Soul Venerable (Re-written)

 

 

As the fight continues, the dimensional laws of the world are currently being altered, Mordred triggering what is referred to as heavenly tribulation.

Humans have Human Will, Dragons have Dragon Will, and naturally, Heavens have Heaven’s Will. 

There might be many names for it, but Heaven’s Will is often revered as World’s Will, or Dimensional Will, or other similar names. 

Of course, it’s not like every micro-plane has a strong will. Depending on the depth of its dimensional laws, most micro-planes can barely accommodate heavenly manifestations as micro-planes are often too small to accommodate various dimensional laws. Heavenly Tribulations would be extremely rare in this type of micro-plane to the point of almost non-existent. 

However, there are special cases when a micro-plane has been maintained for centuries, or perhaps, millennia. 

Just like a biological organism, dimensions also experience a process known as growing, and this ‘growing’ phase isn’t merely on the physical level such as expanding its volume alone. Its depth of dimensional laws will grow in tandem, and so, allowing the said dimensions to accommodate more lifeforms. With more lifeforms inhabiting it, the world’s will would also grow. This is the ideal case scenario for a dimension where the positive cycle keeps on accumulating.

In a sense, a Dimensional Will or a World’s Will can be likened to a collective intelligence. It represents the will of the various life forms within it. 

And so, what if the majority of the lifeforms within this small world is enslaved by one, singular being?

Gorod Krovi could also be considered as a terraforming-class killer move that had latched over into this small world’s origin core. Over a long period of time, this micro-plane has been altered to better accommodate vampires, turning whatever this plane was into a blood-path environment. 

That being said, the construction of a Gorod Krovi has given Lord Erebus the ability to infect the dimensional will of the micro-plane with the will of the vampire lord, to the point of making him the ruler of this world. This micro-plane has become Lord Erebus’ domain to the truest sense conceivable. 

With some of the most complicated methods in his arsenal, the Haemodominari vampire can sense anything that happened in this micro-plane, as if having the knowledge of what’s happening in his own palm.

After all, he is literally the ruler of this small world. The senses of the blood-slaves, the trees, grass, the winds, or even the very soil and terrestrial magnetism in this world is his investigative methods. Every single existence in this small world is under the will of Lord Erebus.

Thus, he almost lashed out in rage the moment he realized what Mordred is trying to accomplish with his song. 

The Gorod Krovi naturally reacted to Mordred’s terraforming-class killer move by sending more and more units, and they are greatly affected by the dimensional laws.

If the action of a specific lifeform is in line with the will of the world, the said lifeform is empowered by the very world. Each of their steps would be light, their action would be lucky. Energy filled their body, it was as if the world was literally supporting their actions. 

Since this is a war, then a mere 10% boost of the whole army would typically be translated to a balance-tipping outcome, and a 25% boost would be the defender steamrolling the invader. This would especially be more apparent since the defenders have an overwhelming number advantage, while the invaders are merely numbered in the fifties.

After all, when the will of this world has been governed by the will of the Vampire Lord, and for such a long time, who can differentiate between what the world wants or what Lord Erebus wants? 

His will has become this world’s will. Every order and arrangement he made had a beneficial effect in this world. 

Still, just because this world is extremely beneficial towards the defenders, doesn’t mean the invaders are weak.

Mordred has designed the Mecha-Fenris Wolf Broodlings above the standard of rank 1 puppets. He used the engineering level for rank 2 puppets despite the lack of materials. With some engineering methods so that they are possible, these puppets’ battle strength hovers between peak-stage rank 1 and early-stage rank 2. They are significantly more durable and effective than rank 1 puppets. Furthermore, Lupusrazor's AI is powerful enough to replace him in controlling the wolf packs.

This has caused the defender to be unable to quickly dispatch him as planned. 

Therefore, the World’s Will or rather, Lord Erebus has decided to escalate the conflict, triggering a Heavenly Tribulation.

