Chapter 137: A Feast for Crows – The Ash Librarian (Part 1)
The silence that followed the colossal fall and fragmentation of the Leviathan was not one of peace. It was a heavy, dense, suffocating silence, laden with the sharp, metallic scent of the evaporated blood of the Three Judges and the strong stench of toxic ozone from overheated imperial cannons.
The Great Obsidian Plaza of the Morningstar Citadel, normally flawless and gleaming like a dark mirror, was now profusely stained with black soot, impact craters, puddles of coagulated blood, and the deformed remains of imperial armor. Samael Morningstar stood on the grand balcony of the Inner Palace, observing his Dantesque handiwork.
Below, covering every inch of the streets and courtyards, the Black Winter Legion—thirty thousand men and women who just hours earlier had descended from the skies believing themselves immortal conquerors—remained rigidly kneeling on the cold stone, hands clasped behind their necks. Not a single one of them dared to look up. They had witnessed with their own eyes how their Great Saints, the invincible deities of the North, were dismembered, humiliated, and devoured like simple, pathetic insects. The arrogant pride of the empire had been shattered into irrecoverable pieces, entirely replaced by an animalistic, atavistic, and paralyzing terror.
In Samael's retina, oblivious to mortal suffering, Imperial System notifications began to cascade—golden, cold, and absolute.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: DEFENSIVE WAR SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED WITH ABSOLUTE SUCCESS]
[Threat Eliminated:] 3rd Siege Fleet of the Cryon Family + 3 Supreme Judges.
[Tactical Evaluation:] Perfect Victory (Damage to civilian infrastructure and core: <5%).
The air in front of Samael's face distorted with a high-pitched hum. Two physical objects materialized, floating tamely in the void. The first was a small chest, intricately carved from unmelting blue ice, pulsing with a pale, cold light.
[Item:] Aurora Resource Chest (Mid Saint Grade).
(Probable content: Millennial beast cores, stellar ores, northern cultivation manuals, pills, and elixirs).
The second object was diametrically different. It neither shone nor emitted light; in fact, it seemed to absorb the photons around it, creating a small patch of darkness. It was an ancient, rectangular ticket made of a thick material that looked like demon skin tanned in dried blood, its edges deeply burned and emitting a faint black smoke.
[Special Reward (Achievement Unlocked: "Godslayer"):] Mythic Roulette Ticket.
[Grade:] Calamity.
[Description:] Allows the summoning of a conceptual entity intrinsically linked to war, macro-scale management, or mass destruction.
Samael took the ice chest with an almost bored disdain and stored it in the immensity of his dimensional inventory without even bothering to look at its contents. His absolute attention was magnetically fixed on the dark ticket. Upon taking it between his gloved fingers, he felt a scorching, painful, and living heat, exactly as if he were holding a piece of coal fresh from the deepest oven in hell.
"Malak is a perfect assassin," Samael muttered to himself, his voice a deep echo in the solitude of the balcony. "Kael is a brutal and devastating sword. Cedric is an unparalleled shield and engineer... But none of them, not even me, truly knows how to build, maintain, and organize a relentless army from nothing and rubble."
Samael looked down at the immense, trembling, and pathetic mass of thirty thousand armored prisoners. "I need an architect of pain. Someone who doesn't see souls, but gears."
Samael raised the Calamity Grade Mythic Roulette Ticket toward the morning sky, still darkened by the plumes of smoke from the fallen battleship. "System," the Sovereign's voice decreed. "Summon."
There were no choirs of celestial music. There were no formations of golden lights descending from the clouds, nor the song of dragons. The sound that announced the deity's arrival was purely visceral, violent, and sickening. It sounded exactly as if someone had grabbed a thick canvas cloth and brutally ripped it in half right next to the eardrum of every single person present in the city.
RRRIIIIIIP!
In the exact center of the Obsidian Plaza, violently shoving aside the kneeling prisoners, space did not open elegantly; it rotted. An immense vertical crack, jagged and of a sickly ashen gray color, appeared floating in the air. From its abyssal interior, a strange grayish "snow" began to spew and fall. But it wasn't frozen water; it smelled of cities burned to the ground, of charred flesh, and of accounting ledgers from centuries of forgotten, lost wars. The temperature in the plaza plummeted abruptly, but it wasn't the piercing cold of ice or frost; it was the gloomy, stale, damp, and definitive cold of an immense, newly opened mass grave.
Samael activated his ocular skill instantly.
[Eye of Destiny: Activated].
From the blackness and ash of the rift, a black high-heeled shoe emerged, polished to the extreme and impeccable, stepping down onto the obsidian floor profusely stained with blood and viscera. But the shoe did not get dirty. In a terrifying display of conceptual repulsion, the thick red blood and pieces of shattered flesh covering the stone literally recoiled and dragged themselves away from the heel, sliding across the floor as if feeling an existential dread at the imposition of its "order."
Then, a complete, stylized figure stepped out of the ash rain. It wasn't a giant multi-headed monster, nor a horned demon brimming with muscle. It was a woman with a military and terrifyingly straight posture.
