands of apocalyptic spears hit the barrier, there was no clash. The destructive energy "flattened" into two dimensions and slid toward the center of the mirror like ink dropping into a pool of black water. The entire attack was devoured by a silent nothingness, leaving Violeta serene and flawless.
The demon, seeing his technique swallowed by the void, knew it was the end. He burned the last drop of life from his vessel to invoke the Judgment of the Blood King.
The abominable vertebrae spear expanded to fifty meters long, shining with the flashes of tortured imperial souls and emitting a deafening choral wail. With a scream of pure hatred, he thrust the immense void spear toward Violeta, seeking to expel her soul from her body.
Time seemed to slow down. The entire legion held its breath.
Violeta opened her Eyes of the Abyss, and behind her, the fabric of reality tore open to reveal a cosmic phantom. It was the immense projection of a tall, white-haired man, dressed in a black imperial robe with violet trims. His eyes, identical to those of Violeta and Eris but forged in abyssal cruelty, looked down upon the demon from above.
The Patriarch raised the symbol of his absolute authority, the black blade of Kurohime. A slow, chilling laugh accompanied the movement.
Violeta's voice, harmonically overlapping with Samael's deep, imperious voice, pronounced the sentence:
"The Sword God That Cut Time. Transdimensional Slash... A Thousand Scars."
Violeta launched a single, elegant horizontal slash with her needle.
Only a click was heard.
And then, reality crumbled.
That single cut multiplied through the Law of Space. Hundreds, thousands of spatial slashes appeared simultaneously within a five-hundred-meter radius. They didn't travel; they were born directly inside matter.
The monstrous fifty-meter spear shattered into a million static pieces. The Holy King's inner world of blood shattered like a glass vault. In the black sky of the Secret Realm, an immense, terrifying gash opened that did not regenerate, as if the universe itself had received an incurable wound.
The Demon King's body was pierced by hundreds of black lines. He remained frozen for a second, before exploding into a cloud of ash and dust, completely annihilated.
The echo of destruction faded. Violeta, suspended in the air, felt the backlash. Having channeled divine power beyond her physical limits shattered her reserves. She spat a heavy stream of blood, her eyes dimmed, and she collapsed, fainting.
Eris was faster than the wind. She jumped, caught her gently in her arms, and landed carefully.
"You did perfectly, Vio..." the Berserker murmured, stroking her sister's hair as she protected her against her chest.
In the Palace of Primordial Heritage, the toll was collected.
Samael, having taken the full cosmic backlash of maintaining the dimensional skill at such an absurd distance, coughed violently. A puddle of dark, golden blood stained the jade floor. The invincible god staggered, his legs giving out.
Had it not been for Seraphina, he would have collapsed face-first onto the floor. She held him firmly, guiding him to rest his heavy head on her lap. Samael closed his eyes, falling into a deep, restorative sleep, his mental state in utter chaos, but with a small, peaceful smile on his lips. Everything had gone exactly as it should.
On the Surface of the Bone Desert
Without a physical body to anchor itself to, the implosive explosion underground spat out the only thing it couldn't fully disintegrate: the pure soul of the Demonic Holy King.
The immaterial soul, a pulsing sphere of red and black hatred, emerged from the void. It was terrified, humiliated, and mutilated. Its first instinct was to devour Violeta, but it didn't dare; the absolute terror instilled by the ghostly figure of the white-haired man crossed it with fear. Fearing that the owner of that murderous deity would come down to finish the job, the soul fled. Like a beaten dog, it took advantage of the crack in the cavern's ceiling and shot toward the surface, breaching the Secret Realm.
The wind howled over the dunes of calcium and red sand. A few hundred meters from the fissure, the desert seemed unaltered, except for a single figure defying the hostility of the environment.
Sienna, the Infinite Mirror Maiden, stood there. She wore an immaculate white silk qipao that emitted a spectral glow beneath the unforgiving sun. Her bare feet floated millimeters above the burning sand. Her blindly silver, iris-less eyes "looked" with cold courtesy toward the depths of the earth. On her left wrist, a small golden bell chimed softly, moved by the wind.
"What a vulgar noise they make when they break space..." Sienna murmured, her melodic voice caressing the hot air. "They used the Axis of Collapse. Samael will be so proud of his little monsters. But... What was that last slash? Ummm."
Suddenly, the sand a hundred meters away erupted like a geyser.
