Chapter 7: The Gaze of Origin and the Last Bastion
On the highest spire of the Golden City's central tower, where the world's Qi concentrated into dense, pearl-colored artificial clouds, City Lord Duan opened his eyes.
He was not a man who could be classified as old, nor as young. His appearance was a disturbing, timeless paradox; his skin possessed the immaculate texture of polished jade, but his deep, unfathomable eyes seemed to hold forcibly contained thunderstorms. As a consolidated expert in the Origin Realm (Stage 3), he had transcended the limits of mortal flesh. He no longer cultivated by accumulating energy in his body; he borrowed the authority of Heaven and Earth.
Therefore, his connection to the Golden City was absolute. He felt every energy fluctuation, every defensive array, and every burst of Qi as if they were nerves connected to his own spine.
Duan slowly set his cup of lotus tea on the mahogany table.
"Strange..." he murmured, his voice echoing in the immense, empty circular hall.
On his sensory 'radar', the Golden City always pulsed with three great focal points of spiritual light, corresponding to the three great noble families. But just a few minutes ago, the 'light' representing the Chen Family, with its six hundred inhabitants and its defensive fire array, had simply gone out. It had ceased to exist.
There were no massive explosions shaking the earth. There were no war cries to wake the commoners in the lower districts. There were no fires lighting up the night. Only a sudden, absolute, and unnatural silence. A void where there was once life.
"Shadow," Duan called out, without raising his voice.
The space behind his chair distorted, and a gray-cloaked figure appeared out of nowhere, dropping to one knee on the marble floor.
"My Lord."
"The Chen Manor is in a sepulchral silence," Duan decreed, his gaze fixed on the dark horizon. "Go and investigate. If you find the young Samael Morningstar in the vicinity... do not interfere yet. It doesn't matter how much blood he has spilled. I want to see how sharp this pup's teeth truly are before I decide whether to break them or let them bite."
The Shadow nodded and vanished into the night wind. Duan picked up his teacup again. The balance of his city was being threatened, and he would not tolerate chaos for long.
Several kilometers away, in the northern district, the situation in front of the Liu Family Manor was diametrically opposed to the silence of the Chens.
The Lius had no way of knowing how or why their allies had died, but the survival instinct of veteran cultivators screamed at them that the reaper was knocking at their door. The entire manor, a complex of white stone buildings and golden roofs, was enveloped in a dome of dazzling energy: the "Solar Scale Grand Formation."
Burning golden runes floated in the air, intertwining to form an impenetrable barrier that emitted a light so intense and purifying it turned night into broad daylight within a hundred-meter radius.
Hidden in the nearest tree line, Samael clicked his tongue in obvious frustration. Beside him, Kael shielded his eyes from the glare, and Malak, the imposing leader of the Shadow Legion, instinctively shrank back into the darkness.
"Damn it," Samael muttered, his violet eyes narrowing at the brightness. "They have a defensive formation of pure Light and Fire attribute. It's pure geographical and elemental coincidence, but it's the worst possible tactical scenario for us."
Malak hissed. The sound was like two stone tombstones scraping together. The giant covered his non-existent face with his solid smoke hood, and the thick black iron chains wrapping him clinked in agitation.
"Pure, consecrated light weakens my form, Master," Malak transmitted directly into Samael's mind. "My specters can cross that barrier if you open it, but upon entering that luminous domain, our nature will be revealed. We will become visible, tangible, and at least 30% slower. Stealth will be lost entirely. It won't be a clean slaughter like the last one."
Samael opened his mental interface.
[STRATEGIC ALERT!]
[Estimated Time Remaining before the arrival of Elite Hunters (Valois Forces): 38 Hours.]
[Current Obstacle: Solar Scale Formation (Light Attribute). Adverse effect on Mythic Summon detected.]
"We don't need it to be clean, Malak. We only need it to be lethal," Samael dictated, his voice dripping with absolute coldness. "If we don't take this manor before dawn, the distress message will reach the North. When Duke Valois finds out Violeta and Eris are alive, he won't send simple mercenaries. He will send the monsters of the Blood Snow Sect to flay us all, and they far exceed this city's level."
Samael turned to his cousin, who was looking at him expectantly.
"Kael, it's your turn."
"Mine?" Kael blinked, looking at the immense golden dome that repelled even the darkness of the night. "Patriarch, my base is barely at Stage 2 of the Qi Sea. If I strike that barrier, the kinetic rebound will shatter my bones."
