Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 5)
The firmament contained within the third spatial void box created by Samael Morningstar was a leaden, suffocating color. Unlike the other pocket dimensions where the echo of explosions still resonated in the fabric of reality, a heavy, freezing, metallic tension reigned here.
In the center of this five-hundred-square-meter prison stood the Guardian of Steel, a revered Stage 5 Saint of the Purple Light Sect. His figure was imposing, wrapped from head to toe in Divine Silver armor that radiated a halo of purifying light. He was not a simple cultivator; he was the incarnation of the absolute edge and unbreakable defense. For two thousand years, no one had managed to even scratch the surface of his armor. His skin and bones had been refined until they became celestial steel.
Fifty meters away, five figures blocked his path. The Annihilation Squad.
Bren (Sequence 19), the Seismic Behemoth, cracked his massive neck, his brown eyes burning with a primal bloodlust as his immense muscles tensed beneath his robes. Beside him, Altair (Sequence 10), the Lord of Entropy, looked like a corpse pulled from a fresh grave; his pale skin, his messy gray hair, and his emotionless eyes reflected the very abyss of existential depression.
Elian (Sequence 20), the Mercury Tide, maintained a relaxed and languid posture, as if he were about to fall asleep, with his silvery-blue hair dripping moisture. Tamsin (Sequence 13), the Jade Widow, coquettishly played with a lock of her acid-green hair, giving the Guardian a smile as sweet as it was toxic. And closing the formation, Lys (Sequence 14), the Beacon of the Aurora, floated a few centimeters above the ground, radiating an angelic purity that contrasted sickeningly with the slaughter unfolding outside the box.
The Guardian of Steel exhaled, and the vapor of his breath was so sharp it cut the stone in front of his lips.
"I have seen the wind die and the illusion shatter," the elder said, his voice echoing like two swords clashing in an empty cavern. "Your Patriarch has a macabre talent for cultivating monsters. But you have made a fatal miscalculation, beasts of the south. Illusion is fragile. Wind is incorporeal. But steel... steel is eternal."
Bren let out a deep laugh that made the dust on the ground vibrate.
"The only eternal thing here is how hungry I am, grandpa! Let's see what that golden tin can of yours tastes like!"
The Guardian narrowed his eyes. His patience was exhausted.
"Soft flesh against sacred silver. I will teach you the definition of futility. [Saint Domain Art: Storm of the Ten Thousand Blades of Judgment]."
The Stage 5 Saint didn't make a single physical movement. He simply expanded his Sea of Consciousness. The space above his head tore open, and from the dimensional cracks, swords began to rain. They were not Qi illusions; they were real physical weapons, ten thousand Low Heaven-Grade flying swords, forged over centuries and bound to his soul.
The sky of the void box darkened under a canopy of sharp metal. The swords began to spin at supersonic speeds, forming an immense cylindrical meat grinder that spanned almost the entire width of the arena. The deafening hum of metal cutting the air threatened to burst the Half-Saints' eardrums. The storm of blades descended like divine punishment, designed to puree them in the first millisecond of combat.
Tamsin yawned. Altair didn't even look up. Lys clasped her hands in prayer. Bren smiled.
Everyone knew whose turn it was to open the curtain.
Elian Morningstar took a single lazy step forward. His eyes, which looked like pools of liquid metal, fixed on the steel apocalypse looming over them.
"How noisy..." Elian muttered in annoyance. "And how light."
From the pores of Elian's skin, his eyes, and his mouth, a thick, silvery liquid began to well up. It wasn't water. It was transmuted Abyssal Dragon blood. [Codex: Heavy Mercury Flow. Thousand-Ton Prison] and [Mantle of the Dead Sea].
The mercury spilled across the marble floor at a terrifying speed, instantly transforming a hundred-meter radius in front of the Morningstars into a perfect chrome mirror lake. But the true nightmare wasn't on the ground, it was in the air.
Elian's [Authority of Crushing Inertia] altered the laws of gravitational physics. The air itself above the mercury became "dense," multiplying its cosmic mass.
When the vanguard of the ten thousand Stage 5 swords entered Elian's zone of influence, the scene defied all martial logic. The swords, traveling at the speed of sound, collided with an invisible wall of oppressive mass. The sharp screech of steel morphed into a muffled metallic groan. The ambient surface tension was so aberrant that the flying weapons began to violently slow down, as if they were trying to fly through solidified honey.
But that wasn't the worst part. The mercury on the ground rose up in the form of microscopic tendrils and adhered to the edges of the divine swords.
The Guardian of Steel opened his eyes in disbelief. His spiritual connection with his weapons remained intact, but the feedback his brain received was impossible. His swords weighed a hundred times more than normal. Elian's Heavy Water had corrupted the mass of the weapons.
