Author's Note: (The world has rules. Mortals die, gods judge, and heaven dictates destiny. But when a Void Dragon decides the firmament is wrong, the rules are rewritten with blood. In this first part of the climax, the tribulation descends, and the Morningstar Empire will show creation that there is no divine punishment that cannot be devoured).
Chapter 37: The Judgment of Heaven and the Birth of the Primordial Era (Part 1)
Time did not stop, but to the eyes of Samael Morningstar, the entire universe seemed to hold its breath.
The immense sphere of divine annihilation, forged by the combined fury of the Black Thunder Dragon and the Heavenly Phoenix, was less than a meter from his face. The heat was so absolute that space itself was melting, and the atmospheric pressure threatened to crush his dragon bones into stardust. That sphere was not an ordinary Qi attack; it was the condensation of the Will of the World, a conceptual erasure designed to eradicate anomalies.
If he touched it, it wouldn't even leave a corpse.
Suspended in the bloody sky, with the apocalyptic storm roaring around him, Samael did not close his eyes. He kept his violet gaze locked on the impending annihilation and, with a calm bordering on madness, his consciousness pressed the golden option throbbing in his retina.
[Selection Confirmed.][Executing: 'Divine Favor - Absolute Karmic Intervention'.]
There was no explosion of light. No giant shield appeared, nor did a god descend to rescue him. The System did not stop the sphere, but it did something infinitely more terrifying: it rewrote the Causal Law of reality around Samael's body.
A thin, almost imperceptible film of translucent energy enveloped his black tunic and pale skin. It was a Conceptual Immunity. For exactly sixty seconds, the Will of the World simply had no authority to harm him. The universe had been usurped.
The sphere of divine annihilation struck directly against Samael's chest.
In the boxes of the vassal Patriarchs and on the walls of Skull Rock, allies held their breath, expecting to see the Sovereign of the Void vaporized. Seraphina clenched her fists, the Ice Crown of the Blue Phoenix glowing with desperation, while Kael and Eris screamed through the Soul Nexus.
But the explosion never occurred.
At the center of the impact, Samael opened his arms. He channeled the entirety of his Absolute Void, pushing it beyond his mortal limits, backed by the System's temporary invulnerability.
In front of his chest, a singularity opened. A black hole the size of a coin, but with an infinite gravitational pull.
"Heaven judges me..." Samael whispered, his voice vibrating through the storm. "Then I will eat heaven."
The Void singularity caught the sphere of annihilation. The pure, destructive celestial energy began to be sucked in, compressed, and devoured directly into Samael's Qi Sea. The veins on the Patriarch's neck and face bulged, glowing with a golden and black light as he ingested a punishment designed to erase entire cities.
In three heartbeats, the sphere vanished. Samael had swallowed it whole.
The two tribulation beasts, the Black Thunder Dragon and the Heavenly Phoenix, stopped dead in their tracks. They had no mind, no consciousness, no words. They were blind forces of nature, but the Law of the World that animated them experienced something akin to shock. The anomaly had not been destroyed; it had consumed the punishment.
Samael did not give them time to gather a second charge. He had fifty seconds of Conceptual Immunity left, and he wasn't going to waste a fraction of a second.
The air crackled as Samael broke the sound barrier, shooting straight toward the tribulation clouds.
His first target was the colossal Black Thunder Dragon. The celestial beast roared—a deafening thunderclap that made the ears of everyone within a hundred kilometers bleed—and unleashed a storm of dark lightning designed to fry the soul.
The lightning struck Samael, but the film of Karmic Intervention made it slide off his skin as if it were mere rain.
Ignoring the electromagnetic fury, Samael materialized directly above the massive head of the cloud dragon. He dug his two bare hands into the scales of pure black plasma.
"Bend!" bellowed the Sovereign of the Void.
Samael didn't use sword techniques. He used the pure and absolute gravitational force of his element. He compressed the gravity around the heavenly dragon's head and neck, forcing the force of nature to collapse in on itself. The immense thunder dragon writhed, its unstable form shattering under the pressure of a million tons of gravitational force.
With a brutal yank, Samael tore apart the beast's structure, reducing the colossal Thunder Dragon to a simple, chaotic mass of formless electromagnetic energy. He didn't assimilate its laws of lightning; he simply killed it as a concept, turning it into pure fuel.
But heaven did not give up easily.
