Chapter 19 — A Blood Feud

The light on the black box completely extinguished.

The originally berserk high-dimensional echo slowly receded within the narrow depths of the canyon. Gravitational constants returned to their places, and the sky full of scrap iron and dust crashed heavily to the ground, emitting dull thuds.

Elias remained in a half-kneeling posture, looking like a statue carved out of blood and iron.

The violent convulsions gradually subsided, but the clothes on his body were already dyed pitch-black by the seeping blood. He lowered his head and slowly tucked that half of the star-core pendant back into his shirt, placing it firmly against the hottest spot on his chest.

"Cough... cough, cough..."

Caleb, who had been blasted away by the high-energy impact, spat out the bloody froth in his mouth and forcibly pushed himself up against the anti-radiation car door. He wiped a smear of blood from his face, his electronic prosthetic eye drawing into a red line, and walked over to Elias with a complex expression.

"Kid... what you just saw..." Caleb's voice was a little tight.

"I saw it clearly."

Elias slowly stood up straight. His movements were as stiff as a corpse that had just crawled out of hell, but his eyes were so calm it was unnerving.

It wasn't a numb calmness, but the freezing cold that comes after experiencing the most extreme agony and fury, having compressed and smelted all hatred and killing intent into the deepest marrow of one's bones.

"The Divine Court told the whole universe that Tartarus was a decaying star that collapsed due to its own energy imbalance," Elias slowly spoke, his voice low and hoarse, but every word fell like iron. "They said it was a natural disaster, the inevitable punishment of cosmic physical laws."

He turned his head, looking at Caleb and Lyra beside him, a highly mocking and cruel sneer hanging on the corners of his mouth. "But what's recorded in the black box... is all a fucking lie!"

"There was no natural disaster. Only arrogance and slaughter."

"Astra, the God of Light, treated her own holy light as salvation, arrogantly smashing it into the planetary core, forcefully pushing the crisis into an irreversible, instantaneous explosion!"

"And Umbra, the God of Darkness..." When Elias said this name, his teeth ground together, a trace of fresh blood seeping out from between them. "She didn't even spare a single glance at the mortals. Like snipping away a piece of rotting flesh, she casually erased hundreds of millions of mortals and the entire planet from the astrolabe by the roots!"

"What 'for the order of the astrolabe'... what 'maintaining cosmic balance'..." Elias's fists clenched so tightly his knuckles emitted a piercing friction sound. "In their eyes, the lives of mortals, the kin of mortals, the dignity of mortals... are nothing but a line of waste data on the 'Sanctum's Ledgers' that can be erased at any time!"

This wasn't some civilization's order at all!

This was a massive slaughterhouse ruled by divine authority!

"We cannot share the same sky..." Elias tilted his head back, looking at that blinding Astral Rift above the canyon. Deep within his lake-green eyes, high-dimensional dark energy and endless hatred fiercely intertwined. "The hypocrisy and arrogance of the God of Light, the absoluteness and slaughter of the God of Darkness... I have tallied this debt."

Especially that pitch-black law that descended with the Annihilation Strike, erasing his sister Aira into stardust!

That texture of dark energy that exterminated all things, that freezing, heartless high-dimensional oppression, had been permanently carved into the deepest part of Elias's soul. Even if he had to chase them to the end of the universe, even if his body was smashed to pieces, he would absolutely never forget that aura!

A blood feud was, at this moment, locked dead between the astral tracks of a mortal and the gods in the cruelest way possible.

Standing in the shadows not far away.

"Vespera" quietly watched Elias.

Through the "karmic buffer" secretly connecting them, Umbra could sense with incomparable clarity that intense hatred surging like erupting magma deep within Elias's soul.

That hatred was too pure, so pure that it didn't have a single trace of impurity. It wasn't mixed with any calculations of profit, nor did it care about the disparity in power or the cost of life and death.

That was the most straightforward killing intent directed at "divine authority," at the very person of "Umbra, the God of Darkness" herself!