"You are a Morningstar. Today you are not just my shield; you are the sword that opens the path." Samael pointed at the formation. "I'm not asking you to destroy it. That array was created to withstand brute force strikes from Transcendence experts. I am asking you to use the Sword Seed you awakened today. Find the conductive thread of the energy, Kael. Do not strike. Cut."
Kael swallowed hard, the weight of responsibility settling on his shoulders. He gripped the hilt of Whisper of the North, feeling the comforting cold of the Earth Grade blade.
"My intent is just a raw seed, Patriarch. I won't be able to hold the fissure open for long."
"We only need three seconds," Samael promised, his eyes gleaming with the promise of violence. "Find the crack."
Kael nodded, exhaled a cloud of vapor into the freezing night, and took a step forward, leaving the protection of the forest's shadows.
The instant the formation's light illuminated him, revealing his distinctive wild red hair and bloodstained clothes, alarms rang out on the walls of the Liu manor.
"There they are! It's one of the Morningstars!" shouted a guard captain from the white stone wall. "Crossbowmen, shoot! Fire at will!"
The air filled with the deafening snap of beast-gut bowstrings. Hundreds of heavy steel bolts, loaded with fire-attribute Qi, rained down on Kael, tracing deadly arcs in the night.
Kael didn't run. He didn't seek cover. He planted himself firmly on the grass, closed his golden eyes, and slowed his breathing until the beating of his own heart sounded like slow drums in his ears. In his mind, he visualized the purest and most primitive concept of his lineage: to separate what is joined. It wasn't about strength, it was about absolute will.
[Sword Intent Seed: Activated.]
The air around Kael began to vibrate with a high-pitched frequency. When he opened his eyes, his pupils were predator slits. The arrows approaching him didn't even touch his skin; they split lengthwise in mid-air, cut by an invisible force field generated by his pure homicidal intent.
Kael unsheathed Whisper of the North.
There was no grand burst of energy or an epic roar. It was a simple, surgical, and almost imperceptible flick of the wrist. But the Intent Seed, amplified by the cold of the Earth Grade metal, projected a concept through space.
ZMMMMMM.
The Solar Scale's golden dome, specifically designed to absorb and repel blunt impacts, met head-on with an abstract concept that ignored hardness: the edge.
Along the barrier of light, a vertical fissure exactly two meters high slashed open. The edges of the golden crack hissed like molten glass falling into ice water, desperately trying to repair themselves.
"THREE SECONDS!" Kael roared, dropping to one knee, blood welling from his nose from the mental exertion of keeping a massive defensive array apart.
"NOW!" Samael ordered.
Samael shot toward the crack like a projectile, his body cloaked in the grayish mantle of the Void. Malak and the hundred specters followed him in perfect synchrony. They became a literal tide of liquid darkness slipping through the open wound in the light.
Just as the last specter crossed, Kael let out his breath, and the golden fissure slammed shut with a thunderous snap. They were inside.
Inside the barrier, all hell immediately broke loose.
Unlike the Chen Manor, stealth died the instant they stepped into the light. The purifying array's golden glare burned the specters' smoke robes, revealing their skeletal silhouettes and smoking claws. The pain made them writhe, but their Mythic nature made them immune to fear.
The Liu elite guards, seeing an army of black figures led by Samael enter, drew their heavy sabers and attacked with the desperation of cornered men.
"They're demons! Use fire techniques! Burn their shadows!" shouted Patriarch Liu from the steps of the main hall, coordinating the defense.
For the first time since their summoning, the Shadow Legion bled—or rather, lost density. The light made them tangible. Swords imbued with fire Qi sliced through their smoke limbs, dispelling some of the lower-level specters.
But Malak, the Reaper of Silence, was furious at the annoyance of the light. His immense body fully materialized in the middle of the training courtyard. With a brutal swing of his rusted scythe, he swept the battlefront. The spectral blade didn't cut the flesh of the Liu guards; it passed through their armor as if it were paper and reaped their souls directly. Twelve guards dropped dead instantly, their bodies intact but their eyes devoid of life.
Samael ignored the carnage around him. He wasn't there to fight foot soldiers. His target was the true threat pulsing inside the hall.
With the Void protecting him from stray arrows, he crossed the courtyard and kicked open the oak doors of the main hall.
"Arrogant brat!" roared a voice from inside.
Ancestor Liu came out to meet him. Unlike the Chen Ancestor, this old man was not sleeping; he was armed and armored. His cultivation base at Transcendence Stage 7 (Peak) felt like a solid iron wall. In his left hand, he held a crystal orb that throbbed with a red light, like a beating heart.
