Chapter 227: Two Faced!
Zhuque’s face ran through expressions the way a dying fire ran through its last fuel.
Disbelief first, then calculation, then something that fought very hard against itself and lost, and the losing produced a sound that came out of the pig-faced Ancestral Celestial.
"Oink."
...!
His face was seemingly full of shame!
But...
An instant later, his Ancestral Land caught fire!
The ferocious look that replaced the submission was not performed. It was the genuine fury of something that had been humiliated past what it could contain!
And what came from the burning land was everything the first attack had been and more, the Primum territory pouring itself into offense without the measured restraint of before.
Mountains formed in the sky above the River and descended, not one but multiple, burning at their edges with the light of Ancestral Land authority set to maximum output. Rivers of formed earth threaded between them, dense and crushing, the accumulated mass of centuries of internal territory development launched downward!
HUUUM!
The crimson-eyed woman attacked simultaneously.
An endless crimson collection of rivers and earth dropped from the space around her, and it came down across the air above the River in a descending wall that sought to encompass everything beneath it!
Damian looked at all of it coming down.
He released his Mana.
Not the Mana he had carried since his Primeval Viridis transformation.
The Mana that came out of him now had been running through the obsidian rivers of THE Primordial Source since the night above the Dominion, and the slivers that had been merging with it continuously since then had changed its character in a way that the Mana itself seemed aware of.
Thousands of tendrils erupted from his existence!
They moved like the fingers of something that had been given an entire sky to work with and saw no reason to use less of it than was available!
They were surging outward in every direction simultaneously, blue-obsidian in color, each one as dense as what Zhuque projected at maximum output.
They found the descending mountains first and wrapped around them, tendrils coiling around the burning rock and the rivers of formed earth with the patient thoroughness of something that had been given a task and intended to complete it. Then they crushed!
The mountains shattered under the constriction, fragments spinning outward across the sky above the River. The rivers of earth dissolved where the tendrils met them, the Ancestral Land authority in them collapsing against Primordial Source-infused Mana with the same result that Zhuque’s first attack had produced!
The crimson rivers and earth came down and the tendrils rose to meet it.
They punched through the descending wall in dozens of places simultaneously, and within seconds the endless crimson rivers and earth were shattered!
Four tendrils found Zhuque.
Four more found the crimson-eyed woman.
Three found the Demon Emperor on the white-gold boat, who had not attacked and wss gazing out incredulously!
The shock on their faces was horrifi!
Damian waved his hand.
The tendrils drew inward, and Zhuque and the woman and the Demon Emperor came with them, floating across the air above the River without any participation from their own intentions.
Beside him, Serala was watching him with amazement. He registered it without looking at her and kept his gaze on the three figures being drawn toward him by blue-obsidian tendrils.
He looked at the crimson-eyed woman.
He snapped his fingers.
The tendrils around her constricted inward, and the internal pressure they were already applying to the edges of her Source increased with the ease of someone adjusting a grip.
Damian found the downward arrow above her singularity without effort, he had practiced this motion on fifty beings at once above the Dominion, and pressed it.
Her power began to fall immediately, draining outward the way everything drained when THE Primordial Source decided the arrangement was over. She shriveled!
He didn’t watch it happen in detail.
He turned his dense obsidian Mana on the Mare territory within her existence, the internal sea she had built across however many centuries of Ancestral Land development, and he pressed.
The sea cracked, and the cracks ran through its depths before the surface had time to register them!
He did all of this without looking away from Zhuque and the Demon Emperor.
He wanted them to see it. He needed them to see it!
The Demon Emperor had gone beyond ashen. He had arrived at a place past that, a place where the calculations had stopped entirely because the input data had exceeded every framework the calculations were built on, and the face was simply one that...was dazed.
Zhuque’s terror was complete.
This was not the terror of a being that had encountered something stronger and was recalibrating. This was the terror of a being that had discovered something he utterly did not understand!
And how could he!
Even the man doing all of this to him didn’t fully understand the power he was utilizing!
Damian looked at the Demon Emperor.
"I have questions for you," he said, and his voice was even, "if you don’t want the same fate as that so-called Ancestor."
He let that land.
His gaze moved to Zhuque.
"And you." He looked at the pig face and the small eyes and the terror living behind them. "I don’t think squealing like a pig can save you now."
...!
The River of the World rushed below them.
The tendrils held tightly!
He wanted to use the Demon Emperor to quickly know the whereabouts of his Ama!
But...
In all the long history of the River of the World, in all the encounters between beings of power that had taken place above its black current since the first demons crawled out of it and formed their first tribes on the far shore, nothing quite like this had ever happened here.
This was what it looked like when THE Primordial Source was brought to the River of the World...and a glimpse of what would happen when its brilliance was exerted over the Lands of Stone!
