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I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the season. With Makar Sankranti upon us, it's a time of new beginnings, positive energy, and moving toward brighter days. Just like the sun begins its northward journey, Ye Caiqian's path is also moving toward greater heights and even bigger challenges ahead.
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Happy Makar Sankranti, and enjoy the chapter! āØ
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The ritual crossed its first irreversible threshold.
The moment the Divine Realm Core fully awakened, everything that was not divine will began to dissolve.
It did not happen violently.
There were no explosions, no tearing screams of space.
Instead, reality obeyed.
Mountains of divine stone softened into light.
Rivers of law unraveled into streams of pure energy.
Floating domains, divine cities, ancestral landsāeverything that had once defined the Divine Realm's formless expanse began to shed form.
The Divine Realm was no longer a realm.
It was becoming matter.
From my position, anchoring one of the stabilizing points, I watched as the heavens themselves were reduced to energy, compressed layer by layer toward the center. The vast, boundless Divine Realm that had once spanned ten galaxies was folding inward, collapsing not into nothingness, but into density.
A round structure began to form.
At first, it was nothing more than an outlineāa faint curvature traced by converging energy streams. But as compression intensified, that outline gained mass, depth, and presence.
A divine planet was being born.
And the one bearing the full weight of that transformationā
Was the Dragon God.
At the core of the process, the Divine Realm Core pulsed violently.
No longer distant and abstract, it had become the axis of conversion, the singular point through which every law, every fragment of authority, every remnant of existence passed.
The Dragon God stood fused to it, his colossal form radiant with draconic law. Golden scales burned with inscriptions older than civilization itself. His aura no longer spread outwardāit was being pulled inward, compressed alongside the realm.
Every fluctuation had to be controlled.
Every resonance had to be corrected.
Every imbalance had to be neutralized in real time.
And all of it fell upon him.
I could feel it even from afar.
The precision required was terrifying.
One mistakeā
One lapseā
And the entire process would collapse into catastrophic fragmentation.
The Dragon God's focus sharpened to an extreme.
His awareness narrowed.
The world beyond the ritual faded.
Even we, the God Kings stationed as stabilizers, felt our presence slip from his perception.
To himā
There was only the ritual.
The Dragon Prince felt it too.
Standing at the Dragon God's side, he poured his own power into the process, bloodline resonance linking father and son in a continuous feedback loop. Golden light flowed between them, stabilizing fluctuations that would have torn lesser beings apart.
At first, it worked.
The pressure eased marginally.
The conversion stabilized.
The forming divine planet gained clarityāits surface smoothing, its internal structure aligning with higher-dimensional law.
But the costā¦
Was escalating.
The Dragon God's breathing slowed.
Not from exhaustionā
But from consumption.
His bloodline essence began to burn.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The core of his draconic lineageārefined over countless erasāwas being converted directly into stabilizing authority, reinforcing the Divine Realm Core where ordinary law could no longer hold.
I clenched my hand unconsciously.
He had gone beyond what was planned.
Time lost meaning.
From the outside, the ritual advanced steadily.
From withinā
The Dragon God was beginning to bleed existence.
Golden light seeped from between his scales, dissolving into the core as pure stabilizing force. His presence dimmed imperceptibly, but to eyes like mine, the change was unmistakable.
He was burning through bloodline essence.
The Dragon Prince noticed.
"Fatherā"
He spoke softly at first, careful not to disrupt the resonance.
"Slow down. The compression rate is stabilizing. You don't need to push further."
There was no response.
The Dragon God did not hear him.
Or perhapsā
He did not allow himself to.
The ritual intensified.
The Divine Realm's remaining formless mass compressed further, the divine planet's gravity well forming for the first time. Space warped. Law thickened. Reality hardened.
And the Dragon Godā
Went deeper.
When bloodline essence was no longer sufficient, he crossed another line.
His life essence ignited.
That was the moment my gaze hardened.
Life essence was not power.
It was not authority.
It was existence itself.
To burn it was to shorten one's own eternity.
To burn it continuouslyā
Was to court annihilation.
The Dragon Prince felt it immediately.
The feedback loop changed.
What had once been steady resonance became painful strain.
His eyes widened.
"Noā¦"
He could feel it.
His father was not merely risking injury.
He was sacrificing himself.