"I knew you would come! That's why I prepared this gift for you!" yelled Ancestor Liu, his eyes bloodshot.
Without a second of hesitation, the old man clenched his fist and crushed the red orb. A crimson, nauseating shockwave exploded in the room, smelling of rotten blood and human sacrifices.
[CRITICAL ALERT! Forbidden Art Detected: Blood Sacrifice (Vital Essence Burning).]
[The target is consuming their longevity to force a temporary breakthrough.]
Ancestor Liu's aura skyrocketed in a violent spiral of red energy. He broke the Stage 7 bottleneck and, with a harrowing howl, touched the edge of Transcendence Stage 8. His muscle mass swelled grotesquely, tearing his silk robes, and his veins turned black.
"Die and join your father in the abyss!" roared the monster the Ancestor had become. He thrust a palm forward, channeling all his earth element and the sacrificed blood into a gigantic hand of scarlet rock that covered the entire exit.
Samael crossed his arms in an X-guard, activating the Crimson King's Barrier, but the difference in raw power was simply too immense.
The palm of blood and rock shattered Samael's defensive barrier as if it were thin glass. The impact sent him flying backward almost twenty meters. Samael crashed brutally into a marble statue in the outer courtyard, cracking the stone.
Samael coughed violently, spitting up a clot of black blood. His Qi reserve was dangerously low after using the costly Dimensional Slash against the Chens. His bones ached, and his vision blurred for a second.
"Do you think you can beat me, Morningstar trash?" Ancestor Liu laughed, stepping out of the hall, his footsteps making the ground tremble, looking invincible in his berserker state. "The message has already been sent North! When Duke Valois finds out those damn twins are still alive, he'll send the Blood Snow Sect to flay you alive!"
Samael, leaning on Obsidian Fang, slowly got to his feet. A wolfish smile, stained with blood, curled his lips.
"I didn't come to beat you in a duel of strength, you old idiot," Samael spat. "I came to hunt you. And on a hunt... I am never alone."
Samael snapped his fingers.
Right behind Ancestor Liu's imposing figure, the dense shadow cast by his own body due to the Solar Scale's light suddenly came alive. Using the chaos of the courtyard and the old man's arrogance, Malak had infiltrated his blind spot.
The smoke giant materialized without making a single sound.
Sentence, was the only thought Samael transmitted.
Malak's enormous rusted scythe came down like lightning from the blind spot. Ancestor Liu, his instincts heightened by the blood sacrifice, sensed the mortal danger in the last microsecond. He spun around and raised both arms crossed, infusing them with earth Qi at the maximum defensive level to try and block the spectral blade.
The rusted edge clashed against the Stage 8 rock Qi. There was a horrifying screech of metal against stone. Malak couldn't decapitate him, but the brute force of his Mythic attack was unstoppable. The scythe sliced through the rock shield, flesh, muscles, and bones.
Both of Ancestor Liu's hands, severed cleanly from the wrists, fell to the ground bathed in blood.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH!" The old man's scream of agony eclipsed the noise of the battle around him. He fell to his knees, staring at the stumps of his arms spraying blood like fountains, his Sacrifice technique collapsing due to the massive fluid loss.
Samael did not waste the divine opening. He knew the price. He knew what would happen to his body. But it was necessary.
Samael channeled the last 20% of his Qi Sea and forced it to flow violently through the meridians of his right arm, mixing it with the unfathomable power of the Void. His arm began to swell. The skin cracked, red and burning, unable to bear the conceptual load of a Heaven Grade technique repeated on the same day.
"SWORD ART: DIMENSIONAL SLASH!" Samael roared.
He launched the horizontal slash through the air, fifteen meters away.
The sound that followed was not that of a cut, but of fabric tearing violently. The skin of Samael's right forearm literally exploded. Blood and shreds of muscle went flying, splattering the ground. A pain so pure and agonizing that it threatened to wipe out his consciousness clouded his mind. His meridians sizzled, burned from the inside out. His arm fell to his side, completely useless and bloody.
But the technique cleaved through reality.
The thin black line appeared out of nowhere directly across Ancestor Liu's lower abdomen. It ignored space, time, and the golden light. The cut was surgical, deep, and irreversible. It cleaved his Dantian in half.
The old man's cultivation core, the work of two hundred years of Qi accumulation, shattered in an instant. Ancestor Liu spat a cascade of blood, his eyes losing focus. He fell sideways, crippled, reduced to a dying, armless, and magicless old man in less than five seconds.
Silence fell over the courtyard. The surviving Liu guards, seeing their protector god mutilated and destroyed, dropped their weapons and fell to their knees, trembling.
