"Quiet," Raven said coldly, and the single word carried more weight than any of their outbursts combined. Instantly, the darkness around the venue came alive. It surged outward from where she stood, moving with purpose and precision, reaching toward the women who had dared to release their cultivation. The sight was shocking—even Iris, the Demi-God sitting invisibly in the crowd, was caught off guard by the sheer scale and control of Raven's display.
Raven was only a Martial Lord in terms of her cultivation realm. But her comprehension of the Law of Darkness rivaled that of Martial Emperors. In practical terms, that meant Raven wielded strength at the Martial Emperor level, although she capped out around Level 4 Martial Emperor in terms of what she could actually bring to bear. For a Martial Lord to fight at that level through pure law comprehension alone was unheard of—it was the kind of thing that turned heads at the Demi God level.
The females who had dared to charge forward were swallowed by the darkness without resistance. Their energy, their experience, their very essence was devoured by it, consumed and broken down until nothing remained, be it their aura, cultivation, or even the smallest hint of their presence.
The venue went dead silent. Every eye in the room was wide open, including Ethan's, who was just as stunned as everyone else by what he had just witnessed.
"This is all because of you…" Raven said, turning back to Ethan. She placed her palm gently against his cheek, her touch light and warm despite the cold devastation she had just unleashed, and looked at him with an expression so soft that it seemed to belong to an entirely different person.
"You showed me darkness can be beautiful. For so long, the world had told me what darkness is… You shattered that. Your acceptance of me, and how you can see darkness as something beautiful…" She said softly. She was taller than him, so Ethan had to tilt his head back to meet her gaze while she looked down at him, her thumb tracing gently across his cheekbone.
Ethan's words from the day they had first met had stayed with her all this time. They weren't just compliments to her—they had fundamentally changed the way she understood herself and her power. It was those words that had helped her comprehension of the Law of Darkness advance to the level it was now, and it was those words that had unlocked a deeper understanding of her own unique physique.
"I love you…" She said softly. Honestly, this was the longest she had ever held a smile in her entire life, and it was a bit unsettling to witness. Seeing someone who was normally as emotionless as a statue suddenly smiling for this long felt less like warmth and more like watching something that wasn't designed to bend being forced into shape.
"That's funny. You chain him up and force him to marry you?" The Ice Phoenix Sect ancestor said coldly from her seat, her voice slicing through the moment like a blade through silk.
Raven turned to look at her, her expression flattening back to its default emptiness, before she looked back at Ethan, who had closed his eyes again, wanting absolutely no part of whatever was about to happen next.
"Open your eyes." She said coldly. How dare he close his eyes? Was she so ugly that he couldn't even bear to look at her?
"..." Ethan unwillingly opened his eyes, knowing better than to test her patience right now. She reached forward and removed the chains from his wrists, then undid the seal that had been placed on his body, freeing him completely.
Ethan just stood there, feeling painfully awkward, acutely aware of every single pair of eyes in the venue boring into him. He opened his mouth, about to say something—anything to break the tension—when Raven suddenly threw up a shield of pure darkness in front of him.
A sword slash crashed against it a fraction of a second later, the impact sending a shockwave rippling through the room that rattled the walls and cracked the floor beneath their feet.
Shiro stepped forward from the crowd, unable to control herself any longer. Her aura exploded outward the moment she moved—a violent, churning storm of blade energy that coated her body like armor, a sea of invisible swords that cut everything they touched, breaking matter down to dust just by being near it. The air around her screamed as it was sliced apart.
"Step aside. My blade has no hatred for you," Shiro said, her voice calm and measured as she ignored Raven entirely and walked straight toward Ethan, her eyes locked onto him with a focus that left no room for anything else.
"This is my husband," Raven said, and her aura of darkness spread outward in response, blanketing the area around them. Everything that the darkness touched ceased to exist—it didn't destroy or break down matter, it devoured and consumed matter and energy alike without leaving so much as a particle behind.
'She has an overpowering physique... I'm guessing this is the Heavenly Darkness Dao Devouring Physique.' Ethan thought, his mind racing even as the two women squared off in front of him. Then his attention shifted to Shiro.
She didn't have any unique physique, special bloodline, or inherited power. She was just a person who had walked the path of the sword to its absolute extreme—pure skill, pure mastery, pure will, taken so far beyond what anyone thought possible that it had become something terrifying in its own right.
