The Primeval Era

Chapter 233: My Scale of Adversity! II

The moment he finished, a pillar of obsidian light erupted from him! free𝑤ebnovel.com

It shot upward, piercing through the floor above and the floors above that and the roof of the Demon Tower and everything between him and the open sky, and it appeared in the crimson heavens above the demon capital as a column of pure obsidian brilliance that climbed past the clouds!

Then it began to disperse. It spread outward from the column the way an endless sea spread, thinning as it widened, turning faint and then nearly invisible as it expanded across the sky, but Damian could feel it continuing even after it passed beyond sight. It spread across the crimson skies of the demon capital and outward toward the River of the World and beyond it, reaching across thousands of miles, settling over the land like something that had decided to stay.

Words bloomed before his eyes.

|A unique action has been taken that covers the vastness of the local domain of existence under the banner of THE Primordial Source.|

|An unfathomable Way has been instituted. Your view on existence has been imposed upon a vast domain and will continue to stretch for thousands of miles, as far as your capacity to utilize THE Primordial Source extends.|

|Your Scale of Existence, focused on effort, adversity, and choices, has been instated across the surrounding Lands of Stone.|

BOOM!

The words sat in the air, and Damian read them, and he understood what he had just done in the way that a person understood a thing they had felt building inside them for a long time before they had words for it.

He had not merely gained power. He had not just become something the Lands of Stone had never produced and the Ancestral Celestials couldn’t match. He had taken the thing inside him that sat above every hierarchy, the thing that did not recognize Circles or Ancestral Lands or any of the structures that beings spent their existences climbing, and he had used it to impose a structure of his own.

A Way.

His father had spoken about Ways during the communion above the Cradle, about how every existence followed one whether it knew or not, about how conviction was what separated those who lived gloriously from those who lived as footnotes.

The Hallowed Voice had told Serala that conviction was paramount. And here, in a garden at the heart of the demon empire, with his mother whole beside him and the Demon Emperor kneeling at his feet, Damian had taken his conviction and pressed it across thousands of miles of existence!

A scale where choices mattered.

A scale where effort and adversity could lift a nobody into something grand.

A scale that would have given a crippled prince hiding in a Dross tribe a chance, back when the only scale that existed had written him off the moment his foundation shattered.

His Ama was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t fully read, somewhere between astonishment and shock.

Serala was looking at him with the bright eyes she always turned on him when he did something that exceeded what she had braced for.

The Demon Emperor was looking at the floor, because the Demon Emperor had felt the obsidian sea spread across the sky and was fucking terrified.

Damian looked up at the dispersing obsidian light in the crimson sky.

This was the beginning of his Way. Not the end of his vengeance, not the rescue of his mother, not the death of the Murderous Saint or the unmaking of two Ancestral Celestials over a black river. Those had been steps. This was the thing the steps had been walking toward!

This was what he had decided to become!

The obsidian sea settled across the Lands of Stone, and somewhere in the distant heights above the clouds, a dozen pig-faced Ancestral Celestials preparing to descend for vengeance felt something pass through the sky that none of them had a name for, and for just a moment, even beings who had exceeded the Nine Circles paused to wonder what it was!

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The burly Ancestral Celestial, Ziavvo, had just received permission to descend.

He stood at the edge of his floating landmass with the dozen pig-faced entities arrayed behind him, the High Ancestral Celestials’ approval still fresh, the plan settled. Go down. Find what killed Zhuque. Make it answer!

He had been about to give the order to move when the far distance below changed.

An obsidian pillar of light shot up from the lands beneath the clouds.

It came from somewhere past the River of the World, somewhere in the territory the demons held, and it climbed with a speed and a presence that stopped the burly Celestial’s order in his throat!

The light was not large at the scale of the distance, a thin column against the vastness of the world below, but the power that rolled off it reached all the way up to the floating landmasses and pressed against beings who had exceeded the Nine Circles, and it felt grand. It felt sacred!

What the fuck was this?!

It felt like something out of their wildest dreams, the kind of power they had spent centuries cultivating toward and telling themselves was the summit of what existence offered.

It did not feel like something a being below the clouds should have been able to produce!

The burly Celestial stared at it, and his pig face, which had held cold fury at Zhuque’s death moments ago, now held something closer to shock and unease.

Moments later, the others came.

Across the cluster of floating landmasses, Ancestral Celestials from different lands floated out from their temples and their forests and their internal territories, drawn into the open air by a power that none of them could ignore.

They came in ones and twos and then in larger numbers, beings of every description, some humanoid, some less so, all of them carrying the weight of Ancestral Lands within their existences. Their expressions were somber!

Every one of them looked at the distant obsidian light with the same shared question on their faces.

What was that?

None of them answered, because none of them knew! freeωebnovēl.c૦m

And then, from one of the floating landmasses, a massive beast arose.

It came up from the landmass slowly, and as it rose, its scale became clear. A winged turtle, one hundred miles across, its shell a dark expanse veined with white-gold light, its wings spreading wide enough to cast shadows across several of the nearby landmasses at once.

Its eyes were a radiant blue, deep and ancient and aware, and the power that rolled off it as it lifted into the open sky above the clouds marked it immediately as a powerhouse among the gathered Ancestral Celestials.

The others made room for it. Even beings who had built vibrant Ancestral Lands and exceeded the Nine Circles by considerable margins shifted their positions as the winged turtle ascended, the instinctive deference of powerful things to something more powerful still.

This was one of the High Ancestral Celestials!

This was the kind of being that the burly pig-faced Celestial had appealed to for permission, the kind of being whose approval moved the lands of the Celestials to action.

It looked at the distant obsidian pillar with its radiant blue eyes, and whatever it saw there, it did not share its thoughts with the gathered Celestials below it. It simply observed, ancient and enormous, taking in the column of sacred power that had risen from the demon territories far below the clouds.

Then it spoke.

Its voice boomed across the cluster of floating landmasses, reaching every Ancestral Celestial who had come out to look.

"Let us go see what power is establishing itself in our borders."

BOOM!

The winged turtle’s wings beat once, and the wind from that single motion pushed clouds apart for miles in every direction.

Across the floating landmasses, the Ancestral Celestials gathered themselves. Vibrant Ancestral Lands shone within their existences as they prepared to move, plains and rivers and forests and mountains and seas blazing inside beings that had spent centuries building them, and the burly pig-faced Celestial who had only wanted vengeance for Zhuque now found himself part of something far larger than a single death.

The whole of the gathered Celestials turned their attention downward, toward the distant obsidian light, toward the territory below the clouds where something had established itself without asking anyone’s permission.

And they began to descend!