Lucius felt immortal, which wasn't so far from the truth. So long as the radiant glow of the sun empowered his mortal vessel, he could tap into a limitless power source, allowing him to spend light Qi without restraint. Healing Glow covered every inch of his body at all times, and his costly attack techniques were now free.
However, it was a power that hadn't come cheap, as he had stunted his cultivation at the peak of the Star Core Realm and pledged his soul to the eternal light. With his healing abilities, his body hardly aged despite centuries passing, but Lucius was not and never would be truly immortal. By his cultivation base stalling in the Star Core Realm, he could never enter the Nascent Soul realm and create an infant soul, which other cultivators used to escape the shackles of time.
Yes, crawl away, you disgusting creature. Lucius sneered as he raised his hand and pulled on the bottomless well of Qi that his god had provided him with. He had only accepted his god's warmth a few times as it would leave his body a broken mess that would take months to heal once the sun dipped below the horizon, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.
Now I just need to spend a moment letting the sun alter my body so it can wield my god's wrath, and then I can exterminate these fools... huh?
To Lucius's surprise, the giant spider stopped fleeing and turned to face him despite the rapidly expanding ball of pure light Qi gathering on his palm that would be enough to wipe out a small sect once fully charged.
Has the beast accepted it's death? Lucius narrowed his glowing eyes at the spider. It had seemed so intelligent and even capable of speaking the ancient tongue, albeit with a terrible accent, so why would it try and face someone wielding the power of a god? Does its beastly intellect fail to comprehend his power?
Lucius was about to cook the stupid thing to death, but a ripple of spatial Qi on another level to anything Hammond had emitted drew his attention. Three enormous portals materialized simultaneously on the palace's roof, and Lucius felt the sudden presence of two beings in the Star Core Realm and one Soul Fire, but they didn't feel human.
How are there more of those strange creatures? Lucius looked up at the giant hole in the roof where he could directly gaze upon the setting sun and then frowned when he saw three heads appear and look down at him.
One was a giant marble statue with eyes of heavenly gold and white leaves forming a glorious head of hair and a magnificent beard. Beside the living statue was a titan of black wood twice the size of the already colossal marble statue that could stand beside the palace and casually gaze in. This black wood titan had eyes of blazing lilac fire, and a large canopy of scarlet leaves sprouted from its hunched back, which cast a looming shadow upon Lucius and blocked out his god's radiant light.
The third and final head that looked down at him as if he were an ant was a beige-colored wooden turtle, which made his skin crawl as it had no apparent eyes, yet it had human-like hair in the form of black vines and a weirdly human form as if it were some cursed mismatch between turtle and man.
"Do you think a mere walking tree can stifle me from my god's light?" Lucius pulled upon his connection with the sun, and the beam's intensity increased tenfold, illuminating the evening sky and causing the scarlet leaves on the titan's back to ignite into a spontaneous blaze. The titan's bark also seemed to show signs of burning, but a sudden burst of lilac soul fire that covered its back saved it.
The white marble statue pointed its finger to the sky, and darkened clouds began to form on the horizon that were soon filled with flashing lights and roaring thunder.
Is that statue a reanimated ancestor of the Skyrend family? Lucius wondered as he raised his palm that held the charging light beam to eliminate these troublemakers. Although his attack wasn't fully charged, he decided it was best to eradicate these strange beings in service to the Ashfallen Trading Company before dealing with the spider.
He first targeted the white marble statue as he didn't like the look of the storm system forming overhead; his entire arm lit up, and a beam of focused light shot from his palm in complete silence and instantaneously obliterated the marble statue's raised arm and brightened the evening sky. The beacon of light pierced through the distant clouds, and the storm system began to calm down and dissipate, but Lucius wasn't done—he wanted that thing dead. So, with the light beam from his hand still going and piercing the heavens, he slowly lowered his hand and enjoyed the overwhelming power as the ray carved into the marble statue's chest.
Strangely, the statue didn't even flinch while being burned alive. Its heavenly golden eyes remained fixated on Lucius as if it were mocking him.
Does it not feel pain? Lucius decided to test that theory as he raised the scorching beam up and went for the things smug face. Still, it didn't flinch, even as its face was scorched in two. In fact, it smiled at him, and in another act of defiance, it raised its remaining arm and called on the clouds once more.
"Bastard, are you mocking me?" Lucius yelled as he raised his other arm and was about to put everything he could into blasting this fucker into the afterlife when something barreled into him, throwing him off balance.
