Chapter 342: Eternal Nightfall

Kael knew he didn’t have much time.

The blood streaming from his nose, eyes, and ears was getting worse.

He made a decision.

All the darkness and lightning receded inside him. The twin domains collapsed simultaneously—the Primordial Void and the Heaven’s Execution Chamber folding inward, their energy compressing back into his body. The void of space returned to its natural, silent state.

Draxos’s eyes narrowed. The retreat of Kael’s domains should have been a victory signal. But his instincts screamed otherwise. Every fiber of his ancient, battle-honed survival instinct told him that what was coming next was worse than anything that had preceded it.

He sensed danger from everywhere.

Kael raised his hand.

Above him, a huge orb of darkness condensed. It started small—the size of a fist—then grew. The orb was the condensed concept of nothingness, the compressed will of primordial void, the fundamental force that existed before creation and would persist after everything ended. The orb’s surface rippled with silver specks—dying stars, fragments of consumed reality, trapped inside the darkness like fossils in amber.

Kael dropped his hand.

The darkness orb fell toward Draxos. Slowly at first, then accelerating, its gravitational pull increasing as it descended. The orb consumed the space it passed through ceased to exist. Asteroids in its path dissolved. Light bent toward it and didn’t escape.

Draxos tried to run. His wings spread, his true demon form surged with power, his Body Manipulation accelerating his movements to maximum speed.

He didn’t get far.

Kael’s gravity seized him. Star Pull—amplified by the Astraeon bloodline at sixty percent, amplified by Gravity Rule Power at Resonance, amplified by the Void Core’s Spirit Soul Rank 8 output—latched onto Draxos with the force of a collapsing galaxy. The demon’s forward momentum stopped. His wings beat uselessly. His eight arms clawed at the void, finding nothing to grip.

Kael murmured, "Eternal Nightfall."

The technique Damian Astraeon used to defeat the Asura Demon Emperor. The ultimate destructive force of darkness, encoded in the Astraeon bloodline’s memory, passed down through generations like a weapon waiting to be drawn. Currently incomplete—Kael lacked the cultivation and the full bloodline awakening to use it as his father had. But even in its incomplete form, even as a fragment of the original technique, it was the most devastating darkness attack he had ever seen.

Draxos felt the orb’s pull. He understood what was happening. His ancient mind, forged through centuries of war and survival, recognized the technique his race’s ancestral memory had burned into their collective consciousness as the instrument of their near-extinction.

"No," Draxos whispered. Then louder. "NO!"

He channeled everything into his physical form. His true demon form expanded—six meters tall now, his exoskeleton armor thickening to its absolute maximum density, bone plates layering over bone plates until his body was more shell than flesh. Eight arms manifested, each one wielding a bone weapon condensed from his purest demonic energy. His Wrath Intent blazed at full output as a personal enhancement, infusing every fiber of his being with rage-fueled power. His dark red eyes burned like twin suns.

He condensed his Wrath Intent into a single, concentrated attack. A beam of pure, condensed rage—the sum total of his hatred, his survival instinct, his refusal to die—erupted from all eight arms simultaneously. The combined blast was the most powerful attack Draxos had ever produced, an assault that could have leveled any city.

The giant darkness sphere swallowed it.

The Wrath attack struck the orb and dissolved on contact, the concentrated rage consumed by the void like a candle flame dropped into an ocean. The orb didn’t slow as it continued its descent, growing larger as it absorbed the Wrath energy, feeding on Draxos’s own power and adding it to its mass.

The sphere reached Draxos.

His exoskeleton armor cracked on contact. His six-meter frame was engulfed.

Draxos screamed.

A howl of agony that echoed across the asteroid field. His body was consumed from the outside in—flesh dissolving, organs rupturing, bones disintegrating.

An explosion occurred.

FWOOOM.

The blast wave was immense. Even in the vacuum of space, the energy release was catastrophic. Asteroids shattered for miles. The shockwave caught Kael, pushing him backward through the void, his wings straining against the force. He raised his arms, gravity manipulation creating a buffer that absorbed the worst of the impact, but the residual energy still rattled his already damaged body.

He stabilized himself quickly.

When the explosion settled, the view was grim.

