Chapter 165: The Soul Battery and the Judgment of the Saints
The fourth year in the depths of the Labyrinth of the Infinite Mirror was not announced with resounding bells or changing seasons. It was announced with an atmospheric pressure so overwhelmingly dense that the air itself within the immense crystal dimensions began to liquefy, falling in heavy drops of pure Qi that distorted the light and crushed the lungs.
On the great obsidian plain, the twenty-four Void Sequences were seated in a perfect circle. They did not speak. They did not move.
Over the past twelve months, under the lethal and merciless tutelage of Samael and the absolute cold of Seraphina, they had pushed the capacity of their Dantians far beyond any known biological limit. Their cultivation had pierced through the complex stages of the Origin Realm like a red-hot knife cutting silk, fueled by the brutal and dense Qi of Sienna's Chambers. Now, the twenty-four assassins stood at the Absolute Peak Stage of the Origin Realm.
They were a single step, a simple and slight thought away, from breaking the great bottleneck and ascending with glory to the Half-Saint Realm. But they did not do it.
Dante Morningstar, with his dark Asura Eye closed in a deep and painful meditation, kept the gigantic dam of his own power locked with pure willpower. The veins on his neck and temples throbbed, black and on the verge of bursting. They had unanimously agreed, through the hive mind, that they would not waste the majestic explosion of energy of a Realm breakthrough in the empty stillness of a meditation room.
They were going to save that quantum blast. They were going to hold it in until their souls bled, to use it as a weapon of mass destruction directly in the Patriarch's face during the start of the next assault. They were twenty-four human time bombs, vibrating in unison with a contained lethality that threatened to tear the fabric of the dimension.
In the exact center of their circular formation floated an immense and complex network of golden, gray, and crimson threads of light. It was the [Soul Nexus].
The primordial gift that Samael had implanted in them years ago had drastically evolved. At first, it was a simple channel of tactical communication through which they shared thoughts and abilities, but the overwhelming overload used to fry their nervous systems. Now, after years of forced adaptation and assimilating the torment, the Nexus had mutated. It was no longer a network; it had become the Unbreakable Soul Battery.
The synergy was absolute. If Voltar spent all his violent electrical Qi in a single second of fury, he did not fall exhausted to the ground. Automatically, Cassius's parasitic Dantian, Goran's immovable core, or Korg's internal forge pumped pure Qi through the thick threads of the Nexus, instantly refilling Voltar's meridians. If Dante suffered mental damage from an illusion or a conceptual impact, the expanded minds of Darius and Lyra absorbed the brutal shock and dissipated it like ripples in a pond.
The forty-five warriors now shared a single, colossal reserve of mana and vitality. They were a dark and unfathomable ocean. Trying to exhaust just one of them meant facing the impossible task of exhausting all forty-five simultaneously.
But while the Void Sequences consolidated their foundation as living explosives, in the abyssal depths of the Extreme Dilation Chambers, the true monsters of the Empire were about to awaken.
The Imperial Sequences, who had been stuck at the Peak Half-Saint Realm for months, crashing against the ceiling of their own mortality, were finally breaking the chains that bound them to the earth.
In the violent Chamber of the Wind and the Zephyr, Varian Morningstar was on his knees, his hands pressed agonizingly against his face. Green and golden blood dripped copiously between his fingers. His eyeballs were reconfiguring at an atomic level, tearing the optic nerves to be able to withstand the pressure of the truths of the universe.
When the Sky Hunter moved his hands away, his pupils were no longer human; they were fractured, brilliant, and divine emeralds, capable of seeing the faint threads of destiny that connected the fabric of space. Varian slowly raised his immense bow, the Hawk's Eye. He did not draw the God's Nerve String. He simply exhaled the air from his lungs. The green energy condensed around him. He had understood that true absolute precision does not require an arrow to travel cutting the wind; it requires altering the spatial rule so that the arrowhead and the target's heart share exactly the same coordinates the millisecond the string is released. You could not dodge what was already inside you. His Dantian exploded, the Half-Saint Qi condensing into a solid, crystalline core. The shockwave shattered all the mirrors in the room. Varian stood up, enveloped in the majestic and indisputable aura of the Saint Realm (Stage 1).
