Chapter 164: The Soul Crystal and the Avatar of the Abyss
Time inside the Labyrinth of the Infinite Mirror ceased to be measured in days, nights, or seasons. There was no benevolent sun rising to give hope, nor a moon setting to grant rest; there was only the perpetual, dull, and maddening hum of the gigantic Extreme Dilation Cultivation Chambers that Sienna had forged into the rock of the abyss.
During the first continuous month of confinement, the silence within those elemental prisons was absolute and agonizing. The forty-five warriors were submerged in Qi densities so overwhelming, so pure and lethal, that the simple biological act of inhaling felt exactly like swallowing ground glass.
In the Chamber of the Puppeteer and the Seal, Cedric Morningstar bled copiously from his ears. The complex golden matrices floating in the room's cutting air were not optical illusions; they were heavy mathematical equations of pure energy trying to forcefully tattoo themselves directly into the marrow of his bones. Beside him, Orion, the sadistic Void Puppeteer, had fractured and bruised fingers from the obscene magnetic tension, desperately trying to weave his spiritual threads in an environment with gravity a hundred times that of the surface.
In the Chamber of Ruin and Magma, the ambient heat would have instantly melted Heaven-Grade steel armor. Kael, Eris, Bren, Korg, and Ignis sat rigidly in a lotus position on unstable islands of volcanic stone, surrounded by a furious ocean of black and white lava. Their skin blistered, carbonized, and regenerated in cycles of mere seconds thanks to Elowen's elixirs. The pain was a ceaseless white fire in their nervous systems, forcing them to expand their dragon meridians millimeter by millimeter, or die incinerated from the inside out.
But the most terrifying and lethal chamber was not the burning hell. It was the Chamber of the Winter Void.
The temperature there wasn't simply extreme weather. It was the total nullification of thermodynamic movement. Space itself creaked, frozen and dead. In the exact center of the room, Violeta, Elara, Eira, and Draven were kneeling on the polished ice. Their bodies were covered in a layer of frost so absurdly thick that they looked like beautiful, tragic statues a breath away from shattering. Their heartbeats had dropped to a single, agonizing beat per minute. They were on the verge of cellular collapse and brain death.
The heavy crystal door of the chamber silently dissolved into mist.
Seraphina entered, floating gracefully centimeters above the deadly floor. The Patriarch's First Wife wore no Qi barrier or protection of any kind against the extreme cold. Her elegant dress of dark silk and silver fluttered in the room's absolute stillness. Upon her entry, the temperature did not rise a single degree, but the very nature of the cold changed drastically. It ceased to be a hostile, wild, and murderous cold, instantly becoming a majestic, reverential, and oppressive cold.
The Empress's body awakened. At Seraphina's pale feet, a gigantic, illusory spectral ice lotus bloomed, encompassing the entirety of the room with its immense petals. The four elites trapped in their ice coffin felt the suffocating frost killing them melt and fade away, not because there was heat, but because Seraphina's imposing presence was absorbing and subjugating all the tyranny of the room's cold, claiming it by divine right as her own.
Violeta let out a harrowing gasp, falling face-first and coughing up half-frozen blood. Draven, the immense and proud blue ice titan, trembled uncontrollably, hugging himself.
"You are trying to resist the cold using the flesh of your bodies," Seraphina dictated. Her voice was no longer that of Samael's loving wife; it resonated with an ancient, melancholy echo, like the silver bell of a ruined cathedral. "That is a mistake of vulgar mortals. True cold does not attack the flesh. It attacks the very concept of life. It freezes the flow of time in your meridians."
Seraphina floated until she was suspended right in front of them. Her eyes, now two unfathomable silver orbs filled with spinning constellations, looked at them with a relentless severity that hid a deep protective instinct. In that state of elemental connection, broken fragments of her past life—as a solitary Empress who ruled worlds of ice before being betrayed—flashed in her mind. She still couldn't remember everything, but the aura of a divine and absolute ruler was already firmly seated and carved into her bones.
"Raise your heads," Seraphina ordered.
