Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 4)
Space itself groaned when the Sovereign's will fractured the Plaza of the Four Winds.
For the Guardian of Illusion, an ancient being who had cultivated for more than two thousand years to reach the revered Stage 5 Saint Realm, the world abruptly shrank to a cubic prison of five hundred square meters. The walls of this "combat box" were not made of stone or vulgar energy; they were walls of absolute spatial void, dark, unfathomable, and coursed with stellar static lightning. Samael's Authority had isolated her from her three brothers-in-arms in less than the blink of an eye.
However, when the Guardian looked around, the fury of her isolation was quickly replaced by a crystalline laugh, beautiful but laden with venomous contempt.
In front of her, fifty meters away, there were no legendary Saints or veteran generals. There were five youths. Five "children" at the Peak Stage 8 of the Half-Saint Realm.
Lyra (Sequence 8) stood with her [Grimoire of Dream Illusion] floating lazily by her side. Draven (Sequence 11), the two-meter giant, cracked the knuckles of his immense hands. Joren (Sequence 17) held his daggers in a relaxed stance, his face devoid of all emotion. Lirael (Sequence 18), with her long orange hair flowing without wind, gave her a freezing, seductive smile. And in the rearguard, Varian (Sequence 21) tuned the tension of his bow of light without even looking at her, as if he were calculating the wind trajectory on a boring hunting day.
The Guardian blinked, her figure existing and not existing at the same time, like a poorly tuned image on the fabric of reality.
"That guy has lost his mind," the old woman said, her voice sounding like a chorus of hypnotic sirens caressing their ears. "He locks me in the void to prevent me from slaughtering his scrap metal army, and hands me five tender morsels as a sacrifice? Children, didn't your parents teach you that the abyss between a Half-Saint and a Stage 5 Saint is the same as the one between a drop of mud and a furious ocean?"
Draven burst out laughing. It was a loud, brutal, and utterly disrespectful laugh.
"Little ones, grandma talks too much!" roared the black-haired giant, stomping massively on the marble floor. "Let's crush her before her hips break!"
The Guardian of Illusion frowned, offended to her core.
"You will be dust before you take your first step. [Saint Domain Art: Labyrinth of a Thousand Realities]."
The Guardian released the entirety of her crushing Stage 5 spiritual pressure. The effect was not just a gravitational force; it was an absolute sensory hijacking. The gravity of the spatial box seemed to invert and twist. The white marble floor dissolved, instantly transforming into an ocean of boiling lava that emitted real, suffocating heat. The sky of the box filled with a million mirrors, and from the Guardian's figure sprouted a hundred identical copies. The hundred women raised their hands, each conjuring a storm of black fire, ice spears, and lightning dragons.
For an ordinary cultivator, their mind would have shattered in that very instant facing the information overload and the terror of confronting an invincible army.
But dragons do not surrender to cheap illusions.
The immense Draven was the first to move. The Tank of the Glacial Bastion did not try to dodge or search for the real Guardian. He planted himself in the center of the illusory hell.
"[Tome of the Living Glacier]."
Draven struck the illusory lava floor with both fists. A rumble similar to a glacier splitting in half shook the void box. Colossal hexagonal pillars of translucent blue ice erupted from the underground, crossing and intertwining at breakneck speed to form a monumental [Wall of the North] in front of his entire squad. Immediately after, the ice didn't stop; it climbed up Draven's legs, enveloping his gigantic two-meter body in a [Giant Bear Ice Armor]. The rough ice, thick as marble and shining with cyan light, gave him a monstrous, prehistoric appearance.
"Hide behind me, little ones!" roared Draven, his eyes shining with an arctic blue from inside the bear helm.
The Guardian of Illusion, furious at the resistance, ordered her hundred copies to attack simultaneously. An apocalyptic barrage of Stage 5 magic rained down on them. Fire spears, wind hammers, and piercing lightning collided against the Wall of the North.
BOOOOM! CRAAACK!
The ice wall, no matter how imbued it was with the concept of Absolute Zero, could not defy the brute force of a Stage 5 with impunity. The wall exploded in a blinding white mist. The residual magic hit Draven head-on.
The giant roared in pain. His bear armor cracked violently; chunks of bloody ice flew off, and his flesh, dense as steel, was torn by the magical impacts. Draven's blood dyed the floor red.
