Chapter 97: The Price of Dawn (Part 3 - The True Saint and the Abyss of the Soul)
The Altar of Lost Origin was bathed in a terrifying, heavy, almost reverential calm. The six elders and Seraphina, still grappling with the immensity of their new Semi-Laws and the biological trauma of their evolution, held their breath when Samael Morningstar took a step toward the center of the black stone circle.
The rock dust that Lilith had oxidized crunched beneath his boots. Samael was not going to claim a fragment of reality, nor was he going to beg nature for an unstable understanding. He was going to subjugate the very fabric of existence.
[Initiating the Path of the Three Trials. Objective: True Saint Stage 1.]
The ethereal doors materialized before him, pulsing with the ancestral energy of the mountain. But Samael did not walk through them. His mere presence, his absolute and unbreakable pride, made them tremble.
The shadow of his lineage tried to assault him with the guilt of the fallen Morningstars, but he simply absorbed the faces of the dead, accepting that spilled blood was the mortar of his empire. The labyrinth of the void tried to devour his Qi, but he was the lord of gravity; he suffocated the labyrinth itself before it could touch him. The abyss of time tried to show him a future of defeat and ashes, but little Celeste's voice echoed in the back of his mind, anchoring his sanity to an unbreakable promise.
Samael shattered the three conceptual trials in less than a heartbeat. The ethereal glass exploded around him.
[Trials Passed. Unlocking Law of Crimson Destiny.]
The first impact was not physical, but perceptual. The material world vanished from Samael's violet eyes. The obsidian cave, the altar, the flesh and blood of the elders surrounding him faded away. In its place, the universe revealed itself as an immense and complex loom.
Samael had just assimilated the Law of Crimson Destiny, a supreme manifestation of Causal Perception and Blood Prophecy.
He no longer saw matter; he saw the Fabric of Causality.
Before his eyes, millions of luminous "threads" crossed space, representing the direct connections between the actions of the present and the inescapable outcomes of the future.
Looking toward where his family stood, he saw threads of a brilliant, vibrant, and robust golden-red color. They were the threads of glory and success of his Primordial Dragon lineage; the destiny of his people shone with a blinding force. His Vision of Linked Threads allowed him to see the vitality of Kael's, Violeta's, and Seraphina's futures.
But when he forced his new vision upward, toward the surface and beyond the northern mountains, the panorama became repulsive. He saw countless black, withered, rotten threads converging on his position. It was the "trail of malice," the threat of the Northern Alliance and the Purple Light Sect that had not yet crossed the border, but whose homicidal intent already stained the tapestry of reality.
Samael smiled in his mind. He understood the true terror of this Law. He wasn't just a passive seer. He could execute the Severing of the Causal Link. By channeling his sword intent, his mind could physically "touch" those invisible threads. If he cut one of those black threads of enemy victory, he could thwart a plan before it was executed, sabotage destiny, ensuring that the opponent suffered "accidents" or failed their techniques. He was dictating the script of reality.
But the System gave him no time to revel in his new omniscience.
[Integrating Supreme Law Fragment: Blood & Void from System Storage.]
The Law of Blood, the atavistic rule that governed the vital essence of living beings, detonated inside him.
Samael felt his body transform into a biological nuclear reactor. A crimson-red energy, so deep it bordered on black, erupted from his pores. It wasn't a light or volatile aura; it had the viscosity of heavy oil, a spiritual liquid that flowed through the cavern air as if they were submerged in the ocean.
The metallic smell of iron and copper saturated the environment. Samael's veins shone intensely through his pale skin, resembling filaments of incandescent ruby. A rhythmic and constant sound, the heartbeat of a colossal heart that did not belong to this world, began to rumble in the cavern, synchronizing with the terrified heartbeats of the elders present.
Samael understood the Domain of Vital Essence. Blood was no longer a fluid; it was a manuscript and a mystic fuel. He could boil the blood of any enemy with an open wound, cause internal explosions, or coagulate it to paralyze hearts with a single thought. His Atavistic Lineage Activation allowed him to burn that essence to triple the power of any attack, becoming a Berserker of Law. But with the power came the instinctive warning: the risk of the "Corruption of Hunger," the danger of becoming a conceptual vampire dependent on slaughter.
