CHAPTER 214: The Specter Sutra and the Eye of the Asura
— Two Days Earlier —
The biting mountain wind whistled through the rocky peaks as Dante watched the backs of Aia, Varian, Ciro, Lia, and Ren disappear into the distance, swallowed by the morning fog in the direction of Aethelgard City.
Once the first group had completely faded from his field of vision, Dante pivoted on his heel and swept his dull gray gaze over the six warriors who made up his shadow squad: Lyra, Altair, Joren, Tamsin, Rowan, and Mira.
"Alright, we have serious work to do as well," Dante declared in a calm yet authoritative voice. "We can't afford to waste a single second. We're going to find a spot where we can practice the Patriarch's martial art without the risk of being detected or interrupted by the beasts of this forest."
The six youths nodded in absolute martial silence. Their silhouettes flickered in unison and melted into the shadows of the primeval forest, moving at breakneck speed without disturbing a single leaf in their path.
After an hour of uninterrupted marching through rocky ravines and hidden trails, the squad emerged before a perfect geographical setting: a vast, gloomy glacial lake whose freezing, dark waters rested in deathly stillness, surrounded by imposing black stone cliffs and a dense pine forest that blocked out most of the sunlight, keeping the area in perpetual twilight.
"Oh... this place is simply perfect," Dante murmured, stopping on the shore where frost coated the pebbles. "Let's isolate the perimeter immediately."
Dante slid his hand over his storage ring and pulled out a mystical artifact that caused several of his companions to smirk: a compact runic plate, personally designed and forged by the clan's two geniuses, Cedric and Iris.
"According to the instructions Cedric gave me before leaving, this little toy is called [The Hundred-Strand Mandala]," Dante explained, holding the object in the palm of his hand.
The artifact was a circular plate roughly the size of an open palm, forged from an exquisitely polished silver and grayish metal alloy. Its surface was not static; it was composed of an intricate series of mechanical concentric rings and micro-runes carved with millimeter precision that spun independently on invisible axes. While inactive, it looked like an inert geometric compass.
However, the instant Dante injected a thread of his Qi into it, the five hundred crystals fused into the core of the plate ignited with a pulse of fractal amber light. The metallic rings began to spin in opposite directions, emitting a subtle, harmonious crystalline chime that vibrated in resonance with the surrounding space.
"Cedric warned me that it has several minor support formations and a couple of high-grade primary arrays," Dante commented, shaking his head with a half-smile. "Honestly, I have no clue how arrays work or what those two little eggheads did to compress so much power into such a tiny space... they really are insane. But knowing them, I can bet this is no cheap trinket."
The others let out low chuckles, remembering Cedric and Iris's obsessive lock-ins in the Morningstar palace's forging laboratory.
"Alright, less talking and let's fire this up," Dante ordered.
Manipulating the outer rings according to the activation sequence, Dante deployed the primary camouflage array: [Concealment Array: The Unseen Lotus Veil].
A transparent, silent wave of energy expanded in an exact one-hundred-meter radius from the center of the plate, covering the entirety of the lake shore and the nearby pines before vanishing without leaving an optical trace. This formation was designed to completely erase the existential presence of everything within it; not only did it deceive mortal sight by altering light refraction, but it temporarily rewrote the local environmental Qi flow. Any Saint or Grand Saint Realm cultivator scanning the area with their divine sense would perceive the space as a completely empty, unremarkable patch of forest, masking heartbeats, body heat, scents, and energy fluctuations.
Seeing that the landscape around them still looked exactly the same to the naked eye, Dante decided to test the invention's effectiveness.
"Wait for me here a second," he instructed.
He walked calmly toward the bushes and moved one hundred meters away, crossing the invisible boundary of the formation. Turning around to look back at the spot where his six companions stood, Dante's face froze in an expression of genuine disbelief: he couldn't see them, he couldn't hear them, and most terrifying of all... his Saint-level divine sense didn't register a single particle of Qi in that direction. It was an absolute void.
Intrigued, Dante activated his mental communication through the Soul Nexus:
"Hey... activate all your Qi at once. Release the fullness of your cultivation without holding anything back."
Inside the barrier, the six warriors looked at each other, puzzled by the order, but obeyed immediately. In unison, they opened their meridians and unleashed a torrent of power at Stage 1 and Stage 3 of the Saint Realm. The pressure was so overwhelming that the entire shore shook violently; the surface of the glacial lake rippled frantically, forming a miniature vortex in the dark water from the sheer gravity of their combined auras.
