Chapter : 1321

  The fight between the four powerful spirits was a beautiful, world-ending work of art. It was a war of basic forces. It painted the dark, evening-like sky with colors of shadow, lightning, stone, and cursed blood. The city of Bethelham, and the unaware guests at the wedding below, were safe from the destruction. They were protected only by the quiet, shimmering shield of the Royal Palace's old defenses. The shield flickered and groaned under the pressure of the powerful energies being used above.

  Roy Ferrum stood like a statue of cold, northern anger in the middle of his own personal hurricane. The power of Magog flowed through him, and the air itself crackled with his controlled rage. He was a storm god, getting ready to deliver a punishment that would wash the skies clean.

  Across from him, Beelzebub let out a soft, dramatic sigh. It was a sound of deep and very insulting boredom. “All this… work,” he mumbled. His voice was a pleasant whisper that could be heard easily over the loud chaos. “All this roaring and crashing. It is so… simple. So very… loud.”

  He looked at Roy, and his smile was full of pity and condescension. “You people from the North,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “You think power is about force, about being loud and angry. A hammer to break your enemies. But you are wrong. True power,” he added, his voice becoming a secret-sharing purr, “is not a storm. It is a silence. A beautiful, perfect, and total silence that simply… erases things.”

  Then, as easily as a man taking off a heavy coat on a warm day, he let go of his human form.

  The change was not violent or ugly. It was a quiet, creepy, and very disturbing process. His body didn't twist; it grew longer, becoming impossibly graceful and looking like both a man and a woman. His skin lost all color, becoming a perfect, polished white, like old, flawless china. Two huge, sharp horns of pure black stone that absorbed all light grew from his head. They didn't burst out with power but grew silently and steadily, like a crystal. His eyes, which had been a beautiful, sharp blue, became empty black holes, two perfect circles of complete nothingness. His lips and the long, elegant nails on his fingers turned the same starless, midnight black.

  This was his true form. A representative of the Abyss. A being of scary, contradictory beauty. He was not a monster of flesh and blood. He was an idea. He was the living form of emptiness, a demon chief of despair.

  He raised a hand, his movements slow and careful, like a conductor about to lead a silent orchestra. As he did, the very idea of hope in the area around him began to weaken and die.

  Roy felt it. A cold, creeping feeling of total despair, a mental poison that got past his shields, his anger, and his very will to fight. It was a whisper in his soul that said, 'Give up. It's useless. You've already lost.'

  The Arch Duke of Ferrum, one of the ten strongest people on the continent, a man whose will was like a force of nature, stumbled in the air. A hint of doubt appeared in his storm-grey eyes. The physical fight was a tie. But the real war, the war of ideas, had just started. And Beelzebub had made the first, destructive move without even moving a muscle.

  Seeing this weakness in his enemy, Beelzebub's black lips curved into a slow, beautiful, and completely terrifying smile. The silence was about to fall.

  But Roy Ferrum was not just a fighter. He was a king. And the king of the North does not bow down.

  With a roar that wasn't a sound, but a show of pure, stubborn will, he fought back. He didn't try to fight the despair. He accepted it. He let the cold, empty feeling wash over him. He found the core of steel in his own soul, the solid belief in who and what he was. He was a father. He was a lord. He was the shield of the North. And he would not break.

  The despair pulled back, unable to get a hold on his strong will. Roy’s eyes became clear again. The storm returned to them, stronger and more focused than before. He had survived the first attack on his mind.

  He raised his own hand, and the power of Gog, the living mountain, flowed into him. The air around him didn't just get heavy; it became solid. He became an anchor, a point of total, unmovable reality in a sky that was being erased by the void.

  Chapter : 1322

  “Your silence is a cheap trick, devil,” Roy declared, his voice like the grinding of the earth's plates. “Now, let me show you the true meaning of substance.”

  He and his two spirits became extensions of his own unbeatable will. They became a single, combined force. A mountain and a storm, united against the approaching, beautiful, and terrible emptiness. The sky above the capital became the setting for a war between creation and destruction, between the raw, chaotic power of the world and the cold, elegant silence of the Abyss. The wedding below went on, a tiny, fragile island of joy in a sea of huge, world-ending war. The fate of everything was uncertain, decided in a secret battle fought in a place where the rules of reality were being rewritten with every hit.

  The war in the skies grew into a kind of mental violence that humans could not understand. It was no longer a simple fight of power against power. It was a battle of beliefs made real.

  Beelzebub, in his true form as the representative of the void, was a terrifying sight of quiet attack. He did not attack in a normal way. He just… existed. His presence was an active, damaging force that tried to unmake the world around him. The clouds that Magog controlled would just disappear if they got too close to him. Their moisture and energy were erased from existence. The very light of the sky seemed to bend and twist around him, as if the world itself was pulling away from his complete nothingness.

  His two evil spirits fought with a similar terrible grace. The Black Dragon didn't just breathe shadow; it breathed a wave of mental decay. When its breath touched Gog’s stone body, the ancient rock didn't crumble; it aged a million years in a second, turning to weak, lifeless dust. The Crimson Oni’s cursed lightning was not just a bolt of energy; it carried a kind of spiritual decay. Every strike that hit, no matter how small, didn't just damage Gog’s physical body. It also put a quiet, creeping poison into his spiritual core.

