—I crawled back from hell to find you.

Adelaide had held that line in her throat like a hot coal, waiting for the right storm. Now it fit like a blade in a scabbard, proud as a banner in burning wind. Her finger stabbed downward like a spear, too sharp for “edgy,” too bright for mockery.

She really had crossed the Void Rift, a corridor stretched like a serpent’s gut. She carved through endless Chaos Spawn, ash and ichor flying like winter snow, and fought her way back from a place that looked like hell.

Not only that.

“I brought you a souvenir, Senior Crus.”

Her eyes flashed like stars in frost. Her hand pointed at the giant mass hanging above her head like a crown of iron.

A moon.

Her gift was that humming orb, a blood-red lantern painting the earth scarlet like spilled wine.

She hadn’t lucked into some wuxia inheritance from the dead goddess Isylia. No secret moon-call dropped from heaven like a jade seal.

And it wasn’t a real moon. Look close, and you’d see a floating body level with the top of the Sealing Array, its surface bound by colossal crimson chains, hammered into a sphere that wore the shape of a moon like a mask.

Unlike the eternal moon that sits like a cold coin in black water, the blood moon above Adelaide breathed like a furnace behind bars. Its chains drew tight and scraped, low noise grinding like millstones, a chorus that sounded like a thousand souls giggling in one throat, or some nameless horror battering a shut gate.

Stare up, and the blood moon blurred like heat above a desert road. Its hum carried a taint like rot in incense, making every creature under its light gag and swoon as if the air turned to sour brine.

It wasn’t built from anything she carried in. When Adelaide entered the Void Rift, she wore only this crimson dance dress, held her pure-white Ceremonial Sword, and hid sacrifice materials inside the sword’s hilt like seeds in a pod. That tiny hollow couldn’t hold a moon, so she had only one option for her raw lumber.

Chaos Spawn—the only thing the Rift held in endless supply, the salt and iron of that void.

Beneath those spiked blood-chains, what lay sealed were the very Chaos Spawn that had tried to stop her, trussed like boars for slaughter.

Under Crus’s orders, they didn’t dare face her head-on. They threw bodies and numbers like waves against a cliff, trying to keep her penned. That suited Adelaide like rain suits rice.

On her way back, she killed and she chose, picking elite Chaos Spawn that looked ripe for a rite. She bound them, locked them in her chain-prison, and raised them high to show the world a harvest.

A moon-model so beautiful it stunned the eye like ice on jade. And—

A bottomless warehouse of sacrificial stock, stacked like grain in a crimson silo.

“So, I hope you’re ready to accept this souvenir, Senior Crus.”

Her mouth curved up like a crescent. Her eyes held a junior’s shine toward a senior, a candlelit reverence—only it was barbed with ridicule, sweet as honey over steel. Her voice dropped like a blade through silk, then shot up into a high-frequency braid of layered spells, a choir wrapped in a wire.

The chant that should’ve taken days got crushed down like powder. Its wavelengths braided into lines as simple as clipped verse, then rippled out as mana waves, like rings in a red lake.

—ninqui carcar yarra...

Her voice poured, and the sky took blood like paint. Scarlet ran over everything like dusk flooding a plain.

—isilmë ilcalassë...

Adelaide raised the Ceremonial Sword, white as bone under moonlight. As the blade slid free, gray-black matter spilled from the pommel like soot from a chimney.

—isilmë pícalassë...

These were the crushed leavings of Soul Devourer Sormaidon under the Forging Hammer, iron turned to ash. As sacrifice, they were too fragmented to support great magic, dead leaves too brittle for a fire. Yet as part of Sormaidon’s old body, they still yearned like swallows for summer, surging toward a dragon-heart aura—toward the Chaos Beast’s flesh like iron filings to a magnet.

—isilmë lantalassë...

Those scraps weren’t the main offering. In space twisted by chaos like warped glass, they served as beacons, fireflies guiding a caravan. The true materials floated above—the blood moon’s chains tightened like a noose. Inside, the struggle thrashed like fish in a basket, until tension crossed a threshold and a crisp crack rang out like a skull snapping under a boot. The prisoners went still, like a storm gone silent.

