Chapter 1414: Awaiting Prey: Cosmic Dragon Face Decree!

When Phei returned, Marcus was no longer screaming, and for the briefest moment the silence almost suggested the three creatures had finally run out of the cruelty Phei had left them to carry out.

One look at Marcus killed that thought.

The Angel Progenitor lay where Phei had left him, but what rested on the golden sea now looked less like a defeated man and more like what was left behind after one. World Essence had rebuilt his body because the Soul Realm could not let its master remain broken.

It had mended torn flesh, rejoined shattered spirit bones and sealed every wound until Marcus once again had something that could be called a whole form.

The healing had done nothing for what lived inside it.

His chest rose in tiny, ragged shudders that barely counted as breaths, each one trembling through him as though even the will to keep living had become one more punishment his soul was too frightened to refuse. His mouth hung half open, as if he no longer had the strength or the sense to close it, and a thin thread of spittle mixed with shining golden blood at the corner of his lips before trailing down his cheek and vanishing into the serene light beneath him.

His eyes were in a worse state than the body—

They stayed open and horribly aware, yet almost nothing human survived behind them.

Marcus Heavenchild had once worn arrogance easily that grows in a man raised among enough wealth and influence and promise of power once he awakened— to mistake being shielded from consequences for being better than everyone else.

None of it remained.

Terror had not merely entered his gaze. It had moved in, torn down everything else and settled so deep that Phei doubted ordinary fear could ever live there again.

Those were the eyes of prey that had finally understood rescue was something that only happened to other people.

Even his six wings looked defiled.

They were still attached only because World Essence had rebuilt them again and again whenever the torment tore them apart, and somehow that endless mending made them more pitiful, not less.

Great patches of feathers were gone, baring the pale-gold bones of light beneath.

Long stretches bent at ugly angles, broken, healed crooked and broken again before the realm could finish its work. Swollen joints twitched on their own, and two wings dragged half sunk through the golden sea, their ruined feathers leaving faint glowing trails whenever his body shook.

Another lay curled awkwardly over one shoulder, less like the wing of a holy being and more like a wounded thing trying to hide from further notice. Whatever sanctity those wings had once carried had been beaten and defiled out of them until they looked like the torn banners a heavenly army leaves behind when it flees the field too fast to gather its dead.

Phei stopped several paces away and looked over what remained.

He had no full idea what, exactly, the ogres had done, and he had no intention of asking.

What he could already see was more than enough to warn him that this was one of those rare times when curiosity deserved to be strangled in the cradle.

Marcus’s state offered fragments, hints and several deeply unpleasant possibilities, and Phei’s mind brushed against them for half a breath before quietly backing away from the whole matter; whatever had happened, it had not finished the task Phei came here to complete.

The instant Phei’s presence brushed Marcus’s awareness, the broken Progenitor saw him, and what followed was almost impressive. Marcus barely had enough command of his body to breathe, yet terror dragged every surviving instinct awake at once.

His pupils swelled until the gold around them nearly vanished.

His breath caught, broke and came back in quick little bursts; the limbs that had ignored every command for so long suddenly tried to move together as his soul hurled whatever was left of itself toward a single goal: away. He tried to crawl backward. His fingers could not close on the shining surface.

His arms twitched without the strength to pull him.

His legs were dead weight behind him, and his wings gave a few weak, pitiful jerks that might once have become flight and now only stirred the World Essence around them. He could not even roll, could not stand or even drag himself a finger’s width before his body gave up.

The only thing that truly quickened was his breathing.

Phei watched the struggle for a few heartbeats and felt the corner of his mouth threaten to rise.

"That’s not all," he said quietly, in the easy tone of a host telling a guest another course was on its way, rather than telling a shattered soul that everything so far had only been the beginning.

Marcus’s ragged breaths grew sharper still.

Phei stepped closer through the golden shallows, the bright sea curling around his boots and smoothing itself behind him, and he stopped only when Marcus lay almost directly beneath his shadow.

Then he released the restraint he had kept wrapped around his presence since entering the Soul Realm. Dragon Dominance unfolded from him like the memory of the first predator ever born into creation. There was no shape at first, no great Dragon looming above him much less a beam of power splitting the sky.

The Soul Realm simply answered.

The golden sea convulsed; currents that had drifted with endless patience for ages shuddered beneath his presence, their calm breaking all at once as something buried far deeper than thought bowed to the Dragon standing among them. Waves rose along the horizon. The bright sky darkened under gathering pressure.

Golden mist was crushed down toward the surface, then torn upward again as the heavens of the Soul Realm twisted around him.

Marcus made a sound that never rose to the dignity of speech.

Phei lowered his gaze, and amethyst burned brighter in his eyes with every heartbeat, until their familiar color seemed threaded with something colder and far older than mortal sight had any right to hold.

"Cosmic Dragon Face!"

The words did not echo, because the Soul Realm did not hear them as sound but as a decree.

Marcus’s entire soul quaked so violently that Phei felt it beneath his feet.

Marcus’s body arched against his will, his back lifted from the shining surface while all six ruined wings jerked behind him. His mouth finally opened wide enough to scream, but the sound came out strangled by blood and terror before breaking into a wet gasp.

Golden fucking blood burst from him.

It spilled from his nose first, then ran in thin streams from beneath his eyes, from his ears and from the corners of his mouth. More welled beneath his fingernails and through tiny cracks spreading across his flesh, until it seemed the Angel Progenitor’s very soul had begun bleeding out its holiness in panic.

The Soul Realm fell with him.

The endless golden ocean that had once looked like the calm dawn of a sacred world became violently unrecognizable. Towering walls of World Essence climbed from the surface and crashed into one another hard enough to hurl whole seas of light into the air. Whirlpool after whirlpool tore open across the horizon, some widening until their hearts vanished into darkness, only to collapse beneath the birth of greater storms.

Golden ridges rose like mountain ranges and shattered moments later.

The sky split under veins of molten radiance, each crack lighting the whole realm in furious pulses, while winds howled in from every direction and dragged sheets of Essence into spiraling pillars.

Marcus’s fear for Phei seemed to be feeding all of it; every surge of terror inside him poured out through his Soul Realm and became storm.

Phei watched the world come apart around the broken Progenitor and felt a deep, ugly satisfaction settle in his chest.

Even the realm feared him—