Chapter 241: The Abyssal leviathan

The threshold between the known world and the Null Expanse was not a physical line, but an agonizing shift in fundamental physics.

The moment Vince’s party crossed the cracked spatial veil, the familiar weight of gravity, atmospheric density, and elemental balance vanished. In their place was the biting, weightless chill of raw, unshaped cosmic mist. Giant chunks of shattered, obsidian-like landmasses floated lazily through the violet-tinged gloom like colossal icebergs, some carrying the frozen, petrified ruins of civilizations that predated the Sovereigns’ six-thousand-year reign.

Yet, within a three-yard radius around Vince, none of that chaos mattered.

His Inward Absolute Domain extended as an invisible, spherical sanctuary of absolute stability. Beneath their boots, invisible platforms of dark-gold force formed with every step, providing firm, unyielding footing. Inside the sphere, the air was warm, rich with clean oxygen, and scented with the subtle vanilla-and-lotus fragrance radiating from Barnaby.

"It feels like walking through a graveyard of forgotten worlds," Lyrielle whispered, her hands gripping her bow of polished elder-wood.

She stood close to Vince’s right side, her delicate pointed ears twitching at every distant crackle of cosmic lightning. Despite the terrifying scale of the void around them, the sheer warmth radiating from Vince’s side kept her posture steady and her violet eyes bright with adrenaline.

"That’s precisely what it is," Barnaby chimed, floating effortlessly at Vince’s left shoulder. Her translucent silver dress swirled around her like liquid starlight, untouched by the void-wind. She looked out over the swirling fog, her golden eyes glowing with a hungry, predatory light. "Before the Six Sovereigns erected the Obelisk and locked the provinces into a static grid, the cosmos was a wild, untamed sea. What you’re looking at are the remnants of realms that refused to bow to divine law."

"And now they’re just food for overgrown worms," Vetra grunted with a dark laugh.

The dragon-kin princess rolled her broad shoulders, drawing her massive broadsword from her back. The silver scales along her arms and neck flickered with a low, aggressive crimson heat that burned bright against the surrounding darkness. "Speaking of which... the ugly bastard noticed us."

A sharp, deafening screech echoed through the void—a sound that vibrated not through the air, but directly through the spatial fabric itself.

A few thousand yards ahead, the colossal Void-Siphon uncoiled from the ruined island it had been draining. The leviathan was staggering in scale: a serpentine nightmare over two miles long, covered in overlapping plates of pitch-black, obsidian-like armor that absorbed all ambient light. Dozens of glowing, crimson compound eyes flared along its snout, and its gaping maw was a whirlpool of spinning, razor-sharp teeth surrounding a core of blinding, black-and-gold energy.

It sensed Vince’s party—not as mortal prey, but as a concentrated, impossibly pure anomaly of absolute law floating in its lawless domain.

GROOOOOOOAAR—!

The leviathan thrashed its massive tail, shattering a nearby floating continent into a million jagged meteorites, and lunged straight toward them. It moved with terrifying, unnatural speed, cutting through zero gravity like a shark through water, its massive maw opening wide enough to swallow their entire platform whole.

"Elena, Lyrielle—cover the flanks," Vince commanded softly, his tone as calm as if he were taking a morning stroll. "Vetra, split its attention. Barnaby... get ready to harvest."

"With pleasure!" Vetra roared, her boots kicking off the dark-gold force platform with explosive power.

She shot forward like a crimson meteor, her broadsword ignited in a blazing pillar of high-density dragon-fire. As the leviathan’s snout loomed over them, Vetra brought her blade down in a brutal, arc-shaped cleave.

BOOOOOOM—!

The dragon-fire collided with the monster’s heavy obsidian scales, creating a blinding shockwave that sent ripples across the void-fog. The leviathan let out an irritated hiss; while its scales were virtually immune to standard elemental magic, the sheer physical force of Vetra’s strike forced its massive head to jerk violently to the left.

"My turn," Lyrielle declared, her voice ringing with newfound royal confidence.

The elven princess dropped into a low, stable stance beside Vince. She drew back her elder-wood bowstring, channeling not standard wind or plant mana, but a concentrated thread of Vince’s residual golden domain light that flowed through her body. A radiant, golden arrow formed on the string, vibrating with a high-pitched, harmonic resonance.

TWANG—!

Lyrielle released the string. The arrow streaked through the gloom, leaving a trail of shimmering golden dust before piercing straight through one of the leviathan’s massive crimson compound eyes.

