CHAPTER 199: The Roar of the Primordial Phoenix (Part 3)
Vargas "The Butcher" stumbled backward, his heavy armored boots slipping on the molten stone and dead ash. His unwavering survival instinct, forged in blood over centuries of ruthless massacres, screamed at him with a single, deafening, unified voice: Flee!
Lilith's body, which mere seconds ago was a rag of flesh torn apart by the Reality Shear and crushed by extreme gravity, had completely disintegrated. But the remains did not fall to the ground to rot. They became an immense, suffocating cloud of purplish-gray ash that completely defied the laws of physics and gravity.
"Are you really so naive to believe that vulgar iron can kill death itself?"
Lilith's voice did not come from a fixed location. It resonated with a terrifying duality from the very ash that now saturated every cubic centimeter of air in the canyon, suffocating the volcano's natural flames and solidifying the boiling magma with its mere icy presence.
Suddenly, the immense ash storm began to spin upon itself, creating an unnatural vortex. In the eye of the whirlpool, the primordial energy of Samael's Will Crystal—the fragment of Absolute Authority pulsing within her—was violently dragged out and voraciously devoured by her bloodline. The fabric of the void cracked, groaned, and broke under the cosmic pressure of that absorption.
An immense, overwhelming wave of Qi swept the battlefield, pushing Vargas back. Lilith was using the dark energy of her nephew's Avatar to force a biological evolution, breaking her bottlenecks with heretical brutality. Her aura skyrocketed like a dark comet, shattering the barriers of cultivation and reaching the Stage 5 Grand Saint Realm in a single, apocalyptic heartbeat.
Within the whirlpool, the ash compacted. The primordial bloodline forged new bones from ultra-condensed Ancestral Feathers and quickly covered them with flawless skin that faintly glowed, resembling stardust amidst the vacuum of space.
Lilith emerged.
Her Primordial Dusk Phoenix Eyes opened. The iris, now a faceted blood diamond glowing in neon crimson and fading into a dark violet, locked its gaze on Vargas. The pupil, mutated into an asymmetrical four-pointed star of platinum light, spun subtly, distorting the Qi currents. The gaze harbored a level of sadism so ancient and refined that it instantly froze the Butcher's iron blood.
The Phoenix spread her immense wings of living smoke, definitively obscuring the false sky of Vargas's domain, and as she did, she unleashed her dual roar.
The sound shattered the eardrums of all the dying mercenaries on the periphery. It was the sharp, beautiful, and immortal trill of the Phoenix, perfectly intertwined with the oppressive, tyrannical, and destructive thunder of an Ancestral Dragon.
Thousands upon thousands of kilometers away from the igneous fault, at the far north of the continent where eternal snow and blizzards devoured the horizons, stood the imposing, frigid Ice Palace of the hidden Vael family.
In the deepest, darkest, and coldest chambers of that golden prison, time seemed to come to a screeching halt.
Kaela Vael, a woman of serene and mature beauty, with extremely delicate features but the withered, empty gaze of someone imprisoned for decades without seeing the sun, sat in front of an ice crystal mirror. With mechanical softness, she brushed the long, silky silver hair of her fifteen-year-old daughter, Kira Vael.
Her eyes, the color of deep glacier ice, looked with infinite tenderness at the young girl's reflection. Kira was her only solace in life, her single, fragile anchor to sanity during these last fifteen years of absolute confinement and psychological torture.
Suddenly, Kaela's pale hands froze in the air. Both mother and daughter tensed like the strings of a bow about to snap.
A roar that did not travel through the air, but vibrated violently and directly through their very blood, resonated in their minds. It was an immensely ancient, primal frequency. An absolute call to the hunt; an echo of heretical domination that only the true bearers of the original bloodline could feel in their veins.
Kaela dropped the fine jade comb. The artifact hit the frozen floor and shattered into a thousand crystalline pieces.
She brought a trembling hand to her heart, gasping for air as the thick emotional armor she had carefully built during her captivity cracked to pieces. Fragments of forbidden memories, memories she had been forced to bury, violently clouded her vision: the face of a tall, broad-shouldered man smiling at her with infinite love beneath the southern sun; the gushing blood of that same man, torn apart while trying to protect her with his life from the crushing power of a Saint King; and the pure, crystalline, mischievous laugh of her little golden-eyed boy, the baby she had to desperately abandon when he was barely three years old to save his life.
