Chapter 1418: Devour of Souls: Soul Sea

The Heaven-Stealer descended. Phei had expected the treasure to hover above Marcus and unfold some ancient formation, perhaps unravel his bloodline rune by rune, or draw it out through the soul bond the Slave Mark had already laid bare.

It did nothing so gentle—

The hourglass slammed straight into Marcus’s brow.

Phei’s eyes widened— but suddenly it disappeared and yet there was no wound.

The treasure passed through his flesh, bone and Soul alike as though none of them were worth its notice. Half the hourglass sank into Marcus’s skull while the rest kept spinning outside him for one impossible moment, and thousands of ancient runes burst from the point of entry, racing across his face, wings and chest before plunging beneath his flesh in branching rivers of pale-gold light.

Marcus convulsed—

His back arched high enough to lift him from the sea, all six wings snapped open at once and scattered radiant Essence across the waters, and a soundless scream twisted his face.

Then the Heaven-Stealer pulled—

Something primordial tore loose inside Marcus, from somewhere far deeper than flesh, and the entire Soul Realm lurched. Golden cracks split the heavens while vast currents beneath the sea twisted toward the place where he lay. The hourglass ripped itself free of his brow without leaving so much as a mark, but what followed it out could never be mistaken for ordinary Essence: a dense river of white-gold radiance woven through with countless tiny shapes of wings, runes, blood and shards of heavenly law, packed so tightly that even Phei’s divine sense struggled to tell one from another.

It was Marcus’s bloodline, the very origin of the Angel race torn out by the root!

The Heaven-Stealer crossed the distance to Phei in a streak of ancient light, and it did not stop before him. It plunged into his body and vanished straight into his Soul Realm.

Phei barely had time to register it before the world around him changed.

The World Essence stopped. Every current in the entire Soul Realm fell still in the same heartbeat. The immense golden sea that had survived storms violent enough to overturn the horizon became perfectly motionless. Waves froze halfway through their rise. The mist ceased drifting.

Golden motes hung in the air exactly where they had been.

Even the great slow rivers of Essence flowing far beneath him, currents that seemed older than motion itself, fell silent.

Phei looked down:

"Now that," he murmured, "does not bode well."

The sea answered him; everything moved toward him at once, and Phei’s expression changed.

This was nothing like the enslavement. Then, the World Essence had erupted into catastrophe and poured into him in colossal storms because the Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark was forcing Marcus’s Soul Realm to kneel. He had swallowed so much that the amount defied reckoning, yet the sea itself had endured; boundless depths still lay beneath the destruction.

Now the entire thing was leaving.

Every drop, every current and every hidden layer buried in depths even Phei’s divine sense had never reached was coming to him.

The horizon caved inward.

A wall of World Essence ten hundred thousand miles long came racing toward Phei from every side, not like a wave driven by wind but as though distance itself had bowed and folded away.

Whole reaches of the golden ocean vanished as the World Essence was dragged forward, and the deeper layers burst up from beneath the surface in colossal rising rivers, carrying so much power that the sky disappeared behind them.

The sea did not merely sink; whole fathomless depths vanished at once into Phei!

The golden waters drained faster than any ocean could, baring the layers beneath for a single instant before those too tore themselves free and surged toward him. Abysses that had seemed bottomless were laid bare stage by terrible stage as the Soul Realm surrendered its very foundation.

Marcus lay motionless at the heart of it all, his wings collapsed around him and his eyes open.

He could see exactly what was happening, and Phei could almost imagine what it felt like to watch an entire once of World Essence vast enough to raise an Angel Progenitor back to the heavens abandon him completely.

The great torrents had reached Phei, and he did not just absorb but he devoured it.

During the enslavement, the World Essence had flowed into him in great streams while his cultivation refined what it could and his young Soul Sea slowly gathered in the depths of his Soul Realm.

Now there was no boundary at all between the incoming ocean and whatever had awakened within him.

Entire rivers narrowed into blinding threads and vanished into his body. Golden hurricanes spiraled around his limbs and collapsed inward. Vast walls of Essence folded through his chest, through his Soul and through something deeper than either, disappearing so completely that not a wisp escaped.

His long white hair whipped upward in the torrent, and his clothes snapped and cracked beneath the pressure. Golden radiance blazed through his skin until his whole form looked translucent at the edges, and beneath that brilliance the black-and-white Void flickered through him, his Primordial Blood began to roar in his veins, and his Soul let out a deep, rumbling hunger that grew heavier with every impossible flood it swallowed.

High above him, the shadow of the Cosmic Dragon opened its jaws as wide as the heavens and drank the falling oceans alongside its master.

The Soul Realm kept emptying, until Phei could actually watch the horizon drawing closer, and for the first time true disbelief crossed his face. "Heavens above..."

He had never imagined such a thing.

A Soul Realm’s Essence Sea was not supposed to be plundered like this.

Cultivators stole treasures, drained the Essence of their foes, seized Cores, devoured cultivation and ripped away bloodlines through vile enough arts, but an Essence Sea was something else entirely. It was part of the very foundation of a being, bound to the Soul that formed it, as inseparable as a heart from its body.

Yet Marcus’s entire ocean was being torn away and poured into Phei as naturally as if the Heavenly Dao itself had decreed a new master and the world had simply obeyed.

The last distant walls of gold curved toward him.

Storms raged within them as the final World Essence rushed in from every direction, countless shining currents braiding together until Phei stood beneath a descending sphere of radiance vast enough to swallow the sky.

The deepest currents rose next, and that was when the Soul Realm truly began to die.

Light drained from its farthest reaches first. Continent-big regions once lit from below by bottomless golden depths turned dull and hollow as the last buried reserves were torn free.

Cracks spread across the bare spiritual ground where an ocean had rolled moments before, splitting outward in webs as wide as continents, and the heavens above lost their shine.

Marcus trembled.

For the first time since the Heaven-Stealer entered him, a sound left the Progenitor: a single broken gasp, as his Soul Realm was hollowed out around him.

Phei stood at its center and kept taking everything.

The final ocean reached him, golden light swallowed his body, and for several breaths there was nothing else.

Then Phei turned his attention inward, to the Soul Sea that had begun gathering in the depths of his Soul Realm during the enslavement, still only scattered pools of refined Essence and faint shores barely holding their shape.

The stolen ocean crashed into it like the heavens falling into a cup.

The scattered pools ran together into rivers, the rivers swelled into a single great expanse, and the expanse kept spreading as Marcus’s inheritance poured in without end. Shores that had barely existed were driven outward and swallowed by rising tides. Depth piled beneath depth until the same fathomless abyss Phei had witnessed in Marcus’s Soul Realm took shape within his own.

Yet this sea did not merely copy the one it had devoured.

It carried the weight of conquest, of a World Essence ocean seized rather than cultivated, and every current in it answered to Phei as naturally as his own breath. Primordial Blood stained its depths with a faint crimson sheen, the Void and Void-Ice drifted through its waters in threads of black and white, and somewhere far beneath its surface the coils of the Cosmic Dragon settled into the abyss as though it had finally found the lair it had always been meant to rule.

Outside, Marcus’s Soul Realm stood nearly barren.

Inside Phei, a true Soul Sea had been born.

Blue light appeared, and the System chimed with almost cheerful timing as Phei stood amid the death of one sea and the completion of another:

[Ding! Your Soul Sea has fully formed!]