Chapter 131: The Baptism of Golden Blood and the Awakening of the Gene (Part 2)
While Altair plunged into his frigid and silent collapse, the rest of the Throne Room braced for the true cataclysm.
Their companions lay writhing in pools of alchemical fluids, heavy mercury, and frosted blood. The air was saturated with pain and the oppression of True Laws being forcibly born. In the center of this evolutionary carnage, Kael, Violeta, and Eris stood immovable, looking at the last three drops of Primordial Blood Essence floating in front of their faces.
They knew that, being the absolute vanguard and possessing the most extreme affinities, their pain would be ten times worse than that of the specialists.
From the base of the dais, the Grand Elder watched. Lilith, the Ash Phoenix, looked imposing and radiant; her rejuvenated body after her own ascension emanated an ancestral heat. Her dark hair seemed wreathed in the hues of dying embers, and her fierce eyes, marked by millennia of massacres, locked onto the three youths with an almost maternal intensity. Despite her hardness, Lilith clenched her fists. She knew that the bodies of these three were about to be thrown into a cosmic meat grinder.
Before her, the three leaders displayed their human fragility for the last time. Kael, with his dark red hair and noble bearing, took a deep breath. Beside him, the unmistakable beauty of the two sisters. Violeta, serene and delicate, with her long silvery-white hair and hypnotic heterochromia—one neon violet eye and the other diamond blue—dressed in celestial robes that contrasted with the darkness of the room. And Eris, the indomitable antithesis, her silver hair dyed with tips red as fresh blood, flaunting her inverted heterochromia—one crimson red eye and the other neon violet streaked with fury—her ever-defiant expression framed by her red and white garments.
Samael, from the immensity of his throne, handed down the final sentence.
"Drink."
The three did not hesitate. They parted their lips and swallowed the red crystals of golden blood.
It was instantaneous. The end of the world was unleashed inside the room.
The entire Throne Room let out a chilling structural groan as the clan's three most destructive auras collided in a single millisecond. It wasn't a simple release of Qi; it was the physics of the universe fracturing under three contradictory dictates.
To the left, Kael (The Sovereign of the Crimson Sword) erupted. His body was enveloped in a dome of unbearable optical distortion. The Domain of Incandescent Friction awoke with a jolt. It wasn't fire; the Qi of the Crimson Dragon of the Spiritual Edge forced the air atoms around him to vibrate at a maddening hyper-frequency. The indestructible obsidian stone beneath his feet didn't burn; it melted instantly, turning into a puddle of glowing lava.
To the right, Violeta (The Blade of the Winter Void) nullified the hellscape. The Pulse of Zero Entropy expanded from her delicate body. The absolute non-vibration clashed head-on with Kael's atomic friction. On the exact line where both auras collided, space seemed to tear, creating static bolts of thermal shock. Violeta slowed down the particle speed at a subatomic level; the air around her solidified into crystals of heavy void that fell to the floor with a dull clink.
And in the exact center of the hurricane, Eris (The Flame of Ruin) devoured both extremes. Her body became a vortex of Entropy Combustion. Her Ruin Dragon blood generated black and white flames that insulted matter itself. The extreme heat of Kael and the absolute cold of Violeta that brushed against her aura did not hurt her; her fire "devoured" them, crumbling the molecular structure of both elements and turning them into vapor of nothingness.
Samael, with his violet eyes fixed on the storm, activated his Law of Causality. Looking at the two sisters immersed in their biological holocaust, the immense causal threads connecting them to the fabric of destiny became visible to him. The karmic strings of Violeta and Eris were neither blue nor golden; they burned with a deep, violent, and overwhelming red destiny, an omen of blood, imperial massacre, and a glory built upon mountains of corpses. They were marked by the universe to be disaster incarnate.
But evolution demanded its tribute in flesh.
Kael was the first to fall to his knees, letting out a roar that made the lava beneath him tremble. His Perfect Fusion between the Magma Sword Physique and the 100% Sword Heart was being forced to intertwine with reptilian blood. Kael's skin tore from the inside of his arms and chest. Crimson scales, hard as diamond and hot as a planet's core, sprouted from his living flesh, welding themselves to his muscles. From his bloody forehead, two angular horns of red obsidian pierced his skull.
The true horror for Kael was his circulatory system. His veins bulged to the breaking point. His human blood boiled and was expelled from his pores as red vapor, being replaced by "Liquid Metal Blood." Kael was being melted down and reforged alive. His body was turning into the Heart of Eternal Forging; if they wounded him now, he would bleed lava at inhuman temperatures, capable of melting his assassin's face before solidifying like steel to seal the wound.
Beside him, Violeta was experiencing a lethally silent torture.
She fell on her back, her mouth open in a mute scream from which only clouds of pure snow escaped. The Passage of Ethereal Blood was rewriting her relationship with space. Her blood now flowed in a parallel dimension of void, granting her a monstrous reactive intangibility, but the biological cost was her own emotional humanity.
