To him, it had almost felt simple.

Damian looked at the decrepit figure of the Murderous Saint and understood the gap between what everyone else had witnessed and what he had actually done.

To the warriors on the walls, to the Demons who had been flanking their Emperor a moment ago, to Serala floating beside him with frozen eyes, the stripping of a Ninth Circle existence had appeared as something beyond the boundaries of what power was supposed to be capable of doing to other power.

He had focused on a downward-facing arrow.

That was the entirety of it. He had found the arrow, looked at it, and applied his attention to it, and the Primordial Source had done what the Primordial Source did with the complete indifference of something that did not find the Murderous Saint’s cultivation worth a longer engagement.

The Nine Circles meant nothing to it. Every system of power that the Lands of Stone had ever organized itself around meant nothing to it. The Primordial Source sat above all of it as an authority that did not participate in the hierarchies it transcended, and Damian had touched it and pointed it and that had been sufficient.

He felt, for the first time, like he could overcome any power structure placed in front of him.

His obsidian eyes blazed in the illuminated dark, and he raised his hand.

The Murderous Saint rose from the crimson cloud.

He didn’t rise with any dignity. His arms moved outward from his body in the flailing motion of someone who had lost their footing on something they expected to be solid and was finding nothing beneath them to grab, and the terror on his emaciated face was complete and unperformed. He came toward Damian across the sky with the complete involuntary obedience of something that had been stripped of the power to resist anything and was still in the process of understanding that this was now its condition.

He had not gotten to speak. He had not gotten to monologue with the authority of an Emperor greeting an upstart, had not gotten to enumerate the ways his power exceeded what the Lost Prince of a dead empire had deluded himself into believing he could bring against it. He had not gotten to demonstrate the Ninth Circle cultivation he had spent a lifetime building. Between the moment he arrived on the cloud and the moment he became what he was now, no genuine engagement had occurred. He had simply been on the cloud, and then the sky had cracked open, and then he was old!

For a man who had operated from the assumption of his own invincibility for decades, the brevity of it was perhaps the most devastating part.

Damian could see the Demons and the Imperators arranged below in the space the Murderous Saint had just occupied. They had not moved. Not one of them had raised a hand or activated a technique or attempted anything that might have been described as intervening, because the Murderous Saint had been the strongest among them and he had been reduced to a shaking elderly man within seconds of Damian locating the correct arrow, and every being with working instincts was currently performing the same calculation: if that was what happened to him, what would happen to us?

Most of them were thinking about running.

None of them had run yet, because the thought of moving while the obsidian-eyed figure above them had his attention on something else was producing a paralysis that their instincts agreed made more sense than the alternative.

Damian brought the Murderous Saint in front of him and stopped him there.

"I will not kill you so easily." His voice was even. "Not quite yet. Some people deserve a swift death and the endless darkness that comes after." He looked at the old man directly, the obsidian light in his eyes burning against the terror looking back at him. "But not you. Not for you. I want you to watch."

BOOM!

The Murderous Saint’s eyes, which had not had room to hold more fear, found room.

Damian turned his obsidian gaze past him to the cloud below, to the Demons still standing around the howling corpse of his father, to the Imperators arranged with weapons drawn that none of them had managed to do anything useful with, to the Demons concealed on the walls who had pulled back from his solar light earlier and were now very still.

He pointed.

"You are stripped of your power." 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

HUUM!

The crack in the sky above roared.

It did not make a sound that belonged to weather or to combat or to any natural phenomenon. It was deeper than those, a vibration that pressed against the inside of the chest rather than the surface of the ears, and as it moved through the illuminated night air above the capital, Damian pressed the downward-facing arrows on every singularity his obsidian vision could locate.

All of them simultaneously.

He felt the Primordial Source engage the way he had felt it engage against the Murderous Saint, that tectonic quiet movement through his existence, only multiplied outward across dozens of targets without diminishing in the application to any single one of them. The Source found each singularity and pressed, and it didn’t ask what Circle the existence had attained or what Lineage it carried or what Demon hierarchy had granted it its rank.

The Demons on the cloud began to age.

The Imperators beside them began to age.

The hidden Demons on the walls began to age.

They aged not by years but by the measure of what they had accumulated through methods that were not theirs, the centuries of devoured souls in the Demons, the decades of cultivation that the Dominion’s strongest had spent their lives building, the power that demonic alliance had supplemented into warriors who should have been lesser than they were. It left all of them in the same visible outward flow that had stripped the Murderous Saint, and as it went, what remained behind it in each of them was what had genuinely belonged to them without supplementation, which in most cases was very little.

Eighth Circle Demons became aged and diminished creatures whose howls of rage dissolved into something weaker before those too stopped.

Seventh Circle Imperators whose bodies had been refined across lifetimes became ordinary men and women whose bodies reflected what lifetimes actually did to flesh when Mana stopped holding the consequences at bay.

On the walls of the capital, warriors who had been holding Physique-activated forms felt those forms collapse as the Source touched them, their Land and Sky Physiques going dark one after another, and they dropped to their knees not as an act of submission but as the first act of bodies that no longer had what they needed to remain standing.

The Demons concealed among them on the walls went to their knees beside them, their concealment failing as their power failed, their yellow eyes showing white at the edges as they looked upward at the obsidian-brilliant figure floating in the sky with an ancient corpse hovering at his shoulder.

Nothing spoke.

Beside Damian, Serala had not moved since the chest-splitting moment. Her white-gold and verdant wings were fully spread but completely still, and her wing-shaped pupils were fixed on him with an expression that had passed through shock several stages ago and arrived at something that had no simpler name than witnessing. She had seen what he could do since the beginning of all this. She had been present for every impossible thing he had produced in every impossible situation they had passed through together.

She was watching him now as if even she could not reach the bottom of what he was currently utilizing.

The stripped and diminished gathered below him across the capital of the Dominion of Crimson Stone, emptied of the power that had built this empire and held it and used it to ruin everything it touched, and the obsidian crack in the sky above continued to look down at all of it with an attention that had not finished!

Only now did Damian feel a sort of a strain, but in seconds...he had stripped an entire Empire of all its powerhouses!