Chapter 71: The Crucible of the Twenty-One (Part 2)
At the pinnacle of the main tower, the silence was barely interrupted by the harmonic hum of the five screens of projected light floating in the center of the immense throne room.
Samael Morningstar watched the images with his arms crossed behind his back. His face reflected the severity of a master evaluating his disciples, but deep in his violet eyes shone a silent, profoundly protective pride. Beside him, Great Elder Lilith watched the first screen with an elegant, maternal bearing. Her white hair, streaked with silver and reddish strands, fell gracefully over her smoky-red garments. Her fair skin, possessing a subtle ashen glow, contrasted with the intensity of her dark red eyes.
In that projection, four figures had been separated into individual, hostile dimensions—environments specifically designed to test their natures. They were Bren, Maren, Xylia, and Lys.
"You sent them to the first floor," commented Lilith, her voice serene and thoughtful. "Anyone would think the basic level is insufficient for Origin Realm cultivators. Especially for those four. They possess the greatest raw destructive power in the entire legion. Bren can demolish a fortress with his bare fists, and Xylia can level an entire valley with a single storm."
Samael did not take his eyes off the screens. "That is precisely why they are there," the Patriarch replied, his voice laden with a firm, pedagogical authority. "They are cannons with fissures, Lilith. They waste more energy than what impacts their targets. Their power is immense, yes, but it is chaotic. If they do not learn to compress their element, any expert with true discipline won't need to attack them; they will simply dodge until they bleed them dry, begging for air."
Seraphina, seated with imperial grace a few steps away, gently rocked the crib where little Celeste slept peacefully. The Empress's silver-blue hair gleamed under the morning light filtering through the windows, and her eyes, of a deep, almost translucent blue framed by that hypnotic silver ring, reflected the flashes of the screens.
"Power that is not controlled is only a danger to the one who wields it," murmured Seraphina, her voice imbued with impeccable tactical wisdom. "Floor 1 will not teach them new tricks. It will force them not to waste a single drop of Qi, or they will consume themselves."
On the screen corresponding to Bren, the colossus's personal hell had just begun.
The bald giant's mind had been thrown into a spherical pressure chamber, forged entirely of glowing obsidian. It was like being trapped in the closed core of a volcano about to erupt. The air was so thick and burning that breathing felt like swallowing live coals.
True to his indomitable nature, Bren did not cower. He roared furiously, smashing his heavy war knuckledusters together.
"Is this all the heat you have, stone box?!" he bellowed, flexing his herculean musculature. "I'll show you what melting mountains looks like!"
Bren tried to channel his ultimate technique. He bent his legs, prepared to activate the [Eruption of Blood and Rock]. He was accustomed to pushing his core to the absolute limit, forcing internal pressure until his own pores sweated pure blood to release the excess tectonic heat and prevent his organs from melting.
However, the instant he tried to release the pressure, the System of Floor 1 imposed its absolute rule.
Bren's virtual body was completely sealed.
His pores closed like steel vaults. His skin became impenetrable. Suddenly, the massive heat he had generated had nowhere to escape. He couldn't sweat. He couldn't bleed. He couldn't release the thermal pressure outward through an explosion.
"AARRGGH!" Bren's scream of agony shook the obsidian chamber.
Spiritual magma boiled within his own meridians, burning his simulated internal organs. In the throne room, Bren's mental damage meter instantly shot up to twenty percent, then thirty. His brown eyes, usually brimming with ferocity, widened, bloodshot with boiling blood.
If he tried to force the explosion like a brute, he would incinerate himself. The psychological pain was indescribable, a claustrophobic torture where his own power was his executioner. He fell to his knees, pounding the burning stone floor with his fists, but the energy simply bounced back inside him.
Control, he thought desperately through the veil of pure agony. If I can't let it out... I must swallow it.
Forced by the fear of his consciousness being annihilated, Bren stopped trying to expel the heat. In an act of superhuman concentration that went against all his brawler instincts, he began to compress the immense amount of magmatic energy. He forced the spiritual lava to retreat from his skin into his muscles, and then, with even greater pain, pushed it deep into his very bones.