But then, his bloodline dictated its law. The [Inertia of Absolute Zero] activated. The heavier the blow, the more he anchored himself to existence. Draven became immovable. He didn't step back a single millimeter. Through [Atmospheric Moisture Regeneration], his hot blood froze instantly, and the vapor from the explosion was sucked into his wounds, rebuilding his ice armor and his shattered flesh at a monstrous rate. He was acting as a massive beacon of flesh, absorbing all the attention and damage so the rest of the team could operate from tactical safety.
"Do you think a wall of ice will save you from madness?" hummed the Guardian's voice, echoing from all angles at once. The Labyrinth of a Thousand Realities shifted.
The Guardian began to sing. It wasn't a human song. It was a high-frequency harmonic screech that drilled into the skull. Lirael and Varian's ears began to bleed almost immediately. The sound induced such extreme vertigo that heaven and earth seemed to spin like an out-of-control top. It was a direct attack on the fluid of the inner ear and the Sea of Consciousness.
Joren (Sequence 17) sighed silently. The light-brown-haired assassin, with the apathy of someone dusting a table, pulled out one of his daggers and dropped it, burying it into the vibrating floor.
"[Codex: Silent Wind. Acoustic Deprivation Zone]."
There was no explosion. There was no flash of light. There was an absolute subtraction.
Within a three-hundred-meter radius, encompassing the entire combat box, sound was simply murdered. The Guardian's hypnotic song was strangled in her own vocal cords. The roar of the spells clashing against Draven disappeared. The racing heartbeat in their chests went mute.
The silence was so dense, so deep and unnatural, that it was unbearably painful. The Guardian of Illusion, who relied on sensory overload to keep her prey in a panic, clutched her throat, her eyes wide with surprise. Her own auditory technique had been nipped in the bud. The abrupt loss of sonic feedback caused a spasm of vertigo in her as well.
Joren didn't give her time to recover. Taking advantage of the acoustic void, he propelled himself with [High-Pressure Zephyr Blood]. His body blurred, leaving "Hundred-Step Shadows" in his wake. Joren slipped among the Guardian's hundred copies.
Using his [Reverse Breeze Fangs], Joren didn't attack the real Guardian; he was dismantling the illusion. The low-pressure vortex in his daggers sucked the fake Qi from the clones, cutting them with blades of pure vacuum.
Without sound to track him, the Guardian watched in terror as her copies simply split in half and dissolved into nothingness, assassinated by a silent ghost.
"ENOUGH TRICKS!" screamed the Guardian of Illusion, though no one could hear her. Frustrated, she prepared her hands to rewrite the visual illusion and create a well of crushing gravity over the five youths.
But she had forgotten that she was trying to use illusions against the Goddess of Nightmares.
Sitting elegantly on the craggy remains of an ice pillar created by Draven, Lyra Morningstar (Sequence 8) opened her immense, ethereal [Grimoire of Dream Illusion]. Her neon blue eyes shone with a freezing, calculating sadism.
"My turn, grandma," Lyra whispered, though only she could read her own lips in Joren's silence.
Lyra exhaled, and from her lips flowed a dense mist, ash-gray with furious violet streaks: the [Mantle of the Nameless Mist]. The fog spilled like a heavy tide, crawling across the Guardian's illusory lava floor and covering everything.
The Guardian, feeling invulnerable in her Stage 5 base, tried to ignore the mist. But Lyra wasn't competing in raw Qi power; she was competing in Conceptual Laws.
Lyra activated [Absolute Psychosomatism].
Suddenly, the Guardian's beautiful Labyrinth of a Thousand Realities began to rot. The copies of the old woman that Joren had not cut became horribly deformed. Their faces melted like wax, turning into gaunt demons with shadow claws, projecting the deepest fears that the Guardian herself had buried in her subconscious after two thousand years of life.
The Guardian backed away, her eyes bulging with genuine panic. Her own illusions had rebelled. One of the mist demons jumped on her and sank illusory claws into her shoulder.
It's an illusion! It's fake! I created this space! the Guardian thought frantically, trying to stabilize her Sea of Consciousness.
But Lyra's Law was absolute. The Guardian's mind believed the demon was a nightmare, and Absolute Psychosomatism forced her biology to respond. The Stage 5 Guardian's shoulder hissed violently. Real flesh, real tendons, and real bone began to melt and bubble as if they had been bathed in concentrated sulfuric acid.