Several dimensions away, in the suffocating Chamber of the Dead Ocean, Elian Morningstar floated adrift in an infinite sea of thick, liquid mercury. His physical body had lost all human cohesion; his veins pumped heavy metal and his silvery-blue hair merged with the environment. The gravitational pressure of the chamber would have crushed a continent into dust, but Elian was at absolute peace.
He opened his eyes, which were now two perfect pools of liquid silver, devoid of pupils. He finally understood the truth of his Law: water does not just flow and adapt; water drowns and crushes with inescapable inertia. He concentrated the entire incalculable mass of the immense chamber's mercury ocean and violently absorbed it into his own body. His mass became so cosmically dense that the room's own gravity collapsed toward him, drawn by his core. Elian broke the mortal barrier, ascending to the Saint Realm, becoming a tide of immovable destruction.
In the burning Chamber of Magma and Rock, the colossal Bren Morningstar was punching a wall of pure volcanic diamond with his bare fists. His knuckles were completely shattered, revealing thick bones that were no longer white, but the deep color of obsidian. With each brutal impact, the entire chamber groaned and trembled. Bren was not looking for a refined technique; he was looking for the absolute Truth of brute force.
His immense muscles expanded, emitting a stellar heat that melted the rock beneath his feet. He understood that the earth is not just dead stone; it is the living memory of the planet's violence and cataclysms. Bren delivered one last, devastating punch, channeling the perfect seismic resonance. He did not break the wall; he disintegrated it into atoms, liquefying the matter at a molecular level. The pure Qi inside him sublimated, transforming his physical body into a divine and indestructible vessel. Bren roared toward the false sky, his Saint Realm aura making the magma around him boil and evaporate.
In the Chamber of the Eternal Night, the voluptuous silhouette of Lirael Morningstar danced in absolute darkness. Her previously smooth skin was now subtly cracked like ancient ceramics, emitting a ghostly silver light from within. Wearing the Veil of the Eternal Night, a cloak woven with collapsed stardust that devoured photons in its path, Lirael became incorporeal.
She unsheathed her sword, the Moon Fang. The black blade did not reflect a single gleam; it absorbed the room's light, becoming completely invisible. Lirael stopped and looked at the ground. She understood that the seductive moonlight does not illuminate the truth; it deceives, hides, and reveals only what it desires. With a fluid and silent movement, her invisible sword cut her own shadow projected on the crystal floor. By doing so, the very concept of her mortality was severed at the root. Her Qi became ethereal, cold, and sharp. She crossed the threshold. The assassin of light had become a lethal specter of the Saint Realm.
In the Chamber of Silence, Joren Morningstar floated a meter off the ground, legs crossed in perfect stillness. There was not a single sound in the immense room. Joren had pierced and destroyed his own eardrums months ago so as not to be distracted by the noise of the world.
He exhaled slowly. He understood that the deadliest and fastest wind is not the one that howls and destroys trees in the storm, but the soft, imperceptible breeze that caresses the neck a millisecond before the head falls to the ground. He wielded his curved daggers, which now absorbed any acoustic vibration. His athletic build became translucent, merging with the very concept of the vacuum of air and the nullification of sound. The absolute silence in his Dantian violently crystallized, granting him an unfathomable sea of Saint Qi. He was the zephyr assassin that not even the gods of war would hear coming.
The chain breakthrough did not stop. The Nexus's Soul Battery pulsed strongly, feeding each member with the pure epiphany of another's revelation. Enlightenment was a contagious forest fire.
In the Chamber of the Abyss, Nylas was brutally crushed against the floor by his own Law of gravity. His bones, dense as a dead star, creaked, threatening to turn to dust. Demonic energy whispered in his ear, trying to devour his sanity. But Nylas did not resist; he embraced the darkness with a twisted smile. He stood up slowly, lifting with him the incalculable weight of his own personal hell. His skin absorbed all the light in the chamber. He understood that gravity is not a simple physical force; it is the infinite hunger of the universe. By assimilating that hunger, his Dantian collapsed in on itself, forming a black, dense, and perfect core. His mere existence now forced reality to bow before him in the Saint Realm.
In the Chamber of the Storm, Maren vibrated at a speed that defied visual perception. The Lichtenberg figure-like scars on his torso glowed with pure, bluish plasma. Maren stopped trying to run faster with his muscles. He understood the epiphany: he was the lightning. His physical body temporarily transmuted into millions of pure electrons. Friction ceased to exist. His hyper-accelerated mind processed a million years of calm in the span of a microsecond. Upon re-solidifying, his aura had changed from blue to a blinding, thunderous white. He had entered the Saint Realm, becoming the executing lightning rod of divine wrath.