At that crack, blood slurry poured from the chain’s gaps like lemon juice squeezed in a press, streaming into the array behind Adelaide, a wheel that spun faster and faster like a cyclone over a field.

—ve loicolícuma...

The Chaos Beast sensed threat like frost under fur. Its body convulsed. Arms and legs bulged and burst through its bloated skin like roots through stone, trying to brace its tilting mass. Before rebirth finished, blood-ink bubbles stuck to its belly again like tar.

Ayu held her abdomen like a wounded soldier, face smeared with blood and dust like war paint. Cracks webbed her glasses like frost, but her eyes stayed firm, two embers in wind. She wasn’t alone.

Silan, Bingxia, and the other First Generation who could still stand chained their spells together like ropes. They pinned the newborn tendrils, iron to iron.

The Type-59 tank swung its barrel like a hawk’s beak. It targeted the bubble-smeared sector. The Module Five plasma cannon overcharged, white-hot light flaring like a small sun.

Behind them, Mira’s blade drank thunder like wine. As the Type-59’s shot bloomed to trigger Ayu’s spell, Mira unfolded her Time Domain, a glass bell over the battlefield.

—raumo nurrua...

Another relay strike hit like a drumline. Another same result unfurled like a script—the earth-shaking blast flipped the Chaos Beast flat like a table. Its freshly healed deconstructive field buckled like wet clay and got split by lightning into two clean halves.

As that narrow slit opened like a wound in armor, the array behind Adelaide filled with blood like a reservoir after rain. Its spinning circles screeched to a stop like brakes on steel. Patterns shoved into each other like crowded stones, collapsing fast until they became a point, a seed of night.

—enwina lúmë

The last beat of the spell fell like a mallet.

Then, the cross-shaped flash returned, bright as a cruciform star. Darkness wrapped the world like a funeral shroud, a black that ate meanings like moths eat silk. It swallowed the Chaos Beast and Crus standing on its crown like a king on a crumbling throne.

It wasn’t Crus’s first taste of that terror, a bitter tea he’d sipped before. He still hadn’t adapted. He dragged himself from the brief night, eyes wide like lanterns, and looked down at the Chaos Beast under his feet like a rider staring at a fallen mount.

The beast trembled with fear like grass in winter wind. Along the cut Mira had carved in its defenses, its serpent-long body split into two lengths like bamboo stalks. The hind half crumbled into null fragments right in front of Crus like ash blown from fingers.

There was no visible process, no gears turning under glass. It was done like a candle snuffed.

Crus watched, pupils shaking like a drumskin. He knew what Adelaide had done.

She hadn’t cast mere Blood Magic. She had used Chaos Spawn as sacrificial fuel and invoked an ultimate blasphemy, a rite black as oil.

The Chaos Beast’s domain crushed long-range magic like waves breaking oars. Most spells lost aim and power before they got close, so the First Generation were forced to grapple in the beast’s shadow, blade to tendon.

There were only two paths out of that trap. One: do what the three tribal leaders did back then—use absolute force and a flood of mana to drown the beast like a river drown a fire. Two: sacrifice a power of the same source as the Chaos Beast, so the deconstructive suppression had nothing to chew, like poison meeting its own antidote.

The second way sounded like a song of victory. In practice, it was harder than the first, a cliff steeper than a wall. It demanded terrifying control and a talent like a star born at noon.

In a sense, even Ayu, a First Generation master of Blood Magic, didn’t choose it in that choke point. That alone showed how high the bar stood, like a gate of iron.

Even for Crus himself, to do the same without a contract with the Lord of Chaos—it was a bridge without planks.

At that thought, fear drained from Crus’s gaze like ink from water. He lifted his eyes to the white-haired girl in the distance, and frenzy lit his pupils like fire under glass.

“Oh, my fiancée, why do you keep surpassing me, again and again?” His voice shook like strings. “I should’ve expected it when I heard you brute-forced my spell scrolls with raw talent, like a hammer through jade. But you—how can you—!”

He trembled, not with terror, but with delight, a river boiling in spring.

“My God! How can you be this perfect!”