Chapter 154: The Void Sequences and the Baptism of Golden Blood (Part 2)
The crimson and golden light in the immense Throne Room slowly faded, leaving behind a dense, suffocating mist. The first seven members of the newly baptized Void Sequences were standing, or resting on their knees, breathing with agonizing difficulty. They were surrounded by boiling vapor and a residual Qi so heavy it distorted the air. Their combined presence in the room was no longer that of a human elite squad; it was that of a pack of archaic monsters, deities of carnage freshly torn from their slumber. Their cultivation levels had skyrocketed with absurd violence; the weakest among them now brushed the peak of the Transcendent Realm, solidifying foundations that would have taken an orthodox genius decades to build.
However, before the attentive eyes of the others, something strange and biologically fascinating occurred.
Borg, still panting and covered in the blood of his own mutation, closed his eyes and let out a trembling exhale. With a wet, repulsive sound, like flesh suctioning mud, his thick organic bronze scales began to sink. The impenetrable carapace receded beneath his epidermis, leaving his human skin reddened, steaming, and feverish, hiding the Rhinoceros Dragon within. A few meters away, Lia blinked rapidly. The violent crackling of her Thunder Falcon Eye dimmed; the black sclera lightened until it turned white, and the vertical golden pupil widened, perfectly simulating a normal human eye, though hiding a latent electrical storm just beneath the surface. Jareth coughed, and the grotesque black and purple veins throbbing with miasma vanished beneath his deathly pallor, returning to him the appearance of a sickly scholar rather than a walking focus of necrosis.
"That is the true gift of the Primordial Blood and the first principle of the Void," Samael said, his voice cutting through the sepulchral silence, observing from the height of the dais how the seven regained their almost entirely human appearance. "At ten percent awakening, you obtain the scales, eyes, density, and bones of a dragon, but you retain control over your mortal mold. You can hide your true nature beneath human skin... until the exact millisecond of the kill arrives."
Samael smiled internally. To manifest the wings, the tails, and the true crown of horns, they will have to awaken even more and endure the threshold to enter the full Dragonoid form. But for now... this is more than enough for the central continent to drown in its own blood without knowing what hit them.
The Patriarch shifted his violet gaze toward the remaining seventeen warriors, from Mira (Rank 17) to the imperturbable Dante (Rank 1). The matrices beneath the palace floor hummed, and ominous columns of crimson light began to form, marking the exact spots beneath their feet.
"Prepare your souls," Samael announced. The room began to tremble again, responding to the pressure of his intent. "The true torture is just beginning."
The silence in the Throne Room became suffocating, tainted by the unmistakable, nauseating smell of electric ozone, acidic sweat, copper, and vaporized flesh left by the first group. Ranks 24 to 18 had crawled toward the immense pillars on the flanks, breathing with death rattles, their auras still vibrating with the instability of newborn monsters struggling to settle into their human meridians.
Samael observed them all with his [Eye of Destiny]. The light columns of those seven warriors were no longer white or a dull gray; they had been dyed a deep, dark, thick red, the unmistakable color of the predatory caste, of calamities destined to rewrite the karma of the world. But his attention did not stop there; it immediately focused on the next seven individuals who, obeying the call, took a step to the front of the formation.
Ranks 17 to 11. The upper tactical elite. The heavy specialists and the anomalies.
"The first group merely tested the temperature of the water," Samael said, his voice devoid of any trace of pity or comfort. "Their mutation was, in draconic terms, a scratch. It was physical, superficial. I altered their bones, densified their muscles, and forged their scales. But as we ascend the hierarchy of the Void, your biological and spiritual affinity demands an infinitely greater tribute. It demands that the beast devour your internal organs, shred your meridians, and mutilate your mind in order to rebuild them from the ashes."
Samael raised his right hand, gloved in obsidian, and his personal system's golden panel flickered, projecting a dark, ominous crimson light directly onto the seven kneeling warriors.
[PRIMORDIAL PATRIARCH SYSTEM: DRACONIC AWAKENING PROTOCOL - PHASE 2]
[Integration Level:] 10% (Awakening of Internal Organs, Transmutation of Fluids, and Spiritual Atavism).