She wore a strict Victorian-style maid's uniform of a severe, suffocating black, buttoned to the neck, with a white apron starched to such a degree of geometric perfection that its edges looked like sharp blades. Her hair, an unnatural steel-gray color, was pulled back into a painfully strict bun, held in place by long silver needles that looked like miniature butcher's daggers. She wore silver-rimmed glasses over the bridge of her fine nose.
But behind those lenses, there were no human eyes. They had no iris, no pupil, no white; they were spheres of pure, liquid gray mercury, projecting data streams, golden equations, and probability calculations at breakneck speed.
What truly froze the blood in the veins of those present were her hands. From her elbows to the tips of her fingers, she didn't wear cloth gloves, but heavy, massive gauntlets of dark metal, deeply rusted and covered in dense, overlapping runes that pulsed slowly with a sick, red heat. From her sharp, metallic fingertips, a thick, viscous black oil dripped rhythmically. Every time one of those black drops touched the obsidian floor, it hissed furiously, not burning the stone, but corroding its very mathematical existence, leaving minuscule holes of absolute nothingness.
Samael blinked and read her definitive status panel.
[NAME:] Vexia.
[TITLES:] The Ash Librarian / The Maiden of Butchery / The Architect of Annihilation.
[RACE:] Divine Concept (Logistical War / Pure Logic).
[ORIGIN:] Shattered Sky Era (An external dimensional plane, destroyed by an eternal, inefficient war). Primordial Entity extracted to the current world.
[CURRENT RANK:] Stage 6 Saint (Power restricted, calibrated, and temporarily sealed by the Laws of the Mortal World and bound to her Master's current level).
[TRUE RANK:] Minor Goddess / Conceptual Deity.
[STATUS:] Bound Servant (Absolute Mathematical Loyalty to Samael Morningstar).
[ONTOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION:] In her original world, she never fought on the vanguard. She managed the "logistics" of mass corpses, the biomechanical restructuring of conscripts, and the aseptic cleansing of failed empires. To her, a living being, a soldier, or a god is not a person with a soul; they are simply a number, a biological resource, and a calculation variable that must be optimized or erased. Her mere presence suppresses morale because the enemy knows, statistically, that their death is an accounting fact.
Vexia adjusted the bridge of her glasses with her metallic index finger. The sound of rusted steel scraping against perfect glass was a high-pitched screech that set the teeth of thousands of prisoners on edge. She slowly turned her head. She didn't look at the thirty thousand men trembling at her feet. She looked at the splintered walls of the Citadel. She looked at the inefficient, irregular bloodstains on the ground. She looked at the mountain of smoking rubble from the Leviathan in the distance.
Vexia made a micro-grimace of deep, genuine, and absolute biological disgust, wrinkling her nose slightly as if she had stepped into a kitchen infested with rotting cockroaches. She brushed a speck of nonexistent dust from her impeccable white apron. Then, she turned toward the upper balcony where Samael stood. She lifted the folds of her black skirt slightly and curtsied: perfect, mathematical, elegant, and devoid of all emotion.
"You have summoned ash and accounting, Master," Vexia spoke. Her voice was incredibly soft, cultured, and modulated, with the exact tone of a strict librarian demanding silence, but it resonated with a cold, subatomic authority that made the molars of those listening vibrate painfully. "The place is... abhorrently messy. There are far too many wasted organic variables on the floor."
"Welcome to reality, Vexia," Samael replied, his deep voice projecting like thunder across the immense plaza. "I need order. I need this trash to become the foundation of my empire."
Vexia straightened with the rigidity of steel. The corrosive black oil from her gauntlets dripped onto the obsidian. "True order, Master, is only built upon the painful elimination of the superfluous and the correction of chaos. What are your optimization directives?"
Samael gestured with his chin toward the immense mass of prisoners, a sea of blue helmets and bowed heads. "Look at them."
Vexia turned her head very slowly. For the first time since her summoning, her inhuman liquid mercury eyes landed directly on the 30,000 elites of the Black Winter Legion. There was not a shred of compassion in her gaze. No cruelty, no hatred, no sadism. There was simple, pure, terrifying technical evaluation. When Vexia looked at them, she didn't see thirty thousand lives, nor fathers, nor frightened sons. She saw holographic spreadsheets filled with red numbers, efficiency errors, and the weaknesses of the flesh. She looked at them exactly as a veteran butcher looks at diseased cattle hanging on metal hooks.
"Clay," Vexia decreed with a disdain so immense it froze the air. "Soft. Disproportionate. Damp. Full of unnecessary fluids, primitive fear, and false hope. Absolutely inefficient and useless as currently configured."
"I want them to stop being useless," Samael said, with a coldness that chilled the blood of his own generals. "I want them to be my true soldiers. Absolute war machines, without fear, without fatigue, and without mercy."
Samael rested his hands on the balcony railing and effortlessly vaulted over. His body dropped thirty meters and landed with predatory softness in the center of the plaza, mere steps from Vexia. The impact of his boots kicked up a shockwave and a cloud of dust that made the thirty thousand kneeling prisoners instinctively recoil, shoving each other in waves of panic. They tried to flee, but General Malak's faceless Shadows had already emerged from the corners, forming a dark, impassable ring of poisoned daggers around the entire perimeter of the plaza. There was no way out. They were in the slaughterhouse.
