Chapter 1423: Genesis Bloodline!

Phei’s ascent halted for a single heartbeat as the innermost petals peeled apart, layer after white-gold layer drew back with agonizing slowness to reveal a deeper sanctum within the flower, a place so saturated with radiance that the World Essence blazing in Phei’s body dimmed beside it. The brilliance there had depth, layer upon layer falling inward toward something that felt both infinitely far away and directly above his head.

The curtains lifted him toward it.

Phei’s eyes widened. "You’re actually putting me insideyou?"

He crossed the threshold, and white-gold light devoured him.

From outside, his figure simply vanished into the heart of the celestial flower.

Inside, there was no darkness at all, not even the shadow of his own body. White brilliance flowed in every direction, laced with gold, and translucent petals overlapped one another across distances he could no longer reckon. He was visible only because the Essence inside him burned brighter than the light around him, until he looked like a figure carved from radiance and golden veins.

The vortex in his chest roared.

The strange power at its heart sharpened, clearer now and closer, and Phei turned his sense inward to meet it.

Something was awakening in his blood, something that could rewrite the foundation of his body without first having to destroy it. It reached his blood, his marrow and his Soul at once, and it went deeper than all three.

The pressure spiked once.

Phei sucked in a breath.

His blood changed.

It grew heavier, and ancient.

Every drop suddenly carried a weight far beyond anything, as though a lost history had been poured into it between one heartbeat and the next. The change swept through his veins into every corner of his body, and when his heart struck again, all the World Essence within the Primordial Lotus answered.

The golden currents shuddered. The orbs froze in their orbits. Even the great curtains of light held still, as though the Lotus itself were holding its breath.

Then the System appeared.

[Ding! New Bloodline Awakened!]

[Bloodline: The Genesis!]

Phei forgot to breathe.

A new bloodline?! This was no evolution of the Cosmic Dragon and no hidden layer waking inside something he already had. It was an entirely new bloodline.

"The Genesis—?"

The name had barely left his lips when the transformation tore forward.

Gold thundered through his veins with every heartbeat as the new bloodline flooded every part of him at once. Phei braced himself. The Cosmic Dragon Bloodline, Primordial Blood and foundations stranger still already lived inside his body, and something new should have met resistance somewhere.

Right?

But nothing resisted.

The Genesis made no war on what was already there. It entered, before weaving itself through his very being, gliding beside the Cosmic Dragon bloodline without provoking it, then sinking beneath both until Phei could no longer tell where coexistence ended and union began. He felt himself being changed at a level terrifyingly close to what he was, rather than what he was made of.

His awareness brushed something beneath the new bloodline.

Beginning! Creation!

A time before things had names, before existence had races, before Essence had Elements, before existence had split itself apart into small, big and giant realms enough to need definitions at all.

His whole being lunged toward it—

—it was gone.

Phei’s eyes flew wide. Whatever he had touched had slipped away too fast to grasp, and it left behind a single bone-deep certainty: Genesis was no pretty title the System had picked because it sounded grand.

His thoughts raced. The Primordial Lotus’s Blessings. A Core forming in his chest. Marcus’s Essence Sea ripped out and devoured to complete him before forming his own Soul Sea. World Essence flooding every hidden pathway in his body—

And now a bloodline called The Genesis.

"What the actual fuck did I steal from Marcus?"

But did he actually steal anything or did what he got from Marcus help awaken what was already in him?!

Something moved beyond the Lotus.

Phei felt it before he saw it, and that alone seized his full attention; everything outside the Lotus was still sealed from him. Eira, the Dragon Lady, the Undead Queen, Cassiopeia, Marcus, the Endless Forest and all of Hell’s Paradise might as well have stopped existing.

Yet this presence slipped through.

The white-gold curtains parted— Sienna appeared.

Phei saw her with perfect clarity, as if the layers of radiance that had erased the rest of the world simply stepped aside for his Nether Goddess. Her long dark hair drifted through the golden light, and her face was so focused, so utterly serious, that the shameless remark forming on Phei’s tongue died before it was born.

When Sienna looked like that during one of his breakthroughs, then something big was coming.

She raised one hand, and space ripped open beside her.

Something emerged, and Phei felt its power; it was so dense that the heart of the Primordial Lotus itself flinched. The curtains around him rippled outward, golden veins flared across the vast petals, and deep within him his newly formed Soul Sea stirred for the first time since he had entered the Lotus, waves rolled across its boundless golden depths as though it had caught the scent of prey.

Sienna held a Core!

Phei’s expression changed.

This was no Primordial Beast’s Core, and it was nothing like the World Transcendent Cores he possessed. The thing above Sienna’s palm was so heavy with power that space itself bent away from it. Dark-golden pressure folded across its surface in slow pulses, each one strong enough to warp the radiance around it.

The Great Immortal God’s Core. Habin’s Core.

Sienna drew back her arm.

"Devour it."

She threw it.

Phei expected the Lotus to reject it. The sanctuary had sealed out everything, even his own senses, and this Core reeked of foreign might.

—but the Lotus opened for it instead.

Curtain after curtain of radiance parted in perfect succession, carving a straight road through the heart of the flower. Golden veins bent aside, and the petals brightened around the Core as it passed, welcoming it like an honored guest, as though Sienna understood something about this anointing that Phei had not yet grasped.

The Core shot toward him. He raised a hand on instinct; it stopped dead above his palm.

The weight almost overwhelmed him at once despite how powerful he was.

The weight was almost one of a mountain in Phei’s grasp as his hand fell down; it was the fraction weight of everything it had once been. Inside it lay the compressed remnants of power that had once upheld a Great Immortal God.

It rolled off the Core in slow tides that made the radiance around it buckle and smooth again, dark-golden currents crawled across its surface, and the thing sealed within throbbed hard enough that Phei’s Soul Sea rose to meet it like a beast rising to its feet.

The Primordial Lotus had its serenity strained.

Sienna’s voice cut through the sanctuary: "All of it."

[Ding! Host has acquired: Great Immortal God’s Core!]

Phei stared at the Core above his palm.

The Genesis Bloodline blazed through him. The unfinished Core in his chest answered with a pulse so violent that golden light exploded across every channel in his body. His Soul Sea surged. The World Essence in the entire Primordial Lotus and the rest of the island seemed to have pressed closer, and above him every petal flared until the great flower seemed to hold an entire heaven in each of its layers.

Slowly, Phei’s lips curved.

Whatever this awakening had started as, it had clearly given up any intention of ending politely.

He closed his fingers around the Great Immortal God’s Core never letting it overpower him; his smile widened.

The awakening had only just begun!