If boosting the performance of the inhabitants could be likened to natural antibodies for a dimension, then Heavenly Tribulation is the heaven's method to directly intervene with whatever happens within the dimension.

If Mordred is a cancer, then a Heavenly Tribulation would be a cancer removal surgery. A heavenly tribulation would typically be harmful towards its own dimension as it would use karma and whatnot as fuel, therefore, it is typically not purposely used for this type of occasion.

Since this is a micro-plane whose dimensional laws are spiked towards the spectrum of blood-path, naturally, the manifestation of a Heavenly Tribulation would be a blood-path one. 

Mordred, standing on top of a hill of corpses, could instantly notice the changes because his terraforming-class killer move had been obstructed, the dimension giving him a fierce resistance. 

“Oh… He’s actually triggering the heavenly tribulation… not bad- well, in a manner of speaking.” Mordred commented as he reloaded the two large caliber pistols in his hands with another potion bottle.

Suddenly, the very soil is bleeding, it is seething with blood. At first, it was like a bloody swamp, but it got worse as the blood could reach up to the ankles of the werewolves. Movement was not only disturbed, but the blood also actively transformed into blood tentacles that would bind them, further disrupting movement.

“Bloodbeast Wave Tribulation…” Mordred analyzed as he killed another wave of gargoyles with his gun-kata combat style. Seeing his mecha werewolves slowly producing blood from their orifice while they fought, Mordred shook his head. 

“Two Heavenly Tribulations in tandem… He’s really going all out, ignoring the karmic retribution from the heavens.” He understood why the werewolves are bleeding despite having no blood in their body because he too, started to bleed from all of his orifice.

“The second heavenly tribulation is Heavenly Essence Hemorrhage. With these two tribulations together, it’s not going to be easy…” 

Bloodbeast Wave Tribulation flooded the very soil with blood, and slowly turned the said blood into a type of near-immortal lifeform known as bloodbeast. 

Just like an earth-path minor elemental wave that would populate an area with mudbeast, this heavenly tribulation did the same but bloodbeasts instead. 

Same thing with mudbeast, bloodbeast have no apparent weakness, they are a lump of blood that could take on various forms and will try to kill the invaders without rest. The only way to kill them is to exhaust all the energy that consisted of the bloodbeast so that they could not repair or resurrect themselves.

However, in this blood-path environment where blood-path energy and radiation is extremely rich to the point of corrosive towards non-blood-path cultivators, bloodbeast could just absorb the ambience energy in the atmosphere to recover. Killing them would take a significant amount of effort.

Furthermore, the second tribulation is Heavenly Essence Hemorrhage. 

In the affected area, the tribulation would convert energy, no matter what form it is, into blood essence. The blood essence would then be forcefully extracted, thus creating the illusion of bleeding despite the mecha werewolves, or Mordred himself, having no blood in their person. 

It is one of those unique Heavenly Tribulation that has low destructive power, but extremely troublesome to deal with. 

For Mordred, energy is finite. With three core reactors (two within himself and the last within Lupusrazor), he had to fuel the war machines which were the Mecha-Fenris Wolf Brood. 

Naturally, the wireless energy transfer and battery attached on each mecha brood would be sufficient for hours of intense combat. 

However, now that his wireless energy transfer is disrupted by Heavenly Essence Hemorrhage and the batteries within the mecha broods are leaking, it wouldn’t be long before they turned into literal metal scraps. 

“As expected… Without two years of preparation, invading a rank 2 being’s domain is extremely difficult.” He glanced at the distance, beyond the battlefield where his mecha army is slowly being slaughtered by waves of blood-slaves and bloodbeasts.

In his senses, the echoes of time and space are being disturbed. The dimension itself is drying itself dry of positive karma to empower an existence. He heard the whole micro-plane cried as it’s origin core is being forcefully extracted out of its energy without caring for the future.

Boom! 