"Listen to me very closely, scum," Samael said. He didn't raise his voice, but his vocal cords, loaded with the oppressive Qi of a Stage 7 Saint and the authority of the Dragon, struck the inside of each soldier's chest like an iron judge's gavel. "You have two options this very fucking second. Die right now, in this plaza, and let your corpses serve to feed my desert beasts... or serve me."
Upon hearing the apparent chance to live, a high-ranking Cryon officer, a mature man with dented crystal armor covered in dried blood, raised his head desperately, trembling from head to toe. "We surrender!" the officer cried, tears carving paths through the grime on his face. "We swear it by the Heavens! We swear absolute loyalty to your crown! We will take the ancient slave blood oath! We will serve the Morningstar Clan as our new masters, we beg you!"
Samael looked down at him. And smiled. It was a terrible, immensely dark smile, where the abyss stared back and bared sharp fangs. "Oh, no. You have misunderstood the proposal completely, commander. I am not in the least bit interested in your stupid loyalty. Human loyalty is fragile; it changes sides with the wind. Oaths are broken. Fear, over the years, fades and breeds rebellion."
Samael slowly raised both hands, palms facing the sky. The air throughout the entire citadel instantly grew heavy, dense, and took on the nauseating smell of rusted iron, turning a dark, viscous red color.
[Skill Activated: Taboo Technique - War God's Puppet Refining Art]
[Infused Buff: Primordial Blood Law]
"I do not want your promises," Samael sentenced, his veins glowing with a luminous, radioactive red through his obsidian skin. "I want your total biological obedience."
The morning sky above the vast plaza tore open into thousands of tiny, glowing red dots. From the clouds, a rain of threads began to descend at high speed. But they weren't threads of cloth, nor magic light. They were thick, organic capillaries of pure crimson energy. Thick, viscous, and pulsating, they moved and writhed in the open air like hungry worms, guided by the body heat and Qi flow of the thirty thousand kneeling humans.
The officer who had just begged screamed at the top of his lungs when the first blood capillary descended and touched the back of his neck. It wasn't a gentle or magical touch. It was a surgical, brutal invasion. The crimson energy thread solidified into a needle hard as steel, pierced the skin of the man's neck, punched through the layers of muscle, tearing flesh, and buried itself directly, deeply, and painfully into the spinal cord, seeking to physically connect with the central nervous system.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHH!"
The officer's agonizing shriek was the spark that ignited the powder keg. The scream was instantly multiplied by thirty thousand. The immense plaza became a madhouse, a literal sonic hell. The rain of crimson threads descended mercilessly upon each and every prisoner. The blood needles pierced necks, penetrated between shoulder blades, and drilled into skulls through broken helmets.
The soldiers, trained to endure imperial torture, broke. They writhed frantically on the ground, suffering massive convulsions, desperately clawing at the obsidian pavement until they ripped their fingernails out by the roots, leaving long furrows of blood on the stone. Some, in a fit of animal panic, tried to grab the pulsating threads and rip them from the backs of their necks, but the instant their gloved hands touched Samael's Blood Law, their own flesh melted, burned by the acidic, corrosive fire of assimilation.
From atop the dark siege walls, the veteran disciples of the Morningstar Clan themselves—warriors who had bathed in enemy blood all night—watched the scene with gaunt faces, pale as corpses. Even Kael, who had cleaved immortals in half without blinking, looked away, his jaw clenched tight. This wasn't an execution. It wasn't a pitched battle. It was the most absolute, categorical violation of the human soul and biology.
The refining process was slow. Deliberately, sadistically slow. Samael, standing in the center of the chaos, showed no mercy. His arms were outstretched, and his long fingers moved rhythmically in the air, like an orchestra conductor or a macabre pianist playing a symphony of neural agony on thirty thousand instruments at once.
The Blood Law acted like a divine parasite. Upon entering the bodies, the crimson Qi violently devoured unnecessary internal organs (stomachs, inefficient lungs) and aggressively expelled the soldiers' original, weak human blood. The prisoners began to vomit torrents of their own blood from their mouths, nostrils, and tear ducts. Their veins swelled to the point of bursting as they were force-filled by Samael's new crimson alchemical substance, a fluid dark as pitch that petrified their bones and turned their flesh into unbreakable fiber.
"Feel it enter deeply," Samael whispered, but the immense power of his will made his voice sound not in the air, but resonate like thunder directly inside the shattered individual minds of the thirty thousand prisoners, drowning out their own thoughts. "Feel the fire of my blood burn away your weak, pathetic human memories. Your mother's face? Erased. Your childhood in the snow? Consumed. Your own name? Completely forgotten. Your pride, your terror, your free will? Irrelevant. You are no longer men. You are my weapons."
The Cryon officer who had begged was now on all fours, vomiting black clots and drooling bile and blood. The veins on his neck and face had turned coal-black, thick and horribly bulging, looking like worms pulsing beneath his pale skin. His eyes, formerly a clear northern blue, were being totally and brutally flooded by a thick red hemorrhage that devoured the iris.
