Chương 370: The Mirror’s Tax

The nine elites hit my perimeter not as individual warriors, but as a singular, legislative block of mana intended to overwrite my existence. They moved with the terrifying coordination of a single hive-mind, orchestrated by the pulsing iridescent wings of the Diviner perched on the high throne-step. The Solar-Monks from the Hollow Suns acted as the catalysts. They unraveled kinetic silks from their wrists that formed a shimmering web across the battlefield.

This was a trap specifically designed to counter my Void nature. They unleashed a Mythic technique that seemed to resonate between them, sharing a singular mana pool. I watched through the Lattice as thirteen rotating, translucent gold rings expanded from their palms. These rings were barriers of dictated logic; they weren't intended to just block my spells or deflect my weapons. Instead, they forced a "Standard Limitation" onto the physics of the area.

Within those circles, the very concept of Displacement was a capped variable. I felt my momentum hit an invisible, air-resistant wall. My mana trailed behind my movement as if through heavy syrup, struggling to find its natural velocity. Beside them, the three Frost-Hearth giants assumed a low, rooted stance. Their skin was made from a type of living magnetic alloy that pulled the surrounding resonance directly through their heels.

They struck their giant maces into the floor to pulse a harmonic frequency I identified as an attempt for a Planetary Burial. The reflective glass of the Seventh Abyss began to weep liquid mercury, turning into a grasping sludge that sought to inhale my boots and anchor me to their specific vector of gravity. The four mind-controlled drones from the coalition's rear-line provided the final, surgical layer. They unleashed [Causal Thorns] — silver soul-needles that shimmered out of sync with our current timeframe.

These thorns were designed to "Wait" while stealthily stalking me through the air, manifesting only when my mana-conduits surged for a heavy strike, snapping like triggered mines directly into my Star-Gates. I parried a cluster of silver spikes with my Void sabre, the chime of metal on metal echoing in a room that almost possessed no air to carry sound. I didn't push back with a wide-scale Domain flare. Not yet.

I wanted to study their movements first, and figure out a way to deal with the Diviner in their backline. I narrowed my eyes at the butterfly-winged man behind the Sovereigns. Through my [Void-Lattice Perception], I watched the way his back line wings hummed just before every elite made a tactical adjustment. He was a conductor.

"Total foresight window seemed to be at around five minutes," I calculated, parrying a giant's mace with a single-handed gravity block that buckled the glass beneath us.

"Synchronization pulse every four seconds. Ten-minute cooldown. Shouldn't be too hard of an obstacle." I decided to play their game for the duration. I kept the duel purely physical, utilizing my newly evolved Body and Spirit reinforcing skills to take hits that would have shattered a moon's core. Every time a giant's kinetic blast connected with my shoulder or ribs, my [Aegis of the Lightless] drank the psychic backlash while [Anchor of the Unmovable] absorbed the kinetic shock.

I turned their aggression into fresh mana for my batteries. To the watchers in the galleons and the Sovereigns on their thrones, I looked like a wolf caught in a heavy wire cage. They were grinning. The Radiant Saint actually stood up, his three eyes glowing with an arrogant, sanctified joy.

"Behold the Sovereignty of Ferra!" the Saint bellowed, his voice sounding like a choir of trumpets.

"Slumped under the weight of its own entropy! You are but a ripple in the path of His Light, Kai! Your fire is dying before the sun has even reached its noon!" One of the solar-monks managed a spectacular maneuver. He braided his silks around his companion's spear, manifesting a twenty-foot blade of white-noise light that was supposed to sever the probability of my head remaining on my shoulders. I felt the spatial shear attempting to cut my [Veil]...

and I let it touch the edge of my neck just to measure the authority. It tasted like paper.

"Ten minutes are up," I whispered. In the Diviner's vision, he likely saw me attempt to break through the front line by sacrificing my left arm. He was currently signaling his monks to reinforce the left quadrant, ready to clamp down on my breakthrough. But I didn't need to move my body. From the dark, ash-capped continent of my inner soul, I reached into a specific Silo.

I launched one of my Echoes — a specialized, hyper-saturated Sigil-Proxy wreathed in the Liquid Flame and packed with every ounce of compressed toxicity [Gluttony] had filtered since Aegis. It manifested directly above the Diviner in a soundless, light-eating translation of coordinate. The Diviner's iridescent wings flared in a panicked strobe-light sequence as he tried to recalibrate his own timeline. His mouth opened to scream, to warn the others, but the air around his head had already been deleted.

"Oh no you don't," I projected across the Lattice. I snapped the trigger. The Sigil-Echo detonated. It wasn't an explosion of fire or mass; it was a point-blank expansion of the absolute Void. A pillar of black-red liquid fire punched upward, shattering the "Lid" of the Seventh Abyss. The Diviner didn't even leave ash; he was erased from the world, along with the two high-tier attendants who had been fanning his ego.

The shockwave was so dense it knocked the three remaining Sovereigns back into their high-backed chairs. The Radiant Saint's crown flickered, and for the first time, I felt the "Golden Link" on his neck pulse with genuine distress. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Well, that should deal with their foresight powers," I noted, walking through the settling grey soot of the detonation. I looked toward the nine stunned elites who were now standing in a tactical blind spot, their conducting wires snapped.

"Now we can play." They tried to regroup, manifesting a desperate tri-shield array wreathed in [Logic stasis]. I didn't let them finish the spell. I engaged my full Sovereign [Void Emperor's Omnipresence]. I simply pointed a finger at the group.