Violeta and Elara obeyed, painfully forcing their stiff necks. Seraphina raised an extremely slender hand and pointed a finger at the empty center of the room.
"Ice is the crystal of the soul. When enemies try to invade your minds and shatter your wills, do not raise stupid shields of fire or vulgar barriers of earth. Freeze your own soul, hide in the immobility of death, so that absolutely no one can touch you."
The air around Seraphina's hand distorted. The Empress's lips moved slightly. She did not shout the name of any grandiose technique. She simply whispered.
The vibration of that whisper pierced the physical defenses of the four warriors as if they were rice paper. The thermodynamics of the room ceased to exist. Violeta felt physical, linear time come to a complete halt. The sound of her own blood disappeared. The light in the room went out. For a terrifying microsecond, the ice girl felt the absolute death of the universe. Her own consciousness stopped dead, locked painlessly in a perfect, impenetrable coffin of conceptual diamond, where matter had simply forgotten how to move or feel pain.
When the overwhelming sensation passed and time flowed again, the four were panting on the floor, soaked in cold sweat, finally understanding the unbridgeable abyss of power that separated them from the First Wife.
"That is exactly what you must achieve," Seraphina said, lowering her hand, her spectral lotus fading into the mist. "An unbreakable and silent defense of the soul. I want you to devour and absorb the essence of this ice until your own meridians can replicate that whisper. Samael will shatter your bodies and bones every week in the arena... but my task here is to ensure that, when he does, your souls always remain intact."
For the next thirty uninterrupted days, under the relentless tutelage of the Empress of the Yin Lotus, the four warriors learned not to fight the cold, but to assimilate it. Violeta began to flawlessly merge space and ice; Elara, the Shadow of Frost, turned her own mist into invisible blades that froze the opponent's neurons; Eira stabilized her atomic core so as never to lose control of its fragility again, and Draven compressed his colossal glacial armor until it became so ridiculously dense that not even magical concepts could penetrate it.
They had survived the first month of confinement. Their Dantians had been forcefully expanded, cracked, and healed a hundred times over. They felt reborn in agony.
And then, the heavy doors of the immense Cultivation Chambers opened with a geological roar. The week of massacre had arrived.
The forty-five warriors emerged in silence from their respective elemental prisons and walked toward the vast obsidian plain in the center of the Labyrinth.
Their steps were firm and synchronized. The violent expansion of their Dantians had purified their Qi until it became heavy. The malnourished Void Sequences now radiated a suffocating aura at the absolute peak of the Transcendent Realm, a single thin thread away from breaking the barrier into the Origin Realm. The haughty Imperial Sequences shone with Law Seeds pulsing beneath their skin, stabilizing and cementing their oppressive power as Half-Saints.
They gathered in the center of the coliseum. Kael and Dante exchanged glances and nodded. Orion, without saying a word, launched his necrotic threads and the Soul Nexus activated at once, connecting the forty-five minds into a lethal hive. There were no longer screams of pain upon merging; they had strengthened their minds in the halls. They were ready for war.
A hundred meters away, amidst the absolute darkness of the obsidian, appeared the figure of Samael Morningstar.
He wasn't wearing his heavy battle armor. He wore his usual dark tunic, with the relaxed, carefree elegance of a predator sitting at the undisputed apex of the food chain. The Odachi Kurohime was not floating by his side. He was unarmed.
"You have fattened your rickety Qi reserves," Samael said, his deep voice crossing the hundred meters without acoustic effort, resonating directly within the core of the Soul Nexus. "You feel you can crush mountains with your bare hands. Your senses are sharpened by suffering. You believe you are ready to try and kill me."
Samael took a relaxed step forward, his hands in his pockets.
"Come. Show me what the first month in the dark has taught you."
Kael Morningstar did not wait for a second invitation. The Sword King immediately channeled the boiling Magma Intent of his Law Seed.
"Absolute frontal advance! Aion, anchor his position! Xylia, maximum orbital punishment!" Kael transmitted through the mental network.