[Critical Vital Risk Warning:] Restructuring at the cellular and molecular level will cause Level 9 pain stress (Neurological equivalent to conscious and repeated physical dismemberment, without loss of consciousness). Risk of ego collapse: 78%.
[Initiating Conceptual Injection of Primordial Blood...]
"Scream if you need to," Samael whispered, closing his fist slowly, as if he were crushing their hearts from afar. "Because stoic silence will not save you from the agony that is about to dismember you."
The first impact of the divine blood struck the group's two main tanks simultaneously, and the reaction was immediate and Dantesque.
Korg (Rank 16 - Iron Skin) and Goran (Rank 13 - Bronze Shield) didn't simply fall; they collapsed face-first against the solid marble floor with a force that shook the palace's foundations, emitting sounds that under no circumstances belonged to human throats. These weren't conventional screams of pain; they sounded like the horrifying screech of ton-heavy metal plates being shredded, bent, and melted in a giant hydraulic press inside an industrial forge.
Goran, the broad, stoic man who had never complained about a wound in all his years of service, let out a guttural shriek, a deep roar that tore his own larynx. The skin on his forearms and shoulders literally split into two perfect, bloody fissures. But the blood that gushed from his wounds wasn't a red liquid; it was a heavy, burning, golden alloy. The bloodline of the Armored Bronze Dragon wasn't playing with his surface; it was replacing his entire adipose tissue, his capillary network, and his muscles with dense layers of living organic metal.
His human bones began to crack. The sound of his femurs and ribs fracturing into thousands of minuscule pieces was audible throughout the hall. But they didn't break from weakness; they broke because the new density of his marrow demanded space. They re-welded in microseconds, creating a structure of [Divine Alloy] that doubled, and then tripled, his body weight. The gravitational impact was so sudden and massive that the immense marble slabs beneath his knees and hands simply ceased to exist, turning into fine gray dust purely from the physical pressure his body now exerted. His eyes lost their human moisture, the corneas hardening until they became two solid metal spheres, two [Bronze Compasses] that now saw the world in vectors of kinetic force. He reached the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9), turned into a five-hundred-kilo bunker concentrated into the stature of a man.
A few meters away, Korg's torture was, if possible, even more visual and horrifying. The blonde giant, usually a lover of food and practical jokes, arched backward and vomited a thick stream of black slag and boiling ash that stained the floor.
"AHHHH! IT BURNS! IT'S BURNING ME FROM THE INSIDE!" Korg roared, digging his thick human fingers into the jade floor, melting the stone on contact.
The Volcanic Iron Dragon's bloodline had ignited the core of his heart. His internal temperature rose exponentially to over two thousand degrees Celsius. The moisture in his body, his sweat, and his tears evaporated with a violent hiss milliseconds before managing to exit his pores. And then, the anatomical horror began: his golden, human skin literally melted. His epidermis flowed like hot wax sliding down the side of a lit candle, sloughing off his musculature to reveal the hideous sublayer of [Organic Iron Dermis], gray scales that throbbed incandescent red-hot.
The pain of being flayed alive by his own internal heat made him howl, but his vocal cords burned and turned to ash from the temperature of his breath. Korg's body forced regeneration, creating vocal cords of metallic tissue; they burned and regenerated three consecutive times in less than ten seconds. The heat emanating from his forged body was so extreme, so radioactive, that the oxygen within a two-meter radius around him constantly erupted into small, violent blue sparks of spontaneous combustion. Like Goran, the energy of the pain catapulted him to the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9). They were, for all tactical purposes, two impregnable fortresses of metallic flesh and magma.
While the two heavy tanks suffered the unspeakable agony of condensation and thermal fusion, a few steps away, the aerodynamic sniper and the group's pyromaniac experienced the opposite torture: violent expansion and absolute void.
Selene (Rank 14 - The Whistling Wind) arched backward into an unnatural inverted bridge, bringing both hands to her throat. The woman with an athletic body and firm breasts (C-Cup) felt the world run out of air. The Slashing Zephyr Dragon's bloodline was the incarnation of void and speed; it demanded, by biological decree, a body that experienced zero friction with reality.
