Chapter 501: Sixth Earth Gate Opened

The axe plunged into the star and vanished, and for a while that was all.

The axe was massive, and even from a distance I could tell that the scale of a single star was so great that this was like a speck of dust falling into an ocean. How much change could that bring?

Except that what I had just thrown into that star was the cumulative death of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of demons, all of it backed by my intent and by the mysterious power guiding the hand of my Abyssal Executioner Title.

Even in the darkness, I heard a sound, a vibration coming off the star that grew until it passed through my consciousness and tore at the edges of what I was.

Then something terrible came out of that sound, and something massive shot free, as if a chunk of the star had been violently expelled from its core.

The last time I came here, the Celestial essence that flooded my body came off the surface of the star. This was almost solid.

The chunk came towards me, and I had a moment to understand what was happening.

Every time I opened a new Earth Gate, I was flooded with Celestial essence, and that essence changed my body and my soul. What I received at the first gate was far less potent than what I gained at the second, and the trend had continued with every gate since.

That was why I could manage the seals inside the Caelith with my Anima. By now it was close to true Celestial essence.

Looking at the chunk coming towards me, I knew that this was not what I should be gaining at the Sixth Earth Gate.

This was far more.

I should have been pleased. Instinctively, I knew it was very bad.

Then I felt the weight of attention land on my consciousness, and I looked up, and I went still.

An eye the size of a galaxy was looking at me.

It is worth noting that before the strange knowledge filled my head in the void, I did not know the true scale of a galaxy. Now I knew a little of it, and it was that knowledge that froze me in place.

Then the essence hit me, and I understood that I might have just bitten off more than I could chew.

[ Sixth Earth Gate — Open ]

[ Bonus: +80 Anima Depth, +150 Endurance, +10 Unattuned Law Fragments ]

[ Error: Influx of Celestial Essence exceeds threshold. Bonus increased. ]

[ Bonus: +110 Anima Depth, +250 Endurance, +15 Unattuned Law Fragments, +2 Active Law Shards ]

[ Ascendant Earth Gate — upgraded ]

[ Seventh Earth Gate — Unlock Requirement — Stored Essence: 10,000,000 ]

By all the lights in heaven, this was bad.

∞

The piece of my consciousness inside that strange space was shredded to nothing, and my eyes flew open, and I had time for one gasp before the full weight of what I had claimed came down on me, and the world outside my body did not know what was coming.

I had opened the Fifth Earth Gate in space. I was opening the sixth on the ground, and looking back, that had been a mistake.

The demons were still pouring out of the fissures, and there were no new fusions. I knew that would not last, and I had no time to think about it.

I was a small container, and an entire planet was being forced inside me, and for a moment the weight of it crushed my consciousness, and I could not think or feel. I could only see a bright light starting in my chest.

Without my willing it, my body tried to shift the pressure away from itself, and that let me gather the pieces of my consciousness back together, and only a small part of what was inside me could be vented out.

The light began as a pinprick of white, expanded, passed through my skin, and tore through the air around me, and it kept going, and a shockwave hit the ground, and the earth shattered.

The plain, already torn apart by the Titan battle, broke into pieces. Great slabs of stone and ash and burning flesh were thrown into the air, and the air itself seemed to scream as the pressure wave raced outward.

The demons within a thousand metres of me were there one moment and gone the next, their bodies reduced to nothing by the sheer force of the light.

The shockwave spread. A mile. Ten miles. A hundred. The earth broke in a ring that widened faster than sound, canyons opening, mountains flattening, rivers vanishing. The ash that had covered the plain was blown away to reveal the bedrock beneath, and then the bedrock cracked as well.

Inside me, I could feel solid chunks of essence slamming into my body and my soul, ripping through me as if I were nothing. It was like trying to hold back red-hot metal with a thin sheet of paper.

It was not only the volume of what was pouring into me. It was the purity of it, which I believe was true Celestial essence.

You see, I had long since worked out that I never received pure Celestial essence. Whoever designed the Seven Earth Gates had made sure the bearer would adapt slowly to higher concentrations of it, though I strongly suspect that what I received at each gate was already far more than was ever intended.

When that essence reached me, it was transformed into Anima and Endurance, which fed my body and my soul, and more recently into Law fragments.

I dimly realised that this separation into different components was the only reason I did not perish instantly, and I did not know whether it would be enough.

My Anima Depth shattered, unable to hold any of what had poured into it, and my body... my body was breaking.

I think I was screaming, and the part of my soul still intact was furiously trying to contain the rest while bleeding off the excess as light and raw energy.

That light rose out of me in a column of pure white radiance a mile wide, straight into the sky. It tore through the red clouds like paper and punched a hole in the atmosphere that could be seen from space, and it kept going, past the clouds, past the edge of the sky, into the void beyond.

And the void answered with the storm that had been building since I first drew lightning out of the heavens that morning. It had been growing for hours. Now it finally broke.

Lightning fell in such ridiculous volume that it lit the sky for thousands of miles, turning night into day and day into something else entirely.

A hurricane erupted from my screaming body and swept across the plain, uprooting trees and flattening everything in its path and sending debris flying for hundreds of miles. The sea, hundreds of miles away, rose in a wave that would reach the coast within the hour.

The earth shook as the power I was releasing pressed against the foundations of reality.

A part of me was realising that the seals for the Pale Matron had shattered when my soul broke to pieces, but that concern was swept aside.