Mordred was originally standing atop of a hill of corpses, but now the corpse hill itself exploded in gore and blood. There was nothing left standing on it.

A few meters away from the edge of the explosion, Mordred landed atop a frozen blood platform. 

“Crazy bastard.” Mordred cursed as he quickly signaled Lupusrazor to return back onto his side as soon as possible. “It was a simple long range blood lance attack… but the sheer energy allows it to travel four times faster than the speed of sound. The current Lord Erebus seemed like a wasteful second-generation bastard.”

Splash! Lupusrazor resurfaced, the blood that covered its frame instantly evaporated due to the high vibration. It trotted hastily on top of the frozen blood platform. 

“I guess I’ll have to sing while combating Lord Erebus in the flesh…” Lupusrazor then quickly opened up its back, allowing Mordred to enter. While the mecha werewolves are being slaughtered, Mordred joins up with Lupusrazor and the alpha wolf immediately shone in prismatic colors.

Nine colors of the elements, crimson red of blood, sharp white of sword, profound purple of soul, mysterious purple of wisdom, prismatic pixels of information, profound orange of refinement, dark red with black outline of dragon, transparent of space, golden of time, profound gray of sound, and semi-translucent white, pastel pink, and pale green of unknown foreign paths. All sorts of colors are being produced by Lupusrazor’s frame, they are shining brightly and manifesting aurora borealis-like lights. 

Each of these colors corresponds to his AT-Field, signifying his breadth of attainments. As for the light intensity, they signify his depth of attainment.

The entire plane shuddered, micro spatial cracks are started to appear amidst Lupusrazor’s surrounding. 

Despite having greatly more complete dimensional laws, this plane still couldn’t bear the burden of accommodating Mordred AT-Field in full power. This wasn’t caused by anything special, the world is simply unable to accommodate his existence.

That’s right, Mordred’s truesoul is actually extremely heavy, in terms of dimensional laws. After achieving rank 1, if not for him being able to suppress it to the absolute limit of what could be considered as crippling himself, it would be impossible for him to enter micro-planes.

Now that Mordred has sensed Lord Erebus is far more powerful than he had given him the credit, it was time for him to go all out as well. This dimension’s space-path laws are deep enough to self-heal from this level of damage, limiting his power so that this world doesn’t break is the least of his worries.

“Alright, let’s see what you can do…” Mordred muttered as Lupusrazor’s frame changed into its werewolf configuration. With the profound blue glow of his AT-Field resisting the pull of terrestrial magnetism, he is no longer bound by gravity. He effortlessly flew up high, reaching sufficient elevation to glimpse at the core of this micro-plane.

It was a gothic city, filled with ancient buildings with gothic architecture. Black, white, and red is the primary color of the city, there are various statues of gargoyle being used as decorations and perhaps, monitoring purposes. Atop the gothic castle in the center of the Gorod Krovi, stood an existence that radiates insane intensity of blood-path radiation, to the point of twisting the light around itself.

“Lord Inquisitor Erebus…” Mordred muttered, as he used investigative methods to pry upon the counterintelligence method of Lord Erebus.

Of course, when Mordred is serious, this level of protection against investigation is meaningless. He literally invented information-path in the main world.

“Holy shit…” Mordred gasped in surprise. “A fully functional biochemical suit! How the fuck did he get one? Did he visit the Jaegers of Kaiserreich for th-” His thoughts were interrupted by sudden, extremely targeted killing intent. Lord Erebus was making an entrance.

The vampire lord suddenly turned into a stream of blood light, leaving a trail of blood mist along the way. 

“Prepare to die, invader!” Lord Erebus made an attack while he’s in his blood-light form, producing blood lances that were previously used to explode a hill of corpses. Each of these attacks contain rank 2 energy that would completely obliterate rank 1 defensive methods like wet tissue. 

