Author's Note:(The labyrinth fell, but the shadows have grown denser. In this chapter, the Sovereign demonstrates that tyranny is reserved for enemies, while his family is granted the utmost respect. Loot is counted in destinies, politics is stained with blood, and the Empire prepares its final and most desperate trap. Enjoy).
Chapter 32: Red Heritages and Traps Beneath Jade
The collapse of the Labyrinth of Jade Whispers didn't just leave a physical scar in the center of the coliseum; it irreparably fractured the arrogance of the Celestial Jade City.
When the Morningstar Clan left the combat arena and walked down the wide, gold-paved avenues toward their temporary base at the Inn of the Jade Lotus, the world around them had changed. There was no longer mocking laughter or whispers of "desert peasants." As they passed, the crowds parted like the Red Sea. Cultivators from medium and major sects averted their gaze, afraid to make eye contact. Mothers from minor clans pulled their children into alleyways.
The name Morningstar was no longer an echo of the past; it was the alpha predator walking in broad daylight.
Upon crossing the immense oak doors of the inn, which Cedric had sealed with Earth Grade detection arrays, the tension of the public exhibition finally vanished, giving way to a silent, lethal euphoria.
The air in the main hall smelled of ozone, dried blood, and the sweet fragrance of spiritual herbs.
Kael, his sword hilt still stained with the blood of the labyrinth assassins, bumped fists with Cedric. Violeta and Eris exchanged tired but triumphant smiles. The junior disciples who had witnessed the destruction from the stands cheered their heirs in a restrained murmur of absolute devotion.
"Enough celebrating," Cedric said, though a pragmatic smile appeared on his face. "Let's see the price of their arrogance."
The strategist approached the immense mahogany table in the hall and emptied the contents of dozens of spatial rings they had looted from the corpses of the "geniuses" and assassins in the labyrinth.
The crystalline sound deafened the room. Mountains of Earth and Heaven Grade spiritual stones, manuals of secret techniques from the hundred sects, defensive talismans, armors forged from rare alloys, and beast cores rolled across the wood. They were obscenely rich. They had plundered the future of a dozen powers in a single afternoon.
Elowen paid no attention to the gold. Her hands glowed with a soft green Qi as she handed out dozens of recovery pills forged with the purified poison from the ambush she had suffered.
"Your meridians are overloaded from the excessive use of Qi," the alchemist warned, handing a pill to Xylia and another to the twins. "Take this. It will stabilize the flow. The massacre was perfect, but the mortal body has limits."
However, Samael was not in the main hall celebrating the spoils of war.
The Sovereign of the Void was deep in the east wing of the inn, sitting in a lotus position in the center of a meditation chamber. His violet eyes were fixed on the empty space in front of him, where the golden panel of the System projected the most dangerous reward of all.
[Patriarch System: Extraordinary Loot Secured.]
[Item: 'Celestial Destiny Fragment' (Synthetic - Heaven Grade).]
[Available Usage Options:]
[1. Direct Assimilation: The Host absorbs the destiny. Expands the body's limits and facilitates the comprehension of a Complete Law. Risk: Attraction of Heavenly Tribulation.]
[2. Karmic Reinvestment: Transfer the Fragment to a subordinate. Grants immediate Semi-Saint potential. Risk: Instability of the recipient's soul.]
[3. Foundation Sacrifice: Disintegrate the Fragment into the Clan's Spiritual Vein. Permanently elevates the Qi density and passive luck of all members.]
Samael raised his hand, and the pulsating golden sphere materialized in his palm. It emitted a heat that was not physical, but conceptual. It was stolen luck, the future of a genius he had devoured with his own hands.
With a thought, Samael deactivated the room's isolation.
"Enter," he ordered.
The heavy wooden doors opened. Kael, Violeta, Eris, Cedric, Xylia, Elowen, and Seraphina entered the chamber. They knew that when the Patriarch called them alone, the future of the clan was about to be rewritten.
Samael showed them the golden sphere. The sheer pressure of the destiny contained within it made the heirs feel a slight suffocation.
"This is the Destiny of a Son of Heaven, courtesy of the Valois Family," Samael said, his voice deep and devoid of emotion. "Its power is incalculable. Assimilating it can push one of us to the Semi-Saint Realm almost immediately, or it can be sacrificed to strengthen the foundations of our base in the desert."
Samael paused, looking at the faces of his generals. He was a ruthless tyrant to the outside world; a monster who crushed skulls and devoured enemies without blinking. But these six youths were not his slaves. They were the pillars that held up the roof of his empire. They had bled for him, and he would bleed for them.
"I do not rule through fear in this house," Samael continued, lowering the sphere. "You are my fangs. Today, the clan decides together. I will listen to your advice. Vote."