"Well? Ready, Dante?" Mira's voice asked through the Nexus. "We're already releasing our entire cultivation at once. If we push any harder, we're going to fracture these cliff rocks."
Standing one hundred meters away in the outer forest, Dante's eyes widened. Even though his companions were unleashing an energy storm capable of wiping out an army, out in the forest, absolutely nothing could be felt! Not a breath of wind, not a tremor in the ground, not the slightest fluctuation of spiritual pressure.
Dante began walking back toward the camp, scanning the air with every step:
"Ninety meters... nothing. Fifty meters... not a drop of Qi. Twenty meters... still a total void."
Reaching the five-meter mark, Dante's chest collided with an invisible wall of extreme density that emitted a faint golden glow: [Defensive Array: The Amber Mirror Fortress]. Because the Mandala's runic crystals were attuned to recognize the biological signature of Morningstar blood, the barrier softened like water, allowing him to pass through without resistance.
Setting foot inside the perimeter, the roar of the wind, the crushing gravitational force of the six Saint-level auras, and the shaking earth hit him head-on all at once. The contrast between the peace outside and the cataclysm inside was so absurd that Dante stood frozen for a second... before letting out a sharp, uncontrolled burst of laughter that echoed off the rocks:
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! Good heavens, these guys really are insane! What a pair of paranoid geniuses! HAHAHAHA!"
Hearing the laughter of their leader—a youth who normally maintained a stoic, ice-cold composure—the six warriors abruptly cut their auras and turned to look at him with raised eyebrows.
"Dante? Did you hit your head on the barrier or what?" Lyra asked, crossing her arms in amusement.
Noticing his siblings' strange looks, Dante instantly cut his laughter short and cleared his throat, feeling a slight flush of embarrassment at losing his composure.
"Ahem, ahem... well, excuse that. It's just that the effectiveness of this formation is monstrous. I verified it: outside, you can't even feel the heartbeat of a mosquito. This place is the perfect sanctuary for our purpose."
After briefly explaining the total sensory nullification he experienced outside, the others looked at the small silver plate floating in the center of the clearing with a newfound level of martial respect.
"Alright," Dante said, sitting down on a flat rock and regaining his steel-cold gaze. "With the perimeter completely secured, let's get to the important stuff. It's time to open the Patriarch's gift."
The seven youths sat on the pebbled shore, maintaining several meters of distance between one another. Each pulled the transmission jade Samael had entrusted to them from their robes and closed their eyes, projecting their spiritual sense directly into the memory matrix of the sacred stone.
A torrent of archaic, complex martial information flooded their minds instantly: the [Shadowless Specter Sutra].
However, when they attempted to read the entirety of the mystical document, they collided with an unbreakable spiritual wall that prevented them from visualizing the final sections of the work.
"Mmmm... I see," Dante murmured, withdrawing his consciousness from the jade and stroking his chin. "I can only get clear access to the first three stages of the technique. The rest is locked by a soul seal that won't yield until we reach a higher cultivation realm."
"Makes sense," Joren nodded from his corner, his sharp eyes gleaming in the dim light. "To impose a conceptual lock of this level on our own perception, this Sutra must be an Emperor Grade martial art or higher. The Patriarch didn't want us destroying our meridians trying to comprehend laws that are still beyond our biological reach."
"Exactly," Dante agreed. "Therefore, for these two days, we will focus on mastering and solidifying the first stage of the technique until it becomes second nature to our bodies."
The seven immersed themselves in reading the first block of instructions imprinted on their minds:
[Shadowless Specter Sutra — Block I: Awakening the Specter]
Law Focus: Subjugation of matter and absolute control of one's own Qi flow. Stage 1: Soot Veil (Subjugation of Brilliance).Cultivation Method: The practitioner trains Flow Suffocation. They force the entirety of their Qi to violently retract toward the center of the Dantian, sealing the spiritual pores of the skin and external channels one by one. Success in this stage is achieved when the cultivator is able to execute complete martial techniques and release their killing intent without their energy emitting a single flash of light, fluctuation, sound of friction, or spiritual pressure outward.
"I have to suppress my Qi until it's compressed into near nothingness, sealing my pores so my presence vanishes completely," Dante analyzed softly, a freezing smile on his face. "And when I manage to stabilize that state, I'll be able to unleash fatal attacks without emitting a single gram of pressure to betray my position... Oh, this art is sublime. Let's begin immediately."
Dante closed his eyes, adopted the posture of deep meditation, and severed all visual contact with the outside world.
