The air congealed into viscous amber, locking everyone in place.
Only Corleone's hoarse chant slithered across the vast, suffocating platform of the Blood Abyss like a slick serpent, its syllables warped and blasphemous.
Arms spread wide, his gaunt frame was thrown into a trembling, distorted silhouette by the pale sky-light and the dark red glow welling up from below.
He no longer looked at the bound, soon-to-be-slaughtered sacrifices, nor at the expressionless guards at his side.
His entire world had shrunk to the boundless, gently rippling crimson lake beneath his feet.
"By blood as covenant… by soul as guide…" he intoned, eyes sunken yet burning with near-mad fire. "Ancestors of Torregar… heed the final cry of your bloodline… return… return!"
Henry struggled; coarse hemp bit deep into the wounds about his wrists, but that pain was nothing beside the icy despair in his heart.
He stared fixedly at Corleone's back, then at the Blood Lake that reeked of thick, sweet fishiness.
Karl, beside him, was white as paper, lips moving soundlessly in prayer to some long-silent god.
Then—
The sky changed.
An indescribable weight fell, as though the heavens had dropped a few spans and pressed down upon every living soul.
The wan, fish-belly light leaking through high cracks was swiftly drained of all colour; the world dimmed.
Next, an ominous, murky blood-red spread across the firmament with visible speed.
Not dawn-glow.
More as if the sky itself had been slashed open and was oozing thick gore.
"L-look… the sky!" an Ironborn bound to a stone pillar shrieked, voice cracking with terror.
Henry jerked his head up.
A vast crimson comet, tail blazing, was ripping through the gloom, creeping across the vault with slow, inexorable purpose.
Its glow was not hot but cold and viscous, daubing everything below—ruins, pillars, every twisted, terror-struck face—with a clotted-blood red.
All creation seemed plunged into a boundless crimson ocean.
Not a beacon of hope; it was the heavens weeping blood, a proclamation of doom.
"Ha… hahaha!" Corleone's chant cut off, replaced by wild laughter.
Head thrown back, arms flung wide, he greeted the omen of ruin as if for an embrace. "It comes! He has heard!"
"Ancient stars guide His path! The very sky weeps joyous blood for this sacred hour!"
His laughter echoed across the empty Blood Abyss, weaving with the uncanny sky to paint a scene of raving horror.
THUMP—!
A muffled, indescribable boom—like the heart of the world, still for centuries, had suddenly lurched once.
The ground convulsed.
Across the lake's surface the shock sent a huge, sluggish ripple.
THUMP! THUMP!
The sound came again, clearer, stronger.
The intervals shortened, turning steady as a death-drum beaten by unseen colossal mallets in the deepest dark.
Each beat slammed livers and lungs awry and set souls shuddering.
The lake began to boil.
Not the usual bubbling, but great dark-red blisters rising from its very depths.
They climbed, swelled, burst with a wet pop, releasing an even fouler, cloying reek.
More and more, faster and denser, until the vast Blood Lake looked like a cauldron of blood porridge seethed by infernal flames.
"It is beneath… it is coming!" Corleone shrieked, voice cracking with ecstasy as he knelt at the platform's edge.
Bony fingers clawed into rock crevices, eyes nailed to the seething crimson below, face a mask of terror and rapture. "Awake, my… great progenitor!"
Henry and every survivor held breath, hearts gripped by the quickening death-drum, near bursting.
Despair, cold as the lake, closed over them.
Yet just as all felt ruin certain—
Everything stopped.
THUMP!
One last dull beat echoed off stone and faded.
The lake flattened with impossible speed.
Bubbles vanished; the viscous surface became a mirror reflecting the slow-crawling comet.
Silence.
Deeper and more terrible than ever.
Wind died, the lake stilled, even Corleone's mad laughter caught in his throat.
The world seemed paused, only the comet's chill light raining down.
The triumph on Corleone's face froze into bewilderment.
He hung there, motionless, a grotesque stone carving.
"What… happened?" he croaked. "The rite… failed? No… impossible! I felt… that power…"
Panic flickered in his eyes, then was swallowed by deeper obsession.
"Yes… too long asleep… more offerings needed! More blood!"