"Kill me!" the officer begged in a final death rattle of humanity, his voice reduced to a choked, unrecognizable gurgle. "Gods, for mercy's sake, kill me already!"
"Extreme pain is only my chisel, soldier," Samael replied, slowly closing the fingers of his right hand into a tight fist. "I am carving something immensely better and more perfect inside you."
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The dry sound of thousands of spinal columns forcefully realigning, cartilage tearing, and necks stretching unnaturally rang out in the plaza like a forest of dry trees being splintered by a hurricane.
And then, as quickly as it began, one by one, the thousands of agonizing screams abruptly ceased. They didn't stop because the infernal process had stopped hurting, nor because the men had died of shock. The screams ceased unnaturally because the area of the biological brain in charge of processing fear, articulating human speech, and registering terror... had been physically devoured and disconnected from the system by the parasitic blood. Human hearts no longer beat in their chests; the Law had forged a "Blood Knot", an alchemical engine that beat in perfect, mathematical, slavish synchrony with Samael's heart.
Silence reclaimed the Obsidian Plaza once more. But it was a deeply, terrifyingly wrong silence.
Thirty thousand armored figures now stood upright. Their outer bodies were still recognizable as those of imperial soldiers, but their anatomical posture had mutated. There were no longer slumping shoulders from the fatigue of war. There were no longer trembling knees or ragged breaths. They were all standing tall, rigidly immovable, like statues of cast steel, chins high and arms pinned to their sides in a sickening symmetry.
The thirty thousand puppets opened their eyes in perfect synchrony. There were no longer human irises in their sockets. There was no longer white sclera. Their entire eyeballs had been biologically replaced by deep wells of a dark, coagulated, luminous red. They were orbs of crimson crystal, devoid of vital light, without compassion, without the slightest trace of a "self." From the joints of their armor emanated a constant, faint, toxic reddish vapor.
Samael lowered his hands and relaxed his stance. The thousands of immense blood threads falling from the sky dissolved into the air, having permanently fused with the nervous systems of his new swarm army.
"Salute your Creator," Samael ordered in a low voice, barely a whisper that traveled through the hive's mental link.
CLANG!
Thirty thousand immense, steel-gloved fists struck thirty thousand armored chests in the exact same millisecond. The sound produced was not an ovation from loyal soldiers. It was so millimeter-perfect, so robotically synchronized, that the acoustics of the plaza consolidated it into a single, massive, deafening beat of a giant drum that shook the city walls. There was no tactical hesitation. There was none of the minuscule, natural human delay of a second that a mortal brain takes to hear, process, and obey a verbal command. The act was the physical manifestation of absolute immediacy.
Samael turned slowly toward Vexia, his face shadowed by his own victorious cruelty. The Ash Librarian, the Divine Concept of Logistical War, observed the monumental, sacrilegious mass transformation with her head slightly tilted. One of her thin gray eyebrows was raised. She methodically adjusted her heavy metallic gloves, from which the black oil continued to drip, burning tiny holes in the stone.
"An interesting application of biological brute force. Purely organic cyborgs," Vexia dictated, her clinical tone analyzing the dead-blood warriors. "A primitive approach, and painfully inefficient in its initial energy consumption, Master, but... undoubtedly functional in the long term. They have lost the martial creativity and adaptability of human intelligence, but, in exchange, they have gained the immaculate perfection of total obedience and the absence of variable morality."
"They are The Dead Blood Guard," Samael said, passing Vexia auxiliary telepathic control through the Imperial System. "They are thirty thousand empty, strong, and blind bodies. And from this moment on, they are exclusively yours to command."
Vexia nodded with a minimal bow and walked, the sound of her immaculate heels echoing, toward the closed ranks of the elite puppet soldiers. She stopped in front of the Cryon officer, the same one who minutes before had begged for mercy and was now an empty shell with red eyes. Vexia raised a cold, heavy metallic finger and carelessly ran it over the officer's thick, dented chest plate.
The contact of the black corrosive oil reacted violently. The armor's stellar steel bubbled, hissed, and fell apart, melting, burning, and piercing the pale, numb skin of the soldier's chest. The puppet did not blink. It did not try to pull away. Its heart rate did not alter in the slightest, nor did its nonexistent breathing catch as the flesh of its chest burned down to exposed bone. Its obedience was immune to physical pain.
"They are still terribly fragile, Master," Vexia concluded with a deep sigh of logistical disappointment, wiping her finger stained with acid and burnt flesh on the pauldron of the very soldier she had just mutilated. "Their flesh remains soft and pathetically organic. If I strike them with adequate intensity, they break and the array fails. If I force them to march for weeks without alchemical resupply, their tendons will give out and they will tire. They need... structural hardware upgrades. Severe reinforcements."
Vexia pivoted on her heels and raised her expressionless face toward the outskirts of the walls, looking directly at the immense twin mountain of smoking scrap, fire, and doom that was the remains of the crashed Leviathan in the desert. Her unfathomable, empty eyes of liquid mercury suddenly gleamed with a cold, calculating, mechanical greed.
"Thousands of tons of raw Heaven Grade Stellar Steel. Black Ice Alloy Arrays. Thousands of unstable magic energy cores, Qi conduits, and heavy artillery gyroscopes," Vexia enumerated, her conceptual brain cataloging the spoils of war with the precision of a scanner. "Wasted resources on a sunken ship."