Being at Stage 1 of the Saint Realm, his control over the profound laws of energy was only just settling into his core. The true, titanic challenge for him lay in his own biological nature: the bloodline of the Demonic Slaughter Dragon.
His Qi was no peaceful or elemental current; it was a savage energy born exclusively for destruction, feeding on spilled blood and projecting a Killing Intent so dense, heavy, and dark that, out of pure predatory instinct, it constantly sought to overflow and crush everything around it.
Dante initiated the process of Flow Suffocation.
Instead of making the mistake of fighting rigidly against the violence of his Slaughter Qi, he used the intrinsic ferociousness of the Asura to force his own energy to devour itself. Driven by his iron will, the sea of dark, crimson energy roaring like a raging ocean within his Saint meridians began to be dragged mercilessly toward the center of his Dantian, as if a black hole had swallowed a storm of blood.
The pain in his spiritual channels was sharp and torturous. His demonic blood, accustomed to boiling and expanding to burn his enemies, protested furiously against the confinement. His veins bulged, and the internal pressure threatened to rupture the acupuncture points on his torso, but Dante clenched his jaw, forcing every particle of scarlet energy to shrink, fold its wings, and fall into deathly silence within his core.
One by one, with relentless discipline, he closed the spiritual pores of his skin, imprisoning the heavy aura of death that normally announced his arrival from leagues away.
As the hours passed, the dark red glow that always outlined his silhouette began to fade. The dense, bloody mist that used to float over his shoulders was absorbed completely. To the immediate surroundings, Dante no longer felt like a primordial beast about to strike; his presence became opaque, cold, and utterly empty, like an ash statue abandoned in the twilight.
After a rigorous day of mental exertion and biological control, the transformation of the first stage consolidated under his bloodline's dominance. His Slaughter Qi no longer radiated the slightest heat or glow; it had become a thin, undetectable layer of conceptual soot coating the inside of his soul.
Without opening his eyes, Dante slowly extended his right arm and pointed two fingers toward a massive black granite boulder located a few meters down the shore.
There was no flash of crimson light. There wasn't the slightest sound in the air, nor was a gust of wind or spiritual pressure generated to betray the movement of his arm. Yet an instant later, the enormous boulder split cleanly into two symmetrical halves in total silence, pierced by a pure, compressed Killing Intent that traveled cloaked in absolute nothingness.
Dante opened his eyes. His pupils flashed with a vertical scarlet glow that vanished in a second to avoid breaking the balance of the Soot Veil. The Asura had learned to hide his fangs in the void.
The silent crumbling of the boulder parted by Dante generated no vibration in the ground, but the conceptual alteration in the surrounding space was enough for Lyra, sitting a few meters away in lotus position, to slowly open her pale silver eyes.
Her current cultivation level also limited her to understanding the first block of the Sutra, but deciphering the principles of the Soot Veil ignited a spark of tactical genius within her psyche.
Her bloodline was that of the Shadow Mirage Dragon, a mystical and terrifying heritage designed to erase the borders between mental delusion and physical reality. To Lyra, Qi was not a sledgehammer of brute force; it was the intangible thread with which she wove lies so absolute and perfect they forced the universe itself to accept them as undeniable truths.
Her Illusion Intent operated under a rule of supreme lethality: if the enemy's brain and soul blindly believed they were suffering physical damage, the target's own body would destroy itself, turning the phantom wound into real, irreversible necrosis.
Initiating Flow Suffocation, Lyra didn't try to crush her energy through brute willpower as her captain had done. Her approach was far more subtle and refined, leveraging the deceptive nature of her own element.
With a measured breath, she ordered her energy to retreat toward the center of her Dantian. Her Sound Qi, which normally vibrated in microscopic, constant frequencies around her body to map her surroundings, shut down completely. The silver spiritual mist radiating from her pores condensed inward, as if her very skin were a vacuum sucking in her local atmosphere.
The major hurdle for Lyra was that Illusion and Sound Qi are, by nature, erratic and volatile, tending to generate involuntary silver flashes or phantom acoustic echoes whenever one attempts to cage them. Yet by combining the Sutra's philosophy with the laws of her dragon, Lyra pulled off a masterclass: she lied to her own meridians. She created an illusion of a perfect vacuum inside her own energy channels, tricking her spiritual flow into believing it was already completely sealed and at rest.
Her silhouette dissolved into the surroundings. It wasn't traditional optical invisibility; rather, her very existence became so irrelevant and empty to the space around her that looking at the spot where she sat caused strange cognitive fatigue, forcing the observer's mind to ignore her. The brilliance of her cultivation was extinguished beneath the conceptual soot of the art.