The silence in the room was heavy, broken only by the beating of the golden sphere.
Kael was the first to step forward. His golden eyes looked at the sphere, but there was no greed in them.
"I don't want a power I haven't cut with my own sword," Kael said. "If you give it to me, my Sword Heart will grow lazy."
Violeta crossed her arms, the air around her cooling.
"Sacrificing it for the base sounds prudent, Patriarch. But we are in the middle of a war, thousands of kilometers from home. A strong base won't save us tomorrow in the arena. We need lethal power now."
Cedric nodded, his bicolored eyes calculating a thousand variables per second.
"Violeta is right. Sacrificing it is a long-term investment. But Valerius Valois will not give us the long term. Tomorrow they will release the big dogs. However, reinvesting it into one of us carries a risk of instability, and an unstable heir in the middle of a pitched battle is a vulnerability."
Xylia, with the composure of an empress, looked directly into Samael's violet eyes.
"The empire belongs to the strongest, Samael. You are our Patriarch, the core of our formation. If you fall, we all fall, no matter how many talents we have. Your power is our shield. Eat it."
Elowen and Eris nodded in silent agreement with the Thunder Empress.
Seraphina, standing next to Samael, rested a cold, delicate hand on his shoulder.
"Take it," Seraphina whispered. "We know you don't need to advance to Semi-Saint to kill them. Use it to expand the limits of your body. You are a Dragon. Make your Qi sea so vast that not even the gods can drain it."
Samael looked at his generals. The absolute loyalty they professed to him didn't stem from blind allegiance, but from respect forged in shared slaughter. A predatory, proud, and sharp smile crossed the Sovereign's face.
"Very well." Samael closed his fingers around the Celestial Destiny Fragment.
He didn't assimilate it in the traditional way. He channeled Absolute Void and crushed it in his fist. The golden sphere burst into a torrent of threads of liquid light that violently penetrated the pores of his right arm, traveling directly to his heart and his Dantian.
Samael let out a muffled grunt. The entire room trembled, and the stone tiles beneath him cracked.
He didn't try to break through the bottleneck to the Semi-Saint Realm. He knew that forcing the comprehension of a Major Law would leave him vulnerable. Instead, he used the pure karmic power and vital energy of the fragment to expand the physical structure of his Dragon Physique and the volume of his core at Stage 9 of the Origin Realm.
His bones cracked, becoming as dense as mythic steel. His meridians, previously like wide rivers, expanded to become deep oceans, capable of storing an amount of Qi hundreds of times greater than a normal cultivator at his same level.
The process was so violent and the amount of energy so massive that Samael's body couldn't contain it all at once. A shockwave of pure, golden, and violet Qi was expelled from his body.
And that was when the Blood Oath sprang into action.
On the left chest of Kael, Violeta, Eris, Cedric, Xylia, and Elowen, the karmic marks glowed with incandescent fire. The Spiritual Vein connecting them acted as an overflow conduit.
The excess of purest energy and celestial luck from the fragment Samael had just refined flowed through the link directly to the heirs.
Since the clan had just crushed the labyrinth with absolute dominance, there were no cracks in their confidence or doubts in their hearts. Their spiritual foundations were perfect. Upon receiving this torrent of flawless energy combined with Elowen's pills, the result was instantaneous and peaceful.
There was no life-or-death struggle for the breakthrough. It was like filling a glass that was already perfectly positioned.
Kael's aura shone, and the hum of his sword grew sharper. Transcendent Stage 9.
Violeta's ice and Eris's fire rippled, their elemental densities multiplying. Transcendent Peak.
Cedric and Xylia felt their Qi seas overflow and stabilize at a higher level, brushing the limits of their current realm.
Elowen exhaled a breath that smelled of pure vitality, consolidating her power and further refining her wood essence.
The System blinked in gold before Samael's eyes.
[Assimilation Completed. Host's Qi Sea expanded to 400% of Origin Stage 9 capacity.]
[Dragon Physique: Physical immunity enhanced against Initial Saint Rank attacks.]
[Oath Resonance: The heirs have absorbed the karmic spillover. Cultivation bases stabilized and elevated by an average of 50% of a stage naturally and without side effects.]
[Clan Luck set to: Supreme.]
Samael opened his eyes, which now harbored a sea of violet and dark stars. He stood up. His presence was no longer just that of a tyrant; it was that of a force of nature contained in human skin.
"The preparation is over," he said, adjusting his obsidian bracers. "It's time to clean out the rats that have sneaked into our house."
The Rats in the Shadows
While Samael assimilated the power of destiny in the bowels of the inn, politics in the Celestial Jade City had become a silent pool of blood.