My love... Kael... Kaela thought, the name burning in her mind like an ember.
Hot, salty, and bitter tears streamed down her pale cheeks, melting the perpetual frost on her face. She didn't know. In her fragmented, wounded mind, her deceased beloved husband's clan was just a small, weak family of cultivators from the south, lacking influence and hope. She couldn't conceive, even in her wildest delusions, that the divine roar now shaking the very millennial glaciers of her impregnable prison came from the same dominant blood coursing through her own veins.
"Mother? What was that?" Kira asked, frightened, turning around abruptly and bringing her hands to her own chest. "I felt... I felt a scream. As if a huge, unbeatable monster asleep inside me suddenly wanted to wake up."
Kaela couldn't articulate a single word. She simply fell heavily to her knees on the ice and hugged her daughter around the waist with desperate strength, hiding her face in her lap, crying in agonizing silence for her murdered husband and for the son she believed lost forever in the cruel immensity of the world.
Kira, clenching her small fists over the fine silk of her mother's dress, felt her own heart beating to the frantic, destructive rhythm of that distant roar. She didn't know what it was. She didn't know from what corner of the world it came. But she swore in that exact instant, with the ironclad, unwavering will of the Vael blood, that one day she would grow up, become strong enough to shatter this ice prison, and discover the origin of that call which had made her mother cry.
Meanwhile, in the suffocating hell of the Igneous Fault canyon, Lilith finished materializing completely.
The echo of her roar continued to make Vargas's ears bleed profusely. The Butcher watched with paralyzing, existential horror as Lilith's immaculate skin emitted an aberrant heat; a heat that didn't physically burn flesh, but disintegrated the will to fight of her opponents just by looking at it.
Lilith slowly stretched her slender fingers, now transformed into long, cruel, and sharp obsidian claws, and shifted her gaze to the Void Herald. Sienna was still floating there on the bow, maintaining that same sadistic smile, and calmly drinking from a steaming porcelain teacup she had conjured out of nowhere.
"Sienna..." Lilith's voice was an acoustic aberration, a perfect blend of a celestial trill and the lethal hiss of a primordial reptile. "Take care of containing that old man who is about to wake up down there. I will personally make sure the 'Butcher' learns in his own flesh what it means to be a piece of trash in a slaughterhouse."
Sienna took a delicate sip of her tea and nodded slightly, her silver mirror eyes shining with deep anticipation.
Vargas, who was already trembling uncontrollably from his knees to his jaw due to the sheer suppression of the Phoenix's roar, tried to take a step back. He tried to flee like a coward. But it was useless; his massive, armored body simply refused to respond to his brain's panicked commands. His muscles were petrified.
Lilith approached slowly, floating barely a hand's breadth above the ground, like a vengeful ghost.
She opened her mouth and inhaled the residual fire of the canyon.
[The Gray Dusk Sea: Qi Extinguishing Prison]
Lilith exhaled a direct hurricane of gray ash. The dense cloud enveloped Vargas instantly. The Butcher inhaled the ash by respiratory inertia. Upon entering his lungs, the ash, acting like a karmic parasite, adhered to his channels and instantly crystallized his meridians, suffocating him from the inside and completely severing the flow of his Grand Saint Qi, as if someone had shut off a master valve.
Vargas fell to his knees on the stone, coughing up thick, black blood, desperately trying to raise his axe to defend himself.
Lilith raised a single hand with indifference.
[Shackles of the Inverse Samsara]
Thick chains made of will-o'-the-wisp fire and compacted ash erupted violently from the ground and coiled like snakes around Vargas's arms, torso, neck, and legs, binding and crucifying him against the volcanic stone. The links pierced his acupuncture points, spilling his blood.
With a final death rattle of desperation, Vargas tried to force the activation of his supreme attack.
"REALITY SHEAR!" he roared with a broken voice, trying to swing his immense axe despite the chains, seeking to misalign Lilith's atomic structure once again.
But the immense black axe didn't even move a millimeter. Vargas desperately tried to increase the gravity of his x100 domain over the monster in front of him, but the heaviness simply slid off Lilith's gray scales like dirty water off polished glass. His power was useless. The Stage 8 Grand Saint Realm had been crushed by the absolute purity of a fully awakened superior bloodline.
Lilith, seeing the Butcher's pathetic and useless attempts, only smiled sadistically. She deliberately withheld the "aging" and "disintegrating" capacity of her ash. She didn't want Vargas to have the mercy of dying from cellular old age in three seconds. She wanted to break his mind, his pride, and his body, bloody piece by piece.
