Chapter 1503: Divine Decree Incarnation Technique of truth
"....."
Robin held his breath—not out of reverence or awe, but because he felt that if he inhaled even once, his body would collapse under the sheer pressure crushing him.
In that instant, he was like a man suddenly thrown into the depths of the ocean, feeling the weight of billions of tons of water pressing from every direction. Only his unyielding will, and the stubborn strength of his body, kept him from breaking. Each heartbeat was a hammer; each second, a trial.
The Divine Decree Incarnation Technique had been forged by men who knew nothing of soul domains, who had never conceived of soul units. All they possessed were scraps of ancient methods to strengthen their soul, little exercises to sharpen focus, or crude tools to amplify force in composite techniques.
Their classifications of spiritual growth were laughably primitive: /My soul feels slightly stronger than last year./ Yet with that crude map they reached a forbidden coast.
With a few dozen soul units they could wield the Decree without fear, for the technique drank deepest from natural energy and life force. Soul units were a garnish—fuel to gift a borrowed body the smallest ember of awareness so it might strike and guard on its own. Whether one poured twenty units or two thousand, the difference was not in birthing the manifestation, only in how cleverly it could think once born.
But Robin lived under a different sky. His law was the third tier of the Master Law of Truth; here, the soul was not a garnish but the keystone, the root, the engine. The difference in demand was grotesque. What others called "enough" was, for him, an opening bid that could not buy the right to try.
...He stared upward without blinking. Above, an eye—vast, aureate, adamant—hung like a sun carved into awareness. It watched downward, all-seeing and all-judging.
Something inside him whispered that the eye was familiar, a reflection that matched the angles of his own being. Another whisper, colder, insisted it belonged to a myth that no mortal could grasp.
Curiosity threaded through his dread. If the eye would burn out, then before it did he would learn. He lowered his chin and searched the field to witness what the eye of Truth would do to a world of lies.
He could not widen his eyes, could not gasp, could not show surprise. And yet shock cut through him cleanly, for everything had changed.
Specter King Arkalon was no longer a king at all. The regalia—the gaunt face stretched tight upon bone, the cords of spectral muscle carved down his limbs, the staff taller than its bearer, the robe like a falling night—had vanished.
In his place floated a compressed mass of soul force, glass-clear and raging with eddies, and within it swam black motes like gnats of night.
These black motes had no eyes, no arms, no legs—only a maw. They chewed the soul force, swallowed, spat, chewed again. Corruption as a process. Hunger as a mechanism. The truth in its ugliest simplicity.
Above that body of storm was a denser knot, so thick with those tiny mouths that light itself could not enter. That knot was the head—the black seat of will where Arkalon’s rotten initial soul resides.
This was the truth of a specter king when stripped of story.
WOOOSH
The mass of force jolted, lashing toward Robin. He felt the killing intent rise like a blade—but he did not move.
HAAAH
The strike hit him square in the chest. It was air, nothing more. No technique, no control, no assembly of cultivated arts. The golden eye had not merely allowed Robin to see the truth; it made every thing act upon it. Arkalon stood naked in essence, a being without leverage.
Robin twitched the corner of his left eye. That was the command.
SHWAAAAAAL
The black motes began to burn. They had no voices to scream, but still Robin felt the shape of the scream—jagged, endless—as negative force ignited within them. The fire ran toward the head-knot like a fuse seeking its charge.
Specter King Arkalon tried to howl. He found no mouth. He collapsed to his knees, clutched the place that had been his skull, and writhed. The pain of a hatred burning out is unlike any other: when a rot is set alight, the whole edifice of self creaks. Flames licked the densest black at his crown. The king thrashed in soundless torment, a tyrant reduced to a knot of need unmade by its own fuel.
HUUUU~
When the darkness in his head finished collapsing, a pearl-white orb drifted out, cool and clean. His spectral body unraveled into smoke. The orb’s faint shell cracked open, the way a chrysalis splits; it was ready to loosen into pure soul and pass away in peace.
Truth was simple: specters are born when negative energy accumulates into those tiny devourers. Purge the devourers, and what remains is a initial soul wrapped in neutral breath. No hatred. No aim. No will. Only a piece of what a being once was, tipping back into the cycle with the gentleness of snow.
Robin blinked again. A soul gate no wider than a hand flowered in the air, braided in white, gold, and black. A net shot out, silken and inexorable, snagged the white orb, and drew it through. The gate shut like an eyelid.
Had Arkalon entered Robin’s soul domain at full strength—saturated in negative energy, armed with full awareness, wearing the armor of his will—he would have savaged Robin’s world from the inside out. But the king had been peeled down to a core. Caught this way, he could be taken.
A smile flickered across Robin’s face, the kind a man makes when the price paid is gouged but the purchase is clean.
He forced his eyes to move, tasting iron at the back of his throat, and swept the field. All around, the specters resembled the same anatomy of sin: transparent storms riddled with tiny black mouths. Rank on rank, an army of hunger.
He did not have the time to burn them one by one. To cleanse three would cost the rest of him; to cleanse ten would demand what could not be given.
So he looked up—past pain, past the urge to gasp—and chose scale over precision.
WOOOSHWOOOSHWOOOSH
Soul gates bloomed in the air like a constellation, each tri-colored in white, gold, and black. From some poured whirlwinds that drank at distance; from others uncoiled nets that hunted close. The whirlwinds gathered the specters’ soul force into rivers and fed the gates. The nets jabbed at the heads, pinched free the initial souls, and wrenched them from their fouled sheaths.
Around Robin, the battlefield twisted beneath the gaze of the golden eye. The very air seemed painted with new ink—lines of force, spirals of intent, stains of hatred rendered visible.
Some specters recoiled in terror at being seen so nakedly. Others shivered, gnawing upon themselves as if the revelation had robbed them of direction.
Robin could feel every vibration through his bones. The ground beneath his feet was no longer stone but a drumhead of soul force, thrumming with each pulse of the Decree. His chest screamed with pain, every shallow breath threatening to break him, yet his will hardened all the more.
The specters’ dissolution was eerie. Nets lashed out, hooking their core orbs, dragging them into gates that shut with merciless finality. Whirlwinds pulled whole clusters of corrupted energy into streams of radiance, siphoning them away.
One specter, larger than the rest, writhed as its core was seized, the motes burning like worms in fire until only a trembling white ember remained. For a fleeting instant, Robin’s heart clenched.
These beings were once stories, once souls. Yet mercy here would mean ruin.
His gaze flicked to Wade. Under the Manifesting Decree, he seemed... different.