"Then die," Shiro said with a quiet sigh, as though the outcome was already decided and she was simply going through the formality. Her sword flashed, cutting clean through the wall of darkness Raven had thrown up.
But Shiro's eyes narrowed when she felt what had happened. The darkness hadn't just blocked her attack—it had devoured a portion of it mid-swing, absorbing enough of the strike's power to weaken it significantly. What was left wasn't enough to land, and Raven slipped to the side, avoiding the diminished slash with room to spare.
"You have combat capability at the Martial Emperor level… but you lack actual combat experience at this level," Shiro said calmly, and Raven's eyes widened as the sword slash she had just dodged suddenly curved mid-air, reversing direction and arcing back toward her like a living thing.
It nearly took her neck clean off, missing by inches, but she reacted in time—forming a dense layer of darkness at her throat that swallowed the weakened slash before it could make contact. The technique dissolved into nothing the moment it touched the black barrier, consumed entirely.
Raven's eyes narrowed as she locked her gaze onto Shiro, but she didn't back down. Instead, the darkness blanketing the venue began to twist and churn around them, responding to her will like an extension of her own body. Even Shiro's shadow began to move on its own—writhing, stretching, pulling away from her feet as it came alive under Raven's control.
Raven's pupils shrank suddenly, and she moved—flashing across the distance at speeds nearing the speed of light, her body blurring into a streak of pure darkness. She appeared directly in front of Ethan, shielding him with her own body just in time to intercept a blood needle that had been aimed straight at his heart.
The needle dissolved against her darkness with a hiss, and Raven whipped her head around to glare at the Blood Queen, who sat in her seat with one leg crossed, not even bothering to hide the fact that she had just tried to assassinate the groom in front of everyone.
But Raven couldn't stay still—she had to move again almost immediately, spinning to block another of Shiro's strikes that came whistling in from the side. In the split second that Raven shifted her position, the Ice Phoenix Sect ancestor surged forward, shieding Ethan from a attack, while moving in to kill him, her hand already forming the seal for a lethal ice technique aimed at his throat.
She was intercepted by the Blood Queen, whose crimson aura exploded outward as the two Martial Emperors clashed mid-air. The impact sent shockwaves rippling through the venue, shattering windows and cracking the stone pillars holding the ceiling up.
In the confusion, the silver-haired dragon clan elder saw her opening and took it—her body erupted in light as she transformed mid-leap, her human form dissolving into the massive, scaled form of a dragon that filled the room with its presence.
She lunged toward Ethan with her jaws wide open, aiming to devour him whole. But the Blood Queen reacted faster than anyone expected, whipping tendrils of blood outward that wrapped around the dragon's body like chains, constricting tightly and forcing the massive beast to redirect its attack toward her instead.
Ethan, watching all of this unfold around him—women trying to kill him, women trying to save him so they could kill him themselves, women fighting other women over the right to decide whether he lived or died—let out a long, tired sigh.
He walked over to the nearest empty chair, sat down, leaned back, and crossed his legs like a man watching a sporting event he had no personal stake in. His eyes drifted across the chaos and settled on the girl in leather, who, along with Iris, showed absolutely no intention of joining the fight. The two of them sat perfectly still while the rest of the venue tore itself apart around them like the eye of a hurricane.
'When will the males arrive...?' Ethan thought, yawning in boredom. The girl in leather caught the yawn and snorted lightly at the sight—a small sound that was the most emotion she had shown since arriving.
'I want to see if you'll still be bored when I have your soul...' She thought, her lips curling faintly before she shifted her gaze skyward. As if on cue, the ceiling of the church exploded inward, chunks of stone and reinforced wood raining down as a wave of male cultivators made their entrance from above.
They descended into the venue like a storm, and every single one of them locked their eyes onto Ethan with a hatred so intense it was practically visible in the air around them.
Imagine spending years—hundreds of years, even—trying to charm the girl of your dreams. Pouring your heart out, training to become stronger, doing everything in your power to earn even a glance in your direction.
Only for a crippled mortal with no cultivation to waltz in out of nowhere, not only charm the girl you loved, but sleep with her, and then walk away with his life as if nothing had happened. The jealousy and hatred these men carried toward Ethan were boundless, a black pit that had been festering for years and had finally found its outlet.
And it wasn't just pride driving them. Many of these females had personally asked these men for help tracking Ethan down over the years. How could they not leap at the chance to kill him? Taking Ethan's head was the fastest shortcut to getting on the good side of the women they worshipped.