"Who dares?!" Lucius grimaced as he felt a wound in his side rapidly close up due to the permanent Healing Glow. Only now did he notice the entire room had become engulfed in a storm of swirling ash that encircled him like a hurricane.
The spirit beast was missing, but its presence was still overwhelmingly there, lurking deep in the ash.
Suddenly, two people came flying out of the ash. One was shrouded in flames of darkness and flanked by shadow copies, while the other was a blonde-haired girl on the defensive, effortlessly deflecting every blow with a calm expression. Lucius instantly recognized the two as Nox and Roselyn and was somewhat surprised to see Roselyn holding up on her own.
The sounds of clashing blades faded into the background as their fight took them back into the swirling ash, leaving Lucius alone and still confused about what had stabbed him in the side. Had the void creature recovered somehow? That was the only thing he had seen so far that genuinely worried him and might be able to kill him even while harnessing the unlimited light of a star.
A sudden whistling noise drew his attention as a sword of excellent craftsmanship engulfed in lilac flames lashed out from the ash to his left, held by what could only be described as a black thorn-covered vine. Moving instinctually, Lucius tilted his head to the side and winced as the sword, traveling at surprising speed, cleanly sliced through his cheek and reeled back into the swirling ash.
"You rat bastard using cheap tricks," Lucius cursed as the wound healed almost as fast as it was inflicted, but that wasn't the point. What in the nine realms was that. Even trees were attacking him now? Or was that another one of these strange beings. Glancing up, his eyes met with the black wood titan; had it been the instigator? The vine color and flame matched, so it was plausible.
Lucius rolled his shoulders to calm himself. Whatever that was, it would take many such swords to stab him all at once to have any lasting impact, so he returned his attention to the hole in the roof and noticed the clouds blanketed the entire sky overhead. The black wood titan had also put its whole body over the hole, and the strange beige wood turtle shook the palace as giant rock walls from all sides loomed into view.
Is that turtle trying to make a dome? Are they trying to trap me? ME? Are they fools? So long as I have the light, they will perish before my burning glory. Lucius pulled on the beam of light, still piercing through the clouds and shining on the black titan's back and burning its bark, yet it still stood there dumbly, as if blindly following the orders of an unwise master.
Does it want to die?
The light gave Lucius unlimited power—the blazing glory of a literal star. It filled his body to the brim with so much Qi he didn't even know what to do with it.
And then it was gone in an instant. Lucius's spotlight was shut off as if day had turned to night. Had another god snuffed out the star like a mortal would to a candle flame? Lucius's eyes widened at the storm overhead that had grown suddenly dark; the rock walls connected and fully formed a dome of grey stone, and the swirling ashen storm entirely engulfed him all at once.
"No..." Lucius raised his hand to the sky and felt no warmth. The light was gone. He almost immediately felt his body explode with pain as light Qi was forcefully pulled from his Star Core to compensate for the lack of light from his god that had been fueling his transcendent form.
They were never trying to trap him but rather deprive him of light.
Lucius clenched his teeth as he felt his Healing Glow wear off, and his body began to break down and wither away from the rampant light Qi still left in his body. His puny mortal vessel wasn't designed to hold this amount of Qi; if he didn't expend it soon, he would involuntarily go supernova sooner or later.
Raising his trembling hands to the sky, he unleashed one of his most costly techniques, "Disintegration ray," Lucius hissed through the pain as a beam of light over a meter wide superheated the swirling ash, blasted through the rock dome, and pierced the clouds, causing cinders and molten rock to rain upon him. None of this mattered to Lucius as he cast Flash Step to instantly travel via the ray of light to stand upon the dome. So long as there was light, he could move short distances at the snap of a finger.
His gaze drifted to the setting sun on the distant horizon, but before he could embrace the light again, that accursed marble statue's head popped up with a grin as if saying hello and consumed his entire view.
"Get out of the way, you stupid golem," Lucius reeled back his fist to finish the job when his world went white, followed by roaring thunder as heavenly lightning arced out from the clouds above and struck him square in the chest, sending him falling back down into the hell that was the darkened room.
He crashed onto the palace room's floor and was left in a smoldering crater, looking up at the darkened sky. He saw the earthen dome rumble closed, sealing the hole he had created, followed by a heap of ash that descended on him.