Here began the true, dark stage of the torture.
Lilith floated until she was centimeters from his face. She grabbed the thick will-o'-the-wisp chain binding Vargas's huge right arm, but didn't pull immediately.
"Let's start with the filthy tools of your trade," Lilith whispered.
With her sharp obsidian claws, Lilith began to literally "peel" the thick black metal plates Vargas had fused to his own anatomy. She dug her nails under the steel of the Butcher's chest and shoulder and slowly pulled back.
Every torn plate brought with it thick strips of raw muscle, torn skin, and exposed nerve endings. The sound of flesh peeling from metal was sickeningly wet. Vargas howled, thrashing like an animal in a slaughterhouse, as Lilith peeled his shoulder until the white bone was exposed.
And then, she gave a brutal, sharp yank on the chain.
The horrific sound of Grand Saint bone snapping like a dry branch echoed in the silent crater. Vargas's right arm was ripped clean out of its socket.
A geyser of arterial blood gushed from the enormous stump. Vargas let out a terrifying scream, a shriek of pure terror and agony so high-pitched it tore his own vocal cords, making him spit blood. His eyes bulged, the veins in his sclera bursting from the shock of absolute pain.
As Vargas howled, Lilith calmly walked to his left side. She grabbed the other chain. This time, she didn't yank it suddenly. She pulled with maddening slowness.
Listening to the sweet melody of tendons stretching to their elastic limit, Lilith separated his left arm from the torso millimeter by millimeter. At the same time, with a simple flick of her fingers, the chains bound to Vargas's legs began to pull in opposite directions, dislocating his thick femurs from his pelvis with wet, sickening pops.
"AAAAAAAH! PLEASE! KILL ME!" Vargas screamed, thick tears mixing with sweat and blood on his disfigured face. "JUST FUCKING KILL ME!"
But Lilith was not finished. Just as Vargas was about to go into hypovolemic shock, his eyes rolling back to find the refuge of death from massive blood loss, Lilith dropped the chains and placed her hand delicately on the Butcher's head.
[Flame of Painful Resurgence (Divine Level)]
Lilith's fire, now fueled by the primordial crystal, did not burn to destroy. It violently penetrated Vargas's open wounds and bleeding stumps, beginning to force a heretical healing.
The gray fire rebuilt his torn arms and dislocated legs, weaving new muscles and bones made of indestructible "Spiritual Ash". But this was not a luminous blessing. This flame burned the soul while it healed matter. The process forced Vargas's nervous system to feel every microscopic nerve, every vein, and every muscle fiber being incinerated alive and restitched simultaneously. Even worse, the new spiritual nerves were ten times more sensitive to external stimuli than the originals. It was the indescribable pain of being submerged in boiling acid, mixed with the repulsive agony of new limbs sprouting forcefully from empty sockets.
The pain was so absolute that Vargas's mind tried to shut down out of a survival instinct. He tried to pass out. But Lilith injected a fine needle of parasitic smoke directly into his Dantian. The smoke acted as an infernal stimulant that forcibly tethered his consciousness, keeping him one hundred percent lucid and awake during every microsecond of the hell.
This apocalypse of mutual healing and burning lasted five whole minutes. Vargas writhed hysterically under the chains, his screams reducing to hoarse, bubbling gurgles until he completely lost his voice, his vocal cords shredded and burned by the futile effort of howling.
When the gray flame finally went out, Vargas was whole again. Physically healed, but with a fractured mind. His breathing was a rapid, agonizing pant, and his bloodshot eyes stared into the void with the panic of a cornered animal.
Lilith crouched in front of him, cradling his massive face between her delicate claws with a feigned, almost romantic, and exquisitely macabre sweetness.
"Tell me, dear Butcher..." Lilith whispered, her breath smelling of stellar ash. "Do you want to die? Or do you want to live?"
Vargas, his vision clouded by acid tears and blood, looked at her. His lower lip trembled uncontrollably.
"K... kill me," he whispered with an inaudible thread of a voice, a broken plea that tore his throat.
Lilith tilted her head, curiously bringing her ear closer to the giant man's mouth.
"I didn't hear you well. What did you say, you piece of beast?" she asked, a razor-sharp smile appearing on her lips.
Vargas gathered the last ounce of his dignity and broken willpower.
