Chapter 1436: WitchBourne Castle & Colorless Sky

Morning came gently to Hell’s Paradise Island although there was something almost watchful about the sun when it finally climbed beyond the horizon.

After everything the night had endured, daylight did not arrive with its usual careless warmth.

—the first rays spread slowly across the island pale along their outer edges before deepening into rich amber as they touched forest, river, towers and distant mountains, almost as though the sun itself were testing the world before committing its full brilliance to it. There was comfort within that warmth, the familiar tenderness of dawn brushing frost from leaves and chasing the final chill from stone, yet something strangely protective accompanied it now.

The vast golden disc hanging above Paradise possessed a solemnity ordinary daylight had never carried before, illuminating every rooftop, every frost-touched blade of grass and every lingering ribbon of mist with such immaculate clarity that the island seemed newly washed beneath heaven.

Beneath that gentleness, however, lived the faint impression of something far less peaceful, as though the heavens had awakened, looked down upon what had happened during the night and decided to keep one eye open.

It appeared the gold had not disappeared with the stars after all.

Perhaps it never would.

World Essence remained woven throughout Hell’s Paradise Island in quantities that simply had not existed before Phei’s awakening. It threaded the air, rested within soil and stone, flowed through lakes and rivers and sank into the hidden spiritual veins beneath the island until it became another unseen layer of the world.

Morning sunlight passed through those golden currents and occasionally produced strange pockets of warmth where nothing visible moved, while water, polished glass and even certain leaves sometimes caught brief flashes of deep gold that vanished before ordinary eyes could decide whether anything had truly been there.

The absurdity was that most cultivators could not perceive any of it.

World Essence now surrounded them in abundance—

It brushed against their bodies as they walked, drifted through homes and cultivation chambers, flowed beside the Mana and Essence they had spent their entire lives learning to sense and passed through forests where powerful cultivators could distinguish the smallest changes in spiritual air.

Yet almost every one of them remained completely unaware of the deeper current moving alongside everything familiar.

It was World Essence— a cultivator and awakened might spend centuries climbing Realm after Realm and yet still remain blind to what now moved past their skin with every breath.

On Hell’s Paradise Island, the number of beings capable of truly sensing it remained painfully small.

Phei naturally stood among them, though calling him merely capable of perceiving World Essence had already become ridiculous when the Essence now flowed across the island because of him. Marcus could still recognize thanks to him being even if unawakened, even after Phei tore away the Angelic Bloodline, Eira could perceive it. Maya could. The Monster and Sienna certainly could, and Phei had privately decided some time ago that Sienna was Sienna had become a perfectly sufficient explanation whenever she saw, understood or accomplished something that should have required several pages of reasoning.

Beyond them, beings standing at the God and Immortal level or higher could perceive the golden currents with far greater ease. Their existences had already climbed high enough beyond mortal cultivation that the deeper threads of the world no longer remained entirely hidden from their senses. Maya and the Monster belonged to the much more irritating category of beings so monstrously powerful that ordinary explanations had stopped being useful long ago, while Sienna’s connection to Phei made the newly spread World Essence almost impossible for her to overlook even without everything else she was— again— she was also the Nether Goddess herself!

Yet another being upon the island had felt the transformation with a clarity different from all of them.

Anahita!

An Angel— Fallen or not— were born from World Essence itself and they sensed the change the instant it began!

Whatever World Essence meant to cultivators, to Anahita it was infinitely more intimate. She had been born from it, and when the first golden current entered Hell’s Paradise Island; it had trembled through the very depths of her being. Her eyes drifted shut as that exquisite warmth bathed her Soul.

Every part of her seemed to open toward it with an involuntary longing, yearning to be steeped in the golden currents, to feel their warmth gather through her until even the smallest trace of herself had been touched. An aching happiness had swelled within her, almost too tender to bear; she felt welcomed with a completeness that left her wanting to surrender to the embrace and remain there, cradled within the very Essence from which she had been born.

