Chapter 70: The Echo of the Frontier – The First Blood of the Mist
The immense obsidian hull of the Herald of the Void cut through the northern clouds like a blade gliding over black silk. The runic glyphs engraved on the bow of the warship hummed with a low, menacing tone, propelling the vessel through the freezing winds of the frontier.
Standing on the main deck, unmoving before the storm that battered his tunic, was Samael Morningstar.
The Patriarch didn't need his dimensional domain to cross the sky today; the Herald was a symbol of conquest, a floating declaration of war announcing to the wastelands that the mountain had a master. In his right hand, resting casually against his shoulder, lay the Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse. The immense curved blade, obtained in the clan's early days of blood, seemed to devour the scarce dawn light, emitting a faint black smoke that distorted the air around it.
"Do you know why I didn't use my spatial authority to bring us directly, Elara?" asked Samael, his deep voice resonating above the roar of the runic engines.
Elara, standing beside him, finished adjusting the leather straps of her tactical gloves. She wore her new daggers, the Mist Fangs, crossed at her lower back. She leaned over the railing, observing the barren, fractured badlands stretching kilometers below. A thick purple miasma covered the bottom of the canyons.
"Because an assassin must learn to observe the terrain before the blood starts flowing," she answered, her frozen-moon eyes fixed on the toxic mist. "And because you want whatever is down there to know we have arrived."
Samael nodded slowly.
"That canyon is a nest of Corrupt Bone Scorpions. They are not beasts born of the desert's nature; they have been feeding on an artificial abyssal Qi. Our scouts detected a mass anomaly. There are exactly one hundred Grade 3 scorpions guarding a Grade 4 armored matriarch."
Elara tilted her head, a wicked, almost childish smile appearing on her pale lips.
"A hundred to one? Master, you are spoiling me."
"Survive," Samael decreed, stabbing the Odachi into the ship's spiritual wood deck. "I won't lift a finger. If you let that plague cross our border, I'll throw you into the canyon myself."
Elara didn't answer with words. Her smile widened into a sadistic grin. Without hesitating for a millisecond, she leapt over the railing of the Herald of the Void, plummeting toward the purple abyss.
The descent was dizzying. The wind tore at her dark tunic, but as she neared the bottom of the canyon, the temperature around her plummeted. When her boots impacted the rocky ground, there wasn't a burst of dust, but a shockwave of pure frost that froze the stone within a ten-meter radius.
The impact was the trigger.
The entire canyon came alive. The earth around her erupted violently in dozens of different spots.
From the cracks and shadows emerged the Corrupt Bone Scorpions. They were the size of warhorses, their carapaces composed of repulsive, calcified bone material, furrowed by veins that pulsed with a sickly purple light. One hundred Grade 3 beasts surrounded the young woman in a circle of clacking pincers and stingers dripping neurotoxic poison.
And at the back of the canyon, emerging from a cavern, rose the Grade 4 matriarch. A colossal monster the size of a battleship, with six pairs of violet eyes and a tail ending in a spiked bone mace.
Any normal Origin Realm cultivator would have felt terror paralyze their veins before such a swarm.
Elara let out a crystalline, unhinged laugh that bounced off the canyon walls.
"Let's play!" she shouted, unsheathing the Mist Fangs.
The first wave of twenty scorpions lunged at her simultaneously, an avalanche of bone and poison.
Elara inhaled the toxic air and, upon exhaling, unleashed the [Shroud of Vitreous Fragments].
A pearly white mist, saturated with billions of ice micro-crystals, exploded from her body, devouring the battlefield. Visibility vanished. The sound of the beasts' shrieks was drowned in a sepulchral silence.
Inside the mist, Elara was a ghost. Using the [White Shroud Camouflage], her body became translucent.
The first scorpion launched a blind thrust with its pincer. Elara appeared beside it, floating like an apparition. She didn't decapitate it. In a swift motion, she slid the dagger through the joint of the beast's hind leg and released a blast of cold.
Crack! The leg froze and shattered. The monster shrieked, falling on its side. Elara was already gone.
Moving at an absurd speed, the disciple began her macabre dance. She wasn't looking to kill; she was looking to dismember. She loved the feeling of the corrupt bone crystallizing under her touch.
She appeared in front of three more scorpions. She summoned two [Frigid Mist Clones]. The beasts, fooled by the decoys, plunged their stingers into the copies. The clones burst in a suction of absolute cold, freezing the three monsters' tails solid. Elara leapt over the frozen carapaces, laughing out loud, and used the [White Breath Thrust] with her bare fingers, piercing the exoskeletons and injecting pressurized gas directly into their swirling corrupt Qi.
The beasts' black blood crystallized from the inside. The scorpions were paralyzed, still alive and conscious, turned into statues of opaque ice that cracked agonizingly.
