Chapter – 35 – The Beast Sovereign Egg
"Why..." Zarah murmured, her breath warm and sickeningly sweet against his neck as her grip tightened inside his flesh, "are you constantly getting in the way of my plans?"
With a sickening squelch, she wrenched her arm backward, tearing through muscle and bone before throwing Lucien like a broken ragdoll across the chamber. His body slammed hard into the pulsing, flesh-textured wall, leaving a streak of dark crimson as he slid to the stone floor.
Zarah casually flicked the blood from her fingers, turning her back, fully expecting him to be a corpse. But the wet, heavy sound of a coughing gasp shattered her confidence.
Lucien pushed himself up. His legs trembled, and dark blood welled from the gaping hole in his chest, but his eyes were wide, burning with a fierce, untamed defiance. Zarah whirled around, her pupils shrinking in genuine shock. Lucien was equally stunned by the sheer depth of her aura, though a grim realization settled over him; he had suspected someone of her monstrous caliber was pulling the strings from the shadows.
"Oh? Still alive?" Zarah's lips curled into a twisted expression of intrigue. "You really are fascinating compared to the other trash. No wonder you were constantly disrupting my harvest."
Damn it... Lucien thought, his breath rattling violently in his throat as his spiritual sea churned. I can't hold back anymore. If I try to hide my cards now, I'm dead. I have to use everything just to survive.
Zarah pointed a single, dark-nailed finger toward the ground. "Crush him."
From a swirl of black mist, the humanoid female doll-like creature materialized, its porcelain face split into a hollow, dead grin as it lunged forward.
Lucien slammed his remaining hand against the floor.
Thick, jagged roots and razor-sharp vines erupted from the stone, tearing through the air like lances. They impaled the puppet, shattering its lower porcelain torso and ripping its limbs apart. Yet, before the debris could even hit the ground, the doll's broken body knit back together instantly, its hollow eyes flashing as it resumed its relentless assault.
Lucien threw himself backward, dodging a sweeping strike that whistled through the air. The scorpion entity fused to the puppet's upper torso suddenly arched its stinger, spraying a jet of sizzling, pale green acid. Lucien twisted mid-air, utilizing Shadow Predator. His body dissolved into a plume of darkness, teleporting through the shifting shadows of the moving stairs to avoid the spray, which hissed violently as it melted the reinforced iron floor into bubbling slag.
Reappearing on a higher step, Lucien analyzed the entity with hyper-accelerated focus. It possesses high-speed physical regeneration, but its movements are far too fluid and sentient for a standard puppet... It's utilizing a bound soul as a core processor! If it's a soul-type construct, then a physical assault is useless.
Lucien leaped high into the air, his spirit forge core roaring to life. "Bloody Veins!"
From the blood-soaked stone of the ritual floor, hundreds of thin, needle-like crimson tendrils shot upward. They didn't target the porcelain shell; they pierced straight into the metaphysical layer of the puppet. The moment the bloody veins made contact, they tore directly into the bound soul inside. The puppet froze, letting out a silent, agonizing psychic shriek before its entire physical form crumbled into a fine, gray powder, scattering across the abyss.
Zarah watched the dust settle, her eyes flashing with dangerous amusement. "Impressive. You are the very first Peak Spirit Forge Realm Master to ever destroy one of my specialized puppets. You are actually worthy of fighting me... State your name, boy."
Lucien flooded his meridians with raw astral energy, activating his dormant Regenerator skill to Regenerate his Ribs and Muscles of Stomach. Opening his eyes, he spat out a glob of dark blood and locked his gaze onto hers. "Lucien Vale. And what's yours?"
"Zarah," she hissed.
In the next microsecond, both of them detonated their spiritual foundations and lunged forward.
The explosion of their movement shattered the immediate stone steps. Rosra, Quindic, and Kelie could only watch in absolute horror, paralyzed by the sheer pressure waves rolling off the combatants. Rosra couldn't even comprehend a Spirit Forge Realm Master fighting at this level; both Lucien and Zarah were clashing like unhinged deities, eschewing weapons entirely in favor of compressing pure, volatile astral energy into their bare fists.