Before Samael could absorb that energy, the Heavenly Phoenix fell upon him from above. There was no haughty song or offer of surrender. The bird of white and golden fire simply enveloped him in a scorching embrace, seeking to incinerate him with the original flame of creation.
Thirty seconds on the Divine Favor clock.
The celestial fire covered Samael. The Conceptual Immunity protected him from instant death, but the pressure of being in the epicenter of a sun began to heat his Qi Sea to critical levels. His Dragon Physique began to show glowing cracks on his skin. The System could not stop the pure saturation of energy.
Samael grunted, his violet eyes bloodshot. He plunged his right arm into the Heavenly Phoenix's chest of white fire. The creature thrashed violently, beating wings that melted the clouds around it.
Samael searched inside the divine beast until his fingers closed around a pulsating core of condensed energy: the heart of the tribulation.
"Mine!"
Samael ripped out the core with a tearing motion. The structure of the Heavenly Phoenix destabilized instantly. Its wings of fire dissolved into a storm of cosmic sparks that swirled around Samael, merging with the mass of lightning energy that had previously been the dragon.
The Sovereign floated in the sky, surrounded by an ocean of chaotic, pure, and absolutely lethal celestial energy. He had shattered the physical manifestations of the tribulation, but the real danger was just beginning.
Ten seconds of Conceptual Immunity.
The energy surrounding him, composed of primordial thunder and the fire of tribulation, was imbued with the "Wrath of the World." It was a stubborn, rabid energy that refused to be tamed. If Samael tried to introduce it into his core as it was, the Wrath of the World would act as a conceptual poison, rotting his meridians and detonating his Dantian.
He needed a filter. Someone who could purge the divine will from that energy before he consumed it.
The Soul Nexus ignited in his chest with the intensity of a supernova.
Samael didn't need to shout. His consciousness descended like lightning toward Skull Rock, connecting directly with the mind of the only person in the Empire capable of burning the intangible.
"Lilith. Prepare yourself. I'm sending you heaven."
Below, on the walls of the citadel, the Grand Elder looked up. Her single sound arm and her stump were tense. Around her, Kael, Cedric, and the other heirs looked toward the sky with their hearts in their throats.
Lilith did not hesitate. Her eyes turned an incandescent orange.
"Give it to me, Sovereign. I will burn it all."
Samael, in the final second of his Divine Favor, fully opened his meridians. He used the Void's gravity not to absorb, but to channel. He created an immense gravitational funnel that sucked up the ocean of chaotic celestial energy and shot it downwards, in a colossal pillar of white, golden, and black light that fell straight toward Skull Rock.
The pillar of divine energy was a punishment that would have cleaved the continent in two.
But Lilith was waiting for it.
The Grand Elder leapt, soaring dozens of meters above the citadel. She didn't try to block the pillar; that would have killed her instantly. Instead, she unleashed the entirety of her newly awakened bloodline.
[Ash and Judgment Phoenix: Domain of Purification].
An immense lotus flower made entirely of gray and black ash flames bloomed over Skull Rock. Lilith positioned herself in the exact center.
The pillar of celestial energy slammed into the ash lotus.
The sound of the impact was drowned out by the roar of the fire. Lilith's flames had no temperature; their sole function in the universe was to devour Qi and nullify intent.
When the violent and wrathful energy of heaven entered Lilith's filter, the ash began to incinerate the "Wrath of the World." It was a conceptual combustion. The divine will, the desire for annihilation, and the punishment imprinted in the thunder and fire were systematically burned away, reduced to harmless smoke.
Lilith screamed, her veins bulging as her ash fire worked at a maddening pace to process the volume of an ocean in a matter of seconds. Her fire consumed heaven's hostility, leaving behind only a torrent of primordial Qi, thick, peaceful, and of incalculable purity.
The celestial energy had been tamed. It was no longer a divine punishment. It had been transformed into the greatest feast the continent had witnessed in millennia.
Samael, falling from the sky after the exhaustion of his immunity, smiled through the blood staining his lips.
"Heirs..." Samael's voice echoed in the Soul Nexus, laden with the authority of a god who had just stolen fire from Olympus. "Open your cores. Eat heaven."
The rain of pure Qi, filtered by Lilith, began to descend upon the Morningstar Empire. The true rebirth of the Supreme Dynasty was a heartbeat away.