"Kill me... please. Have mercy... KILL MEEEE!"
Lilith straightened up abruptly and burst out laughing. It was a crystalline, genuine, and joyful laugh, as if she had just heard the most brilliant joke of her entire, very long existence.
"Hahahahahahahahaha!" the death goddess's laughter echoed in the canyon, freezing the blood of the few prisoners who still listened from afar. "Kill you? Do you think you have the damn right to die, scum?"
Lilith stopped laughing abruptly. Her beautiful face contorted into a mask of pure darkness and madness. Her eyes lost any trace of light and became two spiraling vortexes of absolute chaos.
"No," Lilith whispered, her voice vibrating with the authority of the unfathomable abyss. "The right to die is a beautiful privilege we reserve only for the worthy and the brave. You will not die today. Your only destiny, your only damn right in this universe, is to serve us as mindless livestock for all eternity, worm. And in the unlikely, pathetic event that your soul manages to extinguish itself from wear and tear... we will personally drag you by the hair from the river of the underworld and revive you, just so you can continue serving as a meat puppet. You do not have the right to reincarnate. You do not have the right to rest. NEVER! Hahahaha!"
Hearing his eternal sentence dictated by an inscrutable deity, Vargas stopped struggling. His spirit broke with an almost audible sound. His massive body slumped heavily against the burning chains. The Butcher fell into a sepulchral silence, his mind fracturing definitively. He had been reduced to a mere object.
Lilith, noticing her toy was no longer kicking or offering resistance, sighed with an exaggeratedly sad and compassionate smile.
"What's wrong, little worm? Are you sad because you know you can't run away to death?" Lilith caressed his cheek, slicing the skin with her nail. "You should be immensely glad to know you will live eternally for the glory of the Morningstar Clan. Isn't life grand? Do you not appreciate the infinite kindness of this merciful lady who is saving you?"
And so, without further ado, the second cycle began.
Lilith sank her claws in and ripped off his fingers, one by one, tearing off the knuckles with a hollow snap. She shattered his knees with precise kicks from her fine heels. With a swift, accurate movement, she plunged two claws into his eye sockets and gouged out his eyes with a sickening, suctioning sound. Barehanded, she forced his jaw open, grabbed the root of his tongue, and violently yanked it out. Immediately after, with her sharp nails, she sliced his abdomen wide open. Vargas's steaming intestines spilled onto the floor like dead snakes; Lilith shoved her hand into the open cavity and crushed one of his lungs, forcing the Grand Saint to drown in his own blood while he bubbled pathetically.
Then, when Vargas's heart threatened to stop, she activated the Flame of Painful Resurgence again. The intestines returned to their place. The lungs inflated. The eyes grew back.
And she repeated the cycle. Over and over again.
For twenty uninterrupted minutes of clinical, sadistic, and methodical butchery, the crater of the Igneous Fault Bastion became the private studio of a torture artist.
When Lilith finally got bored, sighed, and lowered her blood-splattered arms, Vargas was an empty shell.
He was physically intact thanks to the last wave of gray healing, without a single scar on his skin, but his gaze was completely dead, fixed on nothing. He no longer moaned. He no longer pleaded. He no longer even trembled. His conscious mind had abandoned his own body and hidden in the deepest depths of madness over ten minutes ago. He was just breathing meat.
Lilith lightly smacked her forehead, smudging her fair skin with a streak of blood, as if she had forgotten a small, unimportant errand. She looked up at the imposing Void Herald.
"Sienna," Lilith called out in a casual tone, flicking a thick drop of blood off her nail. "Will this piece of broken meat still serve as a battery for the Dead Blood Legion? Or did I go overboard and break his brain too much?"
Sienna, who had been calmly drinking her tea from the ship's deck, watching the gruesome spectacle with a clinical eye, lowered her delicate porcelain cup. She looked at Vargas's drooling, inert body with her silver mirror eyes and nodded slightly after evaluating him.
"His Dantian is still completely intact, his cultivation was not damaged, and his body is strong. Yes, he still works for us," Sienna said, her velvety voice projecting softly across the canyon. "But I must admit you surprised me a little tonight, Lilith. Who would have thought that the always serene, elegant, and exceptionally maternal Aunt Lilith harbored such an... artistically sadistic and dark side? I wonder what the Patriarch would think upon hearing this entertaining news. Hmm... I think it would be an excellent idea to tell him the juicy details of this version of his sweet aunt just to see his reaction."