Aion, the Void Black Hole, unleashed a ravenous gravitational singularity directly beneath Samael's boots, attempting to crush him against the obsidian floor with the absurd inertial force of fifty thousand gravities. Simultaneously, Xylia, the Thunder Empress, tore the dark false sky and unleashed a roaring pillar of purified plasma ten meters in diameter, aimed like a hammer of the gods directly at the Patriarch's head.
The devastating cross-attack would have vaporized a small mountain range. But Samael didn't even look up at the sky. His violet eyes shone with a faint, dark glow.
The physical space around Samael did not shatter like glass, nor did it visibly bend. Reality simply ceased to obey the strict laws of geometry. Samael folded the dimension in front of him. Xylia's titanic plasma pillar, a single millimeter away from incinerating Samael's white hair, disappeared, swallowed by a small, imperceptible spherical distortion, exiled into nothingness in a second. At the exact same instant, Aion's massive gravity, which was trying to crush the Patriarch toward the earth's core, was masterfully inverted and channeled through that very same dimensional distortion.
A hundred meters away, right above the exact center of the Morningstar elite's formation, space tore like silent lightning. The immense thunder pillar of Xylia, now multiplied and accelerated by the monstrous gravitational force stolen from Aion, fell exactly upon their own heads.
"SHIELDS NOW!" Goran roared, instinctively raising his golden Bronze defense alongside Draven's massive Ice Wall and Cedric's glowing containment matrices.
The colossal explosion forced them back twenty meters, dragging their boots and shattering the smooth obsidian floor, filling the air with dense smoke, ozone, and flying rocks. When the dust settled, Samael was still standing in the same spot, immaculate, his hands still in the pockets of his tunic.
"You attack point A, naively expecting my body to still be at point A," Samael mocked, tilting his head. "The Law of Space doesn't compel me to dodge like an acrobat. It makes any attack you send me end up deposited exactly where I want it to end up. You aren't fighting me; you are barely fighting your own redirected attacks."
Dante violently wiped the ash from his face. His dark Asura Eye darted frantically, calculating trajectories amidst the smoke.
"If he nullifies overwhelming ranged attacks by bending space, we have to close it by force. Close-quarters combat. Ciro, Joren, Rowan, with me!" Dante ordered through the Nexus.
The four fastest assassins in the empire nodded in silence. Using the Void Intent, the Zephyr, and sonic speed, they vanished from reality. They teleported by dodging wind friction, materializing instantly in Samael's four absolute blind spots: above, behind, left, and right. Their lethal short weapons, imbued to the maximum with Slaughter Intent, converged lethally toward the Patriarch's neck, heart, and spine at the same time.
Samael smiled softly. He didn't use the Law of Space to exile their weapons or escape. He allowed them to get close enough to taste victory.
Just as the cold edge of Dante's blackened dagger was a millimeter from grazing the pale skin of Samael's neck, a thick, nauseating metallic smell of rust flooded the air with the force of an invisible hurricane.
Dante, Ciro, Joren, and Rowan froze completely in mid-air, mere centimeters from their target. They weren't trapped by ice magic, nor by immobilizing chains of wind or gravity.
Their own blood had stopped dead.
Samael wasn't controlling spilled blood on the outside; he was taking the reins of the bloodstream directly inside their veins, capillaries, and arteries. With a simple, sadistic thought, the Patriarch violently inverted the blood flow of the four assassins.
"AAAAAAAH!"
Ciro's scream was harrowing and disturbing. The thick dragon blood tried to travel brutally in the opposite direction of their hearts' biological valves. The veins in their necks and foreheads bulged monstrously beneath the skin, dark and on the verge of bursting. Their eyeballs became bloodshot with vivid scarlet red, streaming tears of blood.
Biological control was lost. They fell to the obsidian floor like fragile puppets whose driving strings had been cut, convulsing frightfully, coughing and vomiting heavy black clots as their internal organs begged for mercy.
