The deep night of the Morey Earldom did not find peace with the fall of the three Inquisitors. Instead, it sank into a preternatural, heavy silence. Inside the grand hall, the coppery scent of blood was bound to the floor—not by a lack of air, but by a lingering gravitational pull that kept the crimson mist from rising more than half a meter above the floorboards.

  Del stood on the landing of the grand staircase. He didn't return to his room immediately. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the moors outside, where the leaden clouds seemed to be curdling into a vortex.

  "Allen, retrieve those two cross-swords," Del’s voice echoed, carrying a resonant, metallic vibration. "They’re forged from Northern Frost-Iron and laced with diamond dust. Hard enough, but their tenacity is garbage. Take them to the master smith in Black Wind City. Have him quench them seven times and fold in the slag from the black-sand ore. I’m going to forge you a set of standard-issue weapons that can actually withstand 'Heavy Pressure'."

  Allen suppressed the turmoil in his chest and bowed. As he passed the dessicated remains of the silver-masked Inquisitor—pressed into the mud like a flattened insect—he glimpsed the once-exquisite rapier. It was now nothing more than a bent rod of scrap metal, thrust into the muck without dignity.

  This sight, more than any lecture, heralded the absolute transition of power.

  Just as Eagle leaned down to heave the corpse of a mithril knight, Del’s eyes sharpened. His pupils contracted into needle-points of ink.

  "Scatter!"

  Del’s silhouette vanished from the landing.

  A beam of golden light, a hundred times more potent than anything the previous knights had manifested, fell from the heart of the cloud layer without warning. It was a hammer of judgment, striking the courtyard before the manor with the precision of a falling star.

  BOOM—!!!

  A terrifying shockwave expanded in a visible white halo of compressed air. Uprooted trees and boulders were flung hundreds of meters into the night. Allen and Eagle were caught in a protective surge of Del’s dark energy, tumbling through the air before slamming into the ground at the edge of the estate.

  As the dust settled, the manicured lawn was gone. In its place was a massive, perfectly circular crater over fifty meters in diameter. At the center of the pit, a man floated silently, three feet above the scorched earth.

  He was encased in armor of dark-gold plate. Behind him, six wings composed of pure, incandescent Combat Qi fanned out slowly, every feather shimmering with a blinding, holy radiance. He wore no helmet; his long silver hair whipped in the artificial gale of his own power. Embedded in the center of his forehead was a crystalline gem that pulsed with sept-colored brilliance.

  Griffin. Deputy Master of the Inquisitorial Temple.

  "So, this is the thing that crushed a 'Torrential Domain'?" Griffin looked down at the purple-robed husk in the mud, his voice as indifferent as a god contemplating an ant. "To kill a few wastes, you utilized a 'Gravitational Decree' of this magnitude. It seems the rats in the deep have indeed stolen a taboo they were never meant to touch."

  Del stepped out from the shadows of a ruined pillar. He had finished the wild fruit he was eating, casually brushing the dust from his palms.

  "One after another... is your Church organized like a set of nesting dolls?" Del looked up at the hovering Griffin, a playful, jagged smile touching his lips. "The last three were just valves for the drainage pipes. But you... in all that gold... you’d make a fine handle for the grand doors of the Black Wind Council Hall."

  Griffin’s pupils constricted. In all his years across the Empire, no one had dared address him as "raw material."

  "Arrogance."

  Griffin snapped his arms wide.

  "Holy Domain: Ninefold Judgment - Descent!"

  Instantly, nine layers of golden, semi-transparent membranes expanded from him like the peeling of a cosmic onion, instantly enclosing a five-kilometer radius.

  The First Fold: 【Temporal Sluggishness】. Allen watched in horror as the flying debris slowed to a crawl, the very roar of the wind turning into a low-frequency, agonizing groan. The Second Fold: 【Spatial Distortion】. To Allen, Griffin seemed only thirty meters away, yet when he tried to step forward, the space felt infinitely elongated, as if those thirty meters had become a vast, unreachable ocean. ... The Ninth Fold: 【Agony Shackles】.

  "Within my domain, your perceptions, your movements, and your very soul are under my jurisdiction," Griffin looked down, the crystal in his brow erupting with light. "Kneel, heretic."

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  A titanic surge of holy pressure flooded toward Del from every direction, attempting to forcibly snap his knees.

  Del stood at the epicenter of the ninefold storm. His grey robe whipped violently in the golden tide, but his plain face held no fear. Instead, there was a look of... curiosity, as if he were examining a peculiar new toy.

  "This is the 'peak' of your Decree?" Del reached out, his fingertip touching the shimmering golden membrane of the nearest fold.

  Sizzle—

  The membrane erupted in sparks of white-hot lightning, resisting Del’s touch with the fury of a dying sun.

  "This stuff... fundamentally, it’s just a clumsy forgery of the world's constants," Del’s voice remained clear and heavy within the muffled space. "You’ve forcibly modified light, distance, and sensation. But you forgot one thing: all forgeries must be anchored in the foundation of matter."

  Del took a deep breath. The 【Black Buddha - Siphon Seed】 within him began to rotate at a frantic speed, emitting a sound like muffled thunder from the depths of his chest.

  "And I," Del whispered, "represent the 'Ultimate Truth' of matter."

  Del slammed a foot forward.

  "Black Buddha Origin - Entropic State: Universal Collapse!"

  CRACK—!