To test the perfection of her technique on this second day of seclusion, Lyra remained in absolute stillness. Without moving a single muscle in her face or altering the rhythm of her breathing, she unleashed a microscopic thread of her Mist Qi coupled with an inaudible sound wave toward a thick pine root protruding from the frozen earth.
The attack crossed the clearing in absolute conceptual silence. There was no vibration in the air, no light, not a single fluctuation to betray the magic.
When Lyra's intent brushed the root, it didn't slice it physically. Instead, she injected a lie into the plant: she made it "believe" it was being devoured by a necrotic plague. In eerie silence, the root's bark began to wither, lose its moisture, and crumble into a pile of black, rotten dust, destroyed from its internal structure by a lethal illusion that nature accepted as absolute fact.
Lyra smiled in the twilight. Now, when she deployed shadow clones in future battles to surround an enemy, the Soot Veil would mask the real Qi among her copies. The enemy would be incapable of distinguishing the true body, and before they could blink, an invisible lie would shred their internal organs in silence.
The black, withered dust into which the root had turned scattered slightly in the cave's icy breeze, landing near Altair's boots.
Sitting with his spine rigidly erect and hands resting on his knees, Altair blinked at the silent decomposition of the wood. His eyes, heavy with sepulchral coldness and an ashen gray hue, had perfectly understood the limitations of his current cultivation, but the theory of the Soot Veil fit his deadly nature like a tailored glove.
His bloodline was that of the Ash Dragon, an archaic heritage governed exclusively by the end of cycles, absolute entropy, and the decay of all matter. Altair's Qi didn't dazzle with lightning or crush with the weight of a mountain; it was a passive, inexorable aura of death that, simply by existing, eroded the lifespan of everything it touched. Any weapon, shield, or cultivator coming into contact with his energy suffered rapid aging: steel rusted, stone eroded into sand, and enemy Qi crumbled like an old man reaching the end of his days.
The dangerous dilemma for Altair when executing Flow Suffocation was that Entropy Qi was, by fundamental definition, highly corrosive and hostile. Trying to force its retreat into the Dantian and closing his pores was equivalent to sealing poison inside a thin glass vial; if his focus wavered for a single second, his own death energy would begin eroding and aging his meridians from within.
With freezing serenity, Altair commanded the retreat. The heavy, invisible, ash-laden air that always hung over his shoulders halted its dance. Seal by seal, he closed the spiritual pores of his anatomy, compressing the grayish cloud into his core.
To prevent entropy from destroying his own body during compression, Altair applied the concept of Death Stasis: instead of keeping the energy in a state of active degradation, he forced it to cool and freeze in time, leaving it as motionless and stagnant as dust buried in a millennial tomb. The deathly glow of his skin faded completely, buried beneath the mantle of the Sutra.
Hours later, Altair reached absolute silence. To verify the success of his compression, he extended his right hand forward with deliberate slowness, pointing his index finger toward a heavy mystical iron chain hanging from one of the cliff's stone pillars.
There was no gust of gray wind. There was no flash of dead light, nor was there the slightest drop in temperature. Beneath the camouflage of the Soot Veil, an invisible spark of his Decay Intent crossed the void.
The exact second the entropy touched the mystical metal, the chain didn't explode or rattle; the laws of the universe simply decreed that its time of existence had expired. In ghostly silence, the iron links were covered in a dense, reddish rust in the blink of an eye; the reinforced metal lost all molecular integrity, becoming brittle as dry clay, and crumbled into a shower of inert rust dust on the stone floor without emitting the slightest sound of fracturing.
Altair let out an imperceptible sigh. His ability to rot and rust enemy defenses now traveled hidden in absolute nothingness.
The faint sliding of rusted iron dust falling onto the rocks was registered by the ears of Joren, who sat in a stillness so ethereal he seemed to form part of the forest landscape.
Withdrawing his spiritual sense from the jade, his eyes—sharp as the blades of two fencing rapiers—gleamed with cold satisfaction. For a natural-born assassin of his caliber, whose combat philosophy was built on pure speed and invisible mid-distance and long-range execution, the Soot Veil was the master piece missing from his martial repertoire.
His bloodline was that of the Severing Wind Dragon(Void and Long-Range Variant). Joren didn't waste his element unleashing noisy tornadoes or kicking up dust clouds on the battlefield; his specialty lay in refining atmospheric air currents until compressing them into ultra-high-frequency invisible threads and blades, capable of slicing the jugular or tendons of a target situated hundreds of meters away, allowing him to vanish from the map before his victim even understood they were under attack.
