Damian had his existence standing ready, and he was genuinely curious.

What was the gap between someone at the Ninth Circle and a Primum Ancestor? How wide was it, and did the width matter to THE Primordial Tongue?

These were legitimate questions, not rhetorical ones. He wanted the information. He had been accumulating information since the moment the Primordial Source opened in his chest above the Dominion of Crimson Stone and had not stopped accumulating it since.

His own existence had not been standing still!

Since gaining access to THE Primordial Source, his Mana had been taking on an obsidian hue, a gradual shift that he had been tracking with the part of his attention not occupied by other things. Slivers of THE Primordial Source were flowing through him in a continuous quiet process, merging with his Mana and making it denser and more compressed in ways that his Mana Core registered as ongoing rather than completed.

They were merging with his three Land and Sky Physiques as well, touching them at their foundations and transforming them into grander versions of what they had been, and the transformation was not finished yet. It was still going.

Since leaving the Dominion of Crimson Stone, he was truly not the same existence he had been when he arrived there.

It was getting difficult to describe himself as a man. The change that THE Primordial Source was working through him felt too fundamental for that word to carry it accurately. He was something else, something in the process of becoming what it was supposed to be, and the process was still running and only getting started.

This was relevant to the current situation because as the pressure of a Primum Ancestor released across the River of the World and pressed against everything within its reach, Damian felt none of it. Not the suppression that the Ninth Circle couldn’t have resisted.

Not the suffocating authority of a Land pressing outward from an existence that had been building it for centuries. Not the weight of it. Not the edges of it.

Nothing!

He raised his hand and beckoned toward Zhuque.

Zhuque stopped laughing.

A sound came from the pig-faced Ancestral Celestial that was not quite a harrumph and not quite a declaration and existed in the specific register between amusement and insult, and then he attacked.

What came from his Ancestral Land was not a technique in the way that Warriors below the Nine Circles understood techniques. From the territory within his existence, rivers of formed earth surged outward, materializing in the air above the River of the World with the density of ground that had been developing for centuries rather than forming in real time.

More earth followed, and then the mountains, the internal peaks of his Primum land tearing themselves from their foundations and converging, rivers and ground and mountain mass gathering into a single sharp point that hung in the sky above Damian and Serala with a presence that spanned miles.

The air below it couldn’t breathe.

For any Ninth Circle existence, this would have been the last clear perception before the end. The mass and the authority and the centuries of Ancestral Land development compressed into a descending point, dropping toward them with the inevitability of a sky that had decided to fall on something specific.

Damian raised one hand!

He extended a single finger upward!

A FINGER!

The descending mass met it.

What happened in the instant of contact was something that the Demon Emperor and Zhuque and the crimson-eyed woman would each process in their own way and none of them would process correctly, because what they were watching required context they didn’t have.

The force of the mountain and all the Primordial Land authority behind it arrived at Damian’s finger and encountered the obsidian rivers of THE Primordial Source running through his existence, and THE Primordial Source asked the mass a question.

Did it have the power behind its Source to stand against something this pristine? Did it even know what THE Primordial Source was? How could it press against something it couldn’t conceive of, something that had been sitting above the frameworks that created it before any of those frameworks existed?

The mass couldn’t answer.

It didn’t know what it was being asked. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Damian felt the force of the mountain push against his finger and understood, with the clarity of something being confirmed rather than discovered, that he had been underestimating THE Primordial Source even now.

He had known it was supreme. He had known it operated above every hierarchy he’d encountered. But knowing and feeling the full weight of what that meant were different things, and the feeling arrived in this moment, in the contact between his raised finger and the full force of a centuries-developed Primum Ancestor’s attack.

This was what absolute disparity felt like.

The mountain above him trembled!

The trembling lasted less than a second. Then the cracks appeared, running from the point of contact outward through the mass in every direction simultaneously, splitting the gathered earth and rivers and Ancestral Land territory into fragments that caught the light above the River before they lost cohesion entirely.

BOOM!

The mass came apart and the pieces fell, some outward across the sky in expanding arcs, others dropping toward the River below in chunks that threw black water in every direction when they hit, and the destruction of it was total and unhurried and done before Damian had lowered his finger.

Zhuque’s face...

The pig-faced Ancestral Celestial, whose centuries of Primum development had just been stopped by a single finger and then returned to him as fragments over the River of the World, had blood coming from his mouth. From the rebound of his own authority collapsing against something it couldn’t penetrate, the internal feedback of a Ancestral Land attack meeting a wall it was not equipped to understand, let alone overcome.

He was breathing heavily. His small eyes were very wide. He was looking at Damian with the full and comprehensive incredulity of something that had just learned something about the shape of the world that it had not been aware it didn’t know.

Damian put his finger down.

"That was all the might of a Primum Ancestor?"

...!

Nobody replied.

The Demon Emperor had gone the color of old ash. The calculations in his eyes had stopped running, or perhaps they were running at a speed that produced no visible output, the silence of a mind that had encountered a result it couldn’t categorize.

The crimson-eyed woman beside him was astonished!

Zhuque breathed.

Damian looked at him.

"Little Pig," he said, and his voice carried the same evenness it always carried, "I’ll give you a chance. Bring me the Demon Emperor standing beside you, and I won’t crumble what remains of your existence."

He tilted his head.

"But that comes after you oink for me. I want to hear at least three squeals. At least three oinks. And maybe, just maybe, you keep your life."

...!

BOOM!

What?

What?!

The River of the World rushed beneath them.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke!

The fragments of Zhuque’s collapsed attack drifted on the black current below, and the obsidian light in Damian’s eyes held the pig-faced Ancestral Celestial with the patience of something that was genuinely prepared to wait for the oinks if that was what the next few seconds required.

He had underestimated THE Primordial Source.

Even now, he had underestimated it. Even after the Murderous Saint. Even after the Demon Dukes and the solar chains and the stripping of power from fifty beings simultaneously. Even with the slivers running through his existence and the Mana taking its obsidian hue and the Land and Sky Physiques transforming beneath the Source’s influence.

Even Ancestors, it was becoming clear, may truly be nothing to it!