Vexia turned back to Samael. For the first time, the librarian smiled. It was not a smile of joy, nor of sadistic cruelty like that of the Assassins. It was the soulless, sociopathic smile of a mad scientist who had just been granted unlimited funding and total diplomatic immunity. It was a smile that promised the dawn of an era of industrial nightmares.
"Grant me official permission to ignite the Citadel's immense underground furnaces to their maximum thermal capacity, Master," Vexia requested, briefly opening her Omniscient War Codex in her left hand. "I am going to order the total scrapping of that damned ship. I will melt the stellar steel down to liquid. And... I will execute the Biomechanical Genesis protocol."
Vexia pointed at the hundreds of soldiers in the front row. "I am going to inject and pour the molten, liquid stellar metal directly through their nervous systems and veins, and I will solidify it directly onto their crimson bones while the metal is still boiling. We will seal their soft flesh beneath forged steel from the inside out."
Samael, the Patriarch and Sovereign, listened to the industrial torture plan that guaranteed the creation of unstoppable biomechanical monsters. There was not a single trace of pity or doubt on his face. "You have my absolute permission, Marshal," Samael approved. "Break them down to their biological foundations. Melt them in the furnaces. Submerge them in stellar magma. And if ten thousand of them burst and die from thermal stress in the upgrade process, use them efficiently as organic fuel to melt the steel for the rest. I don't care about workshop casualties. By the time it comes to deploy them in battle and you call them to march behind my cloak, I want what comes out of those furnace doors to not be resurrected men of flesh, but true, immortal monsters of iron, blood, and tyranny."
Vexia slightly widened her chilling smile and executed an even deeper curtsy. "It will be a profound and systematic statistical pleasure, My Sovereign."
She turned violently, her black skirt billowing, to face the immense legion of 30,000 dead-blood puppets. With a swift motion, she unhooked a severe black leather riding crop, reinforced with lead and engraved with punishment runes, from her tactical belt.
"Suboptimal organic trash!" the minor goddess's voice cracked like the literal sound of a whip breaking the sound barrier, forcing the Morningstar generals on the walls to cover their ears from the conceptual damage. "To the purification furnaces! Grid formation! March to the fire!"
And the thirty thousand zombified prisoners, without emitting a single, minuscule complaint of pain, without a single face showing fear or pleading, turned in unison like a single perfect clockwork mechanism. They began to march heavily, step by step, dragging their dropped weapons, walking willingly, blindly, and inexorably toward the immense conduits of the underground alchemical furnaces in the North Sector, going like obedient cattle to be melted down, dismembered, and reassembled with burning metal in Vexia's personal hell.
From atop the dark observation walls, the clan's twenty-one Elite Sequences watched in complete and mortifying silence as the enemy imperial army voluntarily marched into its own biomechanical foundry.
Kael swallowed thick saliva, feeling a cold, uncharacteristic sweat run down the back of his neck. His golden eyes locked onto the small, strict, terrifying figure of the Ash Librarian, and then onto his older brother, who watched the march with cold approval. "Boss..." Kael muttered, running his bloody hand over the back of his neck. "Please, always remind me, at all times, that never, ever, under any circumstances, should I truly anger you. This is... fuck."
Samael glanced at his First General out of the corner of his eye, his violet eyes calm but abyssal, observing the immense hell of training and mutilation beginning to forge in the lower levels under Vexia's absolute command and sadistic bureaucracy. "This isn't anger, Kael," Samael replied, his voice deep and laden with an apocalyptic maturity. "Anger is a lack of control. This is simple, pure, absolute preparation."
While the dark, metallic screams of the "biomechanical structural reeducation" of the 30,000 prisoners began to echo faintly and drown in the smoking bowels of the earth under Vexia's millimeter-perfect, clinical supervision, Samael withdrew, leaving his generals in charge of the cleanup, and walked alone toward the impregnable sanctuary of the immense Throne Room.
The colossal solid gold and obsidian doors closed heavily behind him with a dull boom, hermetically isolating and completely sealing away the noise from outside, the smell of blood, the mechanical screams, and the constant stress of the ongoing war.
For the first time in days of extreme tactical tension and combative insomnia, the powerful Patriarch and Sovereign Morningstar allowed himself to close his eyes, stop his steps, and exhale deeply. He walked, his heavy cloak dragging slightly, and collapsed, almost letting himself fall, onto the immense, cold, dark Dragon Throne. He felt the comforting, unbreakable chill of the polished obsidian against the back of his armor.
He was exhausted. It wasn't a biological or physical tiredness—his Primordial Body and his Void Dragon metabolism, now recharged after devouring Judge Gamma's energy, was a perfect, tireless, perpetual killing machine. His exhaustion was spiritual and karmic. Carrying the weight of the immense, complex fate of thousands of souls, ruling empires, designing the mass extermination of enemies, and weaving webs of lies and tactics to protect his own, was a gravitational burden that weighed immensely heavier on the mind than any physical mountain range on the shoulders.
