What he held in his hands was a singularity of light that very few could understand. To most, it was just that, a brilliant spark of light with no discernible form. For all they knew, it was an amorphous ethereal mass that related to something fundamental to one's existence. But to Caelum, it was different.
He saw it for what it truly was. A broken Source that he had no way of repairing. It should have originally been in the form of an arrow, but after being assimilated so recklessly into a being it was not even the least bit compatible with, it had been deformed, broken beyond recognition. It now looked like a mobius strip with several parts of the band broken or missing.
This was the Source of the once glorious Divine Beast, Sagittarius the Clairvoyant Divine Centaur. He was a renowned archer, but his title came from his divine ability to see many things. It was not just seeing far away, but also seeing glimpses of the near future. It was not as prophetic as some might hope, but it was enough for him to command a terrifying reputation in the battlefield.
When Sagittarius takes command, the enemies were sure to lose. And when Sagittarius shoots his arrow, the enemies were sure to die. He had never once missed a mark.
As Caelum recalled the amazing feats of the Divine Centaur, Erta's bodies appeared in front of him, dropping the helpless bodies of two other beings. Her bodies fused into one before speaking with a trembling voice that barely held in the anger and resentment she had.
"I found two more. These wretched things must have desecrated their resting places. I imagine there are more of them elsewhere."
Caelum looked at the people that Erta had brought to him. One was a humanoid lizard with brownish scales and the other was humanoid feline, likely a cat rather than something bigger as its slender and agile body suggested. Both of them exuded a particularly chaotic aura of Divinity.
Caelum analysed the aura for a while longer, gleaning some insights to this strangeness he was seeing. By all rights, this should not be possible. Assimilating a Source that was incompatible with one's being was not only stupid, it was suicidal. With his mind now perfectly clear and sharp, Caelum had locked onto this strangeness.
These people should already be dead the moment they assimilated these Sources. And yet, here they were, still alive and even leading large scale battles. It was inexplicable. But Caelum thought back to his brief battle with the ram-horned centaur, if you can even call it a battle.
The ram-horned centaur was indeed stronger than any of the other humanoid beast warriors in the battlefield. His Divinity alone would have allowed him to devastate their enemies in this kind of battlefield. But to Caelum, it was glaringly lacking.
The ram-horned centaur was able to take on a Divine Beast's form with the use of the Source, but that was all it really granted him. A Divine Beast's form was its true form. It should have been at least a league stronger than what its normal form had been, but the centaur barely got any visible boosts from it. It was practically on the same level of power as before it transformed.
This meant only one thing. These Sources should have been a cancer that ate them up from inside out, but they somehow found a way to stabilise their conditions and put the cancer into a dormant state. But by doing so, they also crippled the Sources themselves, preventing them from gaining the true powers of the Divine Beasts the Sources belonged to.
Caelum wondered just how these people had managed to do such a thing. Tampering with Sources was not something even the most powerful beings in Existence were willing to do if it was not necessary. One's Source is proof of one's existence. To tamper with it was not only to tamper with a being, it was to tamper with Existence itself. And there was only so much that Existence will tolerate.
"Who gave you these Sources?"
Caelum went straight to the crux of the problem. With all the information he had, he easily deduced that these three wretched fools could not have done this by themselves. They may have found the Sources, but they certainly did not have the capabilities to tamper with them. This was the act of someone else. Someone was desecrating the resting places of the Divine Beasts.
Erta looked to him in shock as she understood what he told her through the Life Covenant. It seemed that the situation was even worse than she originally thought. The two captured warriors glared at Caelum and Erta with indignation. A similar anger as the one that welled up in the ram-horned centaur was brewing within them. The cat woman sneered at them in derision.
"Ask all you want, but you won't hear a single thing from me, damned outsiders! When the Black Dragon God learns of what happened here, he will hunt you down for good until none of you are left to harm our home!"
Hearing her words, Caelum and Erta fell silent. It was an eerie silence that seemed to precede a storm. The cat woman thought that she had succeeded in intimidating or frustrating them, but she could not be any more wrong. In fact, she had told them a lot already.
Caelum closed his eye, repeating the words in his mind as his arm moved. A thin line of dark crimson traced the path of his finger as his arm swung in front of him. The cat woman barely had time to widen her eyes in shock and regret before her and the lizard man's heads fell to the ground.
Caelum opened his eye with a sharp glint as he finally locked onto the few relevant information that he needed. The first was that the leader of these black and gold armoured warriors was called the Black Dragon God. And the second was that there was another faction present in the Primordial Spirit Boundary, one that was not native to it. For some reason, this last piece of information made him feel grim.
The war that destroyed the Primordial Spirit Boundary was one fought against what these natives would call outsiders. But to be honest, even Caelum and Erta did not know much about this enemy. Even the war was practically a hoax with those outsiders sending only slave soldiers with differing degrees of mutations.
Could it be that this age-old enemy had returned after the war and had entrenched themselves into the Primordial Spirit Boundary? How could they have found this Realm? And before that, how did they even know that it still existed when even Caelum and Erta, who were supposed to be the Masters of the Primordial Spirit Boundary, had thought that it had been completely destroyed?
There were so many questions racing through his mind that Caelum forgot about something that had basically been running in the background. The constant ticking sound that had been echoing within his mind had stopped, and with it the biting cold that cleared his head.
In an instant, everything hit him like a tidal wave. He had used his Karmic Flame twice when he was not even ready to use it yet. He had barely comprehended what it was so the strain on him was tremendous, especially when he first used it in such large amounts to create the wheel and then in a delicate line to cut off the heads of the two warriors they caught.
But worst of all, he manipulated and wielded a power that was not his own. The orange Flames of Disdain were a terrifying curse that was on the level of his Karmic Flames if not slightly above. And although he did not do it deliberately, it still ended up flowing according to his will.
And like a cherry on top, Ciel's voice resounded in his head as he felt his vision slightly blur for a moment.
[You have awakened a dormant aspect: Wrath]
[Your 'Wrath' is untamable.]
['Wrath' is influencing 'Gluttony' and 'Lust'.]
[Your 'Gluttony' and 'Lust' have become more unstable.]
[Warning! Three volatile aspects have been found.]
[Warning! You are being corrupted.]
Ciel was still digesting her gains from the Scarlet Tribulation. It seems that what she gained might have been even greater than what Caelum himself obtained. But her automated protocols were still working in full effect and thus its immediate warnings to Caelum.
The momentary blur in his vision cleared as his mind grew sharp, feeling everything about it to sense the encroachment of this corruption, but he found nothing. It was then that his body seemed to have lost its strength as he stumbled forward.
Erta caught him with a worried look on her face. She too had heard Ciel's warnings and was using her three divine lights to inspect Caelum's body. If there was anything that would be able to find such corruption, it would undoubtedly be her Light of Virtue and Light of Truth. And indeed, she found them.
In the depths of Caelum's being were three singularities releasing unstable waves of power. She could not tell where exactly they were located so she could not pull them out of his body, not that she would have even if she could. After all, she did not know how it might affect Caelum. But it was clear now that perhaps his sudden weakness was not just due to his use of Karmic Flames and the Flames of Disdain.