Stripped of inertia and bearing an unbearable weight, the majestic storm of ten thousand blades collapsed. One by one, the legendary swords fell from the sky like dead birds, crashing into the reflective surface of the mercury pool. The liquid's surface tension acted like a magnetic swamp, swallowing the silver blades and trapping them at the bottom, completely useless and silenced.
The most powerful ranged attack of the Stage 5 Saint had been nullified by a single youth who hadn't even broken a sweat.
"My turn, mermaid," Bren grunted, not giving the Guardian time to process the shock.
Bren didn't run towards the enemy. His battle instinct was pure and instinctive. He knew that the extreme density of Elian's mercury was the perfect conductor.
The Seismic Behemoth raised his massive right leg, concentrating all his mass, his Magma Qi, and his [Authority of Seismic Resonance] into his heel. His limb was covered in black igneous rock and burning orange cracks.
"[World-Devastating Stomp]."
Bren stomped on the mercury lake with the force of a meteorite.
The mercury didn't splash; it absorbed 100% of the kinetic energy. The high-frequency shockwave traveled through the superdense liquid mass without losing a fraction of its power. The seismic vibration crossed the forty meters separating them from the Guardian in a thousandth of a second and erupted directly beneath the feet of the Stage 5 Saint.
The impact wasn't a physical blow; it was a targeted tectonic convulsion.
The Guardian of Steel felt the marble floor beneath his boots simply cease to exist, turned into vibrating dust. The force of the oscillation struck his knees, destabilizing his perfect combat stance and making him stumble backwards for the first time in centuries. A nauseating vibration ran up his legs, threatening to splinter his silver bones.
"BASTARDS!" roared the elder, his wounded pride overcoming his reason.
If his flying weapons were useless and the ground at a distance was a trap, he would crush them with his bare hands. The Guardian unsheathed the greatsword he carried on his back, a two-meter-long High Saint-Grade broadsword, forged from the very essence of a neutron star and coated in sacred silver.
His body shone with blinding light, activating the "Immunity of Sacred Steel." His armor became an impenetrable shell against any conventional physical or magical force. With a sonic boom that shattered the surviving tiles, the Guardian launched himself in a straight line toward the youths' formation.
That was his second and final mistake. He had decided to enter the range of conceptual monsters.
Tamsin, the Jade Widow, winked at the massive elder charging toward them.
"Too stiff, darling. Relax a little."
Tamsin's apple-green eyes shone. She exhaled softly, releasing the [Mist of Withered Souls]. An emerald-green vapor, dense, oily, and profoundly toxic, rapidly expanded in front of the group. It wasn't an ordinary biological poison; it was a Corrosion of Laws. The mist sought out the opponent's Qi and metal impurities.
At the same time, Altair took a languid step forward. The Lord of Entropy opened his [Book of Mute Entropy] and unleashed his [Domain of Withering] and the [Aura of Inevitable Aging].
The world within a twenty-meter radius lost all its color, turning a dead gray and sepia tone. Time itself within that range began to twist, becoming thick, hostile, and ravenous.
The Guardian of Steel plunged straight into the intersection zone between Tamsin's Mist and Altair's Aura.
The synergy between Sequences 10 and 13 was an event of unprecedented alchemical horror.
Steel and silver, no matter how sacred, have an inherent weakness in the laws of the universe: oxidation. Metal corrupts with time and oxygen. Normally, a Stage 5 Saint's armor would take ten thousand years to show a single speck of rust under extreme conditions.
But Altair and Tamsin rewrote the clock of the universe.
Tamsin's hyper-concentrated acid acted as the perfect chemical catalyst, biting into the protective Qi layer of the Guardian's armor and seeking out the metallic bonds. And Altair's Aura acted as the temporal accelerator. What would have taken ten millennia happened in three agonizing seconds.
The Guardian felt the speed of his charge brutally decrease. He tried to raise his greatsword, but his joints creaked horribly. He looked down, and the purest, darkest, most primal panic flooded his ancient mind.
His indestructible Divine Silver armor was bubbling. The shining metal turned dull, then coppery red, and finally a disgusting, rusty brown. The rust advanced like a plague of locusts devouring a harvest. The scales of the armor began to flake and fall to the ground like dead dust. The hilt of his greatsword became brittle, and the blade lost all its luster.
"W-What sorcery is this...? MY ARMOR! MY ETERNAL STEEL!" screamed the elder. His voice no longer resonated with a metallic clang; it sounded like the creaking of old hinges. Tamsin's [Pollen of Oblivion] was already entering his lungs, disconnecting his nervous synapses, while Altair's [Aura] withered the skin beneath the rusted metal, filling it with wrinkles and age spots.
