Absolute Cheater - Chapter 289

Chapter 289: Hollow Waste
The steps into the earth were uneven, ancient, and narrow—cut not by tools, but by will. Asher could feel it with every inch they descended. This wasn’t a tomb made by hand. It was a grave born of remorse, carved by someone who wanted to be forgotten.

“Feel that?” he muttered, his voice barely a whisper.

Valeris didn’t answer, but her eyes narrowed.

It wasn’t pressure. It wasn’t killing intent. It was… grief. Dense and cold, thick enough to choke on. Every breath became harder, not because the air thinned, but because the very atmosphere rejected the living.

They passed old sigils etched into the walls—flickering with faded light. Scenes played out in ghostly carvings: a sovereign leading armies, his blade slicing through legions. Crowns shattered. Cities crumbled. And finally, the sovereign himself falling—not to an enemy, but to his own blade.

“He took his own life,” Asher murmured. “After the war.”

“No,” Valeris said. “After he won the war.”

A silence deeper than before fell over them.

At the base of the stairs, they stepped into a vast cavern—a throne room of death. Dozens of rusted weapons floated in the air, suspended in mourning. Fractured banners hung motionless. Bones lined the walls, not as trophies, but as an audience.

And at the center, slumped over a blackened stone throne, sat Hal-Kareth.

His armor had once gleamed silver, now tarnished beyond recognition. His face was hidden behind a cracked helm, but his presence was unmistakable. Though unmoving, it felt like his eyes were everywhere.

Valeris stepped forward. “Hal-Kareth, Blade of Silence. We seek the key.”

The body twitched.

Then slowly—agonizingly—the Sovereign rose. His movements were stiff, like someone wearing flesh for the first time in centuries. The helm turned toward them, and a voice echoed—not just in the chamber, but within their souls.

“Do you see it?” he asked. “The throne I died for? The silence I earned?”

Valeris said nothing.

“You come for my legacy. But what will you do with it? Will you lead? Will you destroy? Will you regret it, like I did?”

Asher stepped beside her. “We’ll carry it. And if it breaks us… then so be it. But we won’t hide from it.”

A pause.

Then, with a sound like stone grinding against bone, Hal-Kareth reached out his hand—and one of the floating blades flew to it.

“Then carry it through me.”

The throne shattered behind him as he moved. One moment still. The next, a blur of death.

Valeris reacted first. A pulse of command rippled from her voice. “Bind.”

The instant Valeris’s voice rang out—”Bind”—the throne room reacted.

Golden threads of command tore through the dead air like spears of divine will, snaring Hal-Kareth’s limbs in a cage of Law. For a single heartbeat, the ancient Sovereign was held, his towering form stiffened mid-motion. But then his blade—Noctis Sever—twitched.

And silence howled.

The bindings didn’t tear—they ceased to exist, unmade not through power, but through the antithesis of it. Negation. His sword whispered through the air and the very laws that had once shaped the world curled away like ash on a dying wind.

Then he moved.

The cavern warped as Hal-Kareth surged forward, not with speed, but inevitability. He didn’t run. He simply existed closer, as though distance had betrayed them.

Asher activated the Primordial Heart, and his body lit from within—every vein a glowing conduit of ancestral flame and condensed law-essence. His Soul Passage flared violet-white, but he knew that alone wouldn’t be enough.

He exhaled—and gave the blood its due.

“Sanguine Supreme: First Vein—Crimson Initiate.”

A shockwave burst from his core. His hair turned darker than night, edged in gleaming red. A cloak of blood-light wrapped around his form, billowing as if caught in a storm only he could feel. His irises fractured, shaped like lotus petals of spiraling obsidian and ruby.

The floor cracked beneath his feet just from the aura. It was the new fusion art he created after fusing many blood related spells, cultivation arts he found in all the worlds he has been to.

The first vein is like an buff skill for over all improvement and by huge margin of 10x.

He launched forward.

Their blades met mid-air—one a silence-born relic, the other forged of soul and death law. There was no clash—just an instant null, and then a backlash. The air around them screamed as reality tried to reject their battle. Hal-Kareth’s blade carried the weight of unbeing, and each swing shredded not matter, but memory. The longer Asher fought, the more unreal parts of him felt.

He forgot how his mother face. Then his maid’s name. Then his own first breakthrough.

But with the Primordial Heart pulsing and the Sanguine Supreme lines etched across his flesh, he anchored himself. Every lost piece was replaced—not with replacement but with clarity as they returned to him.

“Sanguine Supreme: Second Vein—Bloodlit Dominion!”

Asher’s strike cleaved open the air, and the blood in the atmosphere responded. Every particle, every ancient stain in the tomb’s soil, surged into a network of bloodsigils and runes. They danced mid-air, spinning around him like planets caught in orbit.

This was the effect of Bloodlit Dominion. It granted Asher more than mere control over blood—it granted dominion over everything his blood touched. Once his spilled on anything, It could no longer be turned against him. It became his sentinel, his weapon, his breath. The battlefield itself transformed into his cathedral; the blades, the air, the soil—all recognized him. They moved with him, fought for him, became extensions of him, bound by the unshakable pull of his dominion.

Hal-Kareth recoiled. For the first time in this battle, his silence wavered.

The blood that touched the ground no longer evaporated. It lingered, whispering. Every droplet formed runes, lines, symbols that pulsed with life. It wasn’t just Asher’s essence anymore—it was his claim. And now the very space around them bent in acknowledgment.

The Sovereign of Silence narrowed his gaze. “You would twist blood into Law?”

Asher didn’t answer. He moved.

With Bloodlit Dominion active, the cavern itself became his blade. He vanished, reappearing mid-air, riding a crimson sigil that burst from the floor like a serpent. His hand snapped down—Soul Passage surged forth, elongated into a scythe of screaming violet, blood trailing behind it like a comet’s tail.