Beneath the Primordial Lotus, the island seemed to inhale as Essence suffused the whole island and beyond, flowing effortlessly into the deeper folds of the world. Within that, Anahita discerned a subtle change in creation itself, perceptible to her through their shared origin where an awakened’s greater strength and cultivation base alone might have failed to sense it.

Unfortunately— Anahita was not the only one who sensed that something had changed.

Far beyond Hell’s Paradise Island, across oceans, borders and continents, old beings stirred from meditation with their eyes suddenly open. Some lifted their heads toward directions they could not explain. Others paused within ancient halls or some chambers buried beneath mountains and wondered why the world itself had seemed different for the briefest heartbeat.

A few extended their spiritual senses instinctively and found nothing waiting for them except ordinary morning and the unsettling certainty that something somewhere had occurred beyond their sight.

Most would never learn the answer.

The disturbance reached places that many of the Awakened and cultivators of the present age had long since consigned to myth. Beneath a distant morning sky, beyond the familiar centers of their power, a Castle rose along the bleeding edge of the horizon—

It was Gothic enormity half-veiled in the low grey mist.

Its spires pierced the pale heavens at forbidding angles, some slender as needles, others broken midway through their ascent, their ruined crowns disappearing into long ribbons of fog. Centuries of rain had blackened the outer walls and worn certain stretches of stone almost smooth, while elsewhere roots had prised the masonry apart. Ivy climbed the towers in thick green coils, wound about shattered balconies and disappeared through narrow windows sunk deep within the walls.

From a distance, those dark openings resembled wounds that the encroaching leaves had failed to close.

The whole edifice bore an age beyond any comfortable reckoning.

Weather had effaced the finer carvings without softening their severity, and the surviving stonework suggested a history of far in scars of time.

Fog lay thickest about the lower walls, where briars tangled across the earth, their black, thorned branches thrusting through one another like the fingers of buried things striving towards the air.

Gargoyles crouched along the parapets and ruined ledges, or clung to the steep roofs with their stone wings gathered about them. Rain had hollowed their faces, broken their noses and split their grinning jaws; some had lost such portions of their bodies that it seemed impossible the remainder should still hold.

Their weathered forms had the dreadful persistence of corpses left perched above the grounds, too firmly lodged to fall.

Beneath them, the smell of sodden earth and damp masonry carried a faint metallic taint that brought old blood to mind, though an uneasy imagination might have supplied that part.

Even in ordinary daylight, the darkness about the castle seemed to weigh upon the surrounding countryside. From half a mile away, one could see shadows gathered against walls the sun ought to have reached. Ravens sometimes alighted upon the broken crenellations, then departed without a cry, their silent wings carrying them back into the colorless sky.

One could readily imagine portraits of long-dead women keeping their places along the corridors, their painted eyes still watchful after everyone who remembered their voices had gone to dust.

A girl passed beneath the ancient entrance arch and nearly stumbled.

Her trailing foot remained upon black stone worn uneven by centuries; the other had landed upon flawless white marble.

The change was so abrupt!

The damp smell of earth and decay vanished at the iron threshold. Air of an almost wintry purity touched her tongue, it carried a faint fragrance of lotus, fresh petals mingled with the clean cold of wind passing over untouched snow.

Her heavy satin hem whispered across the marble as she recovered her footing; she gathered the skirts of her Victorian gown in both hands and ran.

Midnight-blue velvet swept through the white sanctuary, its deep colour striking against the unbroken alabaster. Her corset made a grievance of every hurried breath, and the lace at her throat shifted with the effort while silver clasps along her bodice caught the surrounding glow.

Her boots struck a seamless expanse of marble polished to such clarity. Each downward glance caught blue skirts whipping about pale ankles, dark hair escaping its careful arrangement and a face far less composed than years of aristocratic instruction ought to have permitted.

The reflection kept pace with her through the floor, disturbingly complete even where she would have welcomed a little blur.

Colossal white columns rose on either side, their translucent surfaces holding a pale radiance deep within the stone. The longer one looked, the harder it became to judge where the marble ended and the light began.

Above, the pillars climbed towards a vaulted ceiling whose highest reaches dissolved into luminous haze, leaving its full height beyond her sight.