Chapter 1419: The Burning Angel Under Heavens

Outside Marcus’s Soul Realm, Eira spent the time it takes an incense stick to burn halfway down waiting for the catastrophe she had readied half the Endless Forest to contain, and with every passing breath the utter absence of one grew more unsettling than any explosion could have been.

Phei and Marcus lay unconscious near the heart of the vast enclosure while the barrier around them thrummed beneath the combined might of Eira, the Dragon Lady and the Undead Queen.

Layer upon layer of dome had been woven together until the sealed land resembled a small world of its own buried within the Endless Forest, its outer shell fortified far beyond anything Eira had raised during Kyle’s enslavement.

She remembered that first attempt all too clearly.

The moment Phei forced the Slave Mark upon Kyle’s Progenitor Soul, the eruption that followed struck her barrier hard enough to send a soul-shaking waves tearing through the forest.

Ancient trees bowed beneath the pressure, Essence howled across leagues of wilderness, and any expert of sufficient strength within reach could have sensed that something unnatural had awakened among the trees.

This time Eira had prepared for something far worse.

Marcus was an Angel Progenitor whose Soul Realm held an entire ocean of World Essence and Phei himself had grown vastly stronger since his first Progenitor conquest, and every sign said the battle within Marcus’s Soul would unleash power many times greater than Kyle’s ever had.

That was why they had travelled so deep into the Endless Forest than last time, and why Eira had accepted the aid of two existences capable of turning the surrounding land into a graveyard by mistake.

Whatever happened here had to vanish without trace before the Legacy Families realized one of their precious heirs was gone.

Yet the waiting stretched on beneath a dome built to survive the ruin of Souls, and the greatest threat to it remained Cassiopeia occasionally shifting her weight. Eira had just begun to wonder whether her Master had somehow learned to unleash a calamity without dragging the world around him into it when a faint light kindled beneath Marcus’s brow.

The Undead Queen noticed first.

Her violet eyes narrowed on the senseless man, and her voice carried quietly across the frozen clearing. "His Mark."

Eira’s gaze snapped down.

A pattern rose beneath Marcus’s skin, black and white along its edges and impossibly intricate toward its heart, and Eira knew it at once. The Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark that had surfaced in full for a single moment, burning through Marcus’s brow with such weight that his sleeping body convulsed beneath it.

With each pulse it seemed to sink deeper, engraving itself somewhere and then it folded inward and vanished as though it had never been.

Marcus’s eyes opened. There was nothing graceful in his waking. The Angel Progenitor dragged in a desperate breath and jerked against the frozen earth before discovering that his body had little interest in obeying him.

His gaze stayed empty for several heartbeats while awareness returned in scattered shards, and then terror followed so swiftly that his eyes were searching for Phei before he seemed to understand where he was.

Eira watched in silence.

The Slave Mark had taken hold.

Whatever battle had raged within Marcus’s Soul Realm was over, and from the look spreading across his face, Phei had left no doubt at all about who had won.

The Dragon Lady turned her silver-white gaze toward Phei’s motionless body, while the Undead Queen glanced up at the vast sealed heavens around them. Cassiopeia looked from Marcus to Phei and then upward as well, and for one increasingly absurd moment the same question seemed to settle over everyone in the clearing:

—had they truly created all of this for nothing?

Eira’s lips had barely begun to curve into an amused smile when Phei opened his eyes.

The forest stopped!

The silence came so completely that sound itself seemed forgotten. The faint rustle of leaves vanished from Eira’s senses. The Mana flowing through roots, stone and ancient soil hung suspended between one movement and the next. Even the Essence circulating through the colossal dome seemed to pause, as though the barrier itself had sensed something within Phei and was waiting to learn whether carrying on as before was still wise.

Phei lay still for less than a heartbeat before something deep in his chest ignited.

The first light was tiny; it was a golden brilliance hidden beneath the center of his chest, and then it swelled until the glow shone through his body. The light was too fluid, too alive and too restless as it coiled around itself in delicate streams before gathering into a blazing knot in the very heart of his chest, and from that knot slipped the first impossibly fine golden threads.

They started to spread through him.

Threads of gold ran beneath his skin and across his ribs, climbed through his shoulders and divided down both arms in branching webs finer than veins. Others travelled along his spine and down through his belly and legs, multiplying until a second, shining web of channels seemed to live beneath his flesh.

His veins caught a deep golden fire. Light flowed through the sinews binding muscle to bone and into places Eira’s ordinary sight could never have told apart, until even the smallest hidden pathways within him answered the same radiance.

His body was not merely carrying World Essence; Phei himself looked as though World Essence had recognized him from some forgotten age and begun reshaping him in its own image.

The natural warmth of his skin vanished beneath an inner golden glow, so that his whole form seemed nearly translucent around the power moving within it. His long white hair caught the radiance until every strand gained a pale-gold edge, and his amethyst eyes changed more subtly still.

Gold seeped into them slowly joining the small golden hue that had been there since the Endless Void awakening; it started flowing in thin shining spirals around the violet without replacing it, the two colors were distinct yet sharing the same impossible depth, amethyst and gold circled one another like two heavens reflected in the same pair of eyes.

The Dragon Lady expression changed. She had seen Phei carry absurd amounts of Essence before while Eira had watched him swallow power that should have crippled far stronger cultivators when he enslaved Kyle in torrents but had never seen anything like this.

The pressure within him kept climbing, yet none of it escaped violently enough to strike the barrier, and that was when Eira understood why the catastrophe she had been waiting for had never arrived.

It had not failed to happen—

It had changed its form.

"Wait..." she murmured, and the word had barely left her lips when the golden heart within Phei’s chest flared white-gold. Eira’s pupils shrank to points.

Every instinct she possessed screamed at once: "Master, don’t—"

CRAAAAACCCCKKKK!!!!!

A sound like the shattering of a world swallowed the forest.

Deep golden World Essence then burst from Phei’s chest in a perfect sphere, spreading so fast that even Eira’s perception could not follow its first instant. Its leading edge looked like the surface of a newborn star, white-gold at its heart and deepening to radiant gold at its edges, so dense that everything it passed through vanished for a moment behind blinding brilliance.

Phei disappeared within it, then Marcus, Eira, Cassiopeia, the Undead Queen and the Dragon Lady, as the eruption swallowed the clearing and struck the inner wall of the great dome.

Eira braced for the impact but none came.

The wave crossed the barrier but it did not break it, nor did it overpower the three existences sustaining it; as it simply passed through. Eira felt the World Essence slide across the layers she had woven as though her barrier existed in some other world entirely.

The Dragon Lady’s Void-Ice offered no resistance and the Undead Queen’s Death Essence remained undisturbed. The great dome did not crack, bend or even flicker as the golden wave passed through it and rolled on into the Endless Forest, and that frightened Eira more than any destruction could have.

The wave swept across mountains, rivers, valleys and leagues of ancient woodland with such apparent force that every instinct insisted all in its path should have been wiped away in golden ruin.

Nothing moved. No trunk snapped, no branch bent, and no frost fell from grass or leaf.

Distant lakes lay smooth as mirrors after it passed, and even the smallest insects clinging to bark or hidden beneath leaves stayed exactly where they had been while an ocean of World Essence flowed through their bodies; the eruption destroyed nothing at all.

Instead, it changed the island.

Wherever the golden wave travelled, impossibly fine threads remained behind.