Suddenly, Violeta clutched both hands to her chest, convulsing violently. Her biological heart, unable to pump the absolute zero energy, stopped. The cardiac muscle necrotized and, in its place, the bloodline's blood forcibly forged a "Void Crystal Heart." Samael and the Elders heard the unmistakable, dull sound of crystal freezing inside the girl's thorax. Violeta stopped feeling pain; in fact, she stopped feeling anything at all. The crystal now pumped frigid energy, purging her mind of pity, fear, or doubt. She was becoming the perfect Frigid Executioner.
But the purity of the mutation was reaching a level that Kael and Violeta's mortal flesh could not contain.
The System blinked violently in front of Samael in crimson red.
[CRITICAL ALERT: Systemic failure detected in subjects Kael and Violeta.]
[Reason: The purity of the injected primordial bloodline exceeds the containment capacity of their current vessels. Risk of imminent cellular detonation.]
Kael began coughing up fragments of his own charred lungs, while Violeta's skin cracked like battered porcelain, bleeding stardust. They were seconds away from bursting.
Samael did not allow it.
He stood up and descended the steps of the throne, crossing the hellscape of colliding auras as if strolling through a garden. His control over the Void was merely the lowest stage of his capabilities, a useful tool for erasing attacks or creating barriers. But his true domain, his primary and most deadly weapon, was Blood Control, which he had refined to the beginner stage; a level of understanding infinitely higher and more destructive than his spatial manipulation.
Samael didn't use void walls. He directly released 20% of his Primordial Dragon authority, combining it with his absolute blood domain.
He positioned himself between the two fallen warriors. He placed his right hand, burning with crimson energy, directly over Kael's open, bubbling chest. Simultaneously, he placed his left hand on Violeta's frigid, cracked forehead.
"Submit," Samael ordered. He wasn't speaking to them; he was speaking to the rebellious blood in their veins.
Samael's blood control invaded Kael and Violeta's bloodstreams. His Primordial Qi located the filaments of the mutation that were spiraling out of control and crushed them with the absolute tyranny of a Progenitor. He forced Kael's Liquid Metal Blood to cool enough not to disintegrate his vital organs, and compelled Violeta's Crystal Heart to synchronize with her brain rhythm before it froze her soul.
Kael, exhausted to the marrow, stopped screaming and fell unconscious onto the melted floor, breathing dense clouds of smoke. Violeta let out a final sigh, coughing a cloud of crystalline snow, and collapsed like a broken doll, her heterochromatic eyes closing at last. Samael had sealed the biological fissure.
Meanwhile, behind the Sovereign's back, Eris laughed.
The Flame of Ruin was destroying her body just as much as her companions', but Eris was not suffering a systemic failure. Her bloodline possessed the Veins of Catastrophe. Her veins glowed through her pale skin like the cracks of a volcano about to erupt, granting her an absolute biological and psychological resistance to pain.
For Eris, the agony of her bones breaking and her blood burning wasn't a failure; it was fuel. The cumulative Frenzy of Ruin absorbed the massive damage her own body was experiencing and converted it into more brute force. She was turning into a Living Supernova out of sheer stubbornness. When the mutation finished, Eris stopped convulsing. She lay on the floor, panting heavily, drenched in dark sweat, her wild, mismatched, bloodshot eyes fixed on the vaulted ceiling, sketching an unhinged smile. She had tamed ruin all on her own.
Exactly one hour passed.
The silence in the Throne Room was absolute. The visual spectacle was worthy of a slaughterhouse of the gods. The indestructible obsidian floor was covered in puddles of evaporated blood, dead skin shed like the molts of giant snakes, fragments of black ice embedded in the walls, and debris of solidified liquid metal.
Slowly, one by one, the bodies scattered across the floor began to move.
The ten figures of the vanguard and the pillars stood up. The sound of their breathing was no longer human. The creaking of their joints sounded like the grinding of siege armor and the friction of continents. Their eyes shone in the gloom with the glare of alpha predators perched at the unreachable apex of the food chain. Not a single trace of mortal fragility remained in them.
Samael Morningstar, standing in the center of the slaughter, observed them. His violet and crimson eyes gleamed with a deep, tyrannical satisfaction. The army was ready.
"You have been reborn," decreed the Dragon King, his voice echoing with an authority that brooked no questions.
He raised an armored finger and pointed toward the massive side doors of the palace, which led to the deepest bowels of the citadel.
"Go to the core recovery chambers. Eat to your fill. Rest like beasts. Because tomorrow..." Samael sketched a smile that promised rivers of blood, "...tomorrow we will touch upon the subject of your weapons. Now, let us continue with the rest."
The red destiny of the calamities had just been sealed, and the hunt for empires was about to begin.