Chapter 22: Obsidian Judgement

The battlefield was a void of crumbling mirrors—silent, fractured, timeless.

Qin Jiang stood barefoot upon a plane of black glass, staring into the eyes of the man who wore his face. The reflection across from him pulsed with sovereign energy, a dark imperial majesty woven into every breath he took. This was no simple illusion. No conjured phantasm.

This was a mutation of the self. A manifestation drawn from his soul's deepest faultlines.

They had fought across nine spatial layers already—through timelines long forgotten, across dimensions stained with the screams of extinct beast legacies. Each clash of technique had not just burned Qi—it had eroded the very idea of identity.

Yet still, Qin Jiang remained standing.

So did his other self.

The double's voice echoed across the cracked void. Calm. Almost tender.

"You've built yourself into a vessel for power. For legacy. For immortality.""But have you ever asked what would happen… if your soul rejected it?"

Qin Jiang didn't answer. His shoulders rolled as he exhaled, firelight dancing up his spine. His Sovereign Meridian throbbed with pain, but still pulsed—alive, defiant.

He whispered under his breath.

"Then show me."

His double moved first—blurring sideways in a spiral of reversed timeflow. Spatial laws cracked like dried bone.

"Mutation Technique: Shifting Rift – Starve the Light"

Five silhouettes of the doppelgänger branched into existence, each sliding across a separate axis of unstable space. They moved out of sequence with causality itself, their attacks arriving before their feet hit the ground.

Qin Jiang reacted instantly.

"Mutation Technique: Sovereign Loop – Eight-Layer Coil of the Undying Crown"

He slammed his foot down and ignited the runes beneath him. Eight radiant coils of sovereign fire twisted into the air behind his back, each shaped like a burning crown-ring. The coils locked into a spatial vortex, warping distance around his body—rooting him across eight planes at once.

The shadows struck.

But the real Qin Jiang was never where they thought.

He was always one layer deeper.

Still, he couldn't hold the loop forever. His vision blurred. Blood dripped from the corner of his eye.

Then his double whispered something.

Qin Jiang caught only fragments:

"…final…blade…inner judgment…"

And then the darkness twisted.

Reality cracked.

A pressure unlike any previous technique slammed across the void like a divine sentence being passed down. A black wind coiled around the enemy's arm, forming into a spiraling weapon that shimmered with deathless stillness.

His double raised the blade slowly, reverently.

"Mutation Technique: Obsidian Verdict – Blade of the Broken Lineage"

The sword materialized fully.

Not forged, but remembered—drawn from the collective failures of every Qin bloodline heir who had tried and failed to ascend beyond mortality. Its jagged obsidian edge shimmered with compressed timelines and spectral mutations gone wrong. Phantom arms—ghosts of defeated selves—reached out from the blade's spine, screaming in silence.

"This is what you run from," the double said. "The weight of inheritance."

Qin Jiang's instincts screamed. He poured everything into his defense, locking his body in a flame-forged spiral, his arms forming the Heaven-Root Seal of Anchored Breath.

It wasn't enough.

The doppelgänger vanished—

And appeared directly before him.

The obsidian blade had already arrived.

It did not move through the air.

It arrived like a conclusion.

An answer.

A judgment.

Its tip hovered against the soft space between Qin Jiang's collarbones—where pulse met breath. One twitch. One blink. One fragment of doubt—

And it would pierce through not just body, but legacy.

Beneath the roots of Gold Star City—far below its gilded spires and glass temples—lay the Obsidian Hall: a chamber carved from translucent black jade, resonant with ancient sigils and humming leyline channels. Here, seated around an elliptical obsidian table in matching formal suits of black and white—tailored, yet bearing sigil-threaded cuffs and imperial collars—sat the six most powerful cultivators in all of DongNan Guo.

The Sky Leaders.

At the head, calm as the tide before a storm, sat Li BoHan, the Azure Tide Sovereign. His storm-swirled cyan eyes reflected the council lights in slow, tidal motion, and in his palm spun a slowly orbiting Azure Tide Pearl, trailing translucent rings of compressed humidity and fluctuating gravity.

To his right, Yan Mo, the Umbral Shaper, remained statue-still. His Void Shard Blades hung in silence above the velvet strip across his lap, rotating like slow, thinking stars. His obsidian eyes were unreadable, absorbing light but giving back none.

On the opposite side, Zhu Rong, the Dual Forge Master, leaned forward, fingers steepled. The crimson and gold halves of their robes flared and pulsed with restrained thermal force, barely contained by the twin forces of destruction and creation within them.

"The Shun Association is beginning to move." Zhu Rong's voice rang both hot and cold, like a forge at the moment of smelting. "This time, they've gone deeper. Beneath the Academy. Beneath our cities."

No one spoke, but the room thickened with consequence.

Then, without hesitation, Zhu Rong raised a hand. A faint ripple of energy pulsed from their sleeve as they summoned a Jade Command Token, veined with silver flame and sealed with primordial gold sigils. With a precise flick, they shattered it mid-air.

The token broke like brittle starlight.

In the space above the table, a crack opened—not into space, but into truth. For a moment, a flickering image emerged: a deep, fungal-lit crevice beneath the tectonic plates of eastern DongNan Guo. It shimmered, then faded, but not before all six Sky Leaders recognized the network of tunnels and bio-engineered roots anchoring the Shun Association's next locus of activity.

"A sub-realm tethered to a corrupted leyline," murmured Mu Qing, fingers tapping lightly on her Worldsong Staff. "They're contaminating the city's vital qi. Trying to grow something... or someone."

"Containment is paramount," said Gang Shan, voice like grinding tectonic plates. His Skyfall Maul leaned against his chair, humming faintly.

Li BoHan nodded once. Without standing, he extended his hand, and five miniature blue pearls blinked into existence—each no larger than a fingernail, yet each pulsing with storm-locked gravity. He brought them together in a series of spiraling patterns, the air around his fingers rippling as reality twisted under his will.

"Mutation Technique: 'Ocean Gate Harmonization.'"

The pearls melted into one another, compressing into a thin, glowing aqua-blue wristband, inscribed with water-script sigils and tide-encoded glyphs. With a flick of his wrist, he threw the band into the air. It soared upward—piercing the ceiling, vanishing into the skies above—and then pulsed outward in waves of radiant pressure.

Far above, the clouds over Gold Star City spiraled inward, and a hemispherical shield of translucent blue light shimmered into existence, locking over the entire capital like a celestial shell. Airships stilled in place. The skies dimmed for a heartbeat.

Beneath the barrier, the heart of the nation was now sealed.

"Gold Star City is secured," BoHan murmured.

He turned toward Jing Wei, who sat at the end of the table, their Reality Lattice Puzzle slowly spinning in multiple dimensions. Without a word, Jing Wei rotated one obsidian shard, and a second pulse went out—this time aimed toward the southern edge of the country.

Around DanNuan City, home of Sky University, a second shield bloomed—this one faceted like a geode, hexagonal in formation, its surfaces refracting like a shifting crystal palace.

"Sky University has been isolated," Jing Wei confirmed quietly. "Nothing goes in or out without our design."

Silence returned to the chamber—but it was no longer passive. It was watchful. Intentional.

Yan Mo finally spoke, voice like a thread being cut.

"If we wait too long, it won't be a defensive war. It will be surgical amputation."

Zhu Rong nodded slowly, twin sigils above their head flaring in agreement. "Then we act. Before the seventh returns."

Everyone turned, eyes lingering on the empty seventh seat.

The council was not yet whole—but soon, it would be.

And when it was... the heavens themselves might tremble.