Emperor of the Source

The void within the micro-dimension trembled violently, groaning under the weight of a newly awakened power. Hestia's pale golden eyes locked onto the woman who had just brutalized Adrian, and a raging fury burned within her gaze with a coldness that made even the surrounding Peak Rule Stage beings feel their hearts tighten.

The blood on Adrian's robes, the bruises across his body, and the fact that Hazel had dared to strike him again and again while calling him weak had pushed something inside Hestia beyond restraint.

"You dared to touch him."

The words left Hestia's lips with deathly calm, yet the vibration carried within them fractured the very fabric of the sealed space.

Adrian felt the hand on his shoulder tighten slightly, protective and anchoring, before Hestia floated forward past him.

Hazel's red-black pupils narrowed as she assessed the woman before her. She knew who Hestia was. Even if she had been away from Andromeda for millions of years, she had still kept watch over the Ashen Vortex Sect from the shadows, and the name of the Crimson Vital Sect Leader was not unfamiliar to her.

But in Hazel's eyes, Hestia had always been nothing more than a lesser minor sect leader who had stepped out of bounds because Ignis had allowed the situation to drag on too long. A dismissive smirk tugged at the corner of her lips as she raised her dark blue sword.

"A lesser minor sect leader finally dares to stand before me. You should be kneeling in gratitude that I have not erased your entire lineage yet." The blade hummed with restrained power, its edge vibrating with spatial distortion. "Do you truly believe you can stand against me?"

Hestia did not answer with words. Instead, she activated her domain.

Crimson essence erupted from her body, but it was no longer alone. Swirling within the violent tide of red was a brilliant, vibrant green-gold light, the essence of Verdant Genesis perfectly harmonized with her Crimson Vital Dominion.

The two divine concepts did not clash, overlap, or merely coexist; they moved as one, feeding into each other with terrifying balance. Vitality and Blood became deeper beneath the nourishment of Life. Force and Pressure became more stable beneath the endless renewal of Water, Light, and Plant. Her domain expanded with a suffocating pressure, reaching an unprecedented eighty percent authority, an entire ten percent higher than what she had wielded before.

Hestia extended her arms, and her weapons materialized within her grasp. Two lengthy crimson cloths unfurled through the void, each one flowing like silk yet vibrating with enough force to tear apart starship hulls, and at the end of each cloth hung a viciously sharp blade that gleamed with crimson-green radiance.

The weapons floated around her like living serpents, humming with the combined weight of two divine concepts fused into a single terrifying Astral Core.

In the distance, Pyros grabbed Ignis's arm, pulling him back several hundred meters. "She ascended," Pyros hissed, his voice tight with shock. "The woman actually left to ascend."

Ignis stared at Hestia, his jaw clenched. The Hestia they had thought had run away had not fled out of fear. She had left the battlefield to ascend, and now she had returned as an Astral Stage being.

Both men knew precisely how the Astral Stage functioned. When two mid-tier divine concepts, each capable of wielding seventy percent authority, were perfectly merged, the resulting Astral Core granted the cultivator eighty percent authority.

"But she's still new," Ignis muttered, his eyes narrowing as he studied the battlefield. "Hazel has been an Astral for over a few thousand years now."

Under normal circumstances, facing an Astral Stage being would have filled them with absolute terror. Yet right now, neither Ignis nor Pyros felt that kind of despair, because Hazel had already taught them the hidden knowledge of the Astral Stage.

The Astral Stage was classified as a separate realm not merely because of the increase in authority. If authority alone defined the gap, then the two high-tier Peak Rule Stage beings Adrian had brought with him, Octaven and Kaelar, who both wielded eighty percent authority, should have been able to fight Hazel without being overwhelmed.

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But what had truly happened?

With a single intangible roar, Hazel had almost shattered the consciousness of every surrounding Peak Rule Stage being, including those two mighty cultivators who had terrified the battlefield only moments earlier.

The true difference between Astral Stage and Rule Stage is not only the Astral Core's authority. It's the higher mastery of consciousness. The ability to sense, shape, and attack the mind in ways a Peak Rule Stage cultivator could barely defend against.

Willforce became a true weapon, not merely a resource to fuel authority commands.

Because of that, even though Hazel now faced another Astral Stage cultivator, Ignis and Pyros did not fear the outcome. Hestia might have ascended, but in their minds, she was still a newly risen Astral being from a minor sect. Someone like her would not possess proper willforce techniques. She might match Hazel in authority, speed, and domain pressure, but once Hazel's willforce techniques began to grind against her consciousness, the ending would be inevitable.