Her human lungs collapsed internally. They burst under the pressure change when trying to process pure wind Qi, filling her mouth with blood that she couldn't even cough up. Selene opened her mouth in a scream of absolute panic, but no sound audible to the human ear came from her lips; the elimination of molecular friction turned her voice into a massive ultrasonic shockwave.
CRASH!
The immense runic glass windows of the palace, located thirty meters away, shattered into a rain of diamond-like shards.
And the bone pain began. An invisible acid, the Zephyr's wind, penetrated her bones, devouring her spinal marrow and the interior of her skeleton to leave them completely hollow, reinforcing them only with wind crystal filaments. Every joint in her body (shoulders, elbows, knees, hips) dislocated simultaneously with a flurry of terrifying pops, relocating into ultra-flexible tissue sockets to grant her microsecond agility without inertia. Her hair, previously a soft pink color, stood on end and became sharp and rigid like a thousand fine metal needles, while her eyes took on a dark, calculating pink hue, capable of seeing wind tunnels in the void. The pain of losing the entire weight of her humanity made her cry, but the zero friction of the air around her evaporated the tears instantly. She stabilized at Stage 9 of the Transcendent Realm, turned into an unreachable atmospheric ghost.
But even Selene's inaudible howls and Goran's screeching metal were brutally drowned out by Ignis's thermonuclear detonation (Rank 12).
The young man with surprisingly delicate, almost androgynous facial features literally exploded from inside his Dantian in a geyser of orange and white fire that licked the hall's ceiling. It wasn't fire originating from chemical combustion; it was the Volcanic Dragon's purest and most destructive Yang Flame.
"MORE! GIVE ME MORE! BURN IT ALL!" Ignis howled, laughing in hysterical bursts and crying tears of evaporated blood at the same time, standing amidst his own funeral pyre.
Ignis's pain level transcended the physical and brushed against ecstatic madness. His central nervous system, the delicate network of nerves that allowed him to feel, was being violently ripped from his spinal cord and instantly replaced by conduits of superheated liquid plasma. Ignis tore his tunic and dug his own nails into his smooth chest, trying to rip his ribcage open in a fit of pyromaniacal euphoria because the heat of his mutated heart was unbearable. But his fingers didn't find soft flesh; they scraped against his new skin, hardened and shiny like polished obsidian.
His blood boiled so violently that it created large, disgusting bubbles beneath his red skin; these bubbles rose to the surface and burst with loud pops, releasing dense clouds of highly toxic sulfuric smoke. His red hair didn't just look like fire; it physically ignited, turning into igneous filaments that devoured the surrounding oxygen and Qi with parasitic greed. The absolute ecstasy of destruction and the ceaseless agony of cellular incineration kept him plunged into a state of pure madness for a full minute, destroying the marble around him into a molten crater, until his dragon core absorbed the excess flame and forcefully stabilized him in the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
When the gigantic flames finally yielded and returned to his body, Ignis was kneeling in a puddle of melted stone. His skin was perfect, smooth and immaculate like dark glass, without a trace of human burns, but his eyes no longer had irises or pupils; they burned mercilessly, like two immense, furious suns compressed into mortal sockets.
The room was a chaos of uncontrolled elements. But Samael knew, from his own experience, that draconic mutation isn't always loud, explosive, or bright. Sometimes, the truest and most horrifying nightmare occurs in the most absolute and disturbing biological silence.
Mira (Rank 17 - The Crimson Viper) suddenly fell to her side. The exotic beauty, possessing voluptuous curves with D-Cup breasts that strained her tunic and wide hips in a perfect pear shape, began to writhe on the cold floor in a series of uncontrollable, silent spasms.
The Amethyst Viper Dragon's bloodline didn't require fire or metal; it required absolute anatomical contortion. It modified her spine with surgical brutality. A sickly sound, a repulsive, wet CRACK-CRACK-CRACK, echoed in the hall as each of her thirty-three human vertebrae violently separated from one another. Her back grotesquely elongated several centimeters while the void between the bones was filled and welded with divine-grade flexible cartilage. The sensation of her own spinal cord stretching like a string about to snap made her sweat profusely.