"This... this makes no sense," Quindic stammered, his leg vibrating from the ambient shockwaves. "The way they're moving, the raw compression of their energy... it's exactly like the ancient legends of the Legend Realm masters written in the sacred texts!"
Zarah manifested a massive, translucent astral hand, swinging it with enough force to level a mountain range. Lucien used his honed physical instincts, twisting his body at impossible angles to evade the crushing palm strikes, using his raw, unrefined physical power to block the glancing blows that threatened to cave in his ribs.
Seeing an opening, Lucien drove forward, aiming a devastating straight punch at her throat. Zarah merely smiled. "Titan Breaker!"
Her fist came forward, colliding directly with Lucien's attack. The impact generated a blinding shockwave that shattered the surrounding space, sending a concussive blast through the cylindrical tower. The sheer kinetic rebound threw Lucien backward, skidding across the upper platform.
When Lucien looked down at his arm, his breath hitched. His right arm was entirely gone—shattered into a mist of blood and bone fragments from the absolute weight of her strike.
Fuck it, Lucien thought, a savage, desperate madness taking over his mind. I'm done hiding anything.
He channeled a massive influx of astral energy into his Regenerator skill. In full view of everyone, a horrifyingly beautiful sight occurred: a pristine white skeletal structure sprouted from his shoulder, followed instantly by the rapid weaving of red muscle tissue, veins, and fresh flesh. Within three heartbeats, his arm was entirely whole again.
Ever since entering this dungeon, Lucien had kept his regeneration capabilities strictly hidden because he hadn't faced a threat dire enough to warrant revealing it. But he had continuously upgraded the skill in, knowing a day of absolute desperation would eventually come.
Zarah's smooth composure finally cracked, her eyes widening in genuine astonishment. This level of cellular regeneration paired with soul-rending attacks... this brat is an absolute anomaly.
Lucien didn't give her time to think. He raised his newly formed right hand into the air, and a suffocating, ancient pressure descended upon the chamber. Light warped around his palm as he materialized his true weapon: the World Root Executioner Halberd. The massive, archaic polearm thrummed with a heavy, terrestrial malice, its blade gleaming with a terrifying green-and-gold edge.
Rosra, Quindic, and Kelie gasped. They realized with a collective shock that Lucien had been concealing the true depth of his martial might throughout their entire journey.
"My turn," Lucien growled, and attacked first.
The halberd tore through the air, leaving wakes of displaced spatial energy. Zarah fought barehanded, her fingers coated in a dense, diamond-hard layer of black qi, but Lucien's relentless, heavy swings were actively pushing her backward. Every block sent vibrations rattling through her bones. Realizing she was losing momentum, Zarah vaulted upward, her black wings flaring wide.
"Hellfire Rain!" she screamed.
The sky above them instantly turned into a burning sea of pitch-black flames. Meteoric spheres of hellfire rained down in a dense, apocalyptic torrent, targeting not just Lucien, but the entire platform.
"Thousand Petal Burial!" Lucien countered, swinging his halberd in a massive arc.
Thousands of glowing, razor-sharp spiritual petals erupted from his weapon, swirling upward like a violent, beautiful hurricane to meet the falling meteors. The collision of the two high-tier skills was catastrophic. The continuous explosions tore through the upper structural ceiling of the 10,000th floor, blowing the heavy stone roof completely to pieces and revealing the fractured, blood-red sky of the outer pocket dimension.
A thick, blinding curtain of black smoke and ash filled the upper chamber. When the wind finally cleared the debris, Lucien and Zarah were standing fifty meters apart, staring each other down.
Zarah's hellfire had entirely incinerated the upper half of Lucien's garments, leaving him clad only in shredded black pants. The destruction revealed his carefully sculpted torso, his skin humming with the residual gold lines of his astral energy.
