The air in Seraphina's private sanctum was cold, laced with the scent of frozen roses and old power. It was a chamber of dark elegance, all obsidian and silver, a stark contrast to the Sanctuary's sterile white. Jade stood beside a raised dais where Zero's flickering form now lay, transferred from the Core Infirmary under Seraphina's authority. The viewing portal hadn't done the reality of his condition justice.
Zero was a wound in the world. His body phased in and out of existence, moments of solidity giving way to terrifying transparency. A low, constant hum of negation emanated from him, and the very air around the dais was dead—no sound, no light, no heat could penetrate the inch-thick barrier of absolute void his unconsciousness projected. The advanced healing runes Seraphina's attendants had woven around him were being systematically erased, pixel by pixel, from reality.
"He is not rejecting the healing," Seraphina observed, her crimson eyes analytical. "His existence is simply incompatible with it. The Edict of the Empty King is not a skill he uses; it has become a fundamental law of his being. He is a walking 'no.'"
"What is required?" Jade's voice was flat, his gaze fixed on his partner's disintegrating form.
"You," she said simply. "The bond you share is an anomaly that defies even his nullification. You must become his anchor. You will not fight the void. You will embrace it. Your Obsidian Core must become the shore against which his ocean of nothingness crashes. It will be… excruciating. For both of you."
Jade didn't hesitate. He stepped onto the dais.
The moment he crossed the threshold of Zero's passive void-field, it was like plunging into a starless, soundless, airless sea. The world vanished. There was no sight, no sound, only the profound, soul-deep cold of absolute negation. It was an agony beyond physical pain—it was the pain of un-becoming.
DO NOT RESIST, Alter-Jade's voice roared in the confines of his mind, a beacon of manic will in the infinite dark. LET IT SHARPEN US! LET IT SCOUR AWAY EVERY WEAKNESS!
Jade obeyed. He lowered every defense. He allowed the void to press in, to scrape against the edges of his soul, his consciousness, his very sense of self. It was a violation worse than Seraphina's kiss. This was erasure.
In the real world, Seraphina watched, a rare flicker of something akin to awe in her ancient eyes. Jade's body was rigid, his skin turning gray, frost crystallizing on his eyelashes. But he stood firm. And where his feet touched the dais, the void's advance halted. The Obsidian Core within him flared, a black sun of chaotic malice meeting the pure white hole of Zero's silence. They did not cancel each other out. They began to orbit.
Inside the void, Jade pushed forward. He wasn't looking with his eyes; he was navigating by the one thing that persisted—the taut, unbreakable chain of their partnership. He followed it through the endless white, through the screaming silence, until he found him.
Zero was curled in a fetal position at the center of the nothingness, not a man, but a concept—the primeval atom of negation before the Big Bang.
Zero. Jade's thought was not a sound, but a ripple in the void.
The form uncurled. Zero's silver-green eyes opened, but they were not the eyes of his partner. They were the eyes of the Edict itself, ancient, cold, and utterly impersonal. It saw Jade not as an ally, but as a flaw in its perfect emptiness.
You are existence. You are error. Be corrected.
The void contracted, focusing all its annihilating pressure on Jade's consciousness.
This was the critical moment. Fighting back would mean being unmade. Jade did something far more dangerous. He accepted it.
I am your whetstone, Jade thought back, the concept clear and sharp. You cannot be sharp without me. You are the void. I am the edge. We are a closed system.
The Edict hesitated. The logic was irrefutable. A whetstone did not oppose the blade; it was necessary for its function.
In that moment of hesitation, Jade struck. Not with an attack, but with a memory. He showed it the fight against the Hollow Resonance, their perfect, synchronized dance of destruction. He showed it the Tyrant of the Hunting Grounds, and how its nullification had created the opening for Jade's consumption.
See? Jade's thought was a whisper of pure, psychotic triumph. Alone, you are nothing. With me, you can unmake gods.
The Edict, the consciousness of Zero's power, processed this. The endless white void began to darken at the edges, tinged with the chaotic purple of Jade's Obsidian Core. The two opposing forces weren't merging; they were forming a terrifying symbiosis.