The Demon King's soul emerged, shrieking with fury and a thirst for vengeance. Its spiritual senses swept the desert and detected Sienna. A simple, fragile, solitary blind girl. The perfect vessel!
The soul lunged at her like a spectral arrow.
Sienna didn't flinch. A slow, sadistic, and painfully beautiful smile curved her lips. The golden bell chimed once more.
The soul impacted directly against the white deity's chest, seeking to sink into her Spiritual Sea.
But there was no invasion.
At the instant of contact, the Concept of True Reflection dictated the rules. Sienna didn't block the attack; she decided what was reflected. The demon suddenly found itself trapped, floating in a null space, surrounded by infinite invisible mirrors that reflected its own pathetic, mutilated form over and over again, driving it to madness.
"What is this domain...?" the millennial soul trembled, panic devouring it upon realizing that the pressure of this "blind girl" was as unfathomable as the abyss. "You are not human! Let me out!"
Sienna raised her pale left hand. Resting between her delicate fingers was the Blade of Naked Truth, a crystal rapier so pure it was invisible.
"A Stage Nine Holy King..." she cooed, her tone filled with macabre fascination. "So much history, so many secrets of ancient eras kept in such a fragile ego."
With a lazy motion, Sienna used her Matter Assimilation. She didn't cut the soul; she cut the space around it.
The infinite mirrors collapsed toward the center, violently crystallizing. The millennial soul let out one last silenced shriek as space solidified, turning the immense deity into a tiny black and red crystal prism, the size of an apple.
The prism fell softly into her palm. Sienna raised the crystal to the height of her blind eyes.
"You are the perfect energy core," she whispered, smiling cruelly. "The inorganic amalgams of our dead blood legion needed a battery that wouldn't run out. Imagine the irony... an ancient god, reduced to the slave motor of my crystal and scrap soldiers. We will tell each other many stories in the laboratory, grandpa."
Sienna tucked the crystal into her white silk sleeve. The desert wind erased her footprints as silence reigned once more beneath the sun.
Inside (The Core of the Tomb)
Inside the tomb, with the death of its architect and after having taken the devastating impact of the Transdimensional slash, the geometric illusion of the labyrinth began to crumble.
The walls of flesh and fossilized ribs shattered like a broken mirror. The entire world seemed to plummet. The forty-five geniuses fell through the darkness for a few seconds.
They landed on a soft, cold, solid surface.
Kael coughed, using his sword as a cane to stand up. All around him, the entire legion was slowly getting up, groaning from muscle pain and with dry reserves, but alive and victorious. Dante, his eyes healing thanks to Elowen and Lys, looked ahead with icy satisfaction. Eris held Violeta, who was breathing peacefully.
They had arrived. The labyrinth of non-Euclidean horrors was just a foul defensive shell. Now they were in the true core of the tomb.
The place possessed a reverential and overwhelming beauty. It was an immense vault forged in immaculate white stone, illuminated by soft, eternal light formations. And in front of them lay the spoils of war.
They weren't simple chests; they were mountains of wealth that defied human comprehension. Entire hills of Supreme Grade Spiritual Crystals shone with an intoxicating light, enough to fund an Empire for millennia. There were gardens preserved in temporal stasis, overflowing with extinct primordial herbs: dragon bone lotus, stellar blood ginseng. Shelves of incorruptible wood housed manuals and scrolls of lost techniques from the Ruin Era. Piles of invaluable minerals formed barricades of absolute treasures.
The eyes of the legion, exhausted to their limits, lit up with justifiable greed. This was the fuel that would finance Morningstar's ascent to the peak of the continent.
But Kael didn't look at the mountains of gold. His Dragon Eyes locked onto the exact center of the burial chamber.
There, levitating above a modest white jade pedestal, was a single object, surrounded by a halo of light so pure it seemed to be alive. It was a Primordial Lotus Seed, deep onyx black, but with veins that pulsed in hot, liquid gold.
"That is the true treasure..." Iris whispered, her Probability Eye trembling with reverential awe. "It's not a weapon. It's not a technique. It's a True Law Core. The crystallized heart of the cosmic understanding that this Holy King was trying to cultivate before he died."
Kael sheathed his heavy magma sword and walked slowly toward the pedestal. The dragon legion, battered and covered in divine blood, made way for him in solemn silence.
They had massacred the abominations, they had survived a false purgatory, and they had split space in two.
The hunt was over.
It was time to collect.