Past The Primordial Tongue was THE Primordial Source.

Damian registered the name and moved past it. He did not care what it called itself. He did not care about its origin or its nature or the implications of a power that could split his chest open and crack the sky above an empire simultaneously. His father’s corpse was howling below him in stolen armor, and the man responsible for that had been standing on a cloud laughing, and every resource available to him was going to be pointed at that problem until the problem no longer existed.

He communicated the demand inward, toward the stellar obsidian brilliance still pouring from his chest, and his mind was filled.

|Primeval Source Manipulation is now accessible to your existence.|

|What you enact with it is determined entirely by your own existence and what your existence is currently capable of.|

|No external limits apply. The only limits that govern Primeval Source Manipulation are defined by what you are.|

...!

The explanation was not particularly detailed. It communicated what the capability was named and what governed its limits and nothing else, and Damian did not spend time being frustrated by the brevity because his obsidian eyes were already locked on the figure of the Murderous Saint standing on the crimson cloud below, and something about the way he saw that figure had changed in a way that made the explanation sufficient.

He was not seeing people anymore.

The Murderous Saint, the Demons flanking him, the Imperators arranged behind them, every warrior on every wall of the capital below, all of them had become something different in his perception. They were singularities. Small points of concentrated light, each one distinct, each one representing the core of a particular existence, and above each of them, words had appeared in the obsidian-bright clarity of his new vision.

He looked at the one above the Murderous Saint.

|Unranked Source Lifeform. A Lifeform too weak to attain a ranking of its Source. Due to this, manipulation of its Source through Primeval Source Manipulation is possible.|

...!

Not named. Not titled. Not ranked. Eight years of empire and betrayal and alliance with the Demon Emperor, and the Primordial Source looked at Khorvash Valdrath and produced the designation it considered accurate.

Unranked.

Damian looked at the others. The Eighth Circle Demons received the same words. The Imperators received the same words. Every singular presence he could perceive within range of his expanded senses received some variation of the same words, the specific details differing while the fundamental assessment remained consistent. Unranked. Unranked. Unranked.

He turned his attention back to the singularity representing the Murderous Saint, and when he focused on it, it expanded.

What he saw inside the expansion was a cluster of information points arranged around the singularity’s core, each one carrying data about the existence they described. He could have studied all of it. He did not study all of it. His gaze moved immediately to what his instinct had already found before his deliberate attention arrived there.

Two obsidian arrows.

One pointed upward.

One pointed downward.

The upward arrow communicated elevation and progression with a clarity that required no additional explanation. It was what it was. The downward arrow communicated demotion and regression with the same wordless directness.

Damian’s obsidian eyes went to the downward arrow.

He focused on it.

HUUM!

The sensation that moved through him when Primeval Source Manipulation engaged was not like Persevere and was not like Exelissomai. Persevere was warmth and pressure and the deep familiar certainty of a force that had been with him since his resurrection. Exelissomai was verdant fire and the electric shock of genuine evolution occurring in real time. This was larger than both and quieter than either, a movement through his existence that felt tectonic rather than explosive, something fundamental shifting rather than something new being added.

He felt it leave him and find the Murderous Saint.

What happened next was not a battle.

The Murderous Saint trembled. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

The trembling started in his hands and moved inward, and the expression on his face changed from shocked to something that crossed horrified and arrived somewhere without a name. The crimson light that had always moved with him, that arterial red illumination that he wore the way others wore cultivated auras, flickered. Then it flickered again. Then it began to fade.

His Mana left him.

It left steadily, in a continuous outward flow that his cultivation was clearly attempting to stop and clearly unable to stop, and as the Mana went, the power that had been built on top of it went with it. The Ninth Circle cultivation the Murderous Saint had spent a lifetime accumulating drained outward and upward into the obsidian-bright air above him with the inevitability of water leaving a cracked vessel.

From his back, crimson smoke erupted!

It tore through the fabric of his clothing and skin and burst into the illuminated night air in thick desperate columns, and what came out was not simply Mana and was not simply demonic energy and was not something that had originated in the Murderous Saint’s own cultivation.

It was something older than him and far more aware than anything currently present in his expression, something that had been embedded in his existence at a depth the Dominion’s own Shamans hadn’t detected and the Covenant’s records hadn’t anticipated.

The connection to the Demon Emperor, running through the Murderous Saint’s existence at a level beneath cultivation, at a level beneath even the demonic alliance that everyone knew about, fled.

It did not retreat with dignity. It moved with the urgency of something that had encountered a force it recognized as capable of doing to it exactly what it was watching happen to the man it had been using, and it pulled itself out of the Murderous Saint’s existence with a haste that left visible tears in the Mana around him, ragged gaps where the connection had run that would not close cleanly.

The crimson smoke scattered across the illuminated sky and was gone.

What remained of Khorvash Valdrath stood on the crimson cloud.

He was old. Not the distinguished age of a ruler who had cultivated well and grown powerful enough that years became irrelevant. Genuinely old, emaciated, the frame of a man from whom everything that had been supplementing the limitations of his actual body had been removed simultaneously. His crimson armor hung on him wrong. His face had collapsed inward toward its bones. His hands, which had gestured with the authority of a Ninth Circle existence seconds ago, shook with the fine trembling of extremities that no longer had the Mana to hold themselves still.

He looked up at Damian.

The horror in his eyes was immense!

...!

His power had not mattered. His circles had not mattered! Before THE Primordial Source, nothing had mattered!

Damian floated above the capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone with his chest still blazing with stellar obsidian brilliance, the crack in the sky above him still open, his eyes still purely obsidian and fixed on the diminished figure below!