Chapter 314 - 16 Year reunion!
The moment Damien and Isabelle stepped over the shattered remains of the bone doors, the concept of "temperature" ceased to exist.
It was absolute zero. The kind of cold that didn’t just freeze water, but froze mana in the veins, halting the kinetic movement of reality itself.
But worse than the cold was the sky.
There were no artificial stars here, no rocky cavern ceilings. There was only a swirling, apocalyptic vortex of sickening Red Aura.
The same oppressive, world-ending color Damien had seen radiating from Emperor Thraka, but magnified a million times over. It felt like standing beneath the pupil of an angry, bloodshot eye that spanned the entire horizon.
They stood on a high precipice of black ice, looking down at the epicenter of Layer 9.
The dimension was a slaughterhouse.
The ice was shattered by craters the size of oceans, stained black with toxic blood. Floating islands of bedrock were suspended in the air, defying gravity as the fundamental laws of physics broke down under the sheer weight of overlapping 9th-Order Domains.
And in the center of the destruction, towering over the frozen wasteland, was the Rotting King.
He was a five-hundred-foot-tall abomination. He had no true shape, he was a shifting, churning mass of grey decay, bone spurs, and weeping faces, draped in tattered robes woven from the souls of dead leviathans.
The King of the 9th Layer was performing surgery on the world. Massive, glowing green tendrils, the very leylines of the Abyss, were being forcefully ripped from the frozen earth and fed into a colossal, jagged Void Gate hovering behind him.
The Gate was screaming, resisting the unnatural expansion, but the Rotting King’s raw power was forcing it wider, allowing more and more of that suffocating Red Aura to bleed into the Abyss.