Slowly, the chaotic, orange-red glow that always surrounded him began to disappear. His skin stopped cracking. In its place, a white, pure, contained glow of terrifying thermal density began to radiate from within his skeleton. Bren was ceasing to be an erratically erupting volcano, becoming a perfect smelting furnace, an unbreakable forge that did not waste a single degree of temperature.
Millions of mental kilometers away, in isolated chambers sharing an apocalyptic sky, Maren and Xylia faced the unleashed fury of the heavens.
Both had been thrown into immense, barren wastelands of black crystal. Above their heads, electrical storms of biblical proportions roared with a violence that defied reason. Lightning bolts the thickness of towers fell incessantly, fracturing the ground and filling the air with a suffocating smell of burnt ozone.
Maren, the lightning cultivator, leaped nimbly to dodge the first strike. True to his aggressive, electrical style, he tried to generate his own discharges, preparing to launch a net of lightning to intercept the sky's fury.
But his meridians did not respond.
The System of Floor 1 had blocked his ability to generate lightning Qi. He was empty. And above him, a bluish lightning bolt, charged with the force of a natural disaster, fell directly upon his body.
The impact threw him dozens of meters across the crystal floor. Maren screamed, the pain of electrocution shaking his simulated neural network. His mental damage spiked to forty percent. He couldn't attack. He couldn't defend himself with his own techniques. He could only receive.
He understood the rule a second before the next strike: if he couldn't generate energy, he had to assimilate it.
When the second lightning bolt descended, Maren didn't try to dodge or block it. He opened his meridians to the maximum, receiving the strike directly in his chest. The System demanded absolute efficiency. If a single spark of the absorbed energy leaked out of his control, it would burn his skin.
Maren gritted his teeth until they almost cracked, feeling hundreds of thousands of volts course through his pathways. He literally had to become a perfect human capacitor, a battery that trapped the sky's power without letting even static escape. His body, usually crackling with wasted energy, became completely silent, but his eyes shone with a blinding, hyper-compressed blue light.
Several leagues away in that same wasteland, Xylia faced a similar dilemma, but on a much vaster scale.
As a user of Imperial Thunder and possessing innate control over the weather, her first instinct was to dominate the storm. She raised her arms toward the tempestuous sky, imposing her will on the clouds to dispel the dark thunderheads and calm the atmospheric fury.
However, the System was not going to let her win with brute force. The storm looming over her possessed a Qi density a hundred times greater than the maximum reserves of her Origin Realm. Trying to subdue it by force only enraged the storm further, returning her Qi like a whiplash of barometric pressure that threw her to her knees, bleeding from her nose and ears.
The young tactician's mental damage meter climbed to fifty percent. Trying to subdue a lion by grabbing its jaws would only get her arms torn off.
Xylia, panting on the black crystal, lowered her hands. She closed her eyes amidst the deafening pandemonium.
Don't fight the tide, she thought, her tactical mind adapting to adversity. Find the current.
She stopped trying to crush the storm with her imperial Qi. Instead, she extended thin threads of perception toward the clouds, not as chains, but as sensors. She sought the chaotic rhythm of the pressure, the erratic dance of the electrons, the hidden core of the disturbance.
Instead of shouting at the sky to obey, Xylia waited for the exact moment. When the storm's pressure reached its tipping point, milliseconds away from discharging a colossal bolt, she applied a minuscule touch of her Qi. A surgical, precise interference that consumed less energy than striking a match.
The colossal lightning bolt did not strike her; it deviated kilometers away, hitting harmlessly. The storm roared, but Xylia had found the beat. She had learned that the true Empress of the Storm is not the one who spends her energy competing with the thunder, but the one who conducts the celestial orchestra by barely moving a finger.
If the wasteland of lightning was a pandemonium of noise and light, Lys's personal hell was exactly the opposite.
