In the auction’s large hall the old announcer’s voice rose as he listed the specifications of the goods one after another, and the numbers on the screens rose as time passed and the zeros became a long line of circles.

The guards were still surrounding the hall while this event went on quietly and without any problems.

In one of the private VIP rooms, Marquis Valimont sat leaning forward while his shoe tapped against the floor.

His forty-year-old face carried a big frown that brought out any wrinkles that had been hidden, and his jaw muscles were visible from how hard he was clenching his teeth.

"Damn it..." his voice was barely audible in the room.

"When the hell is that bastard coming back," the curses kept flowing from his mouth as whispers with no patience in them.

Nearly an hour had passed since Caius vanished with the envoy... which changed everything for him.

For someone who belonged to the Destruction faction, letting Caius be taken right in front of him was a serious mistake, so for the past few minutes he’d been busy explaining what happened to the envoy the Pillar of Destruction had sent, who arrived a little late.

He wasn’t reprimanded or anything like that, but the thought that his boss would find out about this shameful failure wouldn’t leave his mind.

It wasn’t as if they couldn’t take Caius later, but the fact that he’d met Medirin today meant he’d already become one of them... that woman wasn’t going to let him walk out of there before she made him her slave under the cover of making his own decisions.

While the Marquis kept tapping his foot on the floor, the auction moved along and every other employee did their job.

...

In one of the corridors Ivan stood with his back to the inner wall... he blinked as he stared at the window and the night sky behind it before he sighed painfully. "Boring, boring... even going to the bathroom is off limits."

"What were they expecting me to do if I’d had a lot to drink before tonight... lucky for them I didn’t."

Valia closed her eyes. "Ivan, shut up... please, just a bit, three or four more hours."

He turned his head toward her with a sad look on his face, like someone whose girlfriend had just cheated on him. "Three hours!... You don’t get it, Valia, all of this is painful for me... it’s actually painful."

The girl’s expression twisted as if she were looking at a madman reciting lines of poetry nobody could understand.

She sighed and turned her head to see the other end of this long corridor, there at the end where Emeris and a blonde girl were... one of their colleagues.

Emeris leaned lazily against the wall with her phone in her hand... she couldn’t stop herself from scrolling through videos instead of standing guard... especially when the minutes passed in boring silence and stillness.

But the girl beside her kept warning her over and over, "Emeris, please, we’re going to get caught and you’ll get chewed out... and they’ll dock our points."

She clicked her tongue as she hid the phone. "Tsk... okay, okay."

She raised her head, staring at the window in front of them, a dark night full of stars like every day... but the next moment, a distant light lit up on the horizon.

A crimson light that consumed the darkness as if a red sun had decided to rise from the wrong side.

"Wha... what is that," the girl beside her muttered.

At that moment Ivan’s voice carried over from far away. "Damn it, Valia, look.... finally, I’m not seeing things, right?"

Emeris moved closer to the window, the crimson light reflecting in her silver eyes. ’What the hell is that’

The glow looked very far from them, as if it were coming from hundreds of kilometers away, blocked by the city’s buildings.

"It’s... pretty."

....

Between the mountains and the white snow the moonlight reflected off the ocean of blood that had risen up past the sharp peaks.

Beneath it the ice melted and the rocks shattered, the massive fissure in the ground disappeared and the whole valley with it... as if the world were about to drown under Medirin’s power.

And inside the red expanse, surrounded and trapped in the middle of all that, was Alicia, the wound on her neck trembling while the veins showed on her flawless white skin.

Alicia felt her heart tighten, and her mind turning foggy, the aura around her wavered, threatening to disappear.

In that short moment that didn’t reach a fraction of a second, the small point in front of her expanded.

It was small and unimportant compared to what Medirin was throwing at her.

Just a small star.

"Dawn of Creation."

And from that shining point in front of her, the crimson light exploded and swallowed the world itself.

It blotted out everything...

From the last piece hidden in the depths of the void inside the earth to the last scraps of cloud in the sky.

From the stretch of the sea of blood to the edges of the mountains

Everything disappeared into the crimson light.

For a few moments the light kept sweeping across the mountain range, and even the moonlight itself faded beneath it.

The sky that had been dark black turned into a beautiful crimson as the starlight drowned and disappeared.

Then it slowly began to fade, revealing the full scale of the destruction.

In a circle several kilometers across, everything was erased.

A pit ran about two kilometers deep into the earth and widened as it rose to where the sharp peaks had been one day.

But now all that was left were the scattered mountains in the distance with half of them gone, as if a huge monster had come and bitten into them out of pure hunger.

There was no heat... there was no black ash left behind from what had been there.

Not even the air itself.

It was clean... just an empty stretch of nothing, except for Alicia and Caius at its center.

The next moment the wind howled between the mountains as the air rushed in to fill the huge void, kicking up a storm of snow dust.

In the empty space not a single drop of blood was visible to the eye, while the mountain range began to settle back down... even though it had lost a part of itself.

Caius looked around, swallowing as he took in what had just happened. ’Damn... what the hell was that madness! ’

He let out a breath and looked over at Alicia beside him, asking the most important question. "Is she dead?"

She looked around, her white hair following her movements while her hand was still on her neck, covered in her blood. "No... she got away."

Caius let out a breath. ’Of course, killing one of the Pillars wouldn’t be that easy’

He turned his eyes back to Alicia, focusing on the blood that had run from her neck onto her skin and her white dress. "Are you okay?"

Her hand glowed, making the red liquid disappear from her skin, then she took her hand away, revealing the wound that marred her clean skin.

Alicia let out a breath as she touched the spot near the wound, which had gotten a little bigger. "This is going to be hard to get rid of."

With that the two of them vanished from where they stood and appeared kilometers away at the edge of the crater of destruction.

Caius stared at the missing mountains, there where one of the Void System’s strongholds had been in the past.

But now not even dust was left of it