Chapter 30: Devourers of Legends
The Celestial Jade City dawned under a sky tinged with a strange color of blood and gold. The coliseum, an architectural marvel of living stone and spiritual crystal, gleamed beneath the oppressive combined pressure of Patriarchs, Semi-Saints, and martial leaders. Tens of thousands of spectators filled the stands in a sea of vibrant colors. The minor clans trembled with anticipation; the great powers smiled arrogantly from their floating boxes.
In the highest box, Valerius Valois, the Holy Son of the Purple Light Sect, clenched his fists. His plan to throw the Morningstar Clan into a "Closed Hunting Realm" had been vetoed the night before by the council of elders of the Hundred Sects. "Changing the rules from one day to the next for a single clan will make us look like cowards," the other leaders had argued. So the one-on-one duels would continue. Valerius had been forced to swallow his poison and settle for pairing the Morningstars against the most brutal geniuses available.
But when the battle horn sounded and the Morningstar Clan emerged through the south entrance, the arrogance in the boxes froze.
Samael Morningstar led the vanguard. His violet eyes swept the stands with absolute indifference. Walking beside him were Kael, Violeta, Eris, Xylia, Cedric, and Elowen. They did not look like contestants about to enter a death tournament; they looked like royalty parading through their own courtyard.
The Patriarch of the Purple Light Sect, an imposing elder at Stage 5 of the Saint Realm, floated above the arena.
"Welcome to the Summit of the Hundred Sects!" his amplified voice echoed in the bones of the crowd. "Let the ancestors be witnesses! Today, blood will forge tomorrow! First match of the main round: Kael Morningstar against Jin Tora, Emperor Disciple of the Golden Wolf Sect!"
Kael, with an inscrutable face and barely sixteen years of age, walked to the center of the stadium. His opponent, Jin Tora, was a mountain of muscle with feline eyes and golden steel claws.
"Today I tear out your heart, outsider!" roared Jin Tora, and without waiting for the signal, he activated his ultimate technique. He fused with his spiritual beast. His body expanded, covering itself in golden fur and scales, turning into a giant lycanthrope monster nearly four meters tall that made the coliseum tremble.
Kael did not retreat. His hand caressed the hilt of the Whisper of the North. He used no paraphernalia. He didn't shout the name of his technique. He simply let his Sword Heart beat.
The golden giant lunged at him with the speed of lightning, his claws ready to cleave Kael in two.
Kael unsheathed.
[Sovereign's Slash].
It was not a display of blinding lights. It was a vertical slash, purplish and absolute. The line of the sword crossed the arena in a sepulchral silence.
Kael's slash didn't cut Jin Tora's flesh; it cut directly through space and the karmic resonance between the cultivator and his spiritual beast. The "link" that maintained the fusion snapped like a taut rope. Jin Tora and the giant wolf were violently separated in mid-air, falling to the sand completely unconscious, their eyes rolled back and their meridians in shock, shattered by the sheer pressure of the sword's will. All in a single, clean strike.
The Jade Coliseum fell silent. Then, the VIP boxes erupted in a chaos of voices.
"By the gods, what was that?!" shouted the Patriarch of the Celestial Sword Sect, leaping to his feet and knocking over his jade table. "He's sixteen! That boy is sixteen years old and already possesses a Sword Seed and a formed Sword Heart! He's a monster!"
Immediately, three leaders from different sects specializing in the way of the sword jumped to the edges of their boxes.
"Young Kael!" shouted an elder in white robes. "My Infinite Blade Sect offers you the position of Holy Son right now! We will give you access to our sacred pavilions!"
"Ignore him! The Steel Wind Family will give you our best daughters in marriage and a thousand Heaven Grade stones a month if you join us!"
Kael sheathed his sword slowly. He didn't even look up at the boxes. He turned on his heel and walked back to where Samael stood.
"My sword already has a master," Kael said, his cold voice cutting through the offers. "And you couldn't afford its edge."
The sword sects gulped, publicly humiliated, while Valerius Valois bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood.