Kael roared, his golden eyes bloodshot with rage, and ran toward them with the Magma Fang raised high, followed blindly by the remaining titans and crowd-control experts left standing.
Samael slowly took his right hand out of his pocket and extended it open toward the charging army.
The Law of Blood pulsed like the heartbeat of a dead god.
The remaining forty-one warriors fell to their knees abruptly, their weapons crashing against the crystal. The internal pain was absolute and indescribable. It was as if every drop of vital liquid in their bodies had suddenly turned into boiling lead. Their Half-Saint hearts pumped erratically under unspeakable, impossible-to-sustain pressure.
"You use your blood with pride to fuel your Laws, to move ridiculously fast, to oxygenate and strengthen your muscles," Samael said, walking calmly among the forty-five bodies writhing on the floor because of their own hearts. "But, in your arrogance, you forget that blood itself is an element. And in the manipulation of blood in this world, I am the absolute monarch."
Samael crouched elegantly beside Dante. The young assassin was trying to drag himself toward the Patriarch's feet, gritting his teeth with indomitable fury and willpower even though his own coronary arteries were a heartbeat away from collapsing and killing him.
The Patriarch lifted his bloodied face, gripping him firmly by the jaw.
"You have exactly the whole week to find a tactical way to move while I dominate your hearts at will, Phantom," Samael whispered, his violet eyes fixed on the asura. "If you do not succeed, next time I will make your precious blood boil until it evaporates like red steam through every one of your pores."
Samael let go of Dante's jaw and released the oppressive grip of the Law.
The forty-five collapsed against the ground, breathing heavily, their eyes wide, while Elowen and Cassius ran to desperately heal the cardiac micro-tears with their abilities. They had been humiliated and defeated in less than a minute. The immense abyss between them and Samael's oppressive level seemed simply unbridgeable.
But there was no mercy in the labyrinth. Samael turned around, putting his back to them facing the immensity of the obsidian.
"Get up immediately. The second round of the week begins now. You have six days and twenty-three agonizing hours left."
For seven days, the hell and dismemberment did not stop for a single second.
They were crushed, suffocated from the inside out with their own boiling blood, and bombarded mercilessly by their own lethal attacks, redirected spatially by Samael thousands of times. When the damned week of massacre ended, they were dragged back to the suffocating Cultivation Chambers, leaving behind a Dantean trail of coagulated blood, broken bones, and pulverized egos, only to regenerate painfully in the high, toxic Qi density and repeat the demented cycle the following month.
And so, the months relentlessly turned into years inside the extreme dilation of the Labyrinth of the Infinite Mirror.
Year Two had passed in its entirety; a sadistic, uninterrupted cycle of psychological and physical torture under the oppression of Samael's Laws of Space and Blood, interspersed with Seraphina's mystical, cold, and celestial teachings in the dark.
In the middle of Year Three, the evolution began to show.
On the vast obsidian plain, the Soul Nexus was no longer a simple communication network of chaotic minds that Samael could break with a thought; it had been hammered into an impenetrable Soul Battery.
Samael, standing in the distance, launched a heavy pulse of his Law of Blood to stop the hearts of the vanguard charging at him.
But this time, the warriors didn't fall to their knees. They kept running.
In the rearguard, Cassius and Elowen, deeply connected to the Nexus, had developed a masterpiece of biological engineering to counter it. Using her emerald light, Elowen materialized fleeting, massive botanical beasts brimming with sap. Cassius, without mercy, buried his parasitic spear into those creations, connecting the flow of the plants directly to the warriors' Soul Nexus. They had created an immense, complex "Decoy Circulatory System."
When Samael tried to remotely boil the blood and hearts of Kael or Dante, Cassius's parasitic spear instantly drained and absorbed that oppressive Law pressure, channeling it backward, shattering Elowen's wooden beasts into a thousand pieces in their stead, completely nullifying the Patriarch's internal domain over the army.
Samael watched the sap explosion in the distance and raised an eyebrow, genuinely impressed. His invincible Law of Blood had been nullified by pure, brilliant tactical survival engineering.
