Chapter 119: Divine Intervention...
The heavy obsidian doors of the mausoleum yielded to Zen’s push with a grinding, bone-chilling shriek that echoed across the desolate graveyard.
As the doors swung open, a wave of freezing, necrotic air washed over him, carrying the scent of ancient dust and concentrated Void magic.
The interior of the mausoleum was massive, like a sprawling subterranean chamber lit only by the eerie, pulsing purple glow of the corrupted ley-lines running along the walls.
The air here was so thick with unrefined mana that it felt like walking underwater.
At the far end of the chamber, hovering above a cracked stone altar, was the source of the anomaly.
It was a Void-Lich.
Unlike the skeletal knights outside, the Lich was not a creature of bone and steel. It was a swirling, floating amalgamation of raw necrotic energy and tattered black robes. A skeletal face with burning purple eyes peered out from the darkness of its hood.
In its right hand, it held a massive, double-bladed scythe made entirely of condensed Void-ice.
The system in Zen’s HUD immediately categorized the threat.
[Target: Corrupted Void-Lich. Estimated Rank: High C-Rank (Mutated). Danger Level: Lethal.]
As Zen stepped into the room, the Lich’s burning eyes snapped toward him. It didn’t roar or scream. Instead, it raised its scythe, and the air around it simply warped.
"Spatial distortion," Zen muttered, instantly recognising the technique. "The Trench corruption gave a C-Rank boss A-Rank environmental manipulation. Annoying."
The chat on the Ghost Scrapper stream, which had been buzzing with hype, suddenly ground to a terrified halt.
[xX_Hunter_Pro_Xx]: Is that... a mutated Lich?! Oh my god, he’s dead.
[Mage_Girl_99]: Scrapper, RUN! A D-Rank can’t fight a magic-caster boss! It’s going to nuke the whole room!
[GuildMaster_Rex]: Get out of there, kid! That thing is generating a spatial field! Your knives are useless against it!
Even the VIPs seemed to hold their breath. The constant flood of millions of Mana Credits paused as Vanguard_Queen, Golden_Empress, and Aether_Logic_Prime watched in silence.
The Lich swung its scythe.
Three massive, jagged crescent blades of purple Void energy ripped through the air, hurtling toward Zen at blinding speed.
At the same time, the gravity in the room violently shifted, attempting to root Zen’s boots to the stone floor.
But as usual, Zen didn’t run.
Instead, he deactivated the safety limiters on his leg muscles and allowed exactly 99% of his D-Rank mana to flood into his calves and thighs.
The resulting kinetic burst shattered the stone tiles beneath his boots as he launched himself diagonally into the air, completely bypassing the gravity well.
He flipped gracefully over the first Void blade, twisted his torso to let the second blade pass inches from his chest, and used the flat of his trench knife to literally bounce off the third blade, redirecting his momentum toward the altar.
The chat exploded, but Zen wasn’t paying attention to the text.
The Lich hissed, its eyes flaring as it realised the physical attack had failed. It slammed the butt of its scythe against the altar.
Instantly, the floor of the mausoleum erupted into a minefield of exploding Void-geysers. Pillars of dark purple fire shot into the ceiling, turning the entire room into a lethal grid.
Zen landed softly on a narrow strip of safe stone, immediately pushing off again.
He moved like a ghost, his footwork so precise that he was weaving through the chaotic eruptions of necrotic fire without a single wasted movement. He was dancing on a razor’s edge.
One misstep, one millimeter of miscalculation, and the Void fire would incinerate him.
He closed the distance. Ten yards. Five yards.
He lunged, driving his trench knife toward the Lich’s glowing core.
But the Trench corruption had made the boss smarter than a standard dungeon monster. Just as Zen’s blade was about to pierce its robes, the Lich detonated a defensive Void-shield.
It wasn’t a standard barrier; it was a localized spatial explosion, designed to blast anything within a three-foot radius into a pulp.
Zen’s A-Rank instincts screamed a warning a fraction of a second before the detonation.
He instantly aborted the strike, twisting his body backward and crossing both trench knives in front of his chest to absorb the kinetic shockwave.
The blast hit him like a freight train, throwing him backward through the air. Zen skidded across the stone floor for twenty feet before he dug his knives into the ground to stop his momentum.
He stood up, coughing slightly as the dust settled.
He was fine. His defensive pivot had absorbed 98% of the impact. But as he rolled his shoulders, a sharp stinging sensation flared on his right forearm.
He looked down and saw a tiny, jagged shard of Void-ice had grazed his jacket, slicing through the tactical fabric and leaving a two-inch scratch on his skin. A single drop of blood welled up from the cut, glowing faintly with a trace of purple Void corruption.
It was a completely superficial wound. In the grand scheme of a C-Rank dungeon run, a scratch was a miraculous victory.
But miles away, in the guest room on the first floor of the townhouse, someone did not see it that way.
Selene was sitting on the edge of her bed, clutching her tablet in both hands.