The major technical issue for Joren when initiating Flow Suffocation was the noisy, whistling, volatile nature of his element. Wind Qi, by its own physical laws, always seeks to expand, fluttering robes and generating whistles from air friction that any Saint-rank expert can detect leagues away with their hearing or divine sense. Trying to stuff that entire severing gale inside his Dantian was like trying to trap a storm inside a closed fist.
Joren closed his eyes and began working on containment. Instead of opposing the gusts roaring through his channels with muscular rigidity, he used the Sutra's breathing techniques to thin the density of the wind. He forced the Qi currents to spiral inward, compressing them at the center of his core until the air inside his meridians reached absolute stagnation, devoid of friction.
One by one, he sealed the pores of his skin with immense precision. His black robes, which always fluttered passively due to the cutting breeze radiating from his body, dropped suddenly, clinging tightly to his limbs in deathly stillness. The brilliance of his aura was extinguished beneath the conceptual soot.
To test his progress with a real trial on this second day of practice, Joren made a slight, relaxed flick of his right wrist, mimicking the drawing of a dagger toward a massive natural granite block ten meters away.
The result was breathtaking. There wasn't the slightest whistle of cutting air. The tearing of space could not be heard, nor was a single pressure wave generated to betray the trajectory of the strike. Under the flawless camouflage of the Soot Veil, an invisible wind blade, thinned and stripped of sound, crossed the distance.
An instant later, the top half of the granite block slid smoothly diagonally and fell onto the grass without a sound, revealing a cut as smooth, brilliant, and polished as the surface of a silver mirror. Joren had achieved the unthinkable: unleashing long-range severing wind in total absence of sound and friction. He was now a true ghost, capable of decapitating an enemy in the middle of an army without anyone registering the vector of the blade.
Joren relaxed his hands on his lap, keeping his veil intact as his gaze fell toward the opposite side of the clearing.
There, in a shadowy corner by the water, Mira sat in a lotus posture that defied conventional human anatomy. Her spine curved and flexed with unnatural suppleness, adapting entirely to the predatory physiognomy of her heritage: the Amethyst Viper Dragon.
Her eyes, endowed with mystical perception and vertical pupils designed to hunt in pitch darkness, blinked as she deciphered the secrets of the Soot Veil. A cold intensity settled into her gaze; she didn't rely on brute force or direct impacts to eliminate her targets. Her martial art was that of shadow stalking, lethal ambush, and conceptual poisoning—Poison being her element.
Mira's Qi wasn't a radiant glow, but a paralyzing, cold, and highly corrosive toxin that, thanks to her biological evolution and her [Phantom Blood Intent], had mutated to directly attack the spiritual and magical planes. A simple graze from daggers imbued with her aura no longer sought solely to infect the physical bloodstream; it was designed to contaminate the opponent's Qi, spells, and arrays, rotting their techniques from their very internal structure and turning the rival's mana or defensive Qi into a fatal poison to their own body.
The critical dilemma for Mira when executing Flow Suffocation was the insidious, dense, creeping nature of her venomous element. Amethyst Viper Qi constantly tends to hiss inside the meridians, emitting a faint yet telling purple vapor through the pores, accompanied by an acrid smell and an icy chill that alters the humidity of the immediate surroundings. Trying to trap that concentrated toxicity inside her Dantian and sealing every pore of her skin required both bodily and spiritual control; if the poison stagnated in her own Saint-level channels, her body would begin destroying itself internally within minutes.
Mira closed her eyes and began forcing the retreat. She naturally mimicked the recoiling of a viper coiling on its own axis before striking a lethal bite. She compelled the amethyst Qi to slither smoothly toward the depths of her spiritual core, swallowing the hiss and corrosive vapor from her meridians.
One by one, she sealed the pores of her skin, imprisoning the cold and poisonous aroma of her toxin in deathly stillness. In a blink, the subtle purple glow that always outlined her silhouette in the dark vanished entirely, buried beneath the conceptual soot of the Sutra. To the lake's environment, Mira ceased to exist as a biological organism; her spiritual signature became as cold, undetectable, and dead as a stone at the bottom of a dark well.
To test the success of her concealment, Mira slid her hand with shadow-like fluidity toward the hilt of one of her short daggers and traced a light horizontal slash toward a small stone vessel containing mystical spring water, resting four meters away on a rock.