"Nox!" Lucius cried out to his only ally while coughing up blood. His entire body was in terrible pain, and he was seriously growing concerned. In his current state, regaining his connection with the sun seemed his only hope, which made no sense. How could he be losing to some unknown group in some backwater demonic sect? He had walked these lands for thousands of years, delved and conquered treacherous rifts single-handedly, and even wiped out a family from the celestial empire.
His spatial rings flashed as healing pills of various kinds appeared, and he gulped them down without a second thought—anything to dull the pain so he could concentrate on escaping.
There's a decent chance the statue can't blast me with lightning of that caliber so soon. If I get up there and reconnect with the sun, I can try and locate that spatial cultivator whose presence is blanketing the entire mountain, kill them, and then escape.
Lucius had been foolish and tried to escape from a spatial cultivator once in the past and would never make such an amateur mistake again. While he had been on the run for a week straight, expending his Qi to slaughter monsters and Flash Step to cover as much ground as possible, the spatial cultivator had been relaxing and drinking tea back home. Waiting for him to be worn out before utilizing a teleportation array and appearing before him a week later fully rested.
Shaking his head and pushing himself up from the ground, Lucius barely twisted his body to the side in time to dodge multiple tree-vine-wielded swords aiming for his neck. He tried to flatten the swords with his Star Core gravity as they retreated back into the ash. But the spatial Qi-coated vines made it impossible to wrestle away control of them as he had with spatial cultivators in the past who bragged about controlling a hundred swords with telekinesis.
"They appear without warning," Lucius mumbled as he scrutinized the ash swirling around him. It did an excellent job of masking the tiny ripples of spatial Qi from the portals closing and the swords disappearing again.
In fact, it did such a good job that Lucius almost missed eight portals opening in a circle around him. He enshrouded his legs with Qi and lept up at the last second.
There was a loud clang as the eight swords impacted each other just below his feet, and the many vines became briefly entangled. "Agh," Lucius hissed in pain as he landed awkwardly to the side. His body struggled to contain the light Qi running rampant as he hadn't had enough time to adapt his spirit root to handle the sudden influx of light Qi, and his Star Core didn't have enough capacity to contain it all.
So why should he hold back any longer?
"Nox, brace yourself," Lucius shouted as his eyes and mouth leaked light as if a sun was trying to escape from within, "I'm going to end this myself."
He had refrained from unleashing everything as it would greatly diminish Nox's ability to fight, but Nox was no longer his concern. The useless bitch was struggling to kill Roselyn, who was barely in the Star Core Realm and was even an alchemist! The blonde girl had likely never learned to fight and spent years with her nose buried in books...
Lucius narrowed his glowing eyes. Things weren't adding up.
It had been Nox's idea to come here, and she had kept the real reason secret from me, yet Hammond seemed to know something I didn't? But then he died instantly, and now Nox has been wasting time fighting with the far weaker Roselyn one-on-one rather than lending me a hand while I get tag-teamed by multiple people... is this a betrayal? Is Nox trying to kill me either directly or indirectly?
It wouldn't be the first time he was betrayed, and it likely wouldn't be the last.
Lucius's skin began to glow as he stepped forward, and the stone floor cracked beneath his steps. A blade of light manifested in both of his hands, and he activated Healing Glow without restraint. He then turned in the direction he heard fighting.
"Blazing Radiance," Lucius uttered with as much enthusiasm as one would when describing the weather, and a blast of light pulsed out of his body in every direction. The blaze disintegrated the swirling ash, the walls exploded outward, and the ceiling collapsed.
But Lucius didn't care for the destruction; with the annoying ash and confining walls gone, he could now get a clear view of everything. With the entire east wing of the palace now destroyed, there was nothing but a mountain peak of rubble that gave way to a bustling forest of scarlet leaves and black-barked trees that went down the mountainside until Darklight City in the far distance.
And scattered against these trees was everyone else. They seemed to have suffered severe burns, but Lucius could see them all moving. Meaning they were alive.
"Tsk, annoying," Lucius clicked his tongue as he used Flash Step to get closer and then caught something in the corner of his eye.
Nox was fleeing into the forest.
"You betraying bitch—" Lucius felt the words die in his throat as a sudden pressure not only descended on him but the entire mountain peak. As his knees buckled under the pressure, his head snapped toward the source, which turned out to be an unassuming demonic tree like the rest of the forest suddenly ablaze with lilac soul fire that Roselyn was leaning against.
If things couldn't get any more strange, Lucius felt a chill run down his spine as a mysterious white fog appeared at the edge of his consciousness, and then a thousand voices spoke to him.
"This ends here."