The Dragon Prince's heart clenched.
Memories surged unbidden.
A childhood spent beneath a towering presence.
A mother lost too early.
A father who had borne the weight of an entire race alone ever since.
This ritualā
This impossible gambleā
Was all for him.
For the Dragon Prince's inheritance.
For the future the Dragon God had carved out with blood and fire.
"Stop," the Dragon Prince whispered desperately. "Pleaseā¦ stop."
Stillā
No response.
The Dragon God's consciousness was fully submerged in the ritual.
And thenā
A thought appeared.
Not forced.
Not invasive.
Subtle.
If there were another sourceā¦
If the stabilizing essence did not have to come from himā¦
The Dragon Prince froze.
His breath caught.
His mind raced.
Bloodline essenceā¦ life essenceā¦
I have both.
The thought did not feel foreign.
It felt natural.
Obvious.
If I substitute myselfā¦
Father won't have to burn himself away.
Emotion surged.
Fear.
Love.
Desperation.
And beneath it allā
A quiet nudge.
Unseen.
Unquestioned.
The Universal Law had noticed.
The universe is not cruel.
But it is not sentimental either.
It balances.
It trades.
It corrects outcomes that diverge too far from equilibrium.
The Universal Law observed the ritual and calculated.
Left uncheckedā
The Divine Realm would succeed.
The Divine Planet would be born.
A new axis of power would stabilize.
And the karmic reckoning awaiting the Dragon Clan would be delayed too far.
That wasā¦ unacceptable.
So the universe intervened.
Not by stopping the ritual.
Not by collapsing it.
But by introducing a price.
The Dragon Prince's emotions were amplified.
His grief sharpened.
His fear drowned out reason.
At the same time, his critical thinking dulledājust enough.
Just subtly.
He forgot one thing.
That his father was doing this for him.
That the Dragon God intended him to inherit everything.
That this sacrificeā
Was never meant to be his.
"I can help," the Dragon Prince whispered.
And before anyoneā
Before even Iā
Could interveneā
He acted.
The Dragon Prince loosened his restraint.
He opened his bloodline fully.
Life essence surged outward, unfiltered, pouring into the resonance channel like a flood.
The effect was immediate.
The Dragon God shuddered.
The pressure eased.
The stabilization skyrocketed.
The Divine Realm Core surged with newfound equilibrium.
The forming divine planet smoothed rapidly, its structure locking into higher-dimensional stability.
For a brief, terrible momentā
It worked.
The Dragon God's burning slowed.
His life essence stabilized.
The ritual accelerated toward completion.
And the Dragon Princeā
Was pulled inward.
At first, it was energy.
Then essence.
Then identity.
His form blurred, dissolving into golden light that flowed directly into the Dragon God, reinforcing him, replacing what had been lost.
"FāFatherā¦"
The Dragon Prince's voice did not echo.
There was no space left for sound.
The Dragon God's consciousness, submerged in the ritual, did not register the sacrifice until it was too late.
Bone dissolved.
Soul unraveled.
Bloodline merged completely.
Not a fragment remained.
The Dragon Prince was not killed.
He was consumed.
Erased as an individual existence.
The final compression occurred.
The Divine Realm finished its transformation.
Where once there had been endless, formless divine spaceā
Now there was a Divine Planet.
Vast.
Dense.
Perfectly stabilized.
Law crystallized across its surface. Dimensional layers aligned seamlessly. The pressure of existence settled into a new equilibrium far beyond what the old Divine Realm could sustain.
The ritualā
Succeeded.
The Divine Realm had ascended.
The Dragon God stood at the heart of it, aura blazing brighter than ever, power stabilized at a level bordering the Sixth Dimension.
For a heartbeatā
There was triumph.
Thenā
Silence.
The Dragon God's awareness returned.
He looked around.
"...Where is my son?"
No one answered.
No one could.
The Divine Planet rotated slowly beneath him.
A perfect creation.
Forged at an unacceptable cost.
The Dragon God felt it then.
The absence.
Not lossā
Absence.
A hole where existence should have been.
A silence that law itself could not fill.
He roared.
The sound shook the newborn Divine Planet.
Not in rageā
But in grief so vast it warped reality.
And far away, at my stabilizing point, I closed my eyes.
Heaven had advanced.
And the priceā
Had been paid in blood.
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