  Against this beautiful, elegant, and horrifying attack, Roy Ferrum and his spirits were a fortress of raw, stubborn, and wonderfully chaotic reality. They were the world fighting back.

  Roy, now a perfect mix of his own will and the power of his two guardians, became a force of nature. He was no longer just a man; he was a living storm attached to an unmovable mountain. He met Beelzebub's mental erasing with a huge wave of pure, unfiltered creation.

  He reached out and made a thousand spears of pure, solid lightning from the empty air. Each one hummed with the power of a thunderclap, and he sent them flying towards the Black Dragon. He stamped his foot on the empty sky, and a mountain range of sharp, black spikes shot up from nothingness. It was a cage of solid earth made to stab the Crimson Oni.

  Gog, following his master’s command, stopped trying to fight the Oni directly. Instead, he became a master of earth warfare. He opened his mouth, and a river of melted, liquid rock erupted, not to burn, but to trap. The magma cooled instantly into a shell of black rock, covering the Oni’s legs and pinning the fast creature to the spot.

  Magog, at the same time, stopped its direct attack on the dragon. It became a vortex, a spinning, chaotic engine of air pressure. It didn't attack the dragon directly; it attacked the very air around it. It created small vacuums that tore at the dragon's skeleton wings, messing up its flight and sending it tumbling through the sky like a broken toy.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  The battle was a stunning, terrifying, and amazing tie. It was a perfect, beautiful dance between two opposite and equal forces. The quiet, creeping decay of the Abyss against the loud, chaotic, and unbeatable will of the North.

  Beelzebub watched the show. His black, empty eyes held a flicker of something that could have been surprise, or maybe respect. He had expected a rough, direct attack. He had not expected this. This was not the clumsy anger of a northern brute. This was the disciplined, creative, and scarily adaptable art of a true master.

  “Impressive,” Beelzebub whispered, his voice a smooth thread in the middle of the storm. “You have made the world your weapon. A simple choice, but an effective one.”

  “This world is my home,” Roy roared back, his voice the thunder of a thousand storms. “And I will not let it be unmade by a ghost from the dark.”

  Chapter : 1323

  He pushed his advantage. The sky, which had been a dark purple, now turned a churning, angry black. The full, wild power of Magog was released. A hurricane, a real, continent-sized hurricane, began to form around them. Its eye was the calm, deadly center where the two powerful beings stood.

  Simultaneously, Gog became a living volcano. The rock of his skin glowed with a white-hot fire from within. He was no longer just a mountain; he was the anger of the earth itself.

  Roy Ferrum was no longer just defending. He was attacking. He was using the full, wild, and world-ending anger of his world against the silent, beautiful, and terrible void that tried to swallow it.

  The wedding below continued, a fragile, beautiful lie. The guests laughed and drank, not knowing that the sky above them was being torn apart. They didn't know that a war of gods was being fought for their very existence, that the fate of their world was being decided in a battle of storm and mountain against a beautiful, terrible, and total silence. The storm was getting stronger, and the story was far from over.

  Tab 8

  The change was not a trip; it was like he stopped existing for a moment. One moment, Lloyd was in the large ceremony room. It was a place full of sensations—the loud music, the smell of a thousand flowers, the heat of a hundred people. The next moment, he was in a place of complete and perfect nothingness. The teleport, using his special [Spatial Power], was a rough and confusing act of being taken apart and put back together. It was a process of turning the atoms of his body into pure information and reassembling them somewhere else. He stumbled, feeling very sick as his physical body struggled to feel whole again in this new, strange place.

  He was in his own private space. His personal, 5-square-kilometer prison. It was a world with no features, a sheet of pure, clean white that went on forever to a horizon you couldn't see. The sky was the same blank, shadowless white light. There was no up or down, no east or west. There was only here and now, a perfect, clean, and total emptiness. It was a lab, a safe place, and today, it was going to be a tomb.

  A few yards away, Jager appeared with a similar, sick feeling. The master assassin, even with his strong self-control, handled it worse. He fell to his knees, his handsome face pale. A small stream of blood ran from his nose. His body was not used to the strange violence of teleporting through space and had fought against the change. The effort had been huge. He looked around, his light grey eyes wide with a mix of raw, basic terror and a growing disbelief.

  “Where… where are we?” he stammered. His voice was rough and broken. The smooth, arrogant tone was completely gone. He was a hunter who had just been suddenly moved from his normal jungle into a clean, strange cage. His sharp instincts were screaming at him that everything about this place was deeply and fundamentally wrong.

  Lloyd took a moment to steady himself. He took a deep, calming breath of the plain, non-existent air. The sickness went away, replaced by a cold, quiet, and total focus. The masks were gone. The simple decorator, the clumsy professor, the charming lord—they had all been burned away in the heat of the moment. The person who stood in this white emptiness now was something else entirely. Something colder, older, and much more absolute.

