Chapter 330: Stepping Through Death’s Doors

A massive underground chamber stretched beneath the House of Crimson base, its walls lined with containment pods. Over a hundred glass cylinders held silent, twisted figures. Humanoid, beast-kin, elven, dwarven—all failed experiments. Bodies contorted by forced demonic mutation. Extra limbs jutting from wrong joints. Bone growths piercing through skin in jagged, unnatural directions. Flesh melted into unrecognizable lumps by incompatible bloodline energy. Organs ruptured and floating in murky preservation fluid.

At the far end of the laboratory, Draxos stood over an operating table where a live subject—a Peak Mana Heart human cultivator—was strapped down. The man screamed as Draxos injected a thick, dark liquid directly into his spine. The man’s body began to mutate immediately. His skin darkened to a deep, mottled purple. Bone protrusions erupted from his shoulders, jagged and uneven. His eyes turned solid black, the whites vanishing as demonic energy flooded his nervous system. For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed to work. The man’s breathing stabilized. His muscles bulged with newfound strength.

Then the man’s body ruptured. Blood and organs exploded outward in a wet, violent spray, splattering across Draxos’s chest and face. The body collapsed inward, a hollowed shell emptied of everything that once made it alive.

Draxos stepped back, wiping the warm blood from his face with the back of his hand. "Another failure."

His internal monologue was a dark, heavy thing. The Asura Demon race had declined over centuries after Damian Astraeon’s genocide. Their numbers had dwindled from hundreds of thousands to dozens. They were reduced to scattered remnants hiding across dead worlds and forgotten dimensions, crawling through the shadows of the universe like wounded animals. Over the centuries, their numbers continued to decline. Inbreeding weakened the bloodline, and the few remaining pureblood Asura Demons either killed each other in territorial disputes or were hunted by cultivators seeking demonic treasures.

Draxos was one of the last pureblood Asura Demons. He didn’t know the location of more than two or three others. His race was dying. So he had dedicated centuries to a solution: creating new Asura Demons by injecting his bloodline essence into other beings. But the Asura bloodline was overwhelmingly potent. Ninety-nine percent of subjects died screaming as the demonic energy disintegrating their bodies from the inside out. The hundred pods in his laboratory represented a hundred failures.

Then he remembered Kael. The boy who had a trace—even though weak—of the Astraeon bloodline. The very bloodline that had destroyed his race. On top of that, Kael possessed a powerful physique—Mid Tier 5 Void Body Refinement—which might help withstand the violent integration process.

Draxos arrived at Kael’s torture chamber. The heavy iron door groaned open, revealing the dim, foul-smelling room. Viper’s assistant was there, a masked cultivator monitoring Kael’s half-death state. She turned as Draxos entered, his massive frame filling the doorway.

"Leave," Draxos said, his voice a low, rumbling bass.

The assistant recognized him instantly. She frowned behind her mask, shaking her head. "Viper left strict orders. No one is to inter—"

She didn’t finish the sentence. Draxos’s arm moved with blinding speed. A bone blade erupted from his forearm, sweeping across the space between them in a single, horizontal arc.

A wet, slicing sound was followed by a heavy thud. The assistant’s head separated from her shoulders, hitting the stone floor and rolling twice before stopping. Her body crumpled, blood spurting from the neck stump in a widening crimson pool.

Draxos dismissed the bone blade, the bone retracting into his arm with a sickening crunch. He took a seat on a stool beside Kael, looking at the broken cultivator with a hideous smile. Kael was in a dazed state, murmuring in ancient tongue, his eyes completely unfocused, his lips moving on their own.

"You know," Draxos said conversationally, his deep voice echoing in the damp room, "I’ve tried a hundred times. Well, what followed was a hundred failures. They couldn’t hold what I gave them."

He leaned closer, his black eyes studying Kael’s pale, sweat-soaked face. "But you... you have the Astraeon bloodline. The very bloodline that tried, no, that destroyed my race. And a body that survived a Heavenly Flame. You might just be the one."

He paused, studying the rise and fall of Kael’s shallow breathing.

"I’m going to inject you with my Asura bloodline essence. If you survive, you’ll become something new. A hybrid that shouldn’t exist." His smile widened, revealing sharp canines. "And if you die... well, a hundred and one failures isn’t much different from a hundred."

Kael’s murmuring continued, entirely unresponsive to the death sentence being pronounced over him.

Draxos prepared the injection. From his storage ring, he withdrew a large syringe filled with a thick, dark red liquid. It swirled with condensed demonic energy and a concentrated essence of his own pureblood. The sheer aura radiating from the liquid cracked the glass vial slightly.

Draxos began by injecting pure demonic energy into Kael’s arm first—to prepare his body for the bloodline essence. The thick, dark liquid entered his bloodstream.

Kael screamed. It was a tearing sound, ripped from the very depths of his lungs. His body arched off the stone chair, the rune cuffs groaning under the sudden surge of dark power. His veins turned black beneath his skin, spreading like a spiderweb from the injection site. The demonic energy immediately met resistance. Kael’s Astraeon bloodline activated partially, a dormant defense mechanism flaring to life to combat the invasive energy.

A violent internal war erupted. Kael’s body convulsed, his muscles tearing and reforming as the two ancient energies clashed within his pathways. His skin rippled, alternating between a pale, glowing white and a deep, corrupted black. His screams echoed through the base, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony that made the stone walls vibrate.

Draxos watched, his eyes gleaming with scientific fascination. The demonic energy was fighting to break down Kael’s cellular structure, while the Astraeon bloodline fought to purge it. It was exactly the preparation needed—the pathways were being forced wide open, the body’s defenses being battered down.

Then Draxos injected the Asura bloodline essence directly into Kael’s heart.

The syringe pierced his chest, and the thick, dark red liquid was forced directly into the cardiac muscle.

Kael screamed even louder. His body glowed, alternating violently between a blinding, radiant black and a deep, corrupted dark red. The Astraeon and Asura bloodlines warred inside him on a fundamental level.

Inside his soul space, his Soul Manifestation form cracked even further than before. Deep, jagged fissures spread across his spiritual avatar. His physical body began breaking down. His skin split in places, dark red and black blood weeping from the wounds. His bones splintered, reforming, and splintering again. The rune cuffs on his wrists and ankles shattered entirely, unable to contain the primordial energies surging through his body.

Draxos watched with gleaming eyes, monitoring the process closely. Kael survived for over ten minutes—far longer than any previous subject. The previous record had been two minutes. Draxos’s excitement built with every passing second. The hybridization was holding. The Astraeon bloodline was fighting, yes, but it was merging, adapting, fusing with the Asura essence in ways Draxos had never seen.

His hands shook with anticipation. "Yes. Yes, hold it. Become something new," Draxos whispered.

But eventually, Kael’s body started giving up. The Astraeon bloodline’s defenses, weakened by a month of torture, starvation, and soul corrosion, crumbled. Without the strength to fight back, the Asura bloodline essence went from merging to consuming. It began to dissolve his organs. His stomach ruptured first, leaking acid into his abdominal cavity. His lungs filled with fluid.

His heart stuttered.

Thump.

Thump.

Silence.

His breathing stopped. His chest ceased its violent rise and fall. The glow faded from his skin, the black and red energies settling into a dull, lifeless gray. His body went limp, hanging from the shattered remnants of the stone chair.

Kael died.

Draxos stared at the body for a long moment. The excitement drained from his face, replaced by a dull, familiar disappointment. He let out a heavy sigh, the sound echoing in the quiet room.

"A hundred and one," he muttered.

He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. He left the room without looking back, closing the heavy iron door behind him.