NOVPUBHe raised a single hand. "Zhang Ruoyun," he said, calm as sin.
The Phoenix of Balance moved without a word.
She initially didn't belong to the Origin Families. She wasn't born of Origin Families royalty back then, nor did she carry the inherited superiority bloodline many of the Origin Families council did. But none of that mattered. Zhang Ruoyun bowed only to balance — and balance now had a name, and it was Parker Nyxlith.
Her story with him was even before these families existed but that was a story for another time.
Her steps were light, but the air around her rippled with ancient force. Feathers of black and white shimmered briefly at her back, flickering between illusion and truth. She extended her arm, and from her palm bloomed three orbs — yin and yang split like bleeding moons, each pulsing with divine dichotomy.
The three orbs struck the foreheads of the Voidhowls.
Instantly, the room erupted in screams.
Screams that weren't entirely human.
Julian thrashed violently, his arms clawing at nothing. Annabelle writhed like something was eating her from the inside out. Robert… the Patriarch… only let out a deep, guttural groan — the kind that came from the soul, from something being broken far deeper than flesh.
Parker stepped forward. One boot echoed on the marble. Then the other. Until his voice — smooth, steel-wrapped and casual — cut through their suffering like a scalpel.
"You are no longer tethered to the truth of existence," Parker said, his voice a slow scalpel dragging through their final hope. "From this moment forward, you are stripped. Peeled raw from the balance that once made you whole."
He took a step down from the throne, and the temperature in the room dropped like a dying heartbeat.
"There will be no comfort. No rest. No pleasure—not even the cheap kind people claw for in darkness. No warmth. No sweetness on your tongues. No joy to light the corners of your mind. No fucking gratitude. Nothing good will ever grow in you again."
He circled them like a shadow in human form.
"Just pain. Agony. The kind that crawls up your spine and sleeps behind your eyes. Shame like rot in your chest. Bitterness so strong it'll poison your sleep. Guilt that'll chew you alive. Loneliness so loud it'll drive you into madness. And grief—raw, eternal, ever-present, like a scream you can't finish."
He paused right behind Julian and leaned in, whispering it like a curse straight into his ear.
"You will never taste duality again. I have ripped it out of your soul and set it on fire."
The air shivered. A weight settled over the throne room. Thick. Suffocating. Like the silence that comes when something holy is defiled and the universe forgets how to breathe.
"And of course," Parker added, standing tall again, "you no longer have Ether."
He said it almost casually, like it was a footnote. An afterthought.
"No strength. No regeneration. No bloodline favor. No healing. No power. And not even the mercy of death."
Annabelle sobbed. "Wh-what does that mean…?"
Parker turned to her—slowly. Like a god addressing a roach that dared to speak.
"It means," he smiled, and it was a dark, cold thing, "you're not even Voidhowls anymore. You're just... fragile little skin-puppets."
Then his voice dropped. Not into silence, but into something colder. More final.
"But puppets that can't die."
He stepped back slowly, like an executioner admiring his own guillotine. His eyes were no longer eyes—just twin voids shaped like hunger.
"Bleed. Burn. Break. Be shattered. Be skinned alive a thousand times over. It doesn't matter."
He raised a hand toward Nyxavere, who opened the gate—not a portal, but a wound in space, wide and seething. The Chaotic Abyss stared back at them from the other side like a beast with no face and too many teeth.
The moment it opened, cold heat poured through. Not warmth. No. This was corrosive heat—the kind that didn't warm you, it judged you. Like the place had a will of its own and it hated their existence.
"The air alone will blister your lungs. You'll breathe and it'll feel like inhaling liquid razors. Your insides will boil. Every breath, every gasp, every whimper—will cook you from within."
He let that settle before continuing.
"Your skin will peel just by touching the mist. Every nerve you didn't know you had will scream. The ground bleeds. The rain corrodes. The shadows inside that place? They crawl. They watch. And when you sleep—if you ever can in that place—you'll dream of things beneath dreaming."
Julian tried to scream but only bile came out. Parker's voice sliced through the hall like death playing violin.
"You will feel your teeth melt. Your bones splinter and regrow in the wrong shapes. Your sanity will rot like fruit. And still…"
He raised a finger. Just one. As if pointing at the heavens.
"…you will not die."
He stared down at them with something that could not be called mercy. Or cruelty.
Just judgment.
"And you know the cruel part?"
They didn't answer. They couldn't. Their minds were breaking already—cracking beneath the weight of a reality too twisted to fathom.
Parker leaned in, that damn grin coiling like a serpent around his words.
"You'll beg to die."
A beat of silence.
He turned away.
"And the Chaotic Abyss will listen—but only to laugh and spite at your face."
Then he waved his hand.
And hell swallowed them whole.
Parker motioned lazily toward the yawning portal beside the throne. Its edges rippled like torn skin trying to close around a wound that refused to heal.
But this time, there was sound.
Screaming.
Distant but sharp. Raw. Human. Animal. Wrong.
The cries of the Voidhowls echoed from within the Chaotic Abyss, carried by some cruel cosmic wind—screams that clawed at the ears and scraped across the walls of the throne hall like rusted blades. There was no rhythm to it. No mercy. Just pure, untamed agony bleeding through dimensions.
Some in the hall flinched. Scarlett gripped her own wrist tighter. Even Noctavine's expression twitched for half a second.
Parker didn't flinch. If anything, he looked pleased.
He turned.
Slowly. Deliberately. Toward the others still standing. The ones who'd laughed when he couldn't lift a training sword. The ones who called him mutt. The ones who whispered jokes in the hall and never thought he'd hear them. He heard everything.
"You hear that?" Parker asked quietly, his tone ice over steel. "That's not some storm. That's not some beast howling."
He took a step closer, eyes dragging over each of their faces like a knife pressed just below skin.
"That... is what happens when you break someone and forget they might one day stand back up."
The screaming from the Abyss rose again, sharper, as if on cue—like those trapped inside knew their sins were being watched.
"And just so we're clear," Parker continued, voice now laced with a darker amusement, "they haven't even been there for five minutes yet."
He smiled.
It wasn't kind.
It wasn't sane.
It was the smile of someone who had lived through fire—and decided to become it.
He pointed to Bella, the other bullies who helped Julian, the twins and Maya's brother...
It was time they also paid for their sins too!