Before the boiling blood could corrupt his mind, the Law of the Void appeared to impose absolute silence.
If blood was exacerbated life, the void was the end of all things.
The visual manifestation of the Law of Blood was suddenly swallowed by a "hole" in his sight. It wasn't darkness, it wasn't the color black; it was pure non-existence. Air, light, and energy simply ceased to be around Samael. The edges of this anomaly vibrated with a static of white and very dark violet, where material reality desperately fought not to be devoured.
The thunderous beat of the colossal heart was abruptly silenced. The Silence of the Soul fell upon him, a hollow hum that seemed to originate from within his own brain. Samael understood Conceptual Erasure. Any technique, any element that touched this nothingness, would disappear, because in the Void there are no physical rules that permit existence. He could use Void Displacement to envelop his body, becoming absolutely and truly untouchable. He could unleash the Hunger of the Abyss to collapse matter into a singular point.
But the void hated existence, including his own. If he lost control, he would erase himself, becoming an "Empty Shell," a being without a soul, without a name, without a history.
[Synchronizing pre-existing Law of Space to contain the Singularity.]
To prevent the Void from devouring the Blood, and the Blood from overflowing Destiny, Samael's Law of Space activated at its maximum capacity.
The infinite network of silver lines glowed. The air around him fractured like the glass of an immense mirror. Space folded, compressing distances and dictating the Authority of Volume.
The Law of Space acted as the unbreakable canvas upon which the Blood and the Void tried to paint.
[Multiple Singularity Warning: The Host is attempting to assimilate Four Supreme Laws simultaneously. Risk of soul annihilation: Critical.]
A human's physical body, even one on the threshold of the Saint Realm, was not designed to house four of the universe's spinal columns at the same time. Destiny, Blood, Void, and Space entered into direct conflict. The logic of reality collapsed within Samael's meridians.
The pressure was so astronomically absurd, the spiritual pain so unspeakable, that Samael's mind completely tore apart.
He was violently ripped from his own psyche, expelled from the material world, and hurled into the unfathomable depths of his primordial blood's genetic memory.
The Vision of the Singularity.
Samael was no longer in the cavern. He was falling through a tunnel of dead stars, traveling eons backward in time, until he crashed into the consciousness of a spectator in a forgotten era.
He found himself floating, incorporeal, over a landscape that the human mind was biologically incapable of processing. He was witnessing a war, but not a dispute over empires or planets. It was a cosmic slaughterhouse.
Before his terrified and fascinated gaze, entire universes fell and shattered with the fragility of blown glass spheres. Skies spanning entire dimensions, painted with millions of impossible colors, burned in fires that emitted no heat, but pure conceptual annihilation.
The entities tearing each other apart in this pandemonium were divine monstrosities. Mystical beasts and aberrations more massive than entire solar systems. He saw serpents whose scales were living nebulas devouring constellations, and gigantic wolves forged of dark matter crushing suns in their maws. The entire canvas of creation was a literal ocean of cosmic blood and absolute slaughter, an orgy of unleashed entropy.
Any mortal would have lost their sanity instantly in the face of such insignificance. The fear of the unknown would have pulverized their soul.
But Samael felt no fear.
Through the initial terror, a savage euphoria, a sickly and overwhelming ecstasy invaded the entirety of his being. His own blood, that Morningstar blood he now dominated as a Supreme Law, roared in synchrony with the cosmic massacre. The thrill of infinite battles, the lust for war, the primal desire to drown in seas of blood and kill divine entities boiled within him.
His lineage resonated like thunder in the void, howling with pleasure, dictating a single, unquestionable truth: «This is where I belong. This is my true home. This is the domain I must claim.»
Suddenly, the vision of the war flickered, distorted by brilliant static.
Through the chaos of exploding planets, Samael glimpsed two women. They were enveloped in a blinding, primordial light. They were of a beauty so painful, so perfect and unattainable, that looking at them burned his soul. Both were speaking to him. They moved their lips with desperate urgency, their faces contorted in anguish. They spoke words in an ancient, resonant language, a chant that made the fabric of the universe vibrate, but which Samael's mind, bound by human limitation, completely failed to decipher. They seemed like warnings, pleas lost in the cosmic wind, swept away by the destruction of the war.
Before he could force his mind to understand a single syllable, the vision shifted again with a repulsive violence, causing him spiritual nausea.