  He watched as Jager's terror was slowly replaced by his old arrogance. The assassin’s training was very strong. He got to his feet, brushed the non-existent dust from his perfect dark blue clothes, and a slow, superior smile returned to his lips. He was forcing his own view of reality, his own feeling of being better, over the impossible things he was seeing.

  “A clever trick, Lord Ferrum,” he admitted, his voice getting some of its smooth sound back. “A pocket dimension. Impressive. A rare and valuable skill. You have successfully separated us from the battle.” He paused, looking at the endless white. His smile grew into one of real, hunting amusement. He thought he understood the rules of this new game. “But a cage, my dear lord, works both ways. You have not trapped me. You have trapped yourself. Here, with me.”

  He was not wrong. His thinking was correct. Lloyd had taken them from a battlefield where he had a thousand friends to a place where they were totally, completely alone. It was a foolish, risky, and strategically bad move.

  Chapter : 1324

  To prove his point, Jager called his spirit. There was no big explosion of power. There was only a quiet, creepy tearing of the clean white fabric of the dimension. A swirl of oily, greasy shadow, the color of a bruise on a dead body, spun into existence beside him. It was a wound in reality, and from it, a creature of pure, greedy evil came out.

  It was Kroth, his King-Rank parasitic spirit. The twenty-foot-long iron alligator was a masterpiece of twisted nature, a thing of terrible, raw beauty. Its scales were not the color of living metal, but of cold, dead, and blood-stained iron. Its eyes were not the eyes of an animal. They were two burning coals of pure, greedy hunger. It was a hunger not for flesh, but for life force, for spiritual energy. It let out a low, deep hiss. The sound was not a physical vibration, but a mental one. It was a wave of pure decay that seemed to drain the life from the clean, featureless air. The spiritual pressure it gave off was huge, a choking, heavy wave of decay and despair.

  “A King-Rank spirit,” Jager continued, his voice now a smooth purr of total, unshakeable confidence. He rested a hand on his spirit’s iron-plated snout. The gesture was almost loving, a master petting his favorite dog. “A master of soul-draining and spiritual corruption. Its jaws can crush S-class defensive spells. Its aura can wither a lesser spirit to dust. And you, Lord Ferrum,” he said, his eyes settling on Lloyd with a look of deep, almost pitying scorn, “are a Commander-Rank user with an amusing but ultimately limited fire demon. I have read the reports. I have done the calculations. The math of this fight is brutally simple. You are outmatched. You have, in your bold and admittedly spectacular cleverness, succeeded only in arranging your own, very private, and very foolish, death.”

  Lloyd just watched. He looked quietly, almost scientifically, amused. He let Jager finish his speech, like a patient teacher letting a slow student work through a wrong math problem. He was giving his opponent the most powerful and deadly poison a fighter can have: the gift of complete, unshakeable overconfidence.

  When Jager was done, a perfect, deep silence fell over the white emptiness. The only sound was the low, hungry hiss of the iron alligator. Lloyd’s lips curved into a slow, cold smile. It was a perfect, chilling copy of Jager’s own, but it had a different, and much more terrifying, quality. It was not the smile of a hunter confident in his own strength. It was the smile of a god, looking down on a somewhat interesting but ultimately unimportant mortal who had just made a basic, and deadly, mistake in how he understood the universe.

  “You assume,” Lloyd said, his voice a quiet, normal tone that cut through the heavy silence with the clean, sharp finality of a surgeon’s knife, “that I am the one who is trapped.”

  And then, with a quiet, internal command, he released his true power.

  It was not an explosion. It was not a roar. It was a change in the state of being. The clean, neutral white of the dimension did not get darker; it grew brighter. It became a blinding, cold, and total white that was not the presence of light, but the complete, conceptual absence of everything else. A silent, expanding ball of pure, unfiltered cold erupted from him, a storm of absolute zero. The very air, which didn't really exist in this place, seemed to turn to crystal. A billion tiny, perfect snowflakes formed and then broke in the space of a single, silent heartbeat.

  From the center of this instant, self-contained blizzard, she emerged.

  She was a being from myths and legends, a creature of impossible, heart-breaking beauty and terrible, absolute power. Bingyu, the magnificent, Sovereign-Level Ice Dragon. Her crystal scales, each one a perfect, many-sided diamond, shimmered with the captured light of a thousand far-off, frozen stars. Her huge, elegant body was a living mountain of starlight and frost. Her movements were like a slow, smooth, and unstoppable glacier. Her eyes were not the eyes of an animal; they were two ancient, frozen stars, holding a wisdom and a power that was absolute, eternal, and unforgiving.

  But she did not stay a dragon. The moment she appeared, her huge, physical form dissolved into a swirling, chaotic vortex of shimmering, crystal light, a blizzard of pure, conceptual energy. And this blizzard did not expand. It collapsed, folding inwards, and came together around the quiet, smiling form of Lloyd Ferrum.

  The merge was instant, a perfect, silent, and terrifying combination of man and god.

  The world of white was torn apart by the birth of a new king.