In the resplendent Sanctuary of the Aurora, Lys Morningstar floated, wrapped in six immense wings of pure, solid light. She understood the terrible and bloody truth of light: light does not just shelter and heal; light eradicates without mercy. What is not immaculate must be incinerated to its foundations. Her golden staff, the Beacon of the Aurora, physically fused with her soul. The compassion of her angelic heart became cold and dictatorial. Her Qi burned until it was purified of all mortality, leaving her in the Saint Realm with an aura of offensive healing that would permanently blind any being of darkness who dared to look at her.
In the Rotting Garden, Tamsin laughed with maniacal guffaws as her own beautiful body melted like wax and regenerated in cycles of pure agony. The purplish pustules on her skin burst, releasing a corrosive gas. Tamsin stopped trying to create biological or organic toxins. She elevated her poison to a conceptual peak. Her dark intent could now "poison" abstract concepts: it could infect the sacred Qi of a divine sword, it could poison the friction of gravity, it could rot the air itself. Her Dantian transmuted into a bubbling cauldron of green and black. She advanced to the Saint Realm, becoming an unstoppable walking plague impossible to eradicate or heal.
In the Chamber of Currents, Rowan played lazily with his satellite chakrams, the Cyclone Wings. The stellar silver disks orbited around him without needing to be held. Rowan no longer cut the air with force; the air voluntarily and reverently stepped aside to let him pass. His hollow bone structure vibrated in perfect tune with the currents of the astral plane. Upon activating his dance, the chakrams lost all friction, becoming invisible saws of pure void. His body became so light that the earth itself could not claim him. His advance to the Saint Realm was smooth, completely silent, and overwhelmingly fast.
In the Glacier Chamber, the colossal Draven Morningstar was an impregnable mountain. Draven stopped creating thick outer walls of frost to protect himself. He himself, his very flesh, became the ultimate barrier. His skin and overdeveloped muscles fused with the cold essence of the eternal ice of primordial dragons. Any kinetic or magical impact against him would simply be lost, dissipated and absorbed in the immense and absolute thermal density of his body. The chamber's illusory shield shattered from the inside, revealing Draven enveloped in a crushing aura of the Saint Realm.
In the Hall of Desolation, Altair Morningstar walked slowly, with the cadence of a fallen noble. Every step he took turned the imperishable mirrors of the room into gray, dead ash. Altair looked at his pale hands, marked with black veins. He understood that entropy is the final and inescapable destiny of all things in creation. He did not need to raise a weapon to kill; he only needed to be present and let the aura of accelerated aging and rot do the work. His Dantian emptied of violent energy and filled with a Saint Qi that was gray, passive, lazy, but infinitely more destructive. Saint Realm.
In the Chamber of the Crust, Aylin was completely buried, crushed alive beneath thousands of tons of crystal rock and earth. The golden-eyed "lethal doll" opened her eyes beneath the suffocating subterranean darkness. She understood the divine symbiosis: the wind and the earth are not opposites; the wind gently sculpts the rock, and the strong root supports it. Her spear connected with the immense concept of the ecosystem. The solid earth erupted violently upward. Aylin shot towards the sky in a perfect whirlwind of molten rock and razor-sharp leaves, her green and brown aura shining with the indomitable majesty of the Saint Realm.
The upper chambers vibrated with a tectonic intensity that threatened to collapse and crack the eternal dimension created by Sienna. The high command of the Morningstar Empire were not just awakening; they were aggressively claiming their conceptual domains.
Lyra Morningstar crossed the boundary of reality. When her Requiem Bell rang in the room, her Illusion Intent became so absolute and undeniable that the lie became physical truth. She no longer needed to clumsily deceive sight or hearing; she deceived reality itself. If her illusion made an enemy's mind believe they were burning, their physical body would suffer real, smoking third-degree burns. She had reached the psychosomatic truth of the Saint Realm.
Elowen Morningstar made a colossal, illusory hologram of the Tree of Life bloom in her chamber. Her miraculous war alchemy no longer needed to carry heavy metal cauldrons. Her own beautiful body, forged from unbreakable ironwood, was the master cauldron. With her parasitic spear Yggdrasil, she transmuted ambient Saint Qi and stolen life into divine elixirs directly in her bloodstream, ready to pump resurrection into her army. Saint Realm.