The chaos of the battle vanished, replaced by absolute nothingness.
Before him, in the middle of the void, flowed a river of immeasurable proportions. It was not composed of water, nor of visible energy. It was the River of Time.
An immense current of liquid silver light flowing eternally through the universe, and in its waves, Samael could simultaneously see all possible realities, all alternatives, all withered yesterdays, and all tomorrows yet unborn. It was the main artery of creation.
Where am I? Samael's consciousness wondered, overwhelmed by the immensity of infinity.
But infinity itself broke.
The "sky" above the River of Time tore apart, split in two by a kinetic and magical impact that reason could not conceive.
Two cosmic entities burst into the vision, colliding mid-flight. They were not beasts, nor humanoid gods; they were living concepts sheathed in divine matter. Their battle was so immensely destructive that the reality around them liquefied.
The impact of their clash was so absolute that the River of Time, the most immovable and perpetual force in the universe, churned violently. The waves of silver light overflowed, creating anomalies and broken timelines, and for an instant of absolute terror... the river stopped. Chronology itself froze under the weight of the battle. The dimensions around them crumbled like sandcastles under the tide. The void bled unreal colors.
And then, in the very center of that temporal annihilation, one of the beings mutated.
For a blink of time that to Samael felt like millennia of observation, the entity adopted a biological form that defied every natural rule.
A Dragon.
But not a winged reptile of scaly hide and sulfur fire. It was an unfathomable colossus. Its scales did not reflect light; they contained entire galaxies, spirals of stardust, and stars being born and dying with every movement of its muscles. Its eyes were two gigantic wells of deep, fathomless purple, crossed by lightning storms of bloody crimson. From its massive head projected intricate horns of pure obsidian that intertwined to form a divine crown piercing the firmament.
The Galactic Dragon opened its cosmic maws, and from that obsidian crown, a beam of concentrated energy—a pillar of light containing the weight of a hundred universes—shot forth.
The beam struck the second entity, shattering reality in its path. The roar of that detonation fractured the River of Time. The other being was erased from the plane, sent flying into infinite darkness at transdimensional speeds, defeated by the dragon's supremacy.
The leviathan of galaxies rose victorious amidst the absolute destruction.
And for a second... a single, minuscule, and eternal second... the Galactic Dragon lowered its colossal head.
Its unfathomable purple eyes, filled with the knowledge of creation and destruction, locked directly onto the tiny, invisible, and insignificant soul of Samael Morningstar.
Samael felt the entire universe stop just to look at him. The weight of that gaze immobilized him completely. It was the judgment of a supreme being.
The dragon did not move its lips, but its voice, a telepathic vibration that threatened to pulverize the very concept of Samael, shook the fabric of his existence. Hundreds of arcane words, heavy as planets, slammed into his brain, but the human mind, incapable of processing the divine language without exploding, discarded almost the entire transmission.
Only a single phrase, forcibly translated by the survival instinct of his primordial lineage, was branded with fire and acid into his soul:
"It is the last chance."
The Galactic Dragon's words were not a sound; they were an absolute hammer blow against the very foundations of Samael Morningstar's existence.
Understanding the meaning of that phrase, processing the weight of that violet gaze that encompassed galaxies, was the catalyst for absolute ruin. The human mind, no matter how fortified by four Supreme Laws, remained tethered to the biology of a lower plane. It was a clay vessel attempting to contain the fury of a stellar ocean.
The vessel broke.
Samael's mind fractured into millions of splinters. Pure, cold, unadulterated madness fell upon him. He felt his soul, the very core of his identity, being stretched in a thousand directions simultaneously, ground by the invisible gears of a universe demanding an incomprehensible responsibility from him. The pain was not physical; it was the unspeakable agony of consciousness annihilation. The self was ceasing to exist.
The vision of the cosmic war, the River of Time, and the star-scaled colossus exploded into a tempest of bloody glass.
Samael was cast into the void. But he was not sucked back to his physical body at the Altar of Lost Origin.
The force of the impact was so colossal that his fractured consciousness crashed through the bottom of his own Sea of Consciousness. He broke through the floor of his own mind and fell to a deeper place. A place that not even he, with all his mastery over the Void and Space, knew existed within himself.