Elara was a hurricane of sadism. She cut off tails, froze eyeballs, amputated pincers. The mist was filled with the sickly sound of ice breaking carapaces. In less than five minutes, seventy Grade 3 scorpions lay on the ground, mutilated and frozen alive, unable to move but emitting gurgles of pure suffering.
The Grade 4 matriarch, enraged by the massacre of her offspring, charged blindly through the mist, plowing through the frozen bodies of her own children. Her bone mace swept the area, seeking to crush the human.
Elara dodged the blow with a graceful flip, landing directly on the colossal beast's back.
"You are very big, but your blood is just as cold!" Elara mocked, plunging both daggers deep into the gaps of the matriarch's bone armor.
She was preparing to inject a slow freeze, wanting to see how long the gigantic heart took to crystallize, when an overwhelming pressure fell upon her shoulders, forcing her to drop a knee onto the monster's carapace.
It was Samael's gravitational tyranny.
The Patriarch's voice resonated directly in her mind, amplified by a spatial compression that ignored the distance between the ship and the ground.
"Stop your game immediately, Elara."
The girl's smile froze.
"Cruelty is not a flaw if used to instill terror in a human army," Samael's relentless voice continued, "but torturing beasts for pleasure only shreds the flesh and contaminates the information cores I came looking for. An executioner of the Empire does not play with her prey. She executes."
Elara pressed her lips together, feeling her master's scolding like an icy whip. Her eyes regained their clinical, professional coldness. The "click" reversed.
"Yes, Master," she murmured.
Without releasing the hilts of her daggers embedded in the beast, Elara channeled the entirety of her Origin Realm Qi. No more games. No more partial paralysis.
[Execution: Internal Freezing - Absolute Zero Touch].
Elara infused her power directly into the matriarch's bloodstream. The immense monster stopped dead. An extremely thick white vapor sprouted from the beast's multiple mouths. The purple veins beneath its carapace turned black. In a single second, the moisture inside the fifteen-meter aberration crystallized absolutely.
The matriarch went rigid, turned into an iceberg of bone and ice.
With a flawless flick of her wrists, Elara unleashed a vibration wave through the steel of her daggers.
The colossal monster crumbled into an avalanche of crystal dust and frozen ash. The remaining thirty scorpions, terrified by their leader's annihilation, tried to flee, but Elara expanded her mist and froze their lungs before they could take two steps.
The canyon fell into a sepulchral silence, covered by a blanket of white ice and shattered corpses.
From the sky, Samael descended. He didn't use ropes or visible energy; he simply altered the density of the space beneath his boots, walking through the air as if on invisible steps until he touched the frosted ground.
The Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse remained sheathed at his side. He hadn't needed to draw it.
Elara stood before the remains of the matriarch, panting slightly, her head bowed, expecting a physical punishment for having let herself be carried away by her sadism.
Samael stopped beside her. He reached out his hand toward the older beast's ice dust remains. Applying a slight dimensional compression, he extracted the monster's core from the rubble.
Elara looked up, surprised. The core wasn't green or blue. It was a black, almost purulent orb, furrowed by dense purple veins pulsing with a dark vibration.
"This is not natural evolution," Samael said, his violet eyes scrutinizing the sphere. "It is Abyssal Qi injected artificially."
Samael turned over a piece of bone from the matriarch's carapace that had remained intact. Burned into the calcified bone was an unmistakable mark: a deformed Eye surrounded by purple lightning.
"They are breeding a siege army on our border," murmured Samael, and for the first time in weeks, a genuine, cold fury flashed in his gaze. "There is a cult of heretics worshipping the miasma."
Elara wiped a smudge of black blood from her cheek, her daggers still in her hands.
"If they are breeding monsters, Master... there must be a farm."
Samael nodded, crushing the corrupt core in his fist until it turned to dust.
"You shredded the flesh, I will follow the trail of the miasma. Let's walk. Today you are going to learn how to eradicate a plague from its root."
Hundreds of kilometers away, oblivious to the lethal cold of the canyon, the Morningstar Citadel bustled with the elite's military activity.
In the great training arena, Kael and Cedric watched from a stone box. In front of them, in the lower courtyard, Joren faced five elite disciples of the outer branch, all armed with heavy swords.
It wasn't a normal sparring match; it was a lesson in survival.
Kael, with his arms crossed, frowned.
"Look at him," the golden swordsman grunted. "Joren doesn't block. He doesn't attack with anger. He doesn't shout."
Below, Joren moved like a soundless breeze. There was no aggression on his face, not even a hint of competitive emotion. When a disciple launched a strike that would have split a rock in two, Joren simply tilted his torso a millimeter, let the steel pass, and, with a motion as casual as brushing dust off his shoulder, rested the edge of his matte dagger on the attacker's carotid artery. The fight ended before it began.