"You've become marvelously ingenious," the Patriarch acknowledged in a low voice.
But the lethal surprise of Year Three didn't end there.
Dante, who was crouching in a perfect shadow waiting for the moment, felt his human body reach the critical biological and spiritual limit. He had been devouring and compressing the violent Qi of Sienna's chambers without rest for three years. His Transcendent Dantian was deeply cracked, filled to the brim with energy so dark and pure that it cried out agonizingly for a release. The physical pain of containment was worse than any wound inflicted by Samael.
"It is now, Phantom," Kael's calm, authoritative voice resonated in the Soul Nexus. "Break the damn wall."
Dante finally relinquished control.
A roaring pillar of crimson and black aura, so dense and dark that it literally absorbed the light from the broken mirrors, erupted from his small body toward the heavens. The immense obsidian plain trembled as if split by an earthquake. Dante's Asura Eye copiously bled black tears before scarring over and opening into a brilliant, absolute, and pure red.
The biological dam had broken into pieces. His cultivation leapt from the peak of the Transcendent Realm, and with the force of a death god, violently crossed the border into the unknown.
The false sky of the labyrinth darkened immediately. A miniature heavenly tribulation, automatically created by the Pagoda's millennial laws to simulate real-world punishment, formed spinning above the assassin's head, loaded with furious lightning of judgment.
But Dante was no ordinary cultivator, and he wasn't going to wait for the sky to pass sentence.
With his Slaughter Intent pure and perfected in the abyss, Dante leapt into the sky with a force that cracked the obsidian. His black dagger traced a perfect, silent, and merciless line in the air. It sliced the immense tribulation cloud exactly in half, shattering the lightning before the cloud could even finish forming.
The sky cleared abruptly.
Dante landed on his feet, his aura stabilizing in a new and terrifying immensity. He was no longer a simple Transcendent playing at being an assassin. The Void Sequences had just crowned in blood their first cultivator of the coveted Origin Realm.
Dante's violent breakthrough was the catalyst the Nexus needed.
Like huge dominoes pushed by the massive spiritual resonance of the Soul Nexus, the barriers of the others began to burst in a chain reaction. Aion and Aia screamed in unison toward the sky, their powerful auras of crushing gravity and blinding light merging and violently breaking the barrier into the Origin Realm. Orion, laughing with maniacal guffaws, felt his necrotic threads become as solid and heavy as divine steel as his Dantian mutated with dark energy. Vania, Ciro, Voltar, and Eira flashed in consecutive energy explosions that illuminated the plain.
In a matter of dazzling minutes, the twenty-four Void Sequences, the orphaned shadows of the Citadel, crossed the bottleneck. They had fully reached the Origin Realm. Their Qi was now ten times denser, incalculably faster, and atrociously deadlier.
The Imperial Sequences didn't fall behind in the face of their brothers' evolution. The immense, sudden surge of power in the Nexus immediately fed back into the blood elite.
Kael Morningstar, standing with his eyes closed amidst the chaos, felt his ancestral Magma Law Seed fully germinate, inextricably intertwining with his burning Sword Intent. His battle power as a Stage 1 Saint solidified like stellar diamond, giving him the perfect foundation and weight to challenge and kill enemies of much higher stages. Around him, Violeta, Eris, and Cedric felt their own latent Laws awaken completely, surrounding them with suffocating halos of Absolute Void, Causal Destruction, and Unbreakable Supreme Seals.
Samael silently observed the Dantean and beautiful transformation of his army.
Forty-five boiling, dense, and lethal auras illuminated the infinite darkness of the obsidian room. The air was heavy and laden with the violent birth of new gods. The Patriarch smiled truly, baring his fangs, and for the first time in three tortuous years of training, he reached his hand into the spatial rift and fully unsheathed the Odachi Kurohime.
The howl of the steel and the thunderous hum of the immense black and crimson sword abruptly nullified each and every one of the new auras in the room, claiming its undisputed place as the absolute apex of terror.