But there was no time to sleep. Survival in the cultivation world did not afford the luxury of pause. They had won a legendary battle, humiliating the North, but the true Empire of the Center and the Purple Light Sect would soon receive the news of their fleet's cataclysm. He had to secure his sovereignty before the inevitable continental counterattack.
Samael raised his right hand and, manipulating his inventory's translucent panel, extracted the supreme, unstable treasures he had kept hidden, those that would irreversibly define his immediate future and his absolute dominion over the laws of the universe.
The two ancient crowns, obtained through blood, genocide, and betrayal in previous arcs, materialized in the air before him. To his left, the heavy, oppressive, black [Crown of the Void], radiating a thick, hungry, destructive darkness. To his right, the bright, warm, immaculate [Crown of the Eternal Aurora], pulsing with pure light, creation, and stellar hope. Both relics of opposing conceptual power floated, magnetically repelling each other in the air with violent sparks of static.
"To protect them from the gods that will come from the higher realms..." Samael whispered to the deep darkness of his immense, empty throne room, his eyes fixed on the two antagonistic relics. "To ensure my clan is untouchable, I must definitively stop trying to be a human man."
Samael clenched his fists and forced his will to suicidal levels. He did not hesitate. He violently and greedily absorbed the entirety of the remaining ancient energy and accumulated lifeblood sealed inside both primordial artifacts.
Unlike the physical agony of his previous bodily evolutions, this time there was no tearing pain threatening to burst his veins. Instead, there was a sudden, silent, massive, and deeply violent expansion of his own spiritual consciousness and his Soul Sea. Samael's mortal brain stopped processing reality in three dimensions; his eyes, temporarily blinded by the fused light and darkness, began to see and understand the physical world not as static shapes, colors, or matter, but as an infinite ocean of quantum Qi flows, intertwined fractal laws, and lines of code of existence itself.
The golden System prompt exploded in his mind, validating the usurpation of the laws.
[PRIMORDIAL ASSIMILATION SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED]
[Cultivation Base Updated:] Forced and stabilized Ascension.
[Current Rank:] Stage 7 Saint (Completely Consolidated and Free of Bottlenecks).
With his vast, dark soul finally stabilized and anchored firmly at a new, unexplored, and terrifying peak of divine power, Samael brought the palms of his gloved hands together with a dull, crushing clap in the air.
The two powerful, unbreakable floating crowns smashed violently into each other under the immense weight of his tyrannical will. The blinding purifying light of the celestial Aurora and the destructive abyssal darkness of the Void fought to the death for a long, agonizing second, creating an unstable micro-black hole in the center of the throne room that threatened to devour the building. But, ultimately, both divine wills contained within the steel surrendered and yielded tamely to the Dragon's absolute tyranny.
Both Saint Grade artifacts melted down, mixing like hot wax under the desert sun, until they were forged into a single, new, modest ring of heavy, dense metal of a matte gray color. It lacked dazzling jewels or frivolous adornments, but it emanated and projected a crushing, cosmic presence that buckled the air around it.
Samael raised his hands, took the cold grayish metal ring, and without hesitation, placed it upon his head. He had crowned himself, before himself and the silent universe, with the supreme [Crown of the Primordial Sovereign].
The exact instant the heavy metal touched his forehead and connected with his pineal gland and his Soul Sea, the constant, annoying, incessant background noise in his mind—the stress of continuous war, the weight of lost lives, the existential doubts, the residual fury of dragon blood, the suffocating worry for his wife and daughters—shut off abruptly. The mental silence in his brain became perfect, clinical, absolute, and impassable.
Panic, pain, and emotional fatigue disappeared. All of Samael's vast accumulated knowledge, plans, variables, and tactical concerns were instantly and efficiently ordered, indexed, and archived in infinite libraries within his own impregnable mind. He no longer thought, reasoned, or felt like a furious warrior leader driven by revenge or love. Under the weight of the new crown, Samael Morningstar analyzed probabilities and processed the flow of reality and the future exactly with the relentless, mathematical, indifferent clarity of a true God. His Infinite Mental Calculation activated, allowing him to operate at a cognitive speed close to that of light.
The visible halo, the irrefutable proof of his conceptual mastery of the Absolute Authority of Micro-Space, flared to life behind him. A perfect circular ring of solid light in a stellar platinum color formed silently and began to orbit and float slowly just behind his head, emitting a pale light that cast an immense, ominous, horned shadow that seemed to have a life, hunger, and will of its own against the obsidian wall.
Samael opened his eyes. There was no longer rage in his violet gaze; only an infinite, cold, abyssal comprehension of the world's chessboard.
He rose from his immense throne and walked out slowly, bearing a new aura of gravity that made the floorboards tremble in his wake, leaving the dark Throne Room.
Upon opening the large, heavy double doors of oak and steel leading into the Inner Palace's main corridor, he found a figure waiting for him. Vexia stood there, in a corner with an immovable posture, like an immaculate, Victorian shadow. Upon her hands, now magically free of the enormous rusted metal claws and black oil, rested a gleaming sterling silver tray. And on the tray, folded into a millimeter-perfect rectangle, steamed a soft, white, clean, damp, hot cotton towel, as if waiting for an aristocrat after a long journey. (Samael, with his new omniscient brain, processed and archived the question of "From what damned dimension or basement of this besieged castle did she pull a hot Egyptian cotton towel and a freshly polished silver tray in five minutes?", but wisely decided not to ask).