Draxos floated in the void. His body was beyond recognition. Almost half of his frame was simply gone—his lower torso, three of his eight arms, most of his face, a large section of his chest. His exoskeleton was completely destroyed. His wings were gone. What remained of his body was charred, smoking, the exposed flesh struggling to regenerate. Dark blood floated in zero gravity, forming a crimson halo around his ruined form.

His dark red eyes—barely visible in what remained of his face—still held his fading consciousness as he tried to regenerate.

Kael appeared in front of him. Void Step carried him through the intervening distance in a single, impossible step. His Fiend armor had receded during the Eternal Nightfall. His Asura Demon Transformation had deactivated from mana exhaustion. His white hair floated in the void, his silver eyes fixed on Draxos’s ruined face.

Kael reached out and held Draxos’s face. His fingers gripped the demon’s charred jaw, tilting his head so their eyes met.

"Enough," Kael said. His voice was cold.

"Your race survived. You crawled out of the darkness he left you in. And instead of learning, instead of changing, you came back. You found me. You tortured me. You killed me. And in doing so, you gave me the very power my father used to destroy you." His silver eyes bore into Draxos’s fading gaze. "The cycle ends here."

Kael’s Devouring Darkness activated. The consuming energy poured from his hands into Draxos’s body, latching onto the Asura bloodline essence that had been forced into him weeks ago. The Astraeon bloodline’s consuming ability activated.

Draxos’s remaining energy was pulled from his body in streams of dark red light. His bloodline essence—the pure, ancient Asura genetics that Draxos had spent centuries preserving—was stripped from his cells, extracted by the primordial darkness that was the Asura bloodline’s natural predator. The process was agonizing. Draxos’s mouth opened in a silent scream, his remaining eye wide with agony.

The Devouring Darkness didn’t stop at the bloodline. It consumed everything. Draxos’s mana, his cultivated energy, his physical power, his Wrath Intent—all of it was pulled into Kael’s body, absorbed, integrated, devoured.

System notifications flashed.

[Devouring Darkness: Successful.]

[Asura Demon Bloodline: Fully Integrated. Bloodline now permanently fused with host’s genetic structure.]

[Astraeon Bloodline: 60% → 65% Awakened.]

[Wrath Intent: Novice I → Master Level.]

[New Passive Ability: Asura Dominance — Host’s presence naturally suppresses all demonic entities below Origin Realm. Demonic energy attacks reduced by 40% when used against host.]

[Mana Cultivation: Spirit Soul Rank 3 → Spirit Soul Rank 4.]

[QUEST COMPLETE: Devour the Asura.]

[Reward: 50,000 ASC.]

[Current Balance: 149,000 ASC.]

Draxos’s body started disintegrating. His remaining flesh crumbled to dark ash that scattered into the void.

Kael brought out the Netherworld Soul Locking Flag. The dark fabric unfurled, its surface blazing with anticipation. The flag had consumed thirty-one souls, each one adding to its power. But the soul it was about to receive was different. This was the soul of a pureblood Asura Demon—an ancient, powerful consciousness that had survived for five thousand years.

The flag’s dark energy reached toward Draxos’s dissolving form. A reddish-dark soul emerged from the crumbling body—Draxos’s consciousness, his memories, his identity, stripped of bloodline and power, reduced to pure spiritual essence. The soul was massive, radiating residual Wrath Intent even in its diminished state.

The soul flag swallowed it whole.

The flag blazed—a deep, dark red glow spreading across its surface, the fabric pulsing with newfound power. The thirty-two souls within resonated, the addition of such a powerful spirit elevating the flag’s overall capacity and output.

The flag returned to Kael’s system storage.

Kael sighed. "I’m so exhausted."

The words had barely left his mouth when a powerful aura washed over him from behind. His soul sense, diminished from exhaustion, barely registered the approaching presence before it was already there.

Kael immediately deactivated his true form. His white hair shifted back to black, the Astraeon bloodline suppressing itself. His silver eyes faded to their natural silver-flecked gray. He stood in the void of space, looking like a battered, blood-stained twenty-year-old instead of the ancient prince he truly was.

He turned.

Cassandra Vorn floated in the void. Her cold eyes found Kael’s battered form and softened.

Kael smiled.

Then his eyes rolled back, and he fell forward.

Cassandra caught him.