The Guardian opened her mouth to let out a harrowing scream of agony, but in Joren's Zone of Silence, it was only a pathetic, mute grimace. The old woman writhed, striking at her own phantoms, suffering severe chemical burns generated by her own deceived nervous system. Mental damage was turning into physical mutilation.
Terrified, feeling her sanity cracking under Lyra's dream torture and Joren's suffocating silence, the Stage 5 Guardian made a desperate decision.
She stopped attacking. She concentrated 100% of her immense Stage 5 Qi reserve into her core. She was going to ignore the rules. She was going to detonate a psychic and physical area-of-effect explosion so massive that it would destroy the illusions, the mist, the ice, and the five youths all at the same time, even if she herself suffered an existential toll of centuries.
She hid behind fifty shields of refracting light, camouflaging her energy signature among the echoes of the labyrinth so they couldn't interrupt her channeling.
It was the hunter's time.
Varian Morningstar (Sequence 21), who had not moved a single millimeter since the battle began, closed his left eye. His right eye mutated; the pupil became a vertical slit and the iris shone with a blinding electric yellow.
[Sky Hunter's Eye: Infinite Horizon Vision].
For Varian, the chaos of the battle disappeared. Lyra's mist, the Guardian's illusions, Draven's shattered ice... everything turned a monotonous, transparent gray. In the middle of that gray canvas, forty meters away, Varian saw an intense red pulse, beating frantically like a dying star. It was the Qi core of the real Guardian, hidden behind dozens of invisible barriers.
Varian drew back the light string of his bow, but he didn't form a wind arrow yet. He couldn't miss, and the woman's Stage 5 shields were too dense for a direct shot without opening a breach first.
Varian needed his geometric partner.
Instead of a lethal arrow, Varian fired a laser beam of pure white energy, thin as a hair. The beam crossed the mute battlefield and intentionally bounced off the surface of one of Draven's half-destroyed ice pillars. The refracted beam acted like a theater spotlight, directly illuminating the exact space where the Guardian was floating, channeling her suicidal attack.
Varian's white light caused the old woman's figure to cast a faint, almost imperceptible reflection on the polished surface of the ice block to her left.
It was all Lirael Morningstar needed.
Lirael (Sequence 18), the seductive Broken Moon, walked forward with an inhuman elegance. Her lunar mercury blood began to boil, and her body became translucent. A long, thin sword materialized in her hand that looked as if it were forged from stagnant water under the moonlight; it had no metallic gleam, only a pale white outline.
Lirael didn't run toward the real Guardian. She positioned herself directly in front of Draven's ice block, staring intently at the old woman's trapped reflection.
"It's rude to hide your face, darling," Lirael whispered, her lips moving in the vacuum of sound.
[Codex: Broken Moon Reflection. Slash of Concept].
Lirael raised her illusory sword and, with a fluid, effortless motion, unleashed a devastating vertical slash. Her sword didn't cut the ice. It passed through the solid surface as if it were smoke. Lirael wasn't attacking matter; she was cutting the Spiritual Shadow, the existential map of the Guardian's soul trapped in the reflection.
On Lirael's sword materialized the clean cut that amputated the right arm of the old woman's reflection in the ice.
Across the battlefield, thirty meters away, the real Guardian of Illusion, protected by invincible Stage 5 barriers, abruptly stopped her channeling.
Her eyes bulged. There was no sound of impact. There was no flash of light cutting through her shields. There was no blood. But, in an absolutely unnatural and aberrant manner, her physical right arm, the arm holding the core of her magic, simply... died.
The command to "exist" for that limb had been erased from reality by Lirael. The Guardian's arm turned ash gray, inert and heavy, falling limp at her side. Her spiritual connection to the limb was cleanly decapitated.
Primal terror, fear beyond logical comprehension, seized the Stage 5 elder. What kind of monstrosities were these? Magic that cut concepts? Silence that drowned the world? Illusions that burned flesh?
In that millisecond of absolute panic, where the Guardian's shields faltered from the collapse of her channeling and the loss of her arm, the Sky Hunter executed the sentence.
Varian drew back his solid light bow again. This time, the wind around him spun violently, sucking in the dust and mist. A translucent light arrow, wreathed in an emerald energy drill and vibrating at supersonic speeds, formed on the string.
[Arrow of Inevitable Judgment].
Varian released the string.