Boom! Boom! Boom! Lupusrazor managed to barely dodge them, but each blood lance that landed on the ground exploded as if they were tactical nukes instead of mere blood lances. Obviously, even with full power, Lupusrazor couldn’t take it head on. Not even layers upon layers of AT-Field would protect him from that amount of energy.

“That movement-type killer move… seems familiar.” Even in the midst of combat, Mordred scrutinized the form of blood-light that Erebus took. 

Since this is a rank 2 combatant, he is moving at roughly 1.5 times the speed of sound. Mordred can only have several fractions of a second to react. He also needs to react properly to Erebus moves while continuing his terraforming-class killer move that takes a significant portion of his computation power. 

And so, some part of Lupusrazor’s back opened up to reveal a twig-like wingspan. 

This metallic twig-like pair of wings is actually an outlet for the Electric Jet Stream Propulsion System, allowing Lupusrazor to exhaust an ungodly amount of electricity in an extremely efficient manner to produce high thruster power. And thus, by doing so, gaining the ability to match rank 2 Lords in terms of movement speed.

Boom! Boom! Boom! The electric jet stream propulsion system’s best feature is its insane ability to create acceleration. From standing still to mach speed only takes him an instant.

Just as they were about to collide, the blood-light and mecha-werewolf stopped twenty five meters apart in the air, as if the G-force backlash of doing so did not affect them in the slightest.

On one side, a mecha-werewolf with high tech-looking, twig-like wings.

On the other side, a 4 meter tall organism which was covered with black-scale bio armors with two pairs of scale-plated bat wings better compared to a dragon than that of a bat. Alongside, it has a long and narrow tail with an arrow-like tip, leaking blood-like liquid that evaporates when it touches objects, melting them in the process. Its body is laced with sharp spikes and vein-like red lines, making the bio armor look all-the-more ominous.

The clawed hand of Lord Erebus has a mantis-like blade with multiple small blades attached on it, more like an instrument of torture rather than a weapon of war.

In a sense, the mere visage of Lord Erebus is a terror weapon, almost built for punishment instead of killing, mirroring Erebus’ intense need to enact revenge.

“You eliminated 30% of my slave army before I activated the Heavenly Tribulation. State your name, invader… before I put your head on a spike and display your corpse for millennia to come. At the very least, you earned that much.” Erebus spoke, his tone concealing extreme anger and abhorrence.

“It seems like a strength-path biochemical suit. Was there an effort to remodel it into a blood-path one? Even so… the technique used is shit. You’ve practically ruined a perfectly good biochemical suit…” Mordred muttered, ignoring Erebus’ words. “What a shame…”

The vampire lord only frowned. “Petty insults!” Erebus scoffed as he instantly activated an offensive method. His desire to identify the invader was quickly stifled by his need to kill them. 

The biochemical suit’s right hand bled, the blood immediately solidifying into an axe purely composed of blood.

No mere axe, it was a blood-path Effulgence Weapon. 

With this weapon, he instantly broke the sound barrier, cleaving at Mordred who seemed to be preoccupied with his biochemical suit. 

The sound of two metallic objects colliding reverberated throughout the whole micro-plane. At the last moment, Mordred too formed his own effulgence weapon out of AT-Field. Naturally, the choice of his weapon is…

“Gunlance? You have a poor taste…” Bang! Bang! Bang! Erebus once again waved his oversized blood axe at the mecha-werewolf, but a gunlance made out of prismatic hardlight blocked his every attack. 

The werebat and werewolf entered an intense melee. Both couldn’t overwhelm each other in a short time as both of them are occupied with the other battlefields.

On the ground, the vampiric army are currently fighting with the wolf broods, whereas on the air, their physical bodies are occupied in a contest of strength. 

Although not visible, both were also fighting for dominance over the domain. 

Mordred’s terraforming-class killer move is still ongoing, whereas the Vampire Lord is manipulating the world’s will to resist. 

And so, this fragile balance, if it was balanced in the first place, hangs on a thin thread where one could gain overwhelming advantage if one of the three battlefields fell. 