The minor sects were terrified, but the great clans—those who had lost their geniuses and their money in the labyrinth bets—were furious. They knew that if the tournament rules couldn't stop Morningstar, the rules of the underworld would have to.
In the inn's main reception hall, Cedric was reviewing an inventory scroll. Ten meters away, Grand Elder Lilith sat in an armchair, absentmindedly cleaning the nails of her single sound hand, her eyes half-closed. Kael stood guard near the doors.
Two inn guards escorted a burly man dressed in rich green silk robes.
"Lord Cedric," the visitor announced, bowing deeply. "I come as an emissary of the Emerald Valley Alliance. My Patriarch is impressed by your clan's prowess and wishes to offer a tribute of a hundred thousand spiritual stones as a token of goodwill and..."
The emissary didn't finish the sentence. As he bowed, his right hand subtly slid inside the sleeve of his robe, grasping a piece of yellow paper covered in blood-red runes. It was a Heaven Grade Detonation Talisman, a suicide weapon designed to erase an entire building within a hundred-meter radius. He injected a spark of his Qi to activate it.
The paper glowed.
But the explosion never occurred.
The murderous instinct forged in the desert left no room for carelessness. In the exact microsecond the emissary channeled his hostile Qi, the room plunged into a terrifying auditory void.
[Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash].
Kael didn't walk. He glided across the hall like a specter. The silver flash of the Whisper of the North crossed the space without making a single sound.
The "emissary's" right hand, still holding the ignited talisman, was cleanly severed above the wrist. The hand hit the floor with a dull thud.
The fake emissary opened his mouth to scream in pain, but his lungs filled with hot ash.
Lilith hadn't gotten up from her armchair. She had simply snapped the fingers of her left hand.
A vortex of gray flames and burning embers enveloped the man instantly. It wasn't a slow burn. It was a conceptual incineration. Before the blood from his amputated stump touched the inn's carpet, the emissary's body, clothes, and bones were reduced to a mound of gray ash.
Kael sheathed his sword in absolute silence, while Lilith blew gently on the ash that remained floating in the air.
Cedric didn't even look up from his inventory scroll. He simply used his boot to push the amputated hand and the deactivated talisman away from the table.
"The sects allied to the Valois are no longer competing, Patriarch," Cedric said, addressing Samael, who had just entered the hall with the others. "This is a war of extermination disguised as a tournament. That was the third assassination attempt in the last two hours."
Samael looked at the mound of ashes.
"Desperation makes them predictable," he murmured. "And cowards."
Suddenly, a spiritual crow made of shadows flew in through the window and perched on Cedric's shoulder. The strategist listened to the telepathic message the bird brought and raised an eyebrow.
"It seems not everyone wants our heads. I've received messages from five medium clans in the southern region. The ones not under the thumb of the Purple Light Sect. They are terrified by Valerius's display and his attempt to monopolize the tournament."
"What do they want?" Eris asked, playing with a black flame on her finger.
"They want to swear loyalty to the Morningstar crown. They offer vassalage and half their resources in exchange for us protecting them in the final rounds of the impending massacre."
Samael walked to the window, gazing out at the illuminated city resting above the clouds. Politics were disgusting, but useful.
"Accept their tributes, Cedric. Let them believe they are our allies. When the real carnage begins in the arena, we will use them as pawns to divert the attention of the scum they will send us. Let them serve as cannon fodder; it is the price of our protection."
The Holy Son's Plot
While the Inn of the Jade Lotus became an impenetrable fortress, the Great Palace of the Purple Light Sect, located on the highest peak of the floating city, was steeped in a funeral atmosphere.
In the throne room, the jade tables had been smashed. The valuable tapestries were burned. Valerius Valois paced in circles, his usual purple robes wrinkled, his golden hair disheveled. He was losing his sanity.
The Labyrinth plan had not only failed to kill the Morningstars; it had handed them the top of the leaderboard on a silver platter and had resulted in the death of the genius the Valois Family had cultivated for years. And Valerius knew that his father, Duke Alaric in the north, would not tolerate this level of incompetence.
Sitting on a stone lotus at the head of the room was the Supreme Elder of the sect, Valerius's master, a monster at Stage 3 of the Saint Realm. His eyes were closed, but his aura oppressed the entire room.
"You have lost control of the board, Valerius," the Elder said, his voice raspy and full of disappointment. "You tried to play politics with starving wolves. They tore Torunn apart. They froze our beasts. And they humiliated the judges. Every second those peasants breathe our air, our sect's prestige falls."
Valerius stopped. His eyes were bloodshot, glowing with a cold madness.
"There will be no more politics, Master. The duels don't work. The labyrinth didn't work. If we can't kill them in the dark, we will massacre them in plain sight of everyone. I want you to alter the barriers of the Main Arena."