Upon hearing Samael's name, Lilith's flawless mask of a demented, untouchable, and sadistic goddess shattered in an instant.
She blushed violently. The tips of her ears turned a bright scarlet that rivaled her hair, and she quickly turned her face away to hide her embarrassment, coughing loudly into her fist to clear her throat and regain her composure.
Not daring to utter another word to defend herself from Sienna's sharp teasing, Lilith grabbed Vargas by the thick collar of his armor as if he were a simple sack of potatoes. She flew quickly to the ship and tossed the enormous, heavy Stage 8 Grand Saint body onto the pile of prisoners with a dull thud.
The twelve mutilated Captains, seeing their invincible god turned into a drooling vegetable at the hands of this woman who was now absurdly blushing, became so terrified that their sanity abandoned them. Several of them literally urinated in their pants, the acrid smell mixing with the blood on the deck.
Lilith wrinkled her nose in deep disgust at the smell of the mercenaries' urine. She quickly turned toward the center of the deck, trying to ignore the situation, where the twelve Sequences of the cleanup vanguard were lined up.
The young, lethal Morningstar monsters—Elara, Dante, Varian, Lyra, and the rest—stared at her in absolute silence. In their asymmetrical eyes was an overwhelming mix of disbelief, reverential awe, and a very, very palpable instinctive terror. They swallowed heavily, not daring to blink.
Lilith suddenly seemed to notice the stares of her young audience. Her face softened in a blink, adopting that same warm, understanding, and affectionate smile as always.
"What's wrong, kids? Why are you all looking at me like that?" Lilith asked, tilting her head with genuine innocence, as if she hadn't just disemboweled, gouged eyes out, and tortured a man until his soul was erased.
The twelve youths shook their heads in unison, frantically and wide-eyed, almost panicking, as if mentally saying: Nothing! Absolutely nothing is wrong! Aunt Lilith, you are a damn angel fallen from heaven!
But before Lilith could continue pampering them or questioning them about the mission, the entire world turned upside down.
A colossal, dense, immemorial, and highly suffocating spiritual pressure emerged like a tidal wave from the magmatic depths of the shattered fortress. The deep cracks in the obsidian canyon suddenly glowed with a blinding, radioactive heat, and the sealed sky of the domain trembled violently under the force of a Law that completely transcended the authority of the Grand Saint Realm.
Suddenly, the air around them boiled. And in the murky sky above the central crater, a figure slowly emerged, levitating in a lotus position.
The Ancestor of the Igneous Fault: Lord Volcanis "The Ash King".
He was the absolute owner of the volcano. His cultivation radiated the divine, unquestionable pressure of a Saint King (Stage 1).
He was a legendary, ruthless mercenary who had unified the canyon through genocide centuries ago, and who had spent entire decades sleeping in the depths of the liquid magma beneath the fortress, using the extreme geothermal pressure to nourish and stabilize his Saint King crown. His immense, robust physical body was completely covered in natural obsidian plates and thick veins of crystallized fire that pulsed with a life of their own.
Lord Volcanis did not say a single word. He didn't shout curses, he didn't demand answers, nor did he weep for the death of his Alliance. He simply turned his heavy rock head and fixed his burning eyes, like two supernovas about to explode, directly at the Void Herald.
Gravity itself seemed to bend in fear under his gaze.
Lilith, feeling the immense cosmic pressure of a Saint King clash violently against the ship's runic shields, did not show a single ounce of concern. Her warm and sweet smile slowly transformed into a sharp, predatory grin.
"Well, well..." Lilith murmured, casually leaning her elbows on the iron railing of the ship. "So this old bastard finally deigned to appear. I was beginning to think the coward was going to stay hiding under his rock forever."
Lilith turned her head and looked at Sienna, who was already floating a meter above the wooden deck of the ship, her immaculate black qipao billowing elegantly in the thermal wind.
"Have fun on your hunt, Sienna," Lilith wished her with a knowing smile, crossing her arms.
Sienna didn't respond with words. She only nodded slightly. Her sadistic, incredibly elegant, and icy smile widened as she slowly ascended through the air, step by step, as if climbing an invisible glass staircase.
The Silver Matriarch stopped in the fiery night sky of the plateau, crossing her hands in front of her stomach, positioning herself exactly at the same height as the imposing Ash King.
The true and final calamity of the night, the clash of Kings, was about to be unleashed.
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