Yet, standing deep in the night, the high-dimensional God of Darkness felt unprecedented confusion and bewilderment.

In the tens of millions of years of the Divine Court's history, whenever a low-dimensional creature learned of the lofty power of the laws, learned that the gods possessed the ability to erase galaxies with a snap of their fingers, mortals only ever had two reactions—either they knelt in despair before the absolute gap in power, begging for the gods to bestow hypocritical forgiveness; or they went completely mad in a mental breakdown, turning into useless karmic waste.

In her calculated algorithms, there had never been a third choice.

But this boy named Elias before her, after witnessing the entire process of her slaughtering his home with his own eyes, after experiencing the crushing weight of absolute power, was neither despairing nor broken.

He merely suppressed that agonizing pain and sorrow—enough to tear a mortal's flesh apart—deep into his chest, transmuting it into a heart-palpitating, fatal hatred directed at the gods themselves.

"Why..." Umbra questioned coldly in her heart. "You're obviously just a mortal as insignificant as dust, you obviously know the gods are invincible... why is there such an emotion in your eyes?"

This was a riddle that no high-dimensional ledger could solve.

Caleb wiped the bloody froth from the corner of his mouth and heavily patted Elias's shoulder. His military-grade electronic prosthetic eye drew a heavy, ruthless red line in the pitch-black canyon.

"Kid... you've got more balls than I did back in the day." Caleb hoarsely spat out a breath of stale air, a fierce sneer appearing on his coarse face. "Ten years ago, when I watched my mother planet get leveled, I didn't even have the guts to draw my blade. I just survived like a scavenging cripple. But this time... I'm betting this crippled life on your tactics! As long as you're not leading us to die for nothing, my heavy electromagnetic rifle will follow your signal to hold the line at any time!"

The astrologer Lyra wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and walked step by step to Elias's side. The young girl's fingers still bore the bloody scratches from the berserk particles just now, yet she acted as if she felt nothing. She pulled a clean gauze from her pocket, stood on her tiptoes, and carefully, with incredibly gentle heartache, wiped away the bloodstains on Elias's cheeks and chin bit by bit.

"Don't force it... your meridians are torn," Lyra said in a hoarse, low voice. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and those usually lively and cheerful eyes were filled with deep devotion and care. She gently pressed on his wounds to stop the bleeding; her fingertips brushing over the boy's injuries brought a reassuring scent of herbal medicine.

Then she stood up straight, her eyes becoming unprecedentedly resolute. "Elias... no matter where you have to fight your way to, I'll go with you. I've backed up all the high-dimensional physical blueprints in the black box. As long as you give us time and ore, we can build 'Prototype Shells' capable of paralyzing a divine envoy's shields!"

The soul of the mortal vanguard was, at this moment, deep in these ruins filled with disaster and blood feuds, completely forged together!

Elias turned around, looking at everyone in the squad.

Finally, his gaze stopped on "Vespera," who stood at the furthest edge.

The girl stood quietly in the howling wind, her long hair flying wildly in the pale purple mist. Those eyes, black as the night, were resting on him, showing not the slightest hint of panic or fear.

Elias walked slowly to her, looking down at this "amnesiac refugee" from a commanding height.

He could feel that whenever the dark energy and hatred boiled in his veins, the aura on the woman before him would produce a faint resonance. Even though he didn't have enough evidence right now to prove her true identity, he was certain that this woman was absolutely, inextricably linked to the gods high in the heavens.

"Vespera." Elias's voice was hoarse, his gaze sharp as a falcon's. "Did you see it? This is what the gods have brought us."

"Are you afraid?"

Umbra lowered her head, avoiding his overly fiery yet freezing gaze.

"I'm not afraid." Her cold, clear voice drifted in the wind, carrying a trace of imperceptible mockery and profound depth. "I just want to see... how far you can go."

The corners of Elias's mouth parted slightly, revealing a somewhat cruel and cold smile. "Then keep your eyes wide open and watch closely."

"Because one day, I will make all the gods on this astrolabe... taste the bloodshed and despair of mortals!"