SCREEEEEECH—!

The beast thrashed in blinding agony as the golden energy detonated inside its optic socket, shattering three armor plates and showering the void in black, glowing ichor.

"Direct hit!" Lyrielle cheered, a proud, radiant smile lighting up her face as she instinctively glanced at Vince for approval.

"Excellently done, little spark," Vince murmured, his hand briefly cupping the back of her neck in a warm, approving squeeze that made her cheeks flush with pleasure.

The leviathan, now thoroughly enraged and half-blinded, roared in pure fury. The black-and-gold vortex deep within its maw flared to blinding intensity. It stopped trying to bite them; instead, it began gathering a massive, concentrated beam of compressed void-matter—a breath attack capable of erasing an entire province’s ley-line network in a single blast.

The space around Vince’s party began to warp and buckle as the monster locked its targeting array onto them.

"Vince," Elena warned quietly from his left, her fingers hovering over her tactical rune-screen. "The energy output from its core is spiking exponentially. It’s attempting to collapse the localized spatial coordinates around us."

"Let it try," Vince said smoothly.

He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t raise a shield. Vince simply took one calm step to the front of the platform, his dark coat billowing as he looked directly into the mouth of the charging cosmic beast.

The leviathan unleashed its breath.

A colossal pillar of swirling, black-and-gold destruction, five hundred yards wide, surged out of its maw, vaporizing everything in its path as it roared straight toward Vince’s party.

Vince raised his right hand, his fingers spreading slightly.

"Inward Absolute Domain: Denial."

ZZZZZT—!

The moment the cataclysmic beam reached the boundary of Vince’s three-yard sphere, it didn’t explode. It didn’t push against a barrier. The raw, terrifying beam of void destruction simply... ceased to exist. The energy dissolved into harmless, sparkling dust the microsecond it touched his domain, vanishing like water thrown onto a red-hot furnace.

The leviathan’s eyes widened in sheer, primordial confusion. Its mouth remained open, still spewing energy that immediately evaporated into nothingness, completely unable to penetrate the quiet space Vince occupied.

"Six thousand years in the void, and you still don’t understand," Vince said, his voice echoing clearly through the monster’s mind. "You aren’t the apex predator out here anymore."

Vince closed his hand into a tight fist.

"Rank Severance."

CRACK—!

A silent, invisible shockwave rippled through the leviathan’s two-mile-long body. Instantly, the ancient, obsidian armor plates that had protected it for millennia turned brittle and grey. The primordial authority that held its massive form together was instantly stripped away, reducing its cosmic status to nothing more than a fragile mass of unshaped flesh and raw mana.

"Vetra, drop it," Vince commanded.

"On it!" Vetra bellowed with a fierce, bloodthirsty laugh.

She plummeted down from above like a falling star, her broadsword coated in a dense, dark-crimson aura. She drove her blade straight through the top of the monster’s weakened skull, splitting the two-mile-long leviathan cleanly down its center with a single, magnificent stroke of dragon-kin strength.

ROAAAAAAA—!

The Void-Siphon let out a final, dying whimper as its body fractured into a million glowing fragments of black-and-gold energy.

At the center of the collapsing monster, where its heart had once been, a colossal, orb-like crystal materialized. It was the size of a small house, pulsating with a deep, liquid-gold radiance and releasing a sweet, intoxicating scent of raw, ancient cosmic essence.

Barnaby let out a breathless gasp, her golden eyes wide as she floated toward the floating core. Her chest rose and fell sharply, her pale skin flushing with intense, greedy anticipation.

"The Primordial Void-Core..." Barnaby murmured, her voice trembling with sultry desire as she turned her head back to look at Vince. "Vince... it’s completely pure. It’s enough to push the lotus to ninety-five percent."

Vince glided forward, his domain expanding to encapsulate the massive glowing crystal. He reached out, his hand resting against the warm, humming surface of the void-core before looking back at his party.

Elena was smiling brightly, her tactical feeds reporting zero remaining threats. Vetra was resting her heavy blade over her shoulder, her scales gleaming as she grinned at the victory. Lyrielle was standing tall, her bow lowered, looking out over the conquered void with the proud posture of a true queen. And Barnaby was practically vibrating with desperate, exquisite hunger.

Vince’s mouth curved into a dark, possessive smirk.

"Claim it, Barnaby," Vince said smoothly. "We’re just getting started."