For a few tense seconds, neither moved. Then, simultaneously, they launched themselves into the air, taking the battle directly into the open, ruined sky above the tower.
The heavens turned a deep, bruised shade of blood red as they traded blows in mid-air. Neither gave an inch. Zarah's face was twisted in a manic snarl as she clutched her hands together. "Storm Judgment!"
The sky instantly shifted from red to a blinding, electrified blue as thousands of lightning bolts converged on Lucien's position.
Lucien gripped his halberd with both hands, drawing upon the absolute limits of his physical and spiritual reserves. "Horizon Splitter!"
He swung the halberd horizontally. A massive, line-shaped wave of pure kinetic and astral energy tore through the atmosphere, physically cutting the visible landscape and the sky in two. The horizontal slash sliced cleanly through the storm clouds—and caught Zarah directly across her midsection.
The energy line passed through her, physically cleaving her body in half at the waist.
But before Quindic or Rosra could cheer, a strange, sickening distortion occurred around Zarah's falling torso. Time seemed to snap backward in a localized loop around her physical form. The two halves of her body pulled back together, the flesh reattaching instantly as if the injury had never occurred.
Taking advantage of Lucien's momentary exhaustion from the strike, Zarah thrust her hand forward. "Vacuum Blade!"
An invisible, compressed blade of pressurized air sheared through the sky, cleanly severing Lucien's left leg from the thigh down.
Lucien didn't even blink. He gritted his teeth, his Regenerator skill flaring instantly as a brand-new leg manifested beneath him before he could even lose his balance in the air.
The pacing of the combat was blindingly fast, the color of the sky shifting wildly from crimson to electric blue to dark gold depending on which strike was thrown. To the survivors watching from below, it felt as though two ancient gods were locked in a war of attrition.
Lucien closed the distance, his halberd glowing with a blinding, divine golden light that radiated a suppressive, monarchical aura. "Emperor's Execution!"
He brought the blade down with the weight of a falling star, but Zarah thrust her hands upward, catching the glowing golden blade of the halberd with her bare palms. The impact froze them in mid-air, a massive sphere of crackling energy expanding outward from the point of contact.
The fight was locked in a horrific stalemate. Zarah was structurally unable to land a killing blow that Lucien couldn't instantly regenerate from, and Lucien was throwing every single high-tier destructive skill in his arsenal, yet her bizarre, law-defying defensive abilities kept her perfectly intact.
As they struggled for dominance, Lucien's mind raced against the clock. This is going nowhere. It's a literal battle against time. Either I find a way to destroy the structural integrity of this entire tower before the Warden outside finishes shattering reality, or I kill her here—which is looking increasingly impossible. She isn't even using her full, unrestrained power yet. She's just stalling me.
Looking down through the shattered ceiling, he could see that Quindic, Rosra, and Kelie had already begun systematically attacking the core formations on the upper floors, trying to bring the tower down. But their destructive output was too low; it would take hours to destabilize a 10,000-floor structural anchor.
Movement near the bottom of the shattered chamber caught his eye. Gwenra, Halfred, Samley, Isalyn, and Fayie had finally breached the inner gate and sprinted into the heart of the room. Quindic immediately screamed down to them, brief and urgent, explaining the exact nature of the core ritual and the necessity of destroying the tower.
Without a second thought, the newly arrived realm masters unleashed their respective elements, violently attacking the base of the tower from the bottom. But even with their combined forces, the ancient, flesh-reclaiming walls of the dungeon were absorbing the damage too quickly. It was a complete gridlock. They were running out of time, and the Warden's smile felt closer than ever.
Suddenly, a bright, flashing violet interface snapped open directly in front of Lucien's face, accompanied by a heavy, resonant ping that echoed in his soul consciousness:
[Warning: The Beast Sovereign Egg within your Shadow World has reached maximum soul-saturation limits.][Emergency Protocol Initiated: The Beast Sovereign Egg is about to hatch!]
Author Note:
If you'd like to support the novel and read ahead, my Patreon is linked below. Thank you for reading!
/cw/thenoctvale