  A ripple of absolute, lightless black exploded from beneath Del’s feet. There was no radiant gold, no thunderous roar—only a sickening, heavy thud that felt like a heartbeat stopping.

  The nine layers of the "Holy Domain," previously inviolable laws of the Church, encountered the black ripple and were instantly warped. They didn't just break; they were stretched, twisted, and then crushed. The "Spatial Distortion" was flattened by absolute gravity; the "Temporal Sluggishness" collapsed under the sheer mass of Del's presence.

  "Impossible! These are laws granted by the Holy Father!" Griffin roared, his composure fracturing.

  "The Father?" Del’s silhouette flickered.

  It wasn't movement. It was Del’s gravitational field becoming so dense that it "pulled" the space containing Griffin directly to him. A localized collapse of distance.

  Del appeared inches from Griffin’s face, his ink-black eyes staring directly into the silver pupils of the holy knight.

  "If your Father can withstand ten thousand tons of pressure per square centimeter, then perhaps he is a god."

  Del closed his fist—a simple, unadorned straight punch. Griffin tried to retreat, but his six wings felt as if they were forged from solid lead. They wouldn't move.

  THUD!

  The punch landed squarely on Griffin’s breastplate, forged from mithril and solar-gold. Upon contact with Del’s fist, the metal underwent a state-change. Because the microscopic gaps between atoms were being crushed by the gravity, the solid plate turned into a dense, semi-liquid mass that caved into Griffin’s chest cavity.

  Griffin sprayed a mist of blood mixed with visceral fragments, hurtling through the air like a golden meteor.

  Rumble—

  He carved a trench hundreds of meters long into the earth, pulverizing every tree and mound in his path.

  "Divine Will is eternal! I am eternal!"

  At the end of the trench, Griffin struggled to his feet. His chest was caved in, but the crystal in his brow burst with a renewed, blinding light. The blood he had spilled began to flow backward against gravity, weaving together to mend his shattered ribs and organs. At his level, his body was no longer purely biological; it was a fusion of holy intent and energy.

  "Oh? You can reconstruct?"

  Del hovered in the air, looking down at the regenerating knight. Behind him, a gargantuan, shadowy figure of the Black Buddha manifested—cold, desolate, and infinitely heavy. In every one of its thousand hands, it held a collapsing sphere of gravity.

  "Let’s see how many times you can put yourself back together."

  Del dove. His speed crossed the limit of visual perception.

  Screeee—!

  Allen and Eagle could only see a frantic blur. In Griffin’s location, beams of black light were crisscrossing in a frenzied dance of destruction. Every time a beam passed, a cloud of gold-red mist erupted from Griffin’s body. Griffin swung his holy sword, "The Morning Light," in a desperate arc, but every time it met Del’s dark force, the legendary blade let out a scream of agony.

  "One thousand."

  Del’s voice was the sound of a closing tomb.

  He appeared behind Griffin one last time, his fingers hooked like claws into Griffin’s regenerating shoulders.

  "Black Buddha - Thousand Hands: Final Stripping."

  "AAAAAAGGGGHHH!"

  Griffin’s scream was the most wretched sound the moors had ever heard. He felt his soul and his energy being "peeled" away from his flesh by a force he couldn't even name. The Siphon Seed in Del’s palm opened to its absolute limit, devouring not just Griffin’s Combat Qi, but the Divine Will within the crystal in his brow.

  Seconds later, silence returned to the waste.

  Griffin’s majestic frame had become a pile of lifeless, ash-grey powder. The night wind caught it, scattering the remains of the Deputy Master into the air. Only the crystalline gem—now darkened and webbed with cracks—remained in Del’s hand.

  Del landed, his grey robe still pristine. Not a speck of dust clung to his hem.

  "Master..." Allen ran over, staring at the hundred-meter trench. "He... he was the Deputy Master of the Temple. Griffin. Killing him means the entire Church will..."

  "I know," Del interrupted, looking at the cracked crystal as if examining a piece of low-quality glass. "The purity is subpar, but the law-fragments inside are intact. Allen, take this to the smith tomorrow. Tell him to embed it in the ventilation shaft of the Great Hall underground."

  "The ventilation shaft?" Eagle’s eyes went wide. "This is a Saint-Tier crystal!"

  "Its wind-attribute affinity is decent," Del said, yawning. "It’ll make a perfect power core for an exhaust fan. It’s getting a bit musty down there in Black Wind City."

  Allen and Eagle looked at each other. They had expected gravity-shaking worry or at least a moment of solemnity after killing a man who could dictate the fate of empires. But to Del, the only value of a Saint-Tier powerhouse was to improve the air quality of his basement.

  "Alright, don't just stand there," Del turned back toward the manor. "These 'golden materials' will likely start arriving in greater quantities soon. Since they're so kind as to deliver building supplies, we shouldn't be rude. Allen, tomorrow, double the recruitment for Black Wind City."

  "Are we beginning the counter-offensive?" Allen asked, his eyes burning.

  "No," Del’s voice drifted from the shadows of the doorway. "We’re beginning the 'renovations'. I’m going to turn this place into a fortress where even a god has to pay a toll just to step inside."

  The moonlight fell once more, illuminating the ruins of the Morey estate. Allen looked at the fragment of the crystal in his hand—once a symbol of divine authority, now a mere motor for a fan.

  The old era hadn't just ended; it had been pulverized.