It was the Soul Root. The sanctum sanctorum of his being.
In this space, there was no gravity, no light, no darkness, no time. It was an infinite blank canvas, a primordial void that preceded creation. And here, the broken pieces of Samael's soul floated adrift, on the verge of dissolving into nothingness—which would mean his definitive death, the absolute impossibility of reincarnating or even existing again on the wheel of Samsara.
But the annihilation stopped.
The absolute silence of that infinite nothingness was disturbed by an anomaly. Space itself curved, not from a technique, but from the arrival of presences that superseded the authority of any local law.
From absolute nothingness, two figures manifested. They didn't walk in or open portals; they simply imposed their existence in a place where no one else should be able to enter.
The first was a small, slender figure floating gracefully in the void. Her hair was extraordinary: long, pure immaculate white, and so brilliant it seemed woven from the light of the cosmos's first dawn. Atop her head, intricate and majestic white horns intertwined to form a natural, divine crown. From her back unfolded enormous wings of blinding purity, wings that did not belong to an angel, but to a primordial deity.
However, her face was completely blurred, incomprehensible to any form of perception. Her entire body was semi-transparent, out of phase. She did not exist in the current timeline. She was an echo, a projection from an unreachable place or era, but ironically, she radiated a presence so absolute and suffocating that the very void of the Soul Root trembled before her.
Beside her, the second figure was even more incomprehensible. It had no defined shape. It was a completely blurred, chaotic, and distorted silhouette. Looking at it was to feel one's mind tearing apart. Its mere existence seemed to be a direct and flagrant violation of universal laws, a walking heresy, something flatly forbidden by the Heavens themselves. Chaos and reality refused to coexist with it, causing the space around it to constantly "glitch" and warp.
Both entities appeared because they had felt the collapse. The bond linking them to this piece of broken soul transcended death and dimensions.
Seeing the fragments of Samael's consciousness floating, on the verge of vanishing forever, the aura of both women agitated violently. The temperature in a place lacking thermodynamics dropped to an ontological cold.
The woman with white hair and blinding wings descended quickly toward the fragments. Her posture, despite her divine immensity, denoted a sudden and intense frustration. She crossed her arms, causing her massive wings to flutter with indignation.
"Husband!" the figure in white exclaimed, her voice resonating like crystal bells, pure but tinged with undeniable anger. She was, in every sense, throwing a divine tantrum. "It is still too early! You shouldn't be seeing that! You shouldn't be awakening these memories so quickly! Look at you, you'll only cause yourself irreparable damage if you force the seal before its time!"
Her tone was that of a wife scolding a stubborn husband who had just done something incredibly dangerous and stupid—a familiarity that absurdly contrasted with the cosmic pressure emanating from her being.
The distorted figure, the anomaly forbidden by the Heavens, floated closer slowly. Its voice was not a sound, but a vibration that translated directly into pure meaning. "It is indeed too early for this to happen," conceded the blurry figure, with a chilling, analytical calm. "But you know very well how he is. You know him better than anyone in all existence. He has never known how to wait. He has never known the meaning of restraint."
Hearing this, the white-haired woman stopped her tantrum. She lowered her arms, and her wings folded softly against her back. An aura of profound melancholy and devoted love replaced her annoyance. She sighed, a sound that seemed to hold the weight of millennia of waiting. "You're right..." she murmured, her blurred face leaning toward the pieces of Samael's soul. "But we cannot leave him like this. The soul is the sacred vessel. Damage as severe as this will not only kill him now; it will stop the wheel from turning. It will prevent him from even existing again if the cycle resets. We have to make urgent adjustments. We must do something right now."
The distorted figure nodded solemnly. Reality around it screeched in response to its movement.
Without wasting a microsecond, the two cosmic deities went to work. They extended their hands—or what equated to them—and began to weave. They did not use Origin Stage Qi, or even Supreme Laws of the Saint Realm. They were manipulating Primordial Authorities, the raw material of creation and destiny.
Threads of immaculate white light and chaotic black energy intertwined. The woman in white gathered each splinter of Samael's soul with infinite delicacy, healing the fractures caused by the Galactic Dragon's words. She poured in a vitality that healed the very essence of being, sealing the cracks that madness had opened.