Desperate, knowing that if he stayed in that death zone he would die of decrepitude and oxidation in seconds, the Guardian burned a hundred years of his own vital longevity in a single instant. Driven by madness and terror, he raised his rusted but still lethal Stage 5 greatsword and launched a massive horizontal slash aimed at cleaving Altair in half, seeking to kill the bringer of temporal entropy.
Altair didn't move. His gray eyes watched the rusted sword approach his neck with absolute apathy, as if he were waiting for a train.
He didn't need to move. His anvil was there.
Bren Morningstar roared, interposing himself between Altair and the sword. The Behemoth drew no weapon. He conjured no energy shield. With a reckless brutality bordering on suicide, Bren raised both bare hands, covered in igneous obsidian, and clapped with titanic force directly onto the descending blade of the Stage 5 greatsword.
SPLAAASH! CRAAAACK!
The force and inertia of a Stage 5 Saint cannot be stopped easily. Despite being rusted and diminished, the immense sword cut through Bren's obsidian as if it were glass. The steel sank deep into the giant's palms, tearing flesh, shattering tendons, and biting straight to the bone of both hands, stopping mere centimeters from Altair's neck.
Blood poured in torrents from Bren's mutilated hands.
The Guardian smiled savagely for a fraction of a second.
"Die, animal!" He tried to press the blade down to sever Bren's hands and decapitate Altair.
But the blade didn't move.
The Guardian's smile vanished. Bren's mutilated hands were gripping the edge with preternatural strength. And worse, the blood welling from Bren's wounds wasn't red and liquid. It was thick, viscous, and glowing with a nuclear temperature.
The [Solid Magma Blood] erupted from Bren's veins. The temperature of his wounds exceeded five thousand degrees Celsius in an instant. The sacred steel of the Guardian's sword, already weakened by Tamsin's corrosion and Altair's entropy, could not withstand the direct geothermal heat.
Before the elder's horrified eyes, his legendary Stage 5 sword began to glow red-hot and then simply melted between Bren's bleeding hands, falling to the ground as puddles of molten iron slag.
Bren spat blood from the exertion of holding back such force, but his smile was terrifying, revealing red-stained teeth.
"I told you... you're wearing too much tin."
Even with his palms destroyed and dripping lava, Bren pulled back his right arm, rotated his hip, and concentrated a thousand percent of his physical and seismic strength into his fist.
"[Magmatic Collapse Fist] coupled with [Internal Shockwave]."
Bren's punch broke the sound barrier within the space of a meter. His magma- and rock-wreathed fist struck directly against the rusted breastplate of the Guardian of Steel's armor.
The armor, which already had the structural integrity of a stale cracker, turned to dust upon impact. But Bren's blow wasn't meant to push. It aimed for Phase Oscillation.
The Guardian didn't go flying. His body absorbed the entire seismic impact. The high-frequency wave traveled through his chest tissue, bypassing the silver bones, and detonated directly inside his thoracic cavity.
A disgusting, wet, dull sound echoed in the box.
The Stage 5 Saint's left lung was instantly liquefied. Turned into a bloody pulp by the tectonic vibration. The Guardian opened his mouth, vomiting a cascade of almost black blood mixed with chunks of shattered organs, his eyes rolling back from the incomprehensible pain of the internal autopsy.
He was paralyzed by shock, his chest exposed and smoking from Bren's magma strike.
In that microsecond of absolute vulnerability, a small, slender shadow slipped through the magma giant's blind spot. Tamsin appeared right in front of the elder. Her small, delicate hand, with two fingers stained a dark purple and radiating a lethal poison, shot forward.
Tamsin plunged her two fingers directly into the open, throbbing, fleshy wound in the Guardian's chest.
"[Widow's Kiss]."
The girl's whisper was the neurological death sentence.
The ultra-condensed Half-Saint Stage neurotoxin, empowered by her Basilisk bloodline, entered directly into the Stage 5's bloodstream without having to deal with skin or armor barriers. The poison traveled to the heart and from there to the brain in a millisecond.
The Guardian froze. The pain of the liquefied lung disappeared, replaced by a terrifying anesthetic coldness. His nervous system collapsed entirely. Immense black and neon-green veins sprouted beneath the skin of his neck, face, and arms, drawing a dark lotus that withered his Qi channels.
The immense and unbeatable Guardian of Steel fell to his knees, unable to move a single muscle, drowning in his own blood, his armor disintegrated and his magic nullified.
But, even in that pathetic state, the spark of a Stage 5's divinity refused to extinguish silently. If his physical body was dead, his soul still retained the energy of a small planet.
With ruptured eyes and a blocked throat, the Guardian forced the ignition of his Soul Core. His body began to glow with an unstable and erratic silver light. He was going to detonate his soul. Unlike a normal explosion, the self-destruction of the Steel Soul would fire millions of needles of metallic energy at supersonic speeds, bouncing off the void walls of the box and slaughtering the five Morningstar youths into pulp.