There were no gusts of wind. Not a single flash of purple light was seen in the air, nor could the noxious smell of poison be detected. The attack traveled camouflaged in perfect conceptual invisibility.
The second her Phantom Blood Intent grazed the inside of the vessel, the water didn't splash or evaporate. The pure Qi latent within the liquid simply corrupted instantly. The toxicity of the conceptual infection was so rapid that it rotted the water, causing the entire solid stone vessel to crack and crumble into a small pile of ashen, highly contaminated dust without emitting a single sound of impact or boiling.
Mira had succeeded in cloaking the world's deadliest poison in absolute nothingness. Now, on the battlefield, her weapons could rot enemy Saint Kings' barriers and offensive techniques in spectral silence, without anyone detecting the arrival of the fang.
The slight scattering of that toxic dust in the air was ignored by the immovable figure of Tamsin, who sat a few steps away with severe military rigidity, keeping her spine perfectly straight and hands intertwined.
Withdrawing her consciousness from the transmission jade, her pupils reflected the same reading limitation as her siblings, but the technical description of the Soot Veil ignited a cold fire of anticipation across her face.
To Tamsin, stealth wasn't an evasion tactic, but the art of setting a fatal trap in silence. Her bloodline was that of the Poison Basilisk Dragon, one of the clan's most destructive heritages, governed by the combination of a Paralyzing Venom and an Acidic Blood capable of melting mystical steel and dissolving the hardest rocks in the mortal plane. Her Absolute Poison Intent operated at the level of a Conceptual Infection: her acids didn't require direct physical contact with flesh to destroy; they could infect runic arrays, divine swords, and pure energy barriers, causing enemy cultivators' own shields to corrupt and turn into boiling acid raining down on their heads.
The dangerous dilemma for Tamsin when initiating Flow Suffocation lay in the extreme, boiling volatility of her element. Her acidic blood pulsed with constant, searing pressure inside her Saint-level meridians, and her Qi passively radiated an invisible corrosive miasma that silently melted particles of moisture and dust in the surrounding air. Trying to force all that acidic, devouring torrent back toward the center of her Dantian and sealing every pore of her skin was like trying to contain a boiler of scalding acid inside a thin glass sphere; if her control faltered for a single second under the pressure, the trapped acid would dissolve her own vital organs from within.
With relentless mental discipline, Tamsin began subduing her energy. She used the Sutra's cold breathing to force her Qi to lose temperature and volatility. She compelled the corrosive miasma to condense, retreating layer by layer toward her spiritual core and quenching the constant boiling of her meridians.
One by one, she sealed the pores of her skin with iron concentration. The imperceptible acidic fluctuation that always visually warped the air around her shoulders collapsed suddenly. The greenish glow of her cultivation was extinguished, devoured and buried beneath the conceptual soot of the art. To environmental sensors, Tamsin ceased to feel like a latent biological threat; she became a cold, dead, inert entity, like a sealed tomb in a forgotten graveyard.
After hours of agonizing containment, Tamsin found balance in the void. To put her achievement to a practical test, she extended the index finger of her right hand forward in a sharp, linear motion, pointing directly toward a small runic defense array she had set up on a stone slab as a practice target.
The result defied ordinary martial logic. There was no flash of green light. The characteristic hiss of acid dissolving matter could not be heard, nor was there a single shockwave to betray the strike. Under the flawless camouflage of the Soot Veil, an invisible spark of her conceptual toxin crossed space in total absence of sound and physical pressure.
The second her Absolute Poison Intent touched the perimeter of the light shield, the barrier didn't shatter to pieces or repel the blow. Simply put, the formation's glowing golden runes began mutating in color, turning a rancid, corrupted green in total silence. The conceptual infection rotted the array's energy nodes from within, forcing the shield's defensive Qi to become highly acidic and toxic; the formation collapsed in on itself into a puddle of smoking slag that made no sound as it melted the stone underneath.
Tamsin's eyes opened wide, exhaling a cold sigh as her basilisk pupils extinguished the last glint of acidity in the dark. She could now corrupt and melt her enemies' divine weapons and shields before they even realized they had been infected.
At the far end of the meditation semicircle, Rowan anchored the group of seven fighters in a stillness so absolute he resembled a statue carved from river stone.
Withdrawing his divine sense from the transmission jade, a glint of cold ambition crossed his face upon hitting the same conceptual lock as his companions. His cultivation level, solidly anchored at Stage 3 of the Saint Realm, allowed him to process the first block's information with exceptional speed and clarity. To him, the Soot Veil was not just a concealment technique; it was the catalyst that would elevate his quick-draw art to absolute perfection.