"My most sincere congratulations on your apotheotic ascension," Samael said, pointing Kurohime's sharp tip directly at them. The physical space around the dark blade cracked visibly under the pressure. "You have just earned the glorious right to die under the edge of my sword."
In the serene reality of the outside world, the warm light of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn remained unperturbed and peaceful. Barely a real year had passed since the immense doors of the Pagoda of the Infinite Mirror closed with a slam.
Samael was placidly seated in the majesty of the Obsidian Throne, high up in the Upper Palace.
The true main body of the Patriarch had never stepped foot in the arena. He comfortably observed the immense holographic screens projected by Vexia. The "Samael" who had been torturing them mercilessly for the last three years, the monster who dominated Space and Blood, was simply an immensely powerful Qi avatar, created and sustained by the Absolute Laws of the Labyrinth and a fraction of his consciousness.
Seraphina stood beside him in the hall, her graceful hand resting with infinite softness on the Patriarch's shoulder.
On the main screen, the forty-five warriors, now brimming with their newfound Origin Realm power and their germinated Laws, were charging fiercely against Samael's avatar armed with Kurohime. But despite their glorious ascension and the consolidation of the Imperials, the Odachi's copy continued to tear them apart like rag dolls. Samael's avatar cut through their perfect formations as if they didn't exist, shattering Tormund's thick basalt walls with a single slash and evading Kael and Dante's supersonic cuts with eerie precision and elegance.
The floor of the simulation was red once again.
Seraphina slid her pale, cold hand from Samael's shoulder to his cheek, caressing the Patriarch's skin with devotion.
"You are relentless and cruel with them," Seraphina whispered, her melodious voice lacking any reproach, filled with a deep, ancient, and painful understanding of the colossal weight he carried on his shoulders.
Samael rested his face against her small hand of ice, closing his eyes for an imperceptible fraction of a second, allowing himself in the safety of the throne a minuscule flash of weariness and vulnerability that only the First Wife and absolute owner of the Yin Lotus could witness.
"The great continent will not have an ounce of mercy when we get out, Sera," Samael replied in a very low voice, his abyssal eyes opening again, fixed on the massacre on the screen. "The damn Great Emperors of this world will not hesitate for a second to massacre them and tear their heads off if they see them hesitate, if they see them weak. If I don't break them and forge them in here, in a safe environment where my abilities can heal them... the real world will break them to pieces out there, in a place where there will be no return and no resurrection."
Seraphina nodded softly, her silver eyes watching the screen where Violeta, her stoic sister-in-law, was brutally thrown against a hard obsidian wall by a powerful flat strike from Kurohime, only to rise nimbly a second later, masterfully using the Whisper of Absolute Zero to protect her mind from the overwhelming terror of the avatar's impact.
"They are growing by leaps and bounds," Seraphina said, a slight, beautiful, and lethal smile gracing her immaculate lips. "Our Empire is being forged in fire and ice. They have definitively stopped being raw iron that breaks. Now they are tempered steel."
Samael gently pulled his face away from Sera's hand, his violet gaze hardening once more with the relentless, icy, and absolute authority of a Sovereign.
"They still have three more years of uninterrupted hell ahead of them. They have merely reached the Origin Realm and stabilized the foundations of the Saint Realm. They have learned to survive and resist my manipulation of Space and Blood—"
Samael stood fluidly from the obsidian throne, wrapping a strong arm around Seraphina's slender waist, warmly drawing her toward his body as they both gazed into the distance at the immense, sealed Pagoda through the palace's wide windows.
"But very soon, through blood, they will discover that all this time... I have merely been playing teacher with my base and passive form."
Samael smiled, and his fangs flashed with the promise of the end of the world.
"When the fateful Year Five arrives at their door, my Queen, I will go in there myself. And I will show them firsthand what happens when the Patriarch of the Morningstar Clan transforms and fights for real."
Year Three had finished its cycle of blood. The mortal pieces on the board were polished and aligned. The brutal prelude to the Great Hunt of the Great Saint was a breath away from being unleashed in the abyss of mirrors.