Hazel sneered as her dark blue domain of eighty percent authority crashed into Hestia's crimson-green field.

The clash divided the micro-dimension into two opposing halves, and reality shrieked as it was torn between their competing wills. On one side, Hazel's cold dark blue essence pressed down like a vast, ruthless sea. On the other, Hestia's crimson-green domain surged with blood, vitality, life, force, and growth, refusing to retreat even an inch.

Hestia's crimson cloths whipped forward like lightning, slicing through the void from two different directions.

Hazel parried with her dark blue energy sword, and the impact sent violent shockwaves outward, shattering the drifting remnants of dead cultivators and scattering broken domain residue like ash.

Hazel dashed forward immediately, her physical speed enhanced by her Astral Core to a level completely untraceable to the remaining Rule Stage beings in the distance.

But Hestia was no longer at the Rule Stage.

She met Hazel's charge head-on. Her wrists twisted, and the crimson cloths snapped through the void with terrifying velocity. The sharp blades at their ends sliced toward Hazel from two different blind angles, completely ignoring the direct path of Hazel's sword and forcing the dark red woman to react to threats approaching from behind her own attack line.

Hazel's pupils contracted. She twisted mid-flight, her body rotating at an impossible angle as she made a direct authority command, "Stop her weapons!"

The reality executed her command as it attempted to strip away the kinetic force and spatial acceleration driving the blades.

"Negate."

Hestia's will commanded, her own forty percent share of authority clashing perfectly against Hazel's. The two commands cancelled each other out in a shower of brilliant sparks, leaving only the physical force of the weapons and the mastery of the women wielding them.

Hazel was forced to pull her sword back, parrying one crimson blade while narrowly dodging the second. Even so, the edge carved a thin line across her cheek, and a faint streak of dark blood floated into the void.

Her red-black eyes widened in genuine surprise.

Hestia's physical speed, enhanced by her new Astral Core, was matching her own flawlessly.

"You are fast," Hazel hissed, the words carrying more wariness than praise.

Hazel immediately unleashed a multi-layered authority technique. Dark blue essence exploded outward into dozens of razor-thin spikes that surrounded Hestia from multiple angles, each spike vibrating with spatial restraint and piercing force. "Lock Space and pierce through her defences."

The command sank into the battlefield, attempting to freeze Hestia's movement long enough for the spikes to impale her.

Hestia did not panic. She danced through the void, her movements a mesmerizing display of perfect control. She flicked her wrists, and the crimson cloths snapped into a tight swirling vortex around her body, the blades tracing circular arcs that formed a defensive pattern around every opening.

"Deflect. Compress."

Dense gravity and pressure rules merged with spatial defence, creating a localized barrier that ground Hazel's dark blue spikes into dust before they could pierce through.

Before the dust could settle, Hestia launched her counterattack.

The crimson cloths shot outward like lightning, and she infused them with offensive authority techniques, modifying the rule of Spatial Vacancy to make her afterimages real. Suddenly, eight bladed cloths attacked Hazel simultaneously from every conceivable angle, each one carrying enough cutting power to split open an ordinary Peak Rule Stage cultivator who dared stand too close.

Hazel cursed and swung her dark blue sword in a wide, desperate arc to parry. The void shuddered continuously beneath the weight of their exchanging blows.

To the onlookers, Nightshade, Octaven, Kaelar, Yselia, Pyros, Ignis, and the surviving others, the center of the micro-dimension had become a sphere of absolute annihilation. Crimson, green-gold, and dark blue light strobed violently as the two women engaged in a high-speed lethal dance, their movements so fast that most Peak Rule Stage beings could only follow the aftershocks rather than the actual attacks.

From the outside, it looked as if they were fighting entirely as equals.

"She is actually holding her own," Nightshade murmured from the shadows, his eyes wide as he watched Hestia parry a thrust from Hazel and counter with a sweeping cloth-blade strike that tore through Hazel's sleeve. "An alchemy sect leader is fighting an established Astral Stage cultivator to a standstill."

Yselia, floating near the edge of the battlefield, felt a sickening knot form in her stomach. The woman she had looked down upon, the sect leader she had intended to crush and humiliate, was now fighting a monster from a Major Sect on equal footing.

"She really ascended." The thought echoed through Yselia's mind like a death knell. The reality of the Crimson Vital Sect's transformation pressed down on her like a collapsing sky, suffocating and inescapable.