Simultaneously, the blurry figure proceeded to impose layer upon layer of seals. Runes unknown to any current pantheon surrounded the reconstructed soul. They were ontological padlocks designed to block premature access to the deepest memories of his lineage, sealing the memory of the cosmic war and isolating the comprehension of the Dragon's language, leaving only manageable echoes.
They were pulling Samael from the abyss, rebuilding his mind piece by piece, ensuring he emerged unscathed from that place of perdition.
As they wove the final healing seals, the presence of the forbidden figure became denser and more ominous. "Good," the distorted voice ruled, evaluating the stabilized soul. "With this ready, let us return. The other side is getting worse. The pressure is increasing, and we must hold out until he is truly ready to cross over. We cannot let them realize his existence on this plane yet. If the eyes from the other side fix on him now, he will be erased before his crown blooms."
The white-haired woman nodded gravely. She spread her wings, and a cascade of silver light covered Samael's soul, adding a final, colossal extra layer of concealment. A net of karmic camouflage that would deflect the attention of entities beyond the continent and the world itself. "This extra layer will last him some time," said the white-horned deity, "as long as he doesn't overdo it. If he keeps his power within the limits of this lower continent, he will go unnoticed by the Heavens and by them."
But suddenly, the woman in white paused. She tilted her incomprehensible face and let out a small, melodic laugh, a sound mixing affection with absolute resignation. "You know that's completely impossible, right?" she said to the distorted figure. "Always, wherever he is born, wherever he is, or wherever he goes, he causes trouble. His very nature is conquest. He will always find a way to dominate, to subjugate, and to rule. Asking him to go unnoticed is like asking fire not to burn."
The forbidden figure emitted the equivalent of a deep sigh of cosmic exhaustion. "Yes. You are right. He is the beast that devours the storm. That is why... that is why we established this mechanism. That is why she is here. That was the purpose of her creation. But it seems she isn't doing a particularly good job of containing him."
At those words, the aura of the two immense figures turned frigid, threatening, and lethal.
They turned in unison toward a corner of the infinite void of the Soul Root.
There, hiding, minimized, and trembling with pure terror, was someone else in that infinite nothingness. Floating near the projection of the blurry figure was a tiny silhouette.
It looked like a strange, exotic mix between a small dragon and a fairy. It possessed intricate horns on its tiny head and translucent deep violet wings that crackled with stardust. It was the conscious manifestation, the Avatar of the System that governed Samael's evolution, the entity that communicated via panels and golden letters.
And that being, which presented itself to Samael as an omnipotent, calculating machine, was currently terrified, curled up in on itself under the crushing aura of the two deities.
The white-haired woman, abandoning all her previous sweetness, floated over to the tiny violet creature. Her aura became sharp and dictatorial, that of a true Empress of dimensions. "Do not ever let this happen again," the deity in white hissed, her voice distilling a murderous intent that would have vaporized a True Saint in a blink. "This was a failure in your restrictions. You exposed him to the singularity before his container was forged. If an incident of this magnitude happens again... if anything happens to his soul again... you know what will happen to you, right?"
The tiny creature, trembling convulsively under the weight of the threat, nodded its head frantically. Its violet wings vibrated with panic, its wide eyes reflecting existential terror as it made exaggerated gestures of obedience, as if saying: «Yes, ma'am! At your absolute command! It won't happen again! I will control the information flow!»
The System Avatar knew perfectly well that these two women were not mere projections; they were its creators, or at the very least, possessed the absolute authority to dismantle it code by code, soul by soul.
The forbidden, distorted figure observed the scene, satisfied with the construct's submission. The job was done. Samael's soul was intact, healed, fortified, hidden, and ready to be returned to the physical world. The disaster had been contained.
The atmosphere in the deep void suddenly grew tense, announcing the impending disconnection.
The blurry figure, forbidden by the Heavens, turned toward Samael's repaired soul. It murmured a few final words in a language belonging to no living or dead race in the current universe. They were absolutely unintelligible words, syllables possessing such massive ontological weight that, upon being spoken, they warped and folded the very fabric of the soul for a second. It was a spell of protection, a hidden blessing that would operate in the shadows of his destiny.
And then, without flashes of light or bursts of energy, the three figures—the wife in white, the distorted heresy, and the tiny violet fairy-dragon—simply vanished. They disappeared without leaving a single trace, nor an energy signature, nor an echo in Samael's soul.