"Relocate." In the space of a heartbeat, the nine combatants were plucked from the Seventh Abyss and dropped onto the obsidian sands of my internal geode. Inside my world, I sat upon the matte-white throne, my Void-star pulsar turning the internal sky a lightless crimson. I saw the golden siphoning-tethers snap into life on their chests, frantic mana-wires trying to find a path through my ribcage back to their Saint. The mana was howling, pulling at the very fibers of my internal star-gate.

"Welcome to my House. Just make sure to abide by my Law," I grinned.

"Oh and remember to take off your shoes." I utilized my Stem-Mana to mirror the siphons. I matched their frequency and then rotated the torque. I didn't just stop the drain; I inverted it. The golden threads turned an ashen grey as I began to drink their high-tier artifacts and their souls directly. They screamed as their records were indexed and burned into fuel for my batteries. [Alert: Sovereign Star-Cores reached 98% saturation. Converting overflow into QS…] I returned my consciousness to the physical plane.

I landed on the glass floor with the soundless weight of an anvil. The five Sovereigns — now truly reduced to four effective kings — were waiting. They stood at the base of the dais, the Radiant Saint at the head of the wedge. His expression had lost its heavenly serenity. It was now a mask of frantic, predatory zeal.

"Why?" I asked, walking slowly toward them, letting the [Voidflame] smoke from my skin.

"I offered the others a way home. I asked you why my existence is considered 'evil'. Was it my sponsorship? My lack of a pedigree? Or does the Holy One just dislike a balance he can't tip?"

"Your silence is your confession!" the Titan Lord roared, manifesting a club made of petrified stars.

"You are an eater of futures! You are the hole through which the universe shall spill into nothingness!"

"Hypocrisy is such a boring armor," I noted, my eyes locking onto the small, broken mirror-shard floating just beside the Saint's chest. I watched through the Lattice. The conversation was just air. The mirror-artifact — [The Eye of the Celestial] — was currently reaching its terminal sync-point. It wasn't just trying to copy my black sabres or my [Omnipresence] logic. It was deep-scrying the very limits of my Tier 8 mass, siphoning the numeric data of my spirit-density and mana-pools.

It was attempting to clone my potential onto the Saint. It was an outrageously powerful move — to gain the stats of an enemy without having to undergo the transformation or through a type of dilation. I could have broken it ten minutes ago. But I wanted to know where the ceiling of that shard was. I wanted to know exactly how much the Saint thought he needed to stop me.

"Are you almost done?" I asked, pausing ten paces away.

"The scryer seems to be hitting a bottleneck. The mass is a bit much for that shard of Envy, isn't it?" The Saint's face twisted. He snatched the mirror-shard from the air, hiding it in his fist.

"The Courts provide for the just, abomination! I do not need your permission to reclaim what the heavens already own! Witness your own mirror and drown!" The shard dissolved, bleeding into the Saint's veins like liquid gold. His power surged with the violence of a collapsing sun. His Mid Tier 9 aura flared into a synthetic Tier 10 presence. His three eyes merged into one singular, blinding aperture of starlight, and his wings quadrupled in scale, reaching into the darkened horizon of the Abyss.

The Domain he expanded wasn't just made of white light anymore; it was an imitation of my own Sovereignty. He forced a [Legislative Echo] upon the room, demanding that everything acknowledge his stolen weight.

"Do you feel it?" the Saint shrieked, his voice multiple voices layered together in a discordant harmony. He launched toward me, the ground beneath his flight path vitrifying into starlight-dust.

"I HAVE YOUR MOONS! I HAVE YOUR SILENCE! I AM FINALLY EQUAL TO THE FATHERS!" He struck. He didn't use any technique; he swung his staff with the echoed, raw statistical volume of my own Neutron-Heavy physicality. The air between us instantly lost permission to exist, exploding in a wave of multi-colored mana that should have atomized my frame. I reached for the [Crown of Pride] sitting in my subspace, pulling it into reality.

The lead-alloy circlet landed on my brow with a clack that sounded like the shutting of a coffin lid. I ignited my core, using the Void, the Flame and the Trinity. Hunger, Wrath, and Pride joined my Domain. The Saint's blow hit my shoulder. A wave of copied mass and divine light crashed into me... and then it broke. The golden essence simply washed over my black carapace like sea-spray against an ancient cliff. I stood immobile, my feet not shifting a single micron on the glass floor.

"Delicious," I whispered, the black-red liquid dripping from my mouth as the [Symphony] resonated in tune with his failing attack. I reached up and caught the Saint's ivory staff with my bare hand, [Gluttony] singing a joyful metallic note. I began to siphon his Tier 10 surge slowly as he resisted and immediately used an artifact to escape back to his allies. I looked at the Titan Lord and the Shadow-Warden standing behind their "Golden" leader. The fanatical arrogance in their eyes was dying a cold, sudden death.

For three weeks they had prepared a trap based on my records. They had watched my "exhaustion" as I fought their elites without Consuming their mana. They were looking at the man their God promised was a just weed to be plucked. And for the first time in their lives, the Sovereigns were looking at someone they couldn't calculate an ending for. Their hands were shaking on their artifacts.

"I was really hoping for a longer one on one duel," I said, my voice dropping an octave as the Crown of Pride pulsed with an unyielding crimson light. I took one step forward. The space in front of the Sovereigns' eyes simply deleted itself, drawing them five feet closer to my strike zone against their will. The three Kings looked at each other, their faces grey and hollow. I hadn't even struck yet, but their Domains were already starting to rot under the proximity of the Void Emperor's Crown. I bared my teeth.

"Let's see if your souls can handle the surcharge," I smiled. I met their charge head-on, no longer a phantom hiding in the lattice, but the physical ending of their sector's history. Round three had just finalized its participant list. And I was the only one holding the pen.