Samael, breathing heavily, dragged his feet. With his healthy left hand, he raised Obsidian Fang, walking toward the fallen Ancestor to deliver the killing blow and claim the Family Luck.
But before the black blade could come down, the entire world stopped.
It wasn't a metaphor. The atmospheric pressure over the Liu Manor increased so dramatically that the stone tiles of the courtyard cracked simultaneously. Kael, outside the barrier, was crushed against the grass, unable to move a single finger. Samael was immobilized in his tracks, his knees creaking dangerously under an invisible weight that felt as if the sky itself had descended upon his shoulders.
Malak, the fearsome Reaper, let out a dull roar and was forced to violently dissipate into black smoke, returning to Samael's shadow to avoid being crushed by the pure realm suppression.
A figure descended from the heavens. He wasn't jumping or falling; he was flying. True, sustained flight, defying the laws of gravity with absolute naturalness.
He wore immaculate white robes and kept his hands clasped behind his back.
City Lord Duan.
Samael's System panel blinked frantically, chiming in a lethal red that covered his entire vision.
[MAXIMUM CRITICAL ALERT!]
[Entity Detected: City Lord Duan.]
[Power Level: ORIGIN REALM (Stage 3).]
[Threat Status: Unfathomable power gap. Fusion with Heaven and Earth detected. The Host has no chance of victory. Probability of survival in direct combat: 0.00%.]
Duan landed softly in front of Samael, without kicking up a speck of dust. The Solar Scale's glare seemed to dim in his mere presence. His eyes, the color of storm clouds, looked at the young Patriarch with an unsettling mix of academic curiosity and severe warning.
"You have wiped the Chens off the face of the earth in absolute silence," Duan said, his voice soft, almost melodic, yet echoing in Samael's head like the thunder of a god. "You have crippled the Liu Ancestor and mutilated his pride. You have turned my peaceful city into your personal slaughterhouse in less than a single night."
Duan took a step toward him. The pressure increased. Samael tasted his own blood in his mouth as he fought with every ounce of his will not to kneel.
"You have monstrous talent, Samael Morningstar. You are lethal, unpredictable, and cold," the City Lord continued, stopping a meter away. "But the chaos you have caused ends right now. I will not allow you to kill the last leader of the alliance's great families. I need stability in my territory, and you are upsetting the balance beyond my patience."
From the ground, in a puddle of his own blood and urine, Ancestor Liu moaned, weakly raising his head.
"L-Lord Duan!" the crippled old man cried. "Save me! He's a demon... a heretic! Kill him!"
"Silence, scum." Duan hushed him without even looking at him, the pressure of his aura sinking the old man's face into the broken tiles. Then, he fixed his storm eyes back on Samael. "Leave, boy. Take your people, let this miserable old man breathe, and retreat to your valley. If you take one more step toward him with that sword, or if you attempt to challenge my authority, I will formally declare you an enemy of the State and erase you and your entire clan from history."
Samael was trembling. His mortal body screamed at him to flee. His shattered right arm burned in agony, and his survival instincts begged him to drop the sword and walk away before that Origin Realm monster snapped his fingers and disintegrated him.
But the System, relentless and tyrannical, showed him his inescapable reality.
[Mandatory Main Quest: THE PURGE OF THE GOLDEN CITY.]
[Pending Objective: Exterminate the main Liu bloodline.]
[System Warning: If the Host retreats and abandons the quest, the maximum penalty will be applied immediately. PUNISHMENT: Total Annihilation of the Host and all marked members of the Morningstar Clan.]
Samael lowered his gaze, his white hair hiding his violet eyes.
If he left, the System—the very power that had given him the pills and the Dimensional Slash—would kill him and the twins. If he attacked, the City Lord would kill him. He was caught between the anvil and the hammer of the heavens.
A low, raspy laugh, like the cracking of black ice, escaped Samael's throat.
He raised his face slowly. His violet eyes clashed against the storm eyes of the Origin Realm expert. There was no fear in his gaze, only the twisted majesty of a Sovereign of the Void who had been betrayed by destiny too many times to ever bow again.
Samael smiled, showing his teeth stained with red and black blood. He gripped Obsidian Fang with his healthy left hand, and slowly raised the black blade, aiming directly at the trembling Ancestor Liu's neck, mere inches from the City Lord's immaculate feet.
"Lord Duan... with all the respect your elevated Realm deserves," Samael said, his voice hoarse but loaded with a determination that cut through the crushing atmospheric pressure with pure, insane willpower. "I do not leave my jobs half-finished."