Mira hissed. It was a dull, reptilian sound that made the hairs on the back of the necks of those who heard it stand on end. She brought her hands to her face, her beautiful features contorting in pure agony as her lower human jaw completely dislocated. The flesh at the corners of her lips tore, opening her mouth at a horrendous, demonic angle, exposing her gums. At that instant, two immense, sharp, glowing amethyst retractable fangs violently pierced her upper gums, destroying her human canines in the process. The fangs dripped a thick bead of purple venom that, upon touching the jade floor tiles, produced an acidic hiss, melting the indestructible stone as if it were snow under boiling water.
The sharp, stabbing pain of feeling her perfect, human female anatomy turn and degrade into that of an ancient reptilian predator left her trembling, curled up on the floor, drenched in a cold, iridescent, lethal sweat that poisoned the air. Her purple pupils, previously round and seductive, tore into thin, lethal vertical needles capable of seeing the thermal flow of Qi. However, her contorted and lethal body had crossed the barrier, settling solidly in the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9).
Beside the viper's silent agony, the collapse of a hive mind was unleashed. Vorian (Rank 11 - The Tamer) suffered a pain multiplied exponentially. His Soul Bond connected him intimately to each and every one of the ferocious beasts he had tamed in his life, and the Chimera Shadow Dragon's blood wasn't just mutating him, but sending relentless mutagenic shockwaves through his telepathic connection to all his hidden summons.
Vorian grabbed his head with both hands, digging his fingers into his own scalp, and fell to his knees. A spectral, unnatural, and chilling roar—a cacophonous mix between a battle lion's roar, a spectral panther's hiss, and the primordial bellow of a void dragon—was projected from inside his narrow human chest.
"OBEY! SUBMIT!" Vorian roared at nothing, but the voice that escaped his lips wasn't his hesitant, calculating human voice; it was the imposing, dense, dark thunder of an Alpha Predator's Authority demanding submission from his slave souls.
His muscles, previously skeletal, thin, and almost malnourished from dedicating his Qi to his beasts, suddenly inflated, hypertrophying and tearing beneath the fragile human skin to weave and fuse with dense, heavy, necrotic fibers as black as the night's pitch. The pressure in his head was so abysmal that the old cloth blindfold that always covered his eyes spontaneously burned away from the friction of shadowy Qi. The horror was revealed: there were no gray human eyes in his sockets anymore. His eyeballs had literally melted from the pain and genetic rejection, sliding like thick black tears down his pale cheeks. In their place, the bloodline had forged two unfathomable spheres of pure liquid darkness, capable of seeing soul signatures.
Samael's invading blood completely rewrote his biological pheromones and his Qi signature. Now, the Tamer reeked of primordial death; any beast below the Saint Realm that remotely sensed his presence would kneel in submission, or simply die of a massive heart attack triggered by pure atavistic terror. He reached Transcendent Stage 9, crowned as the king of bestial shadows.
However, to the eyes of the Emperor observing from the throne, the most horrifying, unsettling, and dangerous mutation of the entire group was suffered by the one man who despised the use of brute and physical force.
Darius (Rank 15 - The Inquisitor) didn't suffer abrupt changes to his bones, his temperature, or his muscles. The disgusting and purist lineage of the Mental Abyss Specter Dragon completely ignored his weak mortal flesh and launched a frontal, massive, and devastating attack directly against his physical brain and his Spiritual Sea.
Darius stood rigidly paralyzed, like a statue of ice amidst the chaos, dressed in his impeccably neat scholar's tunic, flanked by the shrunken heads on his belt. There were no screams, no external tremors. But suddenly, thick threads of black blood, dense and smelling of tar and ancient nightmares, began to flow fluidly from his empty eyes, his nostrils, and his ears, staining his impeccable attire.
He opened his mouth in a monumentally painful, yet absolutely silent scream.