"Your sacred and crowned brow was sweating, Master and Sovereign," Vexia said in a soft, emotionless voice, performing a graceful, deep, and perfect courtly bow. "I have proceeded to analyze and solve the external aesthetic issues of your property while you assimilated your power. I have assigned the first 5,000 'experimental recruits' of my new biomechanical infantry to the priority task of deep massive debris cleanup. The blood, pieces of splintered bone, and enemy biological charcoal no longer inefficiently and shamefully stain the precious, polished obsidian of our Main Plaza. It is pristine and optimized for parade."
"Well done, Marshal," Samael said in a neutral tone, taking the warm, steaming cotton towel with his hand to wipe the remnants of golden blood, cold sweat, and gray battle dust from his pale face. "Accompany me immediately, Vexia. It is time for you to meet your Mistress and place yourself at her absolute disposal."
They walked in absolute silence through the wide, intricate, and ornate corridors of the palace, heading toward the private, heavily guarded, and protected Imperial Chambers.
Upon crossing the thick security arches and entering the immense bedroom, the heavy, violent, overwhelming atmosphere of lethal war, poison, and fire that permeated the entire citadel changed abruptly. The air inside the room, heavily climate-controlled by immense temperature arrays embedded in the walls, smelled reassuringly of warm breast milk, freshly washed silk sheets, and pure, crisp night ice.
Seraphina Morningstar, the Sovereign, sat gracefully in a sumptuous, wide, high-backed blue velvet armchair, strategically placed next to the immense magical diamond-glass window that overlooked the balcony and the serene hanging gardens. She was relaxed, the top of her heavy imperial dress unfastened, nursing the tiny, ravenous, and lethal baby Celeste with immense love and tenderness. The majestic Ice Empress, the tyrant of legend who hours before, with a single frigid movement of her raised hands, had defended the entire city and returned sky-fire capable of freezing entire oceans and annihilating battleships, looked in that intimate moment incredibly soft, achingly fragile, and genuinely human, at peace with her maternal instinct.
Hearing the heavy, familiar footsteps of her husband's boots, Seraphina looked up. Her beautiful, divine, ancient white eyes with striking, bright silver rings lit up immediately, and her pale, hard face softened completely, ceasing to be a war machine to return to being a loving wife.
"You smell like melted metal, dead gods, and burned blood from ten meters away, my dark lord," she whispered, tenderly wrinkling her perfect little nose, though an immense smile of genuine relief formed on her lips upon seeing him enter in one piece.
Samael walked toward her, mentally shedding the armor of the tyrannical monarch. He leaned over the wide armchair and kissed her cold white forehead, and then her lips, with a deep passion, care, and devotion that contrasted shockingly and schizophrenically with the inhuman, sadistic biological and mental massacre he had just orchestrated and ruthlessly executed in the streets and skies below them barely an hour ago.
Baby Celeste let go of her mother's breast immediately, turning her little head covered in silver hair, and upon recognizing her father, reached her small, chubby little hands toward Samael's armored chest, laughing in crystalline peals and cooing happily, causing small, harmless ripples of spatial vibration—capable of bursting a normal mortal's skull—to bounce happily against the shielded walls of the room.
In the darkest corner of the large bedroom, dissolved into the shadows themselves, the Eternal General Abaddon (the immense, ancient, lethal, and faithful guardian shadow and nursemaid of the clan) materialized briefly, taking humanoid form, bowing his nebulous, heavy, faceless head to greet his lord and king with a silent, reverential bow, confirming that he had watched over the queen's safety without rest, and obediently faded back into the dark background of the room.
"Sera, my love, I formally and officially introduce you to Vexia," Samael said, stepping back slightly and gesturing with his hand toward the maid-like woman who waited impeccably standing in the frame of the large door. "She, as our new Marshal of Logistics and Grand Void Librarian, will personally ensure that the empire runs like clockwork, the servants and the army have no flaws, and you, my queen, never, for the rest of your immortality, have to lift a single delicate finger again for tedious mundane and administrative tasks if you do not wish to. Vexia, look at me: this is Seraphina. Your absolute and supreme Empress. Her word and mine weigh exactly the same on the scales of the laws."
Vexia, the haughty deity of pure pragmatism and optimization who barely minutes earlier looked at the entire world, mortal soldiers, and human life as if they were insects and biological trash to be recycled, took a single step forward with her head bowed. Then, surprising even Samael with the fluidity of the movement, Vexia dropped and knelt deeply, with ceremonial grace but Prussian discipline, lowering her strictly styled head until her impeccable forehead almost brushed and kissed the cold marble floor of the chambers in front of the skirts of Seraphina's dress.
"Your Imperial Majesty of the Eternal Snows," Vexia's voice spoke, and for the first time, the Librarian's monotonous, robotic, and clinical tone trembled microscopically and genuinely, her mercury eyes recognizing the unfathomable, overwhelming conceptual density of a draconic/celestial bloodline vastly superior to her own. "The efficiency of my existence now belongs to you. Your sacred house and lineage is my temple, my altar of order, and the spilled blood of your enemies my only liturgy. Command me and I will correct the mathematics of the world in your favor."