Elara, Samael's first and silent disciple, disappeared. She literally ceased to exist on the physical plane of her chamber. Her slender body became an incorporeal concept of frozen assassination. She could now dissolve into the very air her target breathed, infiltrating their lungs to solidify as ice blades directly in their brain. The Shadow of Frost claimed her throne in the Saint Realm.
Xylia, the Reincarnated Empress, recovered all the crushing status of her past life. Her Heavenly Thunder Mandate condensed in her veins. She no longer asked for obedience; she demanded it with the inescapable force of a Sovereign Law. The lightning around her turned a purple so dark it looked like fissures in space, capable of paralyzing the nervous systems of entire armies with the simple command of "Kneel!". Saint Realm.
Cedric Morningstar, the sharp-faced regressor genius, finally wove the perfect matrix in the air. His Supreme Metal Intent and his Divine Seals merged in an unbreakable embrace. He created an absolute domain around himself where no magical rule of the universe applied unless he wrote it or approved it with his mind. His Qi shone like liquid gold with the crushing authority of a god strategist of the Saint Realm.
Eris Morningstar let out a savage laugh that echoed in the abyss. Her indomitable Flame of Ruin and her Fire Seed fully merged, leaving no traces of weakness. Her curvaceous body became a dangerous living conduit for true conceptual annihilation. Everything her viscous black fire and blinding white flame touched didn't burn leaving ashes; it was simply erased from existence and broken down into nothingness. Her purely destructive power rose to the peak of the Saint Realm.
Violeta Morningstar, the icy Blade of the Void, opened her mysterious inverted heterochromia eyes. Her Space and Ice Seed collapsed inward into a single, terrifying point of singularity. The astral frost that floated around her was not wet, physical ice; it was frozen and broken space itself. Her thin and immaterial Needle of Absolute Zero acquired the divine ability to cut through the fabric of dimensions to stab the spine of someone miles away, halting movement. Her aura, serene and deadly, consecrated her in the Saint Realm.
Twenty Imperial Sequences. Twenty newly forged Stage 1 Saints in agony. A military level of power.
But at the top of the pyramid, the King was missing.
In the deepest, burning, and most violent chamber of the entire labyrinth, Kael Morningstar stood with his eyes closed, holding the hilt of his immense sword embedded in the vitrified floor.
Kael was already a Stage 1 Saint when he entered the labyrinth years ago. During the three years of intermittent massacre, he had been the group's immovable and main shield, willingly taking the greatest physical and mental punishment from Samael's avatar to protect his younger siblings. His bones had been broken a thousand times. His dragon meridians had expanded to the point of lethal tearing. His Nirvana Sword Intent was already at the extremely high Mastery Level 3, but his boiling Magma and Fire Seed refused to submit. Fire is inherently wild, hungry, and chaotic; the sword is structure, righteousness, and pure discipline. For years, Kael had tried in vain to force the untamable fire to obey the edges of his sword.
But in this fourth year, under the extreme pressure of isolation, Kael, in the darkness, remembered Samael's first real lesson: Do not dominate the element like a tyrannical master. Become it.
Kael exhaled, and stopped imposing discipline on the magma. He threw wide open the immense doors of his soul and let the pure and scorching savagery of his Spiritual Edge Crimson Dragon bloodline freely consume his weapon.
The Perfect Fusion occurred.
The environment abruptly lost its color, becoming a pale, opaque gray, like a dead world. The Magma Fang suddenly ceased to be a metallic weapon coated in conventional flames. The physical steel blade completely disintegrated, replaced by a translucent and hyper-dense plasma. It was a blade of pure sun compressed into the broad shape of a sword. It did not emit scandalous flares; it projected a blinding clarity and a thermodynamic heat so incomprehensibly high that the eternal, immortal mirrors of Sienna's chamber began to give way, slowly melting and falling as heavy drops of liquid crystal to the floor.
Every breath Kael took left spectral lotuses of red ash in the air that bloomed and withered, consuming the oxygen of the world.
The sea of golden and crimson Saint Qi in his Dantian expanded violently, swallowing and evaporating the millennial bottlenecks of cultivation. Kael's aura erupted upwards with the force of a cosmic volcano, conceptually piercing the thick dimensions of the labyrinth.