The Soul Root was left in silence, intact and pure.
The physical universe violently reclaimed its son.
Samael was hurled back into material reality across space and time, suddenly sucked into his body at the center of the Altar of Lost Origin.
He opened his eyes.
The physical experience of waking up was atrocious. He gasped for air with the desperation of a drowned man who had just broken the ocean's surface. His body was drenched in cold sweat, the black tunic clinging to his skin. He trembled uncontrollably, a residual biological spasm from the shock his soul had suffered. His breathing was a ragged, hoarse wheeze echoing in the silence of the obsidian cavern.
The throbbing pain in his head was so intense that the millennial runes of the altar spun around him. He felt as if every vein in his brain was going to burst. But strangely, the sensation that his soul was disintegrating had vanished completely, replaced by a solidity and spiritual fortification he had never felt before.
The material universe did not recognize the dialogue in the abyss; it only recognized the ascension of a tyrant.
Above his head, floating a few inches from his dark hair, the physical manifestation of his new status had materialized—the System's reward for taming four Supreme Laws. The Crown of the Eternal Dawn.
To the sight of everyone present in the cave, the Saint-grade relic did not look like a mortal crown of gold. It was composed of seven geometrically perfect, translucent crystal spires floating in a concentric circle above the Patriarch's head. The seven spires were intertwined and held together by fine threads of brilliant pale blue energy that flickered rhythmically in unison with Samael's frantic exhalations.
Even blinded by the residual pain, the Crown began to operate automatically, passively altering the environment.
The air within the Crown's circle seemed submerged underwater; light refracted strangely, creating the Domain of Micro-Space within a ten-meter radius. Inside that invisible bubble, Samael possessed absolute spatial authority over small trajectories.
Simultaneously, the crown's second vital property activated: Arcane Flow Processing. Samael's violet eyes, still dilated from trauma, began to emit a cold, calculating white glow. Tiny mathematical runes and spatial formulas spun chaotically within his pupils. His cognition accelerated massively. The flow of time for the six elders and Seraphina slowed down by twenty percent in his perception. The chaos of his mind, which until a second ago threatened to lobotomize him, was meticulously reorganized into high-speed mental compartments.
But Samael's appearance was not one of holiness. It was the nightmare of the Void and Blood unleashed.
A passive annihilation barrier, formed by a dark void that devoured light and dense sparks of crimson blood that rotted the air, abruptly expanded around him, repelling any attempt at physical contact. The aura was lethal, unstable.
Seraphina, her usual imperial majesty broken by genuine panic, saw her husband trembling, gasping, and writhing. Holding little Celeste to her chest with one arm, the Empress tried to run toward him. She forgot for a second that her own newly acquired Semi-Law of Static Absolute Zero clashed violently against Samael's annihilation barrier, creating explosions of frost and void where the two forces came into conflict.
"Samael!" the Empress cried, her voice cracking, the sound distorted and slowed by the conceptual forces in the room.
The other elders reacted as well. Lilith, the deity of ash, leaning on the solid stone presence of Elder Marcus and Sela's shadows, took a step forward, her usually inscrutable face now contorted by the deepest fear. "Patriarch! Hear our voices! Come out of the abyss!"
His family's muffled shouts, warped by time, space, and panic, reached Samael like echoes through a wall of deep water. He turned clumsily toward them, resting a bloody hand on the millennial stone of the altar to avoid falling to his knees.
With his accelerated but blurred vision, he saw Lilith reach out to him. He saw Seraphina, his unwavering consort, crying genuine tears that froze into ice diamonds before rolling down her pale cheeks. And he saw little Celeste, who was not crying; the baby reached her little hands toward him from the other side of the annihilation barrier, her heterochromatic eyes reflecting her father's strange, terrifying, and incomprehensible affliction.
What... what the hell just happened to me? Samael asked himself inside his own mind, as sanity retook the helm. What did I see? What was it that almost killed me from the inside?
He forced his brain to remember. He tried to evoke the cosmic slaughterhouse of broken galaxies. He tried to evoke the perfect, blurred faces of the two deities of light. He tried to visualize the silver immensity of the River of Time and the crushing majesty of the Dragon shooting destruction from its obsidian crown.