His bloodline was that of the Severing Wind Dragon. Though he shared an elemental root with Joren, in Rowan the heritage manifested through a radically different combat philosophy: he was a master of short and medium range, focused on explosive speed when drawing his dagger and the invisibility of the blade as it cut through air. Wind was his instrument of pure execution; he didn't use it to project attacks over hundreds of meters, but rather compressed the air directly along the edge of his weapon to eliminate atmospheric resistance, allowing him to draw, sever an opponent's neck or meridians, and sheathe his blade in a fraction of a second—so fast the human eye only registered an inexistent flash.
The immense technical hurdle for Rowan when initiating Flow Suffocation was the intrinsically restless, whistling, explosive nature of his style. Wind compression on a sword's edge naturally tends to generate a high-frequency sharp whistle and a compression wave that any Saint-rank warrior can detect before the blade even leaves the scabbard. Trying to stuff that entire cutting, explosive gale into his Dantian and sealing every pore of his skin required truly freezing spiritual and muscular control; if he failed, the friction of the stagnant air would rupture the tendons in his arms from within.
Rowan closed his eyes and began working inside himself. Instead of opposing the volatility of his meridians with brute force, he used the sutra's breathing to thin and calm the wind in his blood. He forced the air edges to spin inward in tiny low-pressure vortices, compressing them in the center of his core until the flow in his arms reached absolute stagnation.
One by one, he sealed the pores of his skin with relentless discipline. The sleeves of his black robe, which always vibrated slightly from the cutting tension in his hands, fell still in deathly silence. The brilliance of his cultivation was extinguished completely, devoured and buried beneath the sutra's mystical soot. To environmental sensors, Rowan ceased to exist as a body in martial tension; he became a dead statue in the lake's twilight.
After a long day of practice and refinement on this second day, Rowan achieved mastery of the void. To test his draw speed with a real silent trial, he made a slight, almost imperceptible movement with two fingers of his right hand, mimicking his sword's draw path toward a thick runic wooden column he had placed three meters away as a target.
The result was a martial masterpiece. There were no gusts of wind. Not the slightest whistle was heard slicing space, nor was a single shockwave generated to betray his hand's acceleration. Under the flawless camouflage of the Soot Veil, an invisible wind blade, compressed to the limit and entirely devoid of friction noise, left his position.
The second the technique grazed the wooden column, the material didn't splinter or shake. A perfect horizontal line, the thickness of a hair, simply appeared on the surface in ghostly silence.
A heartbeat later, the top half of the heavy wooden column slid smoothly to the side and dropped onto the shore's frost without making a sound, revealing a cut so smooth, polished, and exact it looked like it had been buffed with diamond. Rowan had succeeded in completely eliminating the sound, brilliance, and atmospheric resistance of his draw. Now, on the battlefield, his dagger would slit enemies' throats in a silent blink, without anyone registering the moment the steel left the scabbard.
Rowan opened his eyes, keeping the veil perfectly intact across his body as a cold, satisfied smile formed on his face in the room's twilight.
— The Next Morning —
The stillness of the second day of intensive training on the shores of the glacial lake was abruptly broken by a psychic vibration in the center of their minds. A clear, serene, and faintly amused voice echoed through the Soul Nexus:
"Hey, guys... I'm really sorry to have to interrupt your wonderful deep meditation session, but I need you to do us a favor and eliminate a group of annoying pests tracking us. If we handle it ourselves in this area, we'll raise too much suspicion and run into trouble. Handle it as cleanly, quietly, and quickly as possible."
Dante, Lyra, Altair, Joren, Mira, Tamsin, and Rowan opened their eyes in unison, breaking their breathing cycles.
"What?" Dante blinked, completely dumbfounded by Aia's request. "How long have you been in the city? It's barely been two damn days since we split up! Seriously, you haven't even been in Aethelgard for two days and you already caused a scene that has people chasing you? Is this a joke?"
"Not a joke," Lia's telepathic voice laughed in the background. "It's an arrogant aristocrat who didn't know how to keep his hands to himself and lost an arm. Now he's bringing a hundred hunting dogs after us."
Dante shook his head with a heavy sigh, though his gray pupils flashed with an intense spark of homicidal amusement.
"Ha... alright. Bring that trash directly to our current location coordinates. We'll take care of erasing their existence."
