Chapter 1827: The Ebon Host Rowan watched Telmus and his daughter overhead with a fair bit of amusement as they looked around his realm, and they saw the echo of him that was left in the past. Because he had spent so long sitting in one place when his Origin Land was recreated around him, and he unleashed substantial energies of creation and destruction in this place, Rowan had left a stamp upon his realm, an echo of his presence that was so real, even Telmus could not discern that the Rowan he was acknowledging was a memory of the past. His amusement largely stemmed from his memory welcoming Telmus and initiating a conversation with him, and so Rowan waited to see how long it would take Telmus to realize that he was talking to a memory. After watching for a while, seeing the way his memory was able to perfectly interact with Telmus while showing him around the realm, Rowan figured out that it was impossible for Telmus to discover he was talking to a memory, at least not when he was inside the Origin Land. An advantage of having a Territory was abilities such as these that enhanced the inmate domain of an individual, and in the case of Rowan, that domain had become so potent that it could deceive a Nascent Primordial. In essence, if he wanted, his memory alone was enough to kill a Nascent Primordial. Deciding that his memory was more than enough to handle Telmus, Rowan began preparing the realm for the ascension of a new Primordial. The shell of his Origin Land was strong, but it might not be able to withstand the fury of a Primordial’s ascension, plus there were a lot of fragile lives inside his realm, and the storm of Telmus’s ascension would scour this realm clean. This fledgling paradise, with its singing rivers and mountains of light, was not yet ready to withstand the raw, chaotic storm of a Primordial Ascension, especially one born from the chimeric consumption of the Demon. Telmus’s transformation would not be a gentle bloom like the Genesis Moss; it would be a tectonic upheaval of soul and essence, a violent rebirth that could shatter the fragile new harmonies. With a thought that resonated through the very roots of the reborn Origin Land, Rowan turned his focus inward, to the deepest, most foundational strata of the realm. This was not the vibrant surface, teeming with life, but the profound substrate below, the realm of unformed potential, the silent, pressurized bedrock of his reality, close to the heart of Eos. Only in this place was he assured that he would be able to channel all the power necessary to suppress the tribulation of a Primordial He did not travel there physically. His consciousness, vast as the sky above, simply descended. The kaleidoscope of life and light faded, replaced by a profound, humming darkness. This was the core of his realm, a place where only his Bloodline Avatars could reach. Here, the concepts of ‘forest’, ‘sea’, and ‘sky’ had not yet been pulled from the formless whole. Here, the Ether was not a shimmering mist, but a dense, viscous ocean of raw possibility, silent and waiting. And here, Rowan began to work. This was not creation as he mostly did it, but an act of supreme architecture, of brutal, precise cosmogenesis. He did not build. Rowan defined. His will, the focused intent of the Apex Omniversal Titan, became a scalpel of absolute causality. With a silent, psychic might that would have vaporized dimensions, he cut. A profound feeling of pain that was different from being hurt by any weapon swept across his consciousness, and Rowan suppressed his body so he did not shudder. If he did, the land above would be destroyed by earthquakes so powerful that they would shatter the stars above. He was separating a swathe of this foundational potential from the whole of the Origin Land, and an act like this would cause him enormous pain. It was like surgically isolating an organ for a specific, dangerous procedure. He was willing to provide the best environment for Telmus to ascend, but if, for any reason, something went wrong, Rowan had to be prepared to cut out this space from his body. The space he carved out was vast, a hollow sphere of absolute neutrality a thousand times larger than the world Telmus had just left. Its boundaries were not walls, but the sheer, impassable cliff-face of Rowan’s own will, insulating the nascent paradise from what was to come. Within this colossal, hollow sphere, there was nothing. A perfect, silent void, a blank canvas awaiting its first, violent stroke of color. Rowan provided it. Into the absolute center of the void, he placed a single object. It was a spear. Bleeding Edge. This weapon had a profound history. Made by Primordial Demon to herald the destruction of an Eternal Realm and the end of the Primordial Era, this spear was given to a Demon Lord, and it fell into the hands of Thenos, but Rowan was able to claim it by the sacrifice of his Reflection, and from that moment, he has been nurturing this weapon. With all the battles happening, it was easy to forget that Rowan was a supreme craftsman, and in the depths of his Origin Land, for countless years, Bleeding Edge had been quietly nurtured. For the moment, it would shine once more. To call it a weapon was to call a supernova a spark. For Rowan, this weapon represented the conceptual embodiment of Defiance, and over the years, he had been making upgrades Its haft was now forged from the petrified spine of the Arbor Mentis, a Tree not found in his Reality or Eosah’s but plundered from the depths of Primordial Soul’s Origin. The head was not metal, but a shard of solidified Annihilation, harvested from the core of his Slaughter Revenant Armor—a substance that actively consumed all light, all energy, all hope that came near it. This spearhead was a sliver of absolute ending, a promise of a final, silent no. Yet, where the haft met the head, a single, perpetual flame flickered—a tongue flame, taken from the remains of the Lost Flame, representing the indomitable will to rise again, the core of Defiant Ascension. The spear pulsed with a low, dangerous thrum, a heartbeat of absolute contradiction: the will to endure, married to the power to unmake. Rowan did not think the name Bleeding Edge suited this weapon anymore, but to rename it would be a Fate he would leave to the wielder. At the moment, this could be seen as the most powerful weapon he had ever created. Satisfied with the weapon, he reached into the memory of the slain Primordial Demon, into the very essence of martial order and infernal hierarchy that Telmus had consumed. He did not summon demons. He did not conjure angels. He reclaimed something that had been forgotten from the raw materials of their conflicting natures. The purified essence of the Gilded Maw Spell… His Demonic Angels, now reborn into something new. As he was upgrading the Spear, the Demonic Angels that surrounded and worshipped it for a profound purpose were also remade. The spear was a conduit to their new power and form, and they surrounded it, eternal guardians. From the swirling, formless potential of the void, figures began to coalesce. They stood a thousand feet tall, their forms androgynous and perfect, carved from living obsidian that seemed to drink the non-light. From their backs erupted wings, but these were not the soft feathers of doves or the leathery membranes of bats. They were forged of blackened, shimmering steel, each feather a razor-sharp blade, and when they stirred, the sound was soft, reminding Rowan of the deadly ring of a thousand swords being slowly unsheathed. Their faces were hidden behind helms of seamless, polished jet, featureless save for the single, vertical slit where a visor would be. And from that slit shone a pinprick of the same annihilating power that tipped the central spear. To look into that slit was to see the end of your own story. These were the Ebon Host. Demonic in their absolute, ruthless purpose and their connection to the annihilating spear. Angelic in their perfect, unwavering forms and their sacred duty. Rowan looked upon the last of the children from his previous self, who, like him, had changed and transformed into something new and terrible. He sighed and then imprinted their purpose directly into the core of their being, a single, burning command that was their reason for existence. “Guard. Protect. Ensure the Ascension. Let nothing, from within or without, breach this sanctum. Your master comes. He is the vessel of the power you serve. His success is your only truth.” As the last of the Ebon Host took its place, a perfect, silent legion of ten thousand standing in concentric circles around the thrumming spear, Rowan’s own form finally manifested within the sphere, a figure of concentrated, absolute authority.