The intracranial pressure he was experiencing was astronomical, capable of bursting a mortal's skull in milliseconds. A disturbing sound was heard in the hall, like a thick eggshell cracking millimeter by millimeter under extreme pressure: his skull bone was fracturing internally. His frontal lobe was biologically hyper-expanding; his neural networks were tearing, multiplying, and reconnecting a million times over to process the immensity of invasive telepathy, real-time dream manipulation, and large-scale psychic terror projection.
Samael, carefully observing the anomaly from above, saw how the physical "Shadow" cast by Darius's body on the marble came to life. It detached from the two-dimensional floor, rising as an independent three-dimensional entity, a twisted monster with long, sharp claws and empty eyes. The specter's shadow, born of the mutation, lunged at Darius himself, attempting to strangle its human host with intangible claws. It was the final struggle between the Inquisitor's sanity and the Specter Dragon trying to usurp his body.
Darius's mind hung by a microscopic thread over an abyss of irreversible madness. His new neural perception made him hear, simultaneously and without filters, the deepest subconscious fears of every person within a five-kilometer radius. He felt the suffocating pressure and the fear of perpetual failure harbored by Kael; he tasted the fear of absolute cold and loneliness that Violeta hid inside; and he was buried by the raw terror of death from the thousand minor disciples in their pavilions. That titanic avalanche of traumatic information would have shattered any mortal expert's brain in microseconds, reducing them to a drooling vegetable.
The claws of his own shadow squeezed his ghostly throat. Darius, desperate and on the verge of collapse, raised his trembling hands and tore out painful handfuls of his perfectly combed black hair. His eyes, stained with black blood, were completely bloodshot.
"Silence!" Darius whispered. It wasn't a cry for help; it was an order. His voice dripped pure concentrated malice, a psychic poison that made the air tremble.
Suddenly, the crushing psychic pressure in the room completely reversed. The Shadow released his neck and was forcefully absorbed back into his feet. Darius didn't collapse under the weight of terror; he devoured it. He opened his mutated soul and fed on the ambient fear like a glutton before a banquet. His gray, necrotic aura stabilized at once, wrapping him in a disturbing spectral mantle. He entered the Transcendent Realm (Stage 9), standing tall and smiling with black blood on his teeth, but the suffocating mental pressure that passively emanated from his being made even warriors of Magnus's caliber (Rank 9), stationed on the flanks, feel nauseous, dizzy, and the urge to vomit when looking directly into his eyes.
The crimson light of the Primordial Patriarch System finally faded.
The Throne Room looked as though it had been the closed epicenter of a hurricane of coagulated blood, volcanic fire, twisted metal, and absolute terror. The seven newly ascended specialists were collapsed on the floor or leaning heavily on their knees, gasping for air. Their bodies, previously immaculate or human, were covered in their own pure bodily fluids, puddles of transmuted blood, thick ash, and unnatural, grossly exposed scales.
Mira's new venomous claws scratched the marble involuntarily in post-traumatic spasms, hissing acid. Korg and Borg's enormous frontal horns still smoked, emanating a suffocating heat. Darius's terrifying shadow writhed at his feet, threatening to break free again at the dark scholar's slightest slip.
Samael Morningstar began to descend the obsidian stairs of the throne. The echo of his heavy armored boots resonated rhythmically in the tense, agonizing silence of the room. He walked slowly among the deformities, evaluating his work.
"Look at yourself, Korg," Samael said, his tone coldly dismissive as he kicked a piece of melted marble near the flaming colossus. "If you go out into the outside world looking like that, the false monks of the orthodoxy will hunt you down like the out-of-control demon you appear to be. Goran, you weigh so much that the jade floor yields and pulverizes in your wake, announcing your arrival miles away; you're not an assassin, you're a walking target. And you, Darius, your unstable mind is spilling nightmares into the air like a novice incapable of controlling his own thirst."
Samael stopped in the center of the group, flanked by the panting monsters. His posture straightened, and his voice ceased to be cold, becoming a brutal whiplash of imperial authority and mental control.