"Next match!" announced the judge, sweating cold. "Violeta and Eris Morningstar against the Lunar Sisters of the Mist Swan Sect!"
The twins entered the arena. The opponents, two ethereal women dressed in white silk, immediately initiated their Illusory Dance. The battlefield was covered in a mist so dense that the divine sense of most spectators was blocked. Dozens of mirages of the Lunar Sisters surrounded Violeta and Eris, attacking from all angles.
Violeta sighed, bored. Her heterochromic eyes shone.
She activated the [Step Between Worlds].
Instead of running, the space around her warped. Violeta teleported directly behind the real bodies of the Lunar Sisters, ignoring the illusions. Before the rivals could react, Violeta released her Absolute Ice and fused it with the Void. She froze the mist and space itself, trapping them in a block of dimensional frost.
Eris didn't waste any time. With a feral smile, she raised her hand and unleashed the [Flame of Ruin].
The black and bluish fire swept across the arena. The audience thought it was simply incredibly destructive fire, unaware that it carried traces of the Concept of Destruction. The illusions, the spatial ice, and the Lunar Sisters' defenses were disintegrated into ash in less than a minute.
The victory was so crushing that the audience was slow to react. But the Patriarchs were not.
"Dual Affinity! Ice and Space!" bellowed the leader of the Stellar Void Sect, his eyes bulging as he stared at Violeta. "Space is a supreme law! That girl has a talent born once every thousand years!"
"And her sister's fire is of a terrifying purity!" added the Patriarch of the Red Volcano Sect.
Recruitment offers began to rain down on the twins. Promises of mountains of resources, titles of heiresses, mythical treasures.
Violeta ignored them completely, while Eris simply raised her middle finger wrapped in black flames toward the box of the Red Volcano Sect, provoking scandalized gasps throughout cultivating high society.
The tournament was turning into a showcase of monsters.
When it was Cedric and Xylia's turn against the Formation Squad of the Broken Seal Sect, the humiliation was even more clinical.
The enemies tried to trap them in a complex array of electromagnetic lightning. Cedric, with his hands in his pockets, analyzed the array with his Array Eye. He let out a dry laugh. He walked slowly, kicked three key spiritual stones on the arena floor, and the formation collapsed. With a wave of his hands, Cedric inverted it.
The enemies were trapped in their own snare. And then, Xylia took control.
With her eyes rolled back and the illusory crown shining on her forehead, the Thunder Empress used her [Heavenly Thunder Mandate]. She wrested control of the lightning from the enemy formation, multiplied it tenfold using ambient Qi, and brought it crashing down on the squad, frying them in seconds without killing them, but leaving them writhing in the sand.
"Stop!" shouted an elder in golden robes from the VIP boxes, standing up. "Young Xylia! I am the Patriarch of the Furious Thunder Sect. Your affinity with lightning borders on the divine. Come to our sect! We will teach you the lost secrets of lightning that rule this world!"
Xylia, levitating a handspan off the ground with arcs of black and white electricity dancing on her fingers, slowly turned her head toward the Patriarch. Her gaze was laden with the contempt of a reincarnated empress.
"You?" Xylia let out a crystalline, ruthless laugh. "You are just peasants playing with sparks. Go back to your huts. There is absolutely nothing the mud can teach the storm."
The Thunder Patriarch flushed red with anger and humiliation, falling back into his chair while the other sects murmured. The arrogance of these teenagers from the desert knew no bounds, but their power more than justified it.
The pattern continued. Elowen was sent to fight against a Champion of the Poisonous Sect. When the champion filled the arena with a lethal miasma that melted stone, Elowen simply walked through the fog. She used her [Hand of Life and Death] to transmute the continent's deadliest poison into spiritual pills of pure healing. With a single brush of her Qi-covered fingers, she reversed the champion's toxic flow, causing him to collapse from his own poison.
Immediately, the Supreme Alchemy Sect and the Poisonous Sect got into a shouting match from the boxes, fighting to offer Elowen the position of Head Elder. Elowen gave an elegant bow and returned to Samael, ignoring them royally.