"That's what makes him terrifying, Kael," Cedric answered, analyzing the wind assassin's economy of movement. "You are driven by the glory of the perfect strike. Eris is driven by destruction. Elara kills out of sadism or devotion. But Joren... Joren snuffs out a life with the same emotion as someone drinking a glass of water. He is a perfect killing machine."
Kael snorted, agreeing with his fellow strategist. The legion was packed with lethal weapons, each with a different edge.
At the very top of the fortress's main tower, far from the clash of steel, the atmosphere was radically different.
The main room was bathed in the warm evening light. Seraphina sat on a silk divan, reading a clan logistics scroll, while little Celeste rested in her crib, playing with a small wooden talisman.
Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room grew tense.
It wasn't a change in temperature, but a pure karmic repulsion. The blue-violet mist that always accompanied Celeste, her aura of deep and dark destiny, agitated violently. The baby stopped playing. Her large eyes fixed on the north wall, looking through the stone and the dunes, toward the distant border.
A silent shriek, a vibration of heretical energy, rippled through the air.
Crack!
The tower's immense reinforced obsidian windows cracked simultaneously. The pressure of the baby's aura, reacting instinctively to a corrupt miasma hundreds of kilometers away, was enough to fracture the glass.
Seraphina dropped the scroll and stood up in an instant, shielding the crib with her own body. Her blue eyes shone with an imperial light, her empress's instinct evaluating the threat. However, there were no attackers in the fortress.
She looked at Celeste. The girl wasn't crying; her little hands were clenched into fists, as if she were trying to repel an invisible presence.
"A heretical power..." whispered Seraphina, gently stroking her daughter's forehead to calm the torrent of Qi. "Someone is manipulating the rot of the world too close to our territory."
Seraphina looked north, over the cracks in the glass. She knew Samael and Elara were out there.
"Kill them all, my king," she said to the air. "Let there remain neither bone nor ash."
Deep in the border canyons, the purple trail guided Samael and Elara to a geological fault hidden behind a curtain of sharp rocks.
Upon entering, the stench of death and miasma became suffocating. They found an enormous underground chamber. The floor was covered by thousands of translucent eggs the size of barrels. Inside each one, mutated scorpion larvae floated in a purple amniotic fluid, ready to hatch.
Elara, having learned her lesson in efficiency, didn't wait for the order. She expanded her [Shroud of Vitreous Fragments] throughout the entire cavern. With a single thought, she froze the entire room in fractions of a second. The thousands of eggs crystallized and died before they could beat one more time.
Samael ignored the dead eggs. His attention was fixed on the back of the cave.
The air vibrated strangely. There was a veil, a high-level optical illusion array trying to hide what lay behind the false stone wall.
Samael stepped forward until he stood before the wall.
"Pathetic refraction tricks," the Tyrant grunted.
Samael raised his bare hand. He didn't use the Odachi. He channeled his spatial authority directly onto the illusory veil and the physical rock wall. He clenched his fist, applying raw dimensional compression. Space itself crunched as if it were glass under a hydraulic press. The illusion shattered to pieces, and the rock wall imploded into its own center, revealing the truth.
An unstable teleportation portal, built with bone pillars and purple crystals, glowed in the darkness. And through the portal, in what appeared to be an immense underground base of operations, dozens of hooded cult cultivators worked frantically, feeding machines of corruption and loading weaponry onto armored beasts.
The collapse of the wall caught their attention. The heretics turned, their eyes widening at the sight of the imposing figure of Samael Morningstar and the mist-covered young woman standing in the rift of their secret base.
Samael gave no speech. He didn't draw his weapon. He looked down at Elara. His violet eyes promised absolute destruction.
"There is your graduation exam," the Sovereign decreed, his voice cutting through the heretics' terror like a scythe. "Kill them all. Shred their throats, freeze their hearts, and reduce this sect to a forgotten myth."
Elara twirled her daggers in her hands, the sadistic smile taking over her face once again upon receiving the green light for the slaughter.
"If you let even one escape to sound the alarm," Samael added, the weight of his gravitational domain subtly increasing, "I will break your legs myself."
"There will be no one left with lungs to scream, Master," Elara purred.
With a burst of pearly mist, Elara leapt through the dimensional rift, unleashing absolute winter upon the army of heretics. The first scream of terror echoed in the enemy base before being drowned out by the sound of ice freezing human blood.
Samael, watching the massacre with cold satisfaction, raised both hands and altered the tunnel's coordinates. He compressed the space around the entrance, sealing the physical rift and ensuring the cave became an airtight kill chamber.
The echo of the frontier had been answered. The Morningstar Empire didn't negotiate with plagues; it eradicated them.