"True mastery, the true power of the Void, does not consist of releasing the inner beast from its chains! Any desperate idiot can do that!" Samael roared, releasing an oppressive pulse of his own perfected Primordial Dragon aura to instinctively subdue them. "Mastery is putting a fucking leash on the monster and forcing it to kneel before your humanity! Hide your disgusting scales! Retract those exposed fangs! Compress and swallow your damn auras until you look like pathetic, weak mortals! If you allow the dragon to dominate you instead of using it as a tool... you are not warriors of my Legion. You are simple beasts. And I put down beasts."
Samael's threat, sharper than any divine-grade sword, cut through the fog of pain and confusion clouding the minds of the seven.
They gritted their teeth, swallowing blood and pride. With a monumental, agonizing, and titanic effort of human will, they began the second cycle of torture: forcing the brutal draconic mutation to fold inward, denying the bloodline its true form.
Korg let out a dull, agonizing cry as he literally swallowed, absorbed, and sealed his own fire and lava back into his core. His throat glowed red-hot for an instant before abruptly extinguishing. His metallic, scaly skin receded violently, hurting ten times more than when it emerged, slowly returning to his fake human tan, though his eyes permanently retained an unmistakable, lethal, incandescent green glint.
Goran closed his eyes, tensing every fiber of his being, and began compressing the extreme density of his organic muscles directly into his bone marrow to disguise his massive lethality. His unbreakable grayish metal skin slowly returned to tanned flesh, though, from that day forward, his skin would always be freezing and hard as granite to the touch.
Mira placed her hands on her deformed jaw and, with a brutal, swift, and inhuman motion, dislocated it backward to force it back into its original anatomical position. The dull snap of bone and cartilage relocating echoed in the hall. The amethyst fangs docilely retracted into her gums, hiding the venom. She stood back up, regaining the deceptive appearance of the exotic beauty from before, wiping the sweat from her broad pear-shaped figure; the only vestige of her nightmare was that, when she moistened her lips, her tongue revealed itself to be permanently and subtly forked.
Darius, for his part, blinked slowly and heavily. The thick drops of coal-black blood dried up and disappeared from his pale face like an optical illusion. The oppressive mental pressure in the room collapsed inward into his own mind. He recomposed his posture, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles from his black tunic, returning to the neat, silent, and terrifying scholar he always was. His lethal shadow, upon receiving the mental order, retreated and docilely attached itself to his feet, pretending to be a simple two-dimensional reflection.
In less than three minutes of suppressed agony, the seven ferocious specialists looked like almost normal human beings again, breathing the thick air of the palace. But the latent, primitive, and apocalyptic power they hid repressed beneath that thin, deceptive layer of mortal skin was capable of massacring fortresses and wiping cities off the map with a snap of their fingers.
Samael nodded slowly. A cruel, calculating, and deeply satisfied smile curved the corner of his lips as he saw his living weapons' discipline.
"Perfect," the Sovereign decreed. "Welcome to the Void, specialists. Take your place in the shadows."
The Patriarch then raised his gaze, overlooking the carnage on the floor, and fixed it directly on the ten figures who still waited stoically in the final formation. The top ten. The elite of the elite. The true monsters of the Morningstar Clan, led by Cassius, Eira, Voltar, and the indomitable Dante.
"You have witnessed and smelled pure suffering," Samael announced, and the air in the entire immense hall seemed to freeze under the gravity of his words. "You have seen how the elite writhe on the floor like worms to obtain power. And you are the top of this food chain. Now... we will see what dark blood and matter Kings are truly made of."
The Primordial Patriarch System's golden panel, floating beside Samael, emitted a flashing red light, and a warning of extreme danger appeared in scarlet letters that blinked with urgency.
[PRIMORDIAL PATRIARCH SYSTEM: PREPARING AWAKENING PROTOCOL - PHASE 3]
[Injection Targets:] Ranks 10 to 1.
[CRITICAL DANGER WARNING:] Detection of unstable genetic anomalies. Imperial Class and Asura Class latent bloodlines present in the subjects. Incalculable pain level. Room structural destruction risk: 99.9%.
[Recommended Action:] Prepare forced environment suppression and seal three-dimensional space immediately.
Samael read the notification without blinking. The smile on his face widened, turning into an expression of pure martial anticipation.
The hell in the Throne Room... was just finishing warming up.