The beautiful and devoted priestess of light had fallen into an abyss of absolute darkness. It wasn't a simple absence of light; it was a black, voracious, and aggressive entity, a conceptual void designed to swallow any trace of hope and warmth. It was an existential cold that threatened to devour her sanity.
True to her pure and scorching nature, Lys did not hesitate. She brought her palms together and released the entirety of her luminous Qi.
"[Dome of Dawn]!" she shouted, her voice trembling from the effort.
A hemisphere of golden light erupted from her core, seeking to illuminate the infinite black space and push the shadows away from her. In the real world, this technique would have lit up an entire city and vaporized dark energies with its photonic heat.
Here, on Floor 1 of the Pagoda, the immense golden dome barely lasted three seconds.
The darkness did not back away. It lunged at the light, chewing it, devouring it with terrifying efficiency. The immense amount of energy Lys had expelled was drained immediately. The darkness closed in on her again, denser, stealing the oxygen from her simulated lungs and plunging her into suffocating blindness.
Her mental damage skyrocketed to sixty percent. Panic began to scratch at the edges of her devotion. If she kept expelling light in large quantities, the darkness would feast on her until her mind was left comatose.
She fell to her knees, feeling the absolute cold of nothingness begin to crystallize her thoughts.
Scattered light is just food for the abyss, she realized, pressing her hands against her chest.
Lys closed her eyes, ignoring the darkness trying to drag her down. Instead of pushing her Qi outward to create a massive sun, she began to pull it inward. She compressed her devotion, her unbreakable faith, her sense of justice. She reduced the diameter of her light from kilometers to meters, then to centimeters, then to millimeters.
The internal pressure was horrifying, but she didn't yield.
She forced all the immensity of her Dome of Dawn and condensed it into the tip of her index finger. The effort made tears of light fall down her closed cheeks.
When she opened her eyes, there was no massive glow, no golden dome. There was only a tiny point of light on her fingertip. A single, hyper-condensed photon. But its density was so absolute, so unbreakably pure, that the darkness around her hissed and recoiled, unable to devour something so dense. It didn't illuminate the world, but it pierced the blackness like a divine needle. Lys's light had ceased to be a beacon and became a laser of annihilation.
In the fortress's throne room, the hum of the screens seemed to have stabilized.
The floating numerical indicators marking the mental damage of the four destroyers showed alarming figures: sixty-two percent, sixty-five percent, sixty-eight. They were dangerously close to being expelled from the simulation or, worse, damaging their minds.
However, Samael Morningstar did not look away; a genuine feeling of approval and pride crossed his face. As the pillar of the family, he knew that the young ones' current suffering was the shield that would protect them tomorrow.
On the screens, the chaos had disappeared. Bren was no longer a walking explosion, but a core of white heat, silent and immovable. Maren and Xylia stood amidst the apocalypse as absolute masters of efficiency, deflecting or absorbing colossal lightning bolts with minimal movements. And Lys, in the center of the blackness, held her needle of light with astonishing serenity, its unwavering brilliance cutting the darkness with surgical precision.
They had purged the excess. Their raw power had been tamed and sharpened.
"They have overcome their own nature," whispered Lilith, nodding slowly with a maternal smile.
Seraphina looked at Samael, pausing the gentle rocking of Celeste's crib for a second. Her deep blue eyes shone with an understanding of her husband's strategy. "The foundation of their power no longer has fissures. They have understood that true lethality lies in absolute control."
"And that was only the first level," the Patriarch replied, his tone reflecting the dedication of a master preparing his own for the true challenge. "They have mastered their tools, but a tool is useless if the hand wielding it wavers before pure adversity."
Samael raised a hand and swiped two fingers in the air. The Floor 1 screens turned off instantly, and the Pagoda's matrix runes immediately projected the visions of the next hell.
Floor 2. The Mirror Shadows.
The throne room filled with the light of the stages where Draven, Rowan, Elian, and Cedric had just opened their eyes, unaware that they were about to face the most terrifying enemies the System could conjure: themselves, but devoid of pity, errors, or fatigue.
The true psychological carnage was about to be unleashed.