Naturally, Mordred is at a disadvantage over this. The world’s will itself is on the side of Lord Erebus, and the two Heavenly Tribulations are still ongoing, affecting all non-vampires. This world is truly inhospitable for undead machinery lifeforms like Mordred. Or rather, invaders in general.

Whoosh! Lupusrazor opened up his mouth, releasing an ice and snow cannon breath attack. Although it missed Lord Erebus, the attack still left hundreds of meters long of ground frozen solid in a cone shape. 

With this attack, Erebus inwardly grinds his teeth because the frost cannon breath attack has a double objective. If the primary goal, which was himself, cannot be achieved, then his slave army would take the brunt of the damage. Mordred’s combat style is truly full of scheme, making even the experienced Lord Erebus seeth in fury.

Naturally, the vampire lord wanted to replicate the same. The werebat opened up his mouth, producing a blood ray that would selectively obliterate non-vampire rank 1s like tissue paper.

However, Mordred did not care. In the first place, his puppets are literally consumables. 

Boom! Boom! Boom! The mecha-broods would self-destruct in a conflagration of lightning and fire before their kamikaze mods within their system can be deactivated due to myriad reasons. 

His effort of using blood-ray breath attack to selectively kill the mecha broods have gone up in smoke.

Yes, he had gained battlefield advantage… but who the fuck cares?

Enslavement-path experts excel in engaging in a large war. Their ‘macro’ control upon the battlefield would often leave cultivators helpless, especially enslavement-path experts who would see their army as literal consumables to expend the enemy’s combat resources.

If this was a Control Tower vs Control Tower battle, Lord Erebus would actually win.

However, Mordred isn’t an enslavement-path cultivator in the first place. 

The weakness of any enslavement-path cultivator is a singular, extremely powerful enemy that even their numbers advantage couldn’t handle. The ‘beheading tactic’, so to speak. 

And Mordred has proved himself to be that type of character that couldn’t be defeated simply by sending bodies at him. 

Still, enslavement-path is a profound cultivation path. It’s a battle-tempered path with war strategies developed over the course of several thousand years in the main world alone. In minor worlds whose time rate is even faster, there might be hidden experts who have developed it to a new height. 

Thus, there are various methods to handle a singular, extremely powerful entity. 

The slave army didn’t dare to enter a melee combat with Mordred as a single sweep of his Effulgence Weapon-gunlance is induced with [Triple Extreme Sound: Finger Whistle]. The ground would be littered with scratch marks, as if the sword finger of a giant has been scratching the ground. 

If even the soil, heavily strengthened by the micro-plane’s dominant path, can be messed up like that, what would happen to flesh-and-blood beings like them? Even directly exploding into blood and gore would probably be a better outcome than becoming a quintuple amputee.

And thus, they started to support their vampire lord with various methods.

One of them is to activate a large-scale ritual to boost the performance of their master, while on the other hand, suppressing the invader.

Lord Erebus smiled as he felt the boost in performance that his slave army provided him. “Your terraforming-class killer moves have barely progressed, and I’ve killed all of your puppets. It’s only a matter of time before your energy is completely drained… You’ve lost…”

Bang! The two split apart after an intense melee, their effulgence weapon broke upon Mordred’s Gunlance, and is now in the process of remaking it.

Just as the vampire lord was about to restart their battle, a flash of pink lightning swept over them. It merged with the mecha-werewolf’s chest but did not cause any other phenomena.

“Boy…” He said coldly, in a tone that took no quarter, “You just fucked up your last chance of winning.” Lupusrazor sneered. “Rank 2 time-path killer move, [Subjective Time Stop]!”

“!!!” The Vampire Lord was unable to process what had happened, wincing in extreme pain from some unknown source, like the weight of an entire world had been put on him. But at that moment, by the time he next opened his eyes…

His world had already been frozen.