The breakthrough did not stop at a simple consolidation of power. It broke the limit established by heaven. The atmospheric pressure of the burning chamber tripled, cracking like glass under a giant's boot.
Kael's golden eyes opened, devoid of doubt, shining with the supreme authority of a war leader who obeys no one but his Patriarch. He had crossed the heavy threshold that separates simple talented geniuses from true monarchs of combat.
Saint Realm (Stage 2 - Initial).
The obscene brute force flowing through his liquid metal veins told him that a single, simple slash of his new plasma sword could split an immense ocean in half and evaporate the water before the waves touched the seabed again. The Sword King was ready for war.
With a synchronized roar that shook reality, the colossal doors of the forty-five cultivation chambers simultaneously swung wide open. The fourth year of assimilation had ended.
One by one, the warriors emerged onto the immense obsidian plain. The air itself crackled, charged with ions and power. Reality creaked under the combined weight of forty-five boiling auras that defied the comprehension and limits of any living being.
The twenty-four Void Sequences, led by the young Dante, walked with a calculating, deathly silence. At first glance, their auras remained stagnant at the Peak Origin Realm. But anyone with sharp spiritual senses or soul vision could see the truth: their slender bodies were unstable atomic bombs, vibrating unnaturally, ready to burst violently and jump to the Half-Saint Realm the exact millisecond the battle began. Their lethality and cold-bloodedness were so sharp that the shadows around them seemed to cut themselves.
The twenty-one Imperial Sequences, led by Kael's imposing steps, walked cloaked in the unquestionable majesty of newly crowned earthly gods. Twenty Stage 1 Saints. One Stage 2 Saint. Their Law Seeds had germinated, granting them domains and absolute concepts that warped space in their wake.
They grouped together in the center of the immense coliseum. This time, they did not need the necromancer Orion to cast his necrotic threads into the air. The Soul Battery fused deep within their beings connected automatically, like veins recognizing their own body. The immense and pure energy flowed in a perfect circuit among the forty-five, masterfully balancing the explosive instability of the Void with the immense and inexhaustible reserve of the Empire. They were at the absolute peak of their joint martial perfection.
At the opposite end of the vast plain of raw obsidian, a solitary figure emerged, walking slowly from the cold shadows.
Samael Morningstar walked towards them with a rhythmic step, dressed in his dark tunic. The immense Odachi Kurohime floated lazily at his side. The sheath of the Devouring Twilight emitted a necrotic aura so heavy that the ground darkened in his wake, and an ultrasonic hum—similar to the weeping of a thousand feminine voices thirsty for slaughter—emanated from the weapon, vibrating with a hunger that threatened to devour the light of the entire room.
From above, Seraphina and Vexia watched through gigantic holographic projections in the dark sky of the labyrinth, knowing that the moment of ultimate truth had arrived.
Samael stopped exactly one hundred meters from the battalion. His deep violet and crimson eyes swept over his warriors with the slowness of a predator appreciating its pack. He saw Dante's Asura Eye, burning with an almost maniacal anticipation. He saw Kael's colossal gray and red plasma sword, heating the air, ready to judge the world. He saw the distorted space around Violeta's delicate face and the roaring black fire licking Eris's shoulders.
Samael saw his Empire, for the first time in its existence, complete, lethal, and divine.
But Samael Morningstar did not smile this time. His face was a mask of stone, of absolute and chilling seriousness; the icy mask of a Patriarch who was about to impart the most destructive and bloody lesson of all their lives.
Slowly, without rushing, Samael extended his gloved hand and firmly grasped the black silk hilt of Kurohime. The sheath stopped humming.
"The Fourth Year has ended," Samael declared, and the immense weight, gravity, and resonance of his voice made every golden and crimson thread of the Soul Battery tremble. "You have successfully consolidated your miserable Realms. You have finally awakened your Laws. You have ceased to be pieces of clay."
Samael pointed the great Odachi, still sheathed, directly at the heart of his army. The physical space around the black and crimson blade began to shatter like a fragile mirror, shedding pieces of reality and revealing the abyssal interdimensional void behind it.
"It is time for Year Five," dictated the Demon King, his gaze injecting a blood-paralyzing darkness. "Come at me with everything you are. And pray to whatever it is you believe in, because today... I am going to stop holding back my transformation."
The crystalline air of the immense pagoda suddenly turned a necrotic violet. The true and definitive hell of the Great Hunt of the Saint was about to be unleashed.