Chapter 653: Maximilian’s Soul Domain

The all-out attacks of the Soul Domains of all four Celestial Dragon Elders seemed to slow down as a shadow spread from Maximilian’s body.

The branches of the Celestial Worldtree stopped midway through their swing. The glittering stingers hung motionless in the air, the waves of the Frozen Starsea froze at their crests, and the falling glacier seemed to hover above them. Even the dust of stars that had been drifting through the broken sky stopped moving.

In the blink of an eye, the Abyssal shadow spread outward, devouring the world around them. The flower field, the cracked sky, the towering trees and the mountains of ice vanished one after another without making a single sound.

Everything fell silent, the darkness covering as far as the eye could see. There was no wind, no cold and no heat. Even the elders’ own heartbeats seemed to have been swallowed.

"Wh-what happened?" the First Elder muttered, the iris of his only remaining purple eye shrinking as he tried to focus on something.

"Are we inside the Senseless Dimension?" the Second Elder muttered, equally confused. His voice sounded strangely flat, as if the void were pressing down on every word.

The Third and Fourth Elders moved around with their serpentine silver bodies, scanning their surroundings. No matter which way they turned, there was nothing but endless black.

All of them stopped in their tracks as something appeared in the darkness.

A sea of stars, some distant and some close, in different colours, spread across the void, an endless cosmos surrounding them from every direction. Blue stars burned beside faint red ones, and far away, a pale violet nebula drifted. A river of golden dust containing numerous stars flowed above them without end.

"I-it’s Celestia..." the First Elder murmured, his jaw dropping and revealing his massive jagged teeth. "Th-this is close to what I imagined the space beyond Vyoman would be."

The other elders understood what he meant, since they were having a similar feeling. They had broken through to the Celestial Realm by observing the constellations, after all. They had only ever imagined what the real cosmos might look like.

With just a glance at this ethereal place, they felt their bottleneck of hundreds of years finally shifting.

The Second Elder’s draconic face twisted into a wide smile of greed. "I-if I cultivate here, I might be able to reach the Late Stage of the Celestial Rea—"

"Wh-what’s that!?" the Third Elder exclaimed, gathering the attention of everyone.

Their eyes widened and their bodies froze on the spot the moment they saw the absurd sight behind them.

In their Lóng forms, the dragon elders were several hundred metres tall, each one possessing a body large enough to cover a city. Yet compared to the presence before them, they felt like ants staring up at a mountain.

A massive black dragon hovered before them. His wings, spread wide, blotted out entire constellations behind him, while the stars of the cosmos flickered at the edges of his scales. From the pulsating golden gem at his chest alone, the elders could tell that he was Maximilian. However, his size was nothing a young dragon should possess. His arms were as long as the elder dragons’ bodies, and he was holding something before his abdomen.

An abyssal black hole that absorbed all the light around it. The elders could see a halo of golden light covering the dark sphere. In truth, it was an accretion disc revolving around the black hole at a tremendous speed.

One of Maximilian’s draconic hands held the black hole from below while the other hovered above it. A pair of black holes, smaller but just as dark, was also visible in the dragon’s very eyes. Looking into them for too long made the elders feel as though their souls were being pulled out of their bodies.

The elders couldn’t even move a finger, too overwhelmed by his presence.

"For centuries, you four have followed Vincent and Felix, playing with the lives of innocents and destroying countless families, yet Father never stopped you," Maximilian’s deep voice rumbled through the cosmos. "But I’m not Father. The moment you laid your hands on my disciples, you sealed your fate."

His black-hole eyes fixed upon the four dragons as he declared, "Not even the heavens themselves can protect you from the wrath of the Dragon of Death!"

His words alone sent shivers down the elders’ spines. They instinctively moved back as a raw, primal feeling surged through them, one that no being except the Almighty Sovereign could stir within them. Cold sweat ran down their scaled bodies, floating away in the zero gravity of the void.

It was fear.

The Fourth Elder closed his eyes and shook his head. "Don’t let him fool you," he muttered. "This must be an illusion cast by Gumiho. They must be using their Soul Domains together to deceive us."

He couldn’t even convince himself with those words. He was only trying to deny the absurd situation he was in, like a man who had been backed into a corner. His claws trembled at his sides.

"His size is just an illusion!" the Fourth Elder shouted, his half-burnt face twisting into a smirk of confusion as if he were going mad. "This space is also an illusion! Everything is an illusion! I will tear through it!"

With that declaration, he rushed straight towards Maximilian, his silver body rippling through space like a wave.

"Fourth Elder, wait!" the Third Elder shouted, but he had already reached Maximilian’s massive form, his jaws wide open.

Maximilian’s hand shifted around the black hole as his deep voice echoed.

"Event Horizon: Absolute Imprisonment!"

The black hole in his hand suddenly expanded to the size of his torso.

The Fourth Elder’s eyes widened, his movement slowing. He was about to retreat, but the expansion was so fast that the black hole’s dark surface, or more accurately, its Event Horizon, caught him before he could even turn around.

His draconic body froze on the spot, his expression locked exactly as it had been when he was caught, the hint of fear clear in his eyes. He couldn’t move a finger, as if he had turned into a statue.

The other dragons tensed, their jaws tightening. They realised that they must not get close to him at any cost.

With just a glance at each other, they exchanged an unspoken message. They must fight from afar. His Soul Domain had to be a close-combat type.