But the ontological seals imposed by the distorted figure fulfilled their protective function brutally.
Every conscious attempt by Samael to recover those forbidden memories triggered a stab of pure agony, a lacerating, electrical pain that pierced his frontal lobe. He felt his skull was going to split in two like a dry nut if he kept digging into that artificially sealed memory. The material universe, along with the modifications in his soul, refused to grant him access.
With a hoarse groan, Samael stopped trying to remember. He gave up pushing against the wall of pain in his mind.
He let the image of the cosmic war, of the two women, and of the little fairy-dragon sink irrevocably into the inaccessible depths of his subconscious. The only thing the System, or the entities beyond it, allowed him to retain in his superficial memory was a single isolated phrase, stripped of its apocalyptic context, but loaded with an urgency heavy as lead.
It is the last chance.
Samael slowly lowered his hands from his face. The trembling in his hands ceased. His breathing became steady, rhythmic, and deep.
It was then that the third and most crucial property of the Crown of the Eternal Dawn fully activated, responding to the stabilization of his will: the Unyielding Mind.
The sublime relic above his head stopped flickering and emitted a halo of continuous calm. A faint blue light descended upon him, an energy that did not illuminate the physical darkness of the cave, but radically "cleansed" the confusion of his psyche. Absolute immunity to the pressure of higher realms, to intimidation, and to divine terror sealed the last cracks of madness threatening to linger in the depths of his being. His will, which had been on the verge of being ground down by infinity, was reinforced with spiritual steel.
This passive property granted him an outward appearance of absolute serenity. A frigid, perfect, and tyrannical bearing that contrasted grotesquely with the biological disaster of his own ascension that had just occurred seconds ago.
The Patriarch straightened up. His spine aligned with the uprightness of a conqueror. The unfathomable arrogance and tyranny he possessed returned to his eyes, now bright, cold, and lethal.
With a simple, lazy thought, the chaotic annihilation barrier of blood and void threatening to destroy the elders around him collapsed in on itself, reabsorbed through the pores of his skin without a trace, as if it had never existed.
The System's electronic voice, now sounding inexplicably docile and submissive, confirmed reality's sentence at the edge of his vision.
[Ascension Completed and Multiply Stabilized.][Current Rank: True Saint Stage 1 - Absolute Peak.]
Samael Morningstar was no longer a simple cultivator peering at the peak of the mountain of mortality. He had become a living vessel for four absolute Supreme Laws. He was the undisputed master of distances, the lord of non-existence, the monarch of blood, and the dictator of causality. And upon his head, he wore the crown to prove it.
Samael looked at his wife, whose shoulders relaxed in a deep sigh of relief, and at his daughter, who smiled at him from a distance. Then, his violet gaze swept over the six Half-Saint monsters comprising his council.
Feeling the absolute, dense, and suffocating oppression of his newly stabilized cultivation, the six elders slowly fell to their knees before him. They did not do so out of formal obligation; their bodies were forced downward by the overwhelming pressure of the earthly deity that now resided in their Patriarch's flesh.
The impending war, that extinction crisis plaguing their minds, the Northern Alliance, the three enemy True Saints, and the immense army of the Purple Light Sect... all of it reconfigured in Samael's mind. It no longer seemed like a desperate challenge or a test of survival.
To the accelerated, cold, and unyielding mind of Samael Morningstar, armed with the power of the Void and Destiny, the war now felt like a mere administrative procedure. It was going to be the simple, bloody, and routine act of crushing the insects that had had the suicidal audacity to crawl to the gates of his cradle.
The Patriarch slowly raised his gaze toward the millennial stone ceiling of the cavern.
With his Law of Crimson Destiny flowing freely through his white eyes, his vision pierced the hard obsidian rock, passed through the fortress, crossed the mountains, and cut through the storm clouds of the continent. In the distance, he observed with macabre clarity the dark, withered threads of his enemies marching north, oblivious to the true level of the beast they had just awakened in the desert.
It is the last chance, Samael repeated in the privacy of his mind, accepting the inscrutable mandate without question.
A smile slowly spread across his perfect face. It was not a smile of relief for having survived the madness. It was the smile of a dark deity, infinitely arrogant and sadistic, who had just realized he possessed the absolute power to devour the entire world... and that, finally, he was going to start doing so tonight.