"No! Fall back!" grunted Bren, trying to push Tamsin away, but his ruined hands wouldn't respond. Elian and Altair were too weak to move in time.
But there was one member of the team who hadn't spent a single drop of Qi yet.
Lys Morningstar walked with celestial grace, stepping on Elian's mercury which parted in her wake. Her long golden hair waved like trapped light. Her hazel eyes didn't look at the elder with hatred; they looked at him with the fanatical compassion of an inquisitor about to light the pyre.
"The darkness within you is screaming, heretic," Lys said, her voice resonating with a divine echo. "You have tried to stain my family. The Patriarch demands a clean sky. And the light... does not negotiate with rust."
Lys raised her right hand toward the ceiling of the void box. The [Psalm of the Eternal Aurora] shone intensely.
"[Sentence of the Sun: Spear of Solar Judgment]."
There was no warning. There was no visible charging of energy.
A vertical pillar of hyper-compressed photons, of a bluish-white so scorching that space itself seemed to melt at the edges, fell like a god's spear directly onto the kneeling, swelling body of the Guardian of Steel.
The impact didn't generate an expansive shockwave. Lys's Law of Light was absolute molecular tyranny.
The heat was so incomprehensibly extreme that the Guardian's soul explosion was smothered from within. The elder's body, his rusted armor, his poisoned flesh, and his boiling spiritual core, simply ceased to exist. They didn't burn, they didn't turn to ash; they were evaporated at the atomic level in the span of half a second.
The pillar of light faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving a sepulchral silence in the combat arena.
Where a millennial god of the Purple Light Sect had knelt moments before, there was now only a shallow crater of vitrified marble, and a perfect, black shadow burned into the stone, the only two-dimensional testimony that a man had died there.
The void box flickered. The spatial barrier created by Samael began to dissolve, indicating that the target had been eliminated.
But the Anti-Matter Squad's victory had exacted the most horrific toll yet. They had defied the abyss of Stages and paid for it with pounds of their own flesh and soul.
Elian was the first to fall. The Mercury Tide collapsed to his knees in his own puddle, coughing violently. He wasn't expelling blood, but a dark gray, viscous liquid. The Alchemical Intoxication from overloading the weight of the mercury against a Stage 5 had invaded his nervous system. His veins looked black, and his muscles were torn by the hydraulic pressure. Each exhalation was a sigh of metallic agony.
Beside him, a dull thud signaled Altair's collapse. The Lord of Entropy fell backward, staring at the gray sky without seeing it. The [Temporal Void Hunger] of his Codex had cannibalized him. To maintain the aging process on a superior being, his own body had consumed its vital reserves. He looked like a skeleton covered in translucent skin, his cheeks hollowed and his eyes blind from starvation. He was one heartbeat away from erasing himself from existence.
Bren, the invincible colossus, was on his knees, breathing like a dying bull. His enormous arms hung uselessly at his sides. From the elbows to the fingertips, the skin and muscle had been flayed by the Guardian's sword, and the horrific third-degree burns from his own solid magma revealed blackened, micro-fractured bones. The pain was so acute that even the Behemoth couldn't make a sound, biting his tongue until it bled to keep from screaming.
Tamsin lay curled in a fetal position, clutching her ruined throat. By planting the poison directly into a boiling core, she had inhaled the hyper-concentrated vapor of her own [Black Flower] when the energies clashed. Her vocal cords were chemically burned, leaving her completely mute, as she spat clots of acid-green blood that pitted the floor inches from her face.
The only one left standing was Lys. The Beacon of the Aurora stared at the smoking crater, motionless. Her posture was straight, angelic, and majestic. But from her beautiful hazel eyes, now completely white and blind from the reticular damage of light exhaustion, thick tears of golden blood welled up and slid down her pale cheeks.
Squad 3 had executed the sentence. The three Combat Boxes vanished simultaneously, returning the fifteen broken, mutilated, and victorious teenagers to the bloody reality of the mountain range.
They had massacred the Guardian Dome. They had humiliated the immortals.
But as silence fell over the Purple Light Sect, a horrifying crack cut through the air from the dark southern sky. The metallic sound of an immense blade severing spiritual chains.
Everyone—blind, deaf, or dying—raised their heads out of pure survival instinct.
High atop the Veil of the Eclipse, where the darkness was absolute, the Stage 8 Hidden Guardian—the true monster of the mountain—had just clashed weapons against the blue-eyed Shinigami.
Samael Morningstar smiled from his throne, crossing his legs.
"The appetizer is over. Malak... show them how the darkness hunts."