Chapter 810: The Rise of the Tyrant

Chapter 810: Chapter 810: The Rise of the Tyrant

The torches of spiritual fire lining the walls began to flicker with a violet hue. Crul’s voice echoed with an almost suffocating weight inside Ethan’s mind as they continued their descent.

[To bypass the laws of Creation, the higher races discovered an abhorrent method], Crul narrated. [They used the wombs of mortal females from Middle Earth as dampening vessels. No species was spared from that hell, Master: dragons, phoenixes, leviathans... beasts of sky, earth, and water. They captured females from every known lineage and inseminated their bodies with the essence of multiple races at the same time, forcing the attributes to collide within their entrails. Each creature’s body acted as a bloody catalyst, absorbing the shock of divine rejection.]

Ethan felt a cold shiver run down his spine.

"They were trying to create monsters...", Ethan said.

[They were trying to create hybrid abominations], Crul corrected. [And from that horror, the first true hybrid race was born: the Aberrations. The first successful combination arose from crossing the seed of an infernal demon and the divine power of a celestial angel within the womb of a sacred dragoness. The result was beings of such physical strength that not even the great demons of the infernal plane could match them in hand-to-hand combat.]

Crul paused, letting the silence of the ruins emphasize the gravity of his words.

[But the gods were blind. They failed to realize that each new race born from those experiments was exponentially stronger than the last. Using wombs from all species, they began fusing attributes without limits... until a race was born that became the embodiment of the absolute. They did not call themselves experiments; they proclaimed themselves the Tyrants over Creation.]

At that moment, a mystic vibration coursed through Ethan’s sea of consciousness. Reality seemed to fracture before his eyes as Crul projected an ancestral vision: atop a devastated cosmos surrounded by extinguished stars stood a colossal figure, entirely black, its face featureless except for eyes that glowed with a darkness even denser and more terrifying than the void itself.

Ethan clenched his teeth, feeling his own Void blood churn with an instinct of absolute rejection.

"You know him, don’t you?" asked Crul in his mind.

"The King of Darkness...", Ethan whispered, recognizing the presence. "The assassin of the amethyst ancestor..."

[Indeed], Crul confirmed. [He found the inheritance of the first Tyrant. The race behind him was known as the Tyrants. Unlike other experiments that used mythical beasts, the Tyrant’s unique race was born from the perfect fusion of celestial, abyssal, demon, and chaotic attributes within the womb of a human woman... when he was born, the universe changed forever.]

Ethan paused on a landing of the staircase, gazing at the projected vision.

"How did such a creature survive at birth?" asked Ethan.

[Ironically, when the little Tyrant was born, he possessed not a trace of spiritual power], Crul revealed. [The alchemists and sages of the higher realms classified him as just another failed experiment and ordered the mother executed. However, his father, a low-ranking demon who had genuinely fallen in love with the human woman, risked his life to help her escape. They fled beyond the Middle Plane, hiding at the borders of the Void world, where the child grew up.]

Crul allowed the vision to portray the misery of that childhood.

[The young Tyrant grew up hated, beaten, and spurned by all due to his apparent weakness and impurity. His mother, who loved him with all her soul and protected him until her final breath, died in utter poverty upon a bed of old rags. On her deathbed, holding his mother’s cold hand, the young Tyrant swore upon his life that he would tear down the heavens and hells to avenge her.]

Ethan watched the shadow of the young Tyrant swearing vengeance.

"I can imagine what happened next...", Ethan said, his voice hardened by solemnity. "Did he return to Middle Earth?"

[Indeed he did... and he unleashed a hell the higher realms never anticipated], Crul said. [The Tyrant did not return alone. As his latent power began to awaken, devouring surrounding energy to fuse his five internal attributes, he began gathering all the spurned races. He united the Aberrations, the deformed hybrids, the failed experiments surviving in the shadows, as well as the accepted native races who suffered under the tyranny of the gods.]

Crul’s vision shifted, displaying battlefields shrouded in blood and fire, where entire armies of angels and demons fell slaughtered.

[He divided the oppressed and gave them a purpose], Crul continued. [Many races betrayed their divine creators and united under the Tyrant’s banner. What began as an orphaned son’s vengeance turned into the bloodiest rebellion the heavens had ever recorded. The Tyrant marched toward the higher realms, slaughtering entire pantheons, beheading Celestial Kings, and obliterating whole planes in his wake.]

"And what happened after that?" asked Ethan, looking toward the end of the tunnel.

[The slaughter was so brutal that the higher races, previously mortal enemies, had to form a desperate alliance to face them], Crul continued. [The only entities that did not intervene were the beings of the Void, who held not the slightest interest in their war and remained on the sidelines as mere spectators.]

Ethan pressed his lips together in the gloom.

[The struggle shook the very foundations of the universe. The violence of the conflict reached such a magnitude that it ended up awakening the consciousness of the universe: the remnant of the One], Crul said in a reverent tone. [The Creator watched as his entire creation slaughtered one another without mercy. Frustrated by the failure of his creations, the remnant of the One decided to act: he destroyed thousands of races in an instant to set a brutal example and restore order from chaos.]

"Even the hybrids?" asked Ethan.

[The hybrid beings refused to accept the decrees of the One and tried to resist with all their strength, only to be crushed and subdued], Crul explained. [However, the first Tyrant managed to survive and hide within the cosmic shadows. Possessing all attributes except the Void, he dedicated entire eons to studying the deep laws of the world. In time, he was recognized as the First Cultivator, the true Father of Cultivation. He taught his discoveries to various races of Middle Earth to test how they reacted to the universe’s energy, and that was how a human being emerged who studied directly under his tutelage...]

Ethan paused as he reached the last step, sensing that the narration was reaching its critical climax.

"A human...", Ethan whispered.

[Indeed], Crul concluded. [A human cultivator who, after assimilating the secret teachings of the first Tyrant, would unleash the Second Great War of Creation.]