Ethan lay in the eye of a scorched hurricane. To any observer, he was no longer a man; he was a relic of a catastrophe. His physical body was completely carbonized, a blackened husk missing limbs and patches of torso. He was little more than a skull and a shattered spine, clinging to fragments of burnt muscle that looked like obsidian ash.

For the last hour, there had been no sign of life. No breath, no pulse, no flicker of thought.

But if one dared to press their ear against the scorched earth, they would hear it: a war drum, beating with a furious, rhythmic intensity.

From the depths of his Amethyst Eyes and the marrow of his vertebrae, a thick, violet liquid began to flow. It filled the hollows of his spine, turning the once-white bone into glowing amethyst crystal. The liquid pulsed through his regenerating vascular system, illuminating his blackened shell from the inside out. He was being rebuilt, not as flesh and blood, but as something crystalline and precious—a body forged from the very essence of the void and the amatist bloodline.

Three days had passed since the sky broke.

The Royal Headquarters was a hive of chaotic desperation. Their leader had vanished into the center of a zone that still seethed with remnant lightning. The Matriarch herself had attempted to breach the perimeter to search for him, but the lingering "World Laws" had lashed out with such ferocity that a single bolt struck her square in the chest, hurling her through the air and leaving her heaving for breath.

It was a forbidden zone. No one knew if Ethan was alive inside that electric tomb, or if they were mourning a god.

Jason and Lena had taken command, deploying armored units to circle the zone, monitoring every flicker of energy. The dependence on Ethan was no longer a matter of loyalty; it was survival. They had seen the aftermath. Without him, the Union’s assault would have erased Royal from history without a second thought.

As they consolidated their gains and managed the staggering collateral damage, the rest of the world descended into a madness far worse than any war.

The Union had fractured. The Only One and Lord Truth Seeker had vanished. They thought they had tricked the World Matrix by re-engaging their suppressors, but they had underestimated the "offense" Lord Amethyst had caused. For three days, the lightning dragons had hunted them across the globe, ignoring every teleportation array and cloaking matrix they possessed. Only after seventy-two hours of relentless, soul-shredding pursuit did the sky finally fall silent. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

With the two monsters gone, the remaining Obsidian-rank powers turned on each other like starving wolves. The blood flowed in rivers. Forbidden "Trump Cards" were played with reckless abandon, shattering the peace of the secular world.

The Obsidian ranks had long lived under the delusion that their "Gold-level" subordinates were merely high-grade cattle. They assumed that without a Trump Card, these factions were nothing more than appetizers for the coming feast.

They were catastrophically wrong.

As the Union fractured, several Obsidian clans—most notably the Heavenly Sword Sect and the Iron Citadel—moved to annex the territories of their Gold-rank neighbors. They expected a quick surrender. Instead, they walked into a slaughter.

"Do you really think being Gold means we are weak?" laughed the leader of the Shadow-Stalkers, a Gold-rank mercenary group. "We didn’t lack power; we lacked the arrogance to call ourselves Gods."

In the ruins of what used to be a major financial hub, the Shadow-Stalkers activated a hidden high-frequency sonic array. It wasn’t a Trump Card of ancient origin, but a masterpiece of modern spiritual engineering. The Obsidian vanguard, relying on their "immortal" physical bodies, felt their internal organs turn to liquid in seconds.

The "tigers" had been hiding in the grass, and now they were biting back:

The Crimson Fang (Gold Rank), When the Jade Emperor Clan (Obsidian) tried to seize their mines, the "lower" warriors didn’t flee. They swallowed a concentrated, unstable version of the Demon blood. They became berserker-bombs, their bodies swelling into chitinous nightmares that ignored pain. For every Gold warrior that fell, three Obsidian clan elders were dragged into the dirt and torn limb from limb by bare, clawed hands.

The Silent Monks of the Void (Gold Rank), They had been dismissed as a pacifist sect. When an Obsidian strike team descended on their temple, the monks didn’t use shields. They used Mind Compression. They collapsed the mind space around the attackers, turning the proud "immortals" turned into brainless idiots.

The world watched in horror as the "invincible" Obsidian ranks were hunted by the very people they had oppressed. The "Coiled Dragons" had finally uncurled, and they were hungry. In less than twenty-four hours, the casualty list of Obsidian elites reached a number higher than the last three centuries combined. The elite had forgotten a simple truth: in an apocalypse, a title means nothing if a bullet—or a claw—can still find your heart.

However, for ordinary people, there were no more "natural disasters." On every internet forum, television broadcast, and radio frequency, a single word echoed: Apocalypse.

Religious zealots and panicked survivors began to map the chaos to ancient prophecies, each claiming their faith was the only salvation:

The Clan of the Immortal Force unleashed a Trump Card known as the Life-Siphon Domain. In a single hour, they absorbed every ounce of vitality in a hundred-mile radius to fuel their immortality. Forests turned to dust, animals collapsed into mummies, and lush valleys became desolate deserts. The world cried out that the Third Seal had been broken referring to The Pale Horse of Hunger from the holy scriptures of Christianity..

In the East, a sect used a forbidden artifact that distorted time and morality, causing brothers to slay brothers in a frenzied bloodlust. Scholars pointed to the Vishnu Purana, claiming the final stage of degeneration had arrived, where property conferred rank and passion was the only tie between sexes.

They shouted that it was "The Iron Age of Kali Yuga" of Hinduism

When two massive underground factions breached the surface in the Middle East, leveling cities with seismic weapons, the screams of "Yajuj and Majuj" filled the streets. People saw the destruction of walls and the swarming of armies as the final sign of the Great Trial of The Gog and Magog of the Islam.

Japanese Buddhist monks watched as a "Void-Rank" weapon erased a mountain range, leaving nothing but a literal "nothingness." They wept, declaring the Mappo—the age of the degeneration of the Dharma—where no one could attain enlightenment and the world would be consumed by fire and wind.

Occult cults celebrated as the "Blood-Rain" fell over Europe—a byproduct of the earlier atmospheric disturbance. They claimed the "Great Beast" had finally awakened to feast on the old world’s corpse.

The world was a tinderbox of superstition and slaughter. Every religion claimed the signs were theirs.