He whipped his head around, eyes blazing with mad fire, sweeping over the Ironborn bound to stone pillars and Henry held by guards.
Blood... it needs more blood...!!!
The instant his roar rang out—
BOOM————————!!!!!!
It was no drumbeat.
It was the thunder of heaven and earth splitting apart!
Below the platform, the center of the mirror-smooth Blood Lake, only just calmed, erupted.
An invisible sun seemed to detonate in its deepest depths, hurling an unimaginable mass of crimson water sky-high, forming a monstrous blood-wave over a thousand feet across that linked lake and sky.
The blood column shot upward, swallowing the red comet's light in an instant, carrying an aura of utter ruin.
The entire Blood Lake convulsed and began to collapse.
Rocks at the platform's edge cracked and tumbled.
The pillars binding the Ironborn groaned; two nearest the rim snapped, plunging their helpless captives—still without time to scream—into the churning crimson sea, gone in a blink.
Corleone was flung skyward by the blast, crashed in the platform's center, blood leaking from nose and mouth, yet he clawed upright, a sick joy lighting his face: "It's here! He's here!"
Henry and the rest were thrown off balance; guards staggered, barely holding their line.
Every eye stared, wide with terror and awe, at the apex of the rising blood pillar.
Blood rained like a crimson storm.
And through the fading curtain, a shadow vast beyond imagination slowly appeared.
It was no creature.
It was the ultimate blasphemy against life, order, and existence itself.
Its body seemed forged from thousands of twisted, shrieking souls, mottled in rotting scarlet and ashen decay.
No intact flesh existed—only writhing, splitting, putrid tissue and mountain-sized black bones.
Those bones were caked with clotted, dark scabs and a reeking black slime.
Its wings—if they could be called that—were tattered membranes of hatred and death, shedding black ash with every flutter.
A single idle beat birthed hurricanes reeking of carrion and brimstone.
Most horrifying was its head.
No eyes—only two colossal sockets burning with cold, ghost-green flame.
Its maw opened to reveal rows of crooked, broken fangs; where a tongue should be, a dark vortex of tormented faces churned.
Dead Dragon.
The primordial dragon of Torregar described in the frescoes—The Seafarer!
Dragged from eternal death by a blasphemous rite and a sea of blood.
Light dimmed around it, sound was swallowed, even time seemed to thicken and warp.
It had not returned; it was an invasion of the world of the living, a walking cataclysm.
"It worked... I did it!" Corleone staggered upright, cheeks flushed with terror and rapture.
He flung his arms wide, shrieking skyward, voice cracking in a sobbing tremor: "Look at me! Look at me! I am Corleone!"
"Last blood of Torregar! I woke you! Me! By the ancient pact—"
"I... I shall ride you—!!!"
What he hurled was no command but a madman's wish, a desperate thirst for power.
As if answering the insect's cry, the abomination slowly turned its sockets of pale green flame toward the platform.
No pupils, no focus.
Yet all felt a freezing, deathly, hate-filled gaze sweep over them.
Then the beast opened that abyssal maw woven from countless anguished faces.
No sound came.
But a silent, soul-rending roar surged like a tsunami through the space!
"ROAAAR—!"
Guards and Ironborn near the edge had no time to scream.
Invisible hammers smashed them—eyes burst, blood gushed from every orifice, bodies collapsing like rag dolls, life snuffed in an instant.
Their souls seemed torn out and ground to dust.
Henry, Carl, and other survivors, farther away, felt skulls pierced by a thousand needles, ears ringing, knees buckling.
And this was only the beginning.
Dead Dragon appeared enraged by the puny, arrogant call.
The dark vortex in its gullet spun faster; a speck of ghost-green light condensed, then burst into a breath of annihilation—like a broken dam of the Styx, boiling lava mixed with wailing souls—pouring straight at Corleone and the platform.
Where the breath passed, air ignited with a charnel reek, space rippling ominously.
Dragon-flame—a profane torrent of death and resentment, the flood that devours life.
The rapture on Corleone's face froze, replaced by incomprehensible horror and the shattering of his dream.
"No—! I am your—" His scream was swallowed by the roar of the breath and the shrieks of the dead.
Ruin descended.
Ãdvåñçé çhàptêr àvàilàble óñ pàtreøn luffy1898