The Jade Coliseum was on the verge of madness. No clan in the history of the tournament had presented a lineup of geniuses so pure, so destructive, and so unreachable. They were all around sixteen years old, and they all treated the local superpowers like annoying trash.
But the main course had not yet been served.
"Final match of the first round of the main block!" announced the judge, his voice cracking slightly. "Samael Morningstar against Kaelen, the Blood Genius of the Eternal Lion Sect!"
Silence fell again like a heavy cloak. Samael, the Patriarch, barely twenty years old, walked slowly toward the center.
His opponent, Kaelen, was a famous genius at Stage 8 of the Origin Realm. He was known to practice a forbidden blood art that allowed him to burst his enemies' blood vessels from the inside.
Kaelen smiled, his elongated fangs gleaming in the sun.
"Your subordinates are talented, Patriarch," Kaelen said, bringing his hands together in a twisted seal. "But you are just a human shield. I heard your cultivation is high, but facing my Profound Blood Arts, you are just a sack of liquid waiting to burst. Crimson Boil!"
The genius unleashed his technique. A red, oppressive pressure filled the arena, attempting to connect with Samael's bloodstream to boil him alive.
Samael stood still. He kept his breathing calm. He didn't invoke the Law of Space. He didn't let the Void devour the technique. He didn't use his own Blood manipulation. In this arena, in front of everyone, he was going to show that even the most brute and fundamental force of his being was unreachable to them.
Samael smiled. His violet eyes flashed with an arrogance that eclipsed everything his generals had shown.
"You play with blood... in front of the predator who invented it?" Samael whispered.
His Dragon Physique and his cultivation at Stage 9 (Peak) of the Origin Realm erupted.
The sheer physical pressure of his muscles, the density of his bones forged by Primordial Blood, completely nullified the enemy's forbidden art. Kaelen's technique crashed against Samael's body and shattered like a glass cup against an obsidian mountain.
Kaelen spat blood from the backlash of his own broken technique. His eyes widened in absolute panic.
"W-What are you?!" the genius babbled, backing away.
Samael didn't unsheathe the Odachi. He didn't need to.
He took a step. The sand beneath his boot sank a meter. In a blink that most spectators couldn't even register, Samael crossed the twenty meters separating them.
Samael grabbed Kaelen by the throat with his bare hand and lifted him off the ground as if he were a ragdoll. The genius tried to stab needles of poisonous Qi into his arm, but the needles snapped against Samael's pale skin.
Without using a single magical technique, with only the brute force of his body at Origin Stage 9, Samael slammed Kaelen face-first into the spiritual stone floor of the coliseum.
CRAAAACK!
The sound of the genius's skull fracturing against the high-density stone echoed to the highest stands. The arena trembled from the purely physical impact. Samael lifted him once more, with Kaelen completely unconscious and disfigured, and casually tossed him out of bounds, like someone discarding annoying trash.
Samael dusted his hands off and looked directly at the VIP box where Valerius Valois stood paralyzed.
While the stadium fell silent before the crushing and humiliating physical supremacy of the Morningstar Patriarch, the System lit up in Samael's retina.
[Patriarch System: Combat Evaluation: Divine Humiliation.]
[Mission 'Crown of the Legend Devourers' Activated.]
[Main Objective: Have 5 members enter the Top 10. Minimum 2 in the Top 3.]
[Secret Objective Revealed: To complete the ultimate humiliation, the Host must challenge and defeat a True Saint Level Elder in front of the Hundred Sects at the closing ceremony.]
[Pending Rewards: Celestial Bloodline Chest, Divine Favor of choice, Luck Multiplier x10 for the clan.]
Samael closed the interface. He knew that the Hundred Sects, now humiliated and terrified that these "geniuses" would slip through their fingers, would turn to the darkness. Tomorrow there would be no fair rules. Tomorrow they would send the real assassins.
And Samael would be waiting for them with a smile.
END OF CHAPTER 30