The Supreme Elder opened one eye, intrigued. "Alter them for what?"
"Tomorrow is the third and final day. The finale. I will demand that the Battle of Heritages be decreed." Valerius clenched his fists, blood dripping from his palms where his nails had dug in. "A faction war. A pitched battle where the sects face off as teams, no rules, no referees, no death limit. We will allow the use of beasts, lethal artifacts, and mercenaries."
"If you do that, Samael and his heirs will massacre all the geniuses of the remaining hundred sects," the Saint warned.
"Let them do it," Valerius spat, with a deranged smile. "I don't care about the other sects. They are cattle. While they are distracted fighting the riffraff, I want you to release the Sealed Saint Puppet from the deep vaults."
The Supreme Elder frowned deeply. The Saint Puppet was a taboo weapon, the corpse of a former Patriarch of the sect that had been refined into a pain-immune killer automaton, armed with the lethal power of a Stage 1 Saint. Bringing it into the light of day in a youth tournament was a continental scandal.
"If we use the Puppet and alter the barriers so Samael cannot escape, victory will be absolute... but the other sects will accuse us of tyranny," the master murmured.
"When the Sovereign of the Void is dead and the desert belongs to us, no one will dare accuse us of anything," Valerius declared. "Prepare the seals. Tomorrow, the Dragon dies."
The Blood Edict
The third dawn over the Celestial Jade City was somber. Clouds covered the rising sun, casting a grayish light over the Coliseum.
The stands were packed to maximum capacity, but unlike the previous days, there were no cheers or boisterous bets. A heavy, funereal silence reigned in the stadium. Everyone felt the dense killing intent floating in the atmosphere. They knew this would not be the last day of a tournament; it would be the first day of a war.
The Morningstar Clan entered through the obsidian gates. The legion was not walking to a competition; they were marching in military formation.
Samael was at the front, flanked by his heirs. Beneath his skin, the immeasurable power of the Celestial Destiny and his expanded Qi Sea boiled imperceptibly to the weak, but terrifyingly to the experts.
In the center of the arena, the Head Judge, sweating profusely under the menacing glare of the Purple Light VIP box, raised his trembling hands.
"Representatives of the Hundred Sects!" announced the judge, his voice devoid of enthusiasm. "Due to the... unforeseen destruction of the previous stages, the Supreme Council has decreed the final round! The Battle of Heritages!"
A murmur of panic rippled through the ranks of the minor sects in the arena.
"There will be no individual matches!" shouted the judge, reading from a scroll. "It will be a Faction War! A free-for-all pitched battle! The absolute use of spiritual beasts, combat arrays, lethal artifacts, and bloodline capture is permitted! Deaths will not be penalized by the Empire! The last faction standing will be crowned absolute master of the Sacred Resources!"
The announcement was a death sentence. Many minor clans tried to retreat, but the colossal iron gates of the exits slammed shut. Simultaneously, the sky above the arena glowed as a barrier of golden energy, thick and punitive, activated, sealing the combatants in an inescapable dome.
The sects allied to the Valois—nearly five hundred elite cultivators and heavily armed mercenaries—unsheathed their weapons in unison, their eyes fixed on the small group in black robes of the Morningstar Clan at the south end.
Samael stood still. The air around him began to vibrate. He slowly looked up, his violet eyes meeting the bloodshot gaze of Valerius Valois, who watched him from the safety of his VIP box.
Samael did not feel fear. He did not feel pressure. He only felt the immense, overwhelming, and intoxicating confirmation that the mask of civility had finally fallen. The game was over.
"So you want a war without rules..." Samael whispered, and a wide, dark smile laden with infinite cruelty spread across his face. "Cedric."
"Yes, Patriarch?" replied the strategist, unfurling a black iron fan.
"Lift the illusory camouflage from our cargo holds."
"With pleasure, My Lord."
Behind the Morningstar legion, the air distorted. The seal that had hidden them for the last three days dissipated like smoke in the wind.
A scream of pure terror escaped the throats of the nearest judges and cultivators.
From the shadows, in absolute and deadly silence, emerged two figures draped in heavy robes. Their auras were not those of promising youths. They exuded the cold, repulsive, and crushing pressure of death. They were the undead puppets of the Semi-Saint assassin (Dune Shadow) and the True Saint (Protector of the Frozen Abyss) that Samael had refined in the desert, ready to be unleashed in the arena.
For the first time in the tournament, Samael unsheathed the immense black blade of the Odachi, the Ravenous Eclipse. The weapon hummed, sensing the impending hunger.
"Kill them all," ordered the Sovereign of the Void. "And don't let the gods find their bodies."
END OF CHAPTER 32