Seraphina nodded slightly, dignified and slow, accepting the abject submission and devoted service of the new member with a deeply regal naturalness, characteristic of one who millennia ago already ruled and destroyed galaxies before being betrayed.
Then, the Lotus Empress raised her deep eyes to her husband's pale, sweaty face. Maternal instinct gave way to tactics. "Is the butchery out there finally over, Samael?" Seraphina asked, her voice turning serious and direct.
"The phase of desperate defense against the Cryons ended with total victory and the capture of invaluable resources." Samael knelt softly on one knee beside her chair, taking her hand. "The massive counterattack against old enemies begins, the purging of the map and the revenge, starts very soon." Samael gestured with his hand in the air toward his own inventory and pulled out, materializing it in a flash of frozen starlight that brutally chilled the entire room, a long, beautiful, translucent sword resting in a white gold scabbard encrusted with dark meteorites. "But before moving the city and marching to the final war... this is, by right, for you, my queen. The legendary Holy Sword: [Star Render]."
Seraphina let out a gasp of pure, absolute childlike wonder. She reached out her fine white hand and lightly touched the gleaming, pure, translucent blade of stellar silver with her fingertips. The instant of physical contact, the immense sword awoke from centuries of slumber. It vibrated vigorously in her hands, singing and humming with a high, pure note that resonated instantly and harmonically with the vast, ancient, freezing soul of the Empress's Supreme Lotus. Tiny points of intense, bright white light, exactly like freezing, unreachable stars, began to float, blink, and slowly orbit around the blade and the white gold and black meteorite hilt, like a miniature solar system bound to her murderous will.
"It's absolutely beautiful, Samael," Seraphina whispered in a breathless, lovesick voice, and her divine, haughty ice eyes grew visibly damp, shining with emotion, admiring the lethal gift that multiplied her power. "Touching it... I can physically feel how the blade has the innate power to cut spatial distance and freeze the vital energy of stars. With this in my hands, I swear it by my core... no one will touch a single hair on our daughter's head, nor the city. I will be the wall of frost covering your back in the storm."
Samael looked at her with absolute devotion, his violet eyes softening before the woman he loved. With extreme delicacy and warmth, he took his wife's free hand, guiding it slowly until it rested, palm to palm, over her wide, swollen belly. "And for them, the future twin sovereigns..." Samael murmured in a hoarse, protective voice.
Samael opened his left hand, and in it glowed an intricate rune of platinum and golden light: the ancient and mythical [Primordial Bloodline Fusion Seal]. During the last few months and the long days of the siege, Seraphina had been suffering in a heroic, tearing, and immense stoic silence. Both parents knew the truth and felt in terror how the two immense sparks of life, the twins inside her spiritual womb, were not only beating, but violently fighting and clashing for genetic supremacy. The destructive, apocalyptic heritage of Samael's thick, toxic primordial Dragon Blood and the freezing, ancient, untouchable Body of the Eternal Lotus Empress of Seraphina were cosmic elemental forces too diametrically opposed, dominant, and unstable, locked in an agonizing, dangerous, all-out biological war within the mother's body for control of fetal development, threatening to tear her apart from the inside.
Samael rested his huge glowing hand, bearing the Seal, directly against the skin of Seraphina's tense, aching lower belly and applied the divine incantation. There was no pain, no rejection, no struggle. An immense, calming, warm, maternal golden light instantly and completely enveloped the queen's belly. The translucent vision of the spiritual womb became fleetingly visible through the magic: for a microsecond, floating in the amniotic fluid of pure Qi, one could see the beautiful and terrifying fetal silhouette of a frozen five-petaled crystal Lotus that, instead of repelling, was being tenderly and peacefully embraced, protected, and wrapped by the long spiky tail of a tiny black dragon of fire and void.
Both lethal bloodlines stopped fighting. They stopped trying to consume each other and, under the light of the Fusion Seal, they united perfectly, genetically, and slept together in a deep, indestructible symbiosis of absolute power. The constant cramping, the heaviness, and the dull, piercing pain vanished from Seraphina's entrails. The unbearable magical tension dissolved into maternal warmth.
Seraphina let out a long, trembling sigh, and a thick, solitary tear finally rolled uncontrollably down her cheek, falling onto her dress. She closed her eyes, finally feeling the cellular harmony in her body. "They're no longer fighting each other, Samael..." the Empress sobbed softly, desperately clinging with both hands to her husband's huge, warm hand resting on her belly. "They are... finally in absolute peace. They are no longer fire and ice at war. They are... a single, impossible new thing."
Samael leaned forward reverentially and kissed his wife's pale, cold little hands, looking into her eyes with the promise of the apocalypse in his pupils. "Our daughters are the damned incarnate future of this universe, Sera. They are the genesis of a terrifying, new supreme race. And I, I swear it to you by my blood, I will burn the map of this entire world and massacre every fucking clan and every supposed deity on the continent just to build them, upon their broken bones and ashes, a throne and a cradle that are worthy and free of threats."