She was wearing her pure white silk nightgown, her pink hair falling in a messy halo around her face. She had been watching the stream in silence since he entered the dungeon.
She hadn’t donated.... she hadn’t typed in the chat. She had simply prayed.
But the moment the screen zoomed in on Zen’s arm... the moment she saw the tiny, red drop of his blood mixing with the filthy purple corruption of the Void, something inside the Saintess snapped.
Her eyes dilated until they were completely black and her breathing stopped.
’He’s bleeding,’ Selene thought, her mind spiralling into a dark, suffocating abyss of devotion and panic. ’My Emperor is bleeding. That filthy, disgusting magic touched him. It hurt him. It tainted him.’
"No," Selene whispered, her voice trembling with an emotion that bordered on madness. "No, no, no. I won’t allow it. I won’t let him be hurt. I must cleanse him. I must heal him!"
She didn’t care about the rules; she didn’t care about the anchor paradox or the spatial degradation. Her territorial, yandere instincts as the supreme healer of the Sanctum overrode every logical thought in her brain.
Selene gripped the tablet tighter till the glass screen began to crack under the pressure of her thumbs.
She didn’t cast a spell; she didn’t even draw a runic circle. She simply closed her eyes and channelled the raw, unfiltered, S-Rank holy authority of the Saintess directly into the device in her hands.
"Purify," she commanded.
The tablet glowed with a blinding, incandescent green light. The holy mana surged through the device’s circuitry, violently overriding the digital network.
It didn’t just hack the streaming platform; it forced the digital connection to become a physical tether, riding the GE Link-Eye Drone’s signal all the way back to the Grave of the Forgotten.
Back in the mausoleum, Zen had just raised his knives to resume the fight.
Suddenly, the air pressure in the room vanished. The oppressive, heavy stench of the Void was instantly annihilated by the overwhelming scent of frankincense and ozone.
Before Zen or the Lich could react, the ceiling of the subterranean mausoleum simply ceased to exist.
A colossal pillar of blinding, liquid-green light crashed down from above, blasting through fifty feet of solid rock and earth, and struck the centre of the boss room with the force of a divine meteor.
The chat on the Ghost Scrapper stream went completely white as the camera feed was overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of the holy magic.
The green light washed over Zen, feeling as warm and gentle as a summer breeze. The tiny scratch on his forearm instantly vanished, the skin knitting back together perfectly. The trace of Void corruption was annihilated at the cellular level.
But for the Void-Lich, the light was complete hell.
The undead boss let out a shriek of unimaginable agony as the S-Rank holy magic slammed into it.
Its powerful, mutated Void-shield evaporated like water on a hot stove. The condensed Void-ice scythe shattered into a million pieces. The dark robes burned away, and the Lich was violently slammed into the stone floor, completely pinned and paralysed by the sheer weight of the purification aura.
The pillar of light faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving the mausoleum bathed in a soft, lingering silver glow.
Zen stood frozen in the center of the room, his trench knives still raised, staring at the paralysed, smoking remains of the C-Rank boss.
He looked at his fully healed arm. Then he looked up at the massive, perfectly circular hole in the ceiling of the dungeon.
’...Selena,’ Zen muttered, rubbing his temples in utter exasperation. ’Is she out of her mind?’
The GE Link-Eye Drone’s lens finally recalibrated, restoring the video feed to the tens of thousands of viewers watching the stream.
The chat was dead silent for ten seconds.
And then, it exploded with a force that nearly crashed the platform’s servers.
[xX_Hunter_Pro_Xx]: WHAT THE %$#& WAS THAT?!
[Ares_Alumni_04]: HOLY MAGIC?! S-RANK HOLY MAGIC?! DID AN ARCHANGEL JUST NUKE THE DUNGEON?!
[GuildMaster_Rex]: That... that was a Divine Intervention. That level of purification magic... only the High Priestess of the Sanctum Domain can cast that!
[Mage_Girl_99]: Is the Ghost Scrapper secretly dating the Saintess?! Why did a column of holy light just save him from a scratch?!
[Iron_Fist_Dan]: THIS GUY IS A MONSTER! HE HAS S-RANK SPONSORS AND A SECRET S-RANK HEALER OFF-CAMERA!
Even the VIPs were stunned.
[Golden_Empress]: You cheating fanatic.
[Vanguard_Queen]: I’m going to kill her. I’m literally going to strangle her with her own rosary.
[System Alert: User ’Holy_Devotion_Forever’ has donated 10,000,000 Mana Credits! User has achieved VIP Tier 1 Status!]
[Holy_Devotion_Forever]: You are cleansed, my Ghost Scrapper. You are pure. Please don’t let the dirty monsters touch you again. If they do, I will burn the entire sector to ash.
Zen let out a long, tired sigh.
He walked over to the paralysed, smoking Void-Lich, raised his trench knife, and calmly grabbed the monster’s exposed core, ending its miserable existence.