"Perfect. Thanks, guys, see you in a few minutes," Aia closed the nexus connection.
Dante slowly stood up, stretching his back and arm muscles after two whole days of immobility in lotus position. His joints popped with a dry echo in the cliff's dim light. Around him, Lyra, Altair, Joren, Mira, Tamsin, and Rowan did the same, brushing frost off their robes and gripping their weapons with silent bloodlust.
"Alright, everyone," Dante announced, looking toward the shadows of the pine forest. "It's time to get back to real work. Since we spent two whole days practicing and consolidating the first stage of the Specter Sutra, I think this ambush will be the perfect trial by fire before we begin our journey down into the Underworld."
"Not a single drop of blood out of place," Joren smiled, drawing his two short daggers in absolute silence.
"Now... let's conceal our arrays and wait patiently for our prey," Dante ordered.
With a swift wave of his hand over the Hundred-Strand Mandala, Dante deactivated the golden defensive barrier but kept the Unseen Lotus Veil formation operating across the lake perimeter. Instantly, the seven Morningstar fighters activated their newly mastered [Soot Veil]. Their auras, their scents, the brilliance of their bloodlines, and their breathing vanished from the face of the earth. They turned around in silence and leaped into the high branches of the ancient pines, melting into the canopy's darkness like true waiting ghosts.
— Present Time —
Aia, Varian, Ciro, Lia, and Ren's group vanished into the fog of the eastern trail with a blur of supernatural speed, leaving the clearing as if the hundred swords surrounding them were nothing more than blades of dry grass.
On the pebbled shore of the glacial lake, Cassian Aurelia felt his breath catch in rage and disbelief. His spoiled aristocrat brain, accustomed to the whole city trembling before his family name, simply couldn't process what was happening in that second.
Who the hell belonged to that voice speaking from the branches above?! And why had those five nomadic plebeians ignored him completely, turning their backs to walk away as if he and his hundred elite troops were just a pile of garbage for someone else to clean up?! The humiliation made his blood boil in the stump of his amputated arm.
"KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL RIGHT NOW!" Cassian shrieked in a hysterical, unhinged voice, pointing his remaining hand toward the pine canopies surrounding the lake. "GORN! BRING THAT DAMN FOREST DOWN! LEAVE NO ONE ALIVE! TEAR THEM TO PIECES!"
At that exact second, on the thick branch of an oak-pine located directly above the heads of the Aurelia family army, Dante stood up.
He didn't activate a single spark of dragon fire, strictly obeying the order of stealth and identity concealment imposed by Patriarch Samael. Yet the instant his black silhouette straightened in the canopy's gloom, the floodgates of the Underworld broke open within his soul.
The ambient temperature across the entire perimeter of the glacial lake plummeted thirty degrees instantly. The moisture hanging over the dark water froze on the spot, turning into a shower of black frost that began falling on the soldiers' armor.
The morning sunlight filtering through the cliffs was completely devoured within a one-hundred-meter radius, as if an eclipse of blood and darkness had fallen exclusively over that coordinate of the mortal world.
"Tell me something, one-armed little prince..." Dante whispered from above.
His voice didn't travel through the air; it resonated like an icy echo directly inside the skulls and minds of Cassian Aurelia, the giant Gorn, and the hundred elite mercenaries, paralyzing their heartbeats.
"Are you all... truly ready to die today?"
Without emitting a single gram of Qi fluctuation outward thanks to the Soot Veil's compression, Dante released the fullness of his supreme assassin bloodline's sovereign martial intent: [The Asura Intent].
The physical space directly behind Dante's back warped and tore open like an old rag. In the pitch darkness of the upper foliage, shadows condensed and materialized the spiritual, illusory projection of a primordial demon of war and slaughter: two titanic, bloodied, and deranged scarlet eyes with vertical pupils opened in the darkness of the clouds, blinking slowly and bathing the entire surface of the glacial lake in a crimson glow dripping with impending death.
A primitive, paralyzing, absolute terror crushed the souls of the hundred Aurelia men. Gorn stepped back, trembling, unable to lift his greatsword.
Dante tilted his face slightly beneath his hood, looking down at the cornered herd on the shore, and issued a single command in a graveyard voice:
"Hunt, shadows."
And in overwhelming, spectral silence—devoid of brilliance, sound, or Qi pressure—the seven black silhouettes of the Morningstar warriors plunged from the pine sky like true shadowless specters, descending with their invisible blades upon the hundred men screaming on the frozen lake's shore.
Note from Void_Scribe: 🐉
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