In the sanctum, Zero's flickering form snapped into perfect, solid focus. His chest rose in a sharp, sudden gasp of air—the first breath he'd taken since the fight. The void-field didn't vanish; it retracted, coiling tightly around him like a second skin, a controlled, lethal aura.
His eyes opened. They were his own again, but the silver-green was now shot through with veins of absolute black. He looked at Jade, who stood panting, sweat and frost mingling on his skin.
A glitched System prompt appeared for both of them simultaneously:
[FORBIDDEN] Edict of the Empty King - [LOCKED: System Quarantine]
[DIVINE] World-Ender's Thirst - [LOCKED: System Quarantine]
WARNING: Divine skills exceeding reality stability threshold. Access prohibited.
Jade's analytical mind registered the data. Both skills locked. The System is terrified of what we can do together.
No words passed between them. None were needed. The understanding was absolute, forged in the crucible of shared annihilation.
Seraphina let out a slow breath. "It is—"
At that exact moment, the wards around her sanctum screamed. A section of the obsidian wall vaporized, not from an explosion, but from a precise, surgical severance.
Standing in the breach were three figures clad in the glowing white armor of the Divine Realm. Elara was not with them. These were not scholars. They were executioners.
"The Anomaly and the Paradox," the lead executioner intoned, his voice resonating with divine authority. "You are hereby sentenced to cleansing."
Before Jade or Zero could even twitch, Seraphina was just there, standing between them and the executioners. The air dropped to absolute zero. Jagged spikes of black ice erupted from the floor, and the very light in the room dimmed, as if afraid.
"You," she said, her voice a whisper that promised infinite pain, "will not lay a finger on what is mine."
Her power wasn't a wave of force; it was a conceptual command. The lead executioner gasped, his divine armor cracking as the concept of his attack was frozen solid in his mind, shattering his will to fight. The other two stumbled back, their auras guttering like candles in a blizzard.
The lead executioner, still held in Seraphina's psychic ice, stared in holy terror.
It was then that Zero moved. He rose from the dais, his long, blonde hair flowing as if pushed by a wind that existed only for him. A new, fierce energy crackled around him—not void, but something raw, primal, and electric.
LEVEL UP! Zero: Level 9 -> Level 10
CLASS AWAKENED: [Empty Sword Saint]
ELEMENT AWAKENED: [Lightning]
The System announcement was a shock to everyone, even Jade. From the absolute void had been born its conceptual opposite: the violent, brilliant, and instantaneous fury of Lightning.
The two executioners, recovering from Seraphina's assault, lunged forward, their blades gleaming with holy light.
Zero didn't move. He vanished.
It was Chinmoku perfected by his new element. He didn't run; he became a lightning step, a flash of incandescent motion that left afterimages of ozone and light. He reappeared between the two executioners, who were still mid-lunge.
He didn't use a sword technique. He didn't need to. His hands, charged with the power of the storm, simply chopped forward, two blindingly fast strikes that crackled with blue-white energy.
There was no sound of impact. Only the sharp CRACK-THOOM of thunder that shook the sanctum.
The two executioners' heads were no longer on their shoulders. They tumbled to the ground, their bodies following a moment later, smoke rising from the cauterized wounds at their necks.
Zero stood between the falling bodies, his back to Jade and Seraphina, his form crackling with fading arcs of lightning. He slowly turned his head, his silver-green eyes now holding a sharp, electric intensity within the lingering void-black veins. His gaze met Jade's.
"It seems," Zero stated, his voice still a monotone, but now humming with a new, latent power, "the void has gifted me a spark."
The lead executioner, still held in Seraphina's psychic ice, stared in holy terror at the headless bodies of his comrades. The Empty Sword Saint had not used his world-breaking void. He had simply leveled up and annihilated them with a power no one saw coming.
Jade looked at the scene, then at Zero. A slow, psychotic grin spread across his face. Their divine skills were locked away.
It didn't matter. The monsters were already out. And one of them had just become a Saint.