Sovereign of the Ashes-Chapter 1006: Blood Essence

Any creature that sought godhood through faith placed immense importance on their followers.

To them, their believers were the foundation of their existence.

In Feymous Canyon, there were hundreds of thousands of Gray-headed Apes.

To a powerful deity like Spider Queen, this number was insignificant.

However, to the God of Brute Force, an obscure and weak deity, these creatures likely made up nearly one-tenth of its total followers in Faeloria.

During Sein’s years in Faeloria, he had not been studying the world’s structure and composition alone. Even from afar, in the Magus World, the Spider Queen had been meticulously analyzing this plane.

Faeloria’s planar rules were distinctly unique. Unlike the Magus World, this civilization showed no signs of outward expansion.

With the deities of Faeloria bound to their respective domains, they placed immense value on their followers and the cultivation of faith.

Why had Faeloria remained free from large-scale wars and devastating clashes between the continent’s lesser beings for millennia?

From the Spider Queen’s perspective as a goddess, she speculated that the Faelorian deities were deliberately protecting these lower-tier creatures.

After all, they were the sources of faith; the very essence of their divine power.

With this in mind, the Spider Queen had ordered Sein to set up special spell arrays on the outskirts of Feymous Canyon.

Some were meant to target the God of Brute Force directly, while others were meant to deal with the Gray-headed Apes.

The impending massacre of hundreds of thousands of creatures did not stir the slightest emotion in the Spider Queen.

By using these creatures as hostages, she was certain that the God of Brute Force would be forced to take the bait.

Aside from that, she had another backup plan—Sein himself.

Letting Sein strike first was a calculated move, designed to confuse the God of Brute Force and provoke it into action.

To further aid him, the Spider Queen lent him a treasure known as the Blood Magic Artifact.

With this final piece in place, she was confident that their target would not resist the bait.

***

Since this battle needed to be resolved quickly, Sein activated his Flame Demon transformation and wasted no time diving into the fight after completing the final preparations.

The decision to activate his Flame Demon form was made after careful deliberation between Sein and the Spider Queen.

Though actual Flame Demons might not exist in this world, his aura as a demon could be easily recognized.

This deception served a crucial purpose—to shift suspicion onto the demons, complicating the situation for their enemies and thus making it easier for Sein and the Spider Queen to operate unnoticed.

As for whether this would bring misfortune upon the demon clans of this world... That was none of their concern—at least, not for now.

The moment Sein’s demon wings unfurled, casting a shadow over the Feymous Canyon, flaming meteors rained down from above.

This was nothing short of an extinction crisis for the Gray-headed Apes in the canyon.

With the overwhelming strength of a Rank Three powerhouse, Sein tore through their territory like an unstoppable force.

To him, this canyon was no different than an uninhabited land.

The strongest among the Gray-headed Apes was a Rank Two Legendary Being—but even among Legendary Beings, it was considered weak.

As for the God of Brute Force, it was nothing more than a weakened deity. Its divine strength was feeble even by Rank Four standards.

If it was this weak, how could the race it came from or the followers under its command be any stronger?

For the Gray-Headed Apes to have produced a Rank Four deity was nothing short of astonishing.

In most other planes of the Astral Realm, it was almost unheard of for a god to emerge from a species with a population of less than ten million.

The fact that the God of Brute Force had managed to ignite divine fire was a mystery that puzzled the Spider Queen.

She suspected it was due to the unique laws of this world, or perhaps this god had stumbled upon some miraculous encounter during its ascension.

This was one of the secrets that Lorthisra desperately sought to unravel.

What exactly was the true nature of these “weakened deities”?

If Sein, in his Flame Demon form, was a boiling drop of oil poured onto Feymous Canyon, then the red energy barrier that rose around the canyon’s periphery moments after his arrival was the lid sealing the pot.

There was nowhere for these Gray-headed Apes to run!

Sein had no interest in gathering specimens or conducting research right now.

His sole mission was destruction.

As Sein unleashed his full power, a blood-red metallic construct shaped like a massive funnel appeared in the sky above Feymous Canyon.

With every Gray-headed Ape that fell to his assault, the blood essence in their body was slowly drawn from their corpses by the crimson artifact in the sky.

Even those who still clung to life were left weak and drained, their vitality sapped by the artifact.

Compared to the Silver Spider Ring in Sein’s possession, the Spider Queen’s Blood Magic Artifact was of equal grade.

When he was studying in Sky City, Sein had come across records of a rare and forbidden discipline within the Magus World—blood magic.

Coincidentally, the Spider Queen was an expert on it.

With her unparalleled expertise in blood magic, she had once lured and corrupted an entire branch of elves, turning them into a new race known as “Blood Elves” or “Moor Elves”.

Unlike ordinary elves, Moor Elves devoured elemental energy from blood.

As the goddess of these fallen elves, Lorthisra had long since perfected the art of blood manipulation, pushing it to its absolute limits.

The function of the Blood Magic Artifact was to drain the blood of every living being in Feymous Canyon, and refine their essence into a condensed form of pure blood energy—a high-grade resource known as “blood essence”.

In her early years, the Spider Queen had committed an atrocity beyond imagination—she had sacrificed an entire low-level plane, annihilating tens of millions of living beings.

The blood essence harvested from such a scale of slaughter was nothing short of extraordinary.

Through this mass slaughter, Lorthisra had created a Rank Four Blood Elf King, one of her most powerful subordinates.

His name was Caelzas, and he was both her right and left-hand man.

Anyone who believed the Spider Queen was acting alone in her schemes against Faeloria would be sorely mistaken; her influence was actually vast.

The very names and functions of the Blood Magic Artifact and blood essence made it clear—these were creations of pure malevolence.

Though the Magus Civilization frequently waged interplanar wars, they rarely resorted to worldwide extermination—not out of morality, but because native beings were often more valuable alive than dead.

But the Spider Queen was different.

Perhaps she lacked the patience for slow, systematic exploitation.

Or perhaps, to her, the flesh and blood of a foreign plane was simply more useful when harvested directly.

Regardless, blood essence was a resource that might even surpass energy crystals in value.

As the price for Sein’s role as bait, the Spider Queen promised him that all the blood essence harvested from the fallen Gray-headed Apes in Feymous Canyon would be his.

“That is very generous of you,” Sein remarked.