The arrow didn't travel through the air. The Falcon Dragon bloodline bent causality. Physics dictated that a projectile had to cover the forty meters of distance, but Varian's Law dictated that the impact was already a pre-existing fact.
The instant Varian's charred fingers released the tension, the emerald energy arrow appeared embedded directly in the center of the Guardian of Illusion's chest.
It pierced the weakened Stage 5 defenses, bypassed the divine silk robes, and cleanly punctured the millennial old woman's biological heart and spiritual core.
The Guardian looked down at her chest, seeing the neon green light radiating from within. A grimace of absolute disbelief froze on her face.
But a Stage 5 Saint is no mortal. Sensing that death was imminent, that her core was about to collapse from Varian's arrow, the old woman's instinct for mutual annihilation took over. Her body began to expand, swelling with a radioactive, corrupt violet light.
She was going to self-detonate. A core explosion from a Stage 5 Saint inside a closed void box was an extinction-level event that would atomically disintegrate everything within a ten-kilometer radius.
"TAKE COVER!" was the mute shout of Draven, who read the expansion of light in the living corpse's eyes.
The ice giant did not flee. He threw himself forward like a falling mountain, placing himself directly between the Guardian's about-to-burst body and his four companions. Draven channeled every last drop of Qi and moisture in his body, generating twenty simultaneous layers of the Wall of the North and overloading his bear armor until it turned black from the density of the ice.
The Guardian of Illusion detonated.
The psychic and physical shockwave was monstrous. Joren's Acoustic Deprivation Zone was instantly annihilated by the sheer force of the blast.
BOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The deafening sound, suppressed for ten minutes, returned like a slap from the gods.
Draven took the hit head-on. His twenty Peak Half-Saint level ice walls were evaporated in milliseconds like rice paper in front of a blowtorch. The wave of violet plasma and kinetic force struck his chest. His bear armor burst into millions of fragments. Draven's flesh, his sculpted muscles, and his reinforced bones crunched repulsively. The Tank was sent flying, landing thirty meters away with half of his torso flayed, bleeding profusely, his ribs exposed, alive solely due to inhuman stubbornness and a regeneration that desperately consumed the moisture of his own blood to keep his heart beating.
Behind him, the remnant of the psychic explosion, the mental curse of a dying Stage 5, swept over the rest of the team.
Lyra, whose brain was directly connected to the Guardian's mind through the Nameless Mist, took the cerebral whiplash. Her beautiful neon blue eyes and her ears burst into a thick, red hemorrhage. The Goddess of Nightmares let out a choked cry and collapsed, completely unconscious, entering a self-protective coma forced by her Sea of Consciousness to prevent her brain from liquefying.
Joren, the Wind Assassin, fell to his knees clutching his head. As his Codex of Silence was violently broken, the atmospheric pressure crushed his ear canals. His eardrums ruptured, leaving him temporarily deaf and with vertigo that made him vomit blood onto the tiles.
Lirael, the seductive wielder of the Broken Moon, collapsed over her illusory sword. "Reality Exhaustion" had consumed her. By cutting such a high-level concept, her own presence in the world destabilized. Her body flickered, becoming translucent and transparent, her feet barely touching the ground, fighting not to be erased from physical existence.
And Varian, the patient Hunter, dropped his light bow. His left arm, the one that had held the tension of shooting through the rules of causality against a superior being, was unrecognizable. The skin, muscle, and blood vessels from the tips of his fingers to his elbow were completely charred, black and smoking, twitching with uncontrollable spasms of agonizing pain.
The dust from the explosion and the vapor from the melted ice filled the combat box.
When the violet light finally dissipated, nothing remained of the majestic Guardian of Illusion in the center of the arena. Only a fine layer of dark ash and a smoking crater testified that right there, just a few minutes ago, a god of the Purple Light Sect had breathed with arrogance.
The five Morningstar youths were devastated. Their bodies broken, bloodied, blind, deaf, or on the verge of existential collapse. They had crossed the abyss between realms, they had looked death in the eyes and had prevailed, but the cost had been a baptism of pure pain.
However, through the blood clouding his vision, Draven raised his intact right arm. His trembling fist rose toward the black sky of the spatial box, in a silent gesture of absolute victory.
Not far from there, in the confines of the mountain range covered by Malak's eclipse, a dull crack echoed in the total darkness of the mountain, announcing that the blood banquet of this apocalyptic night, in the shadows of the immortals, was not yet over.