The Imperial Marble Hall of Judgment was cold enough to freeze bone.
Chains hanging from the vaulted ceiling collided in the biting wind, let out a piercing, teeth-gritting clank.
Lu Cen hung suspended in the very center of the judgment pit, his wrists locked tight by dark, heavy cold-iron shackles. He kept his head lowered, lanky strands of hair obscuring his eyes. Only his bare torso was visible, gleaming with a sickly, pale coldness under the flickering torchlight.
Twelve floating judgment seats hovered around him like silent tombstones, sealing him within their core.
"Lu Cen, the final disgrace of your noble house."
A low voice descended from the highest seat, booming with the hum of amplification magic. Archmage Cedric sat shrouded in the shadows, his eyes the only thing visible—two shimmering orbs of violet light.
"By the sin of your congenitally sealed mana circuits, you have defiled the bloodline and dignity of this Empire."
"By the decree of the Lex Magica, you are hereby sentenced to the Thunder-Magnetic lash. Following your punishment, your surname shall be stripped, and you shall be exiled to the heavy water mines."
Lu Cen gave no response. Not even a finger twitched.
"Commence the sentence," Cedric commanded coldly.
The executioner brandished a long whip etched with intricate, glowing runes. Instantly, the air was saturated with the sharp, pungent sting of ozone.
Crack!
The first lash fell. The air was torn apart by an arc of electricity, trailing a brilliant spark of violet fire. The whip struck Lu Cen squarely across his back. The hall echoed not with the sound of tearing flesh, but with a dull thud—like a heavy sledgehammer striking a block of lead.
The watching nobles held their breath, waiting for a shrill scream of agony.
Instead, Lu Cen merely squared his shoulders. The wound on his back, which should have been a shredded mess of gore, did not leak a single drop of red blood.
[System Notification: High-level Lightning Magic impact detected.]
[Breaker System initiated. Commencing physical energy conversion.]
[Stamina Reserves +0.1%. Muscle Density +0.05.]
The corner of Lu Cen's mouth twitched. Hidden in the shadows where no one could see, he wore a smile of pure relief.
He had waited for this moment—waited ten long years.
In this world where magic was the ultimate law, his body was a parched black hole. To him, all magical damage was nothing more than a form of "hardcore nutritional supplement."
"Second lash!" the executioner roared. The whip blurred into a frenzy of motion, the lightning coiling around Lu Cen like a venomous serpent.
As the tempo of the whipping increased, Lu Cen's breathing grew steadier and more powerful. The temperature in the hall began to rise—a result of the high-frequency bio-thermal energy radiating from his vibrating skin. With every bolt of lightning that entered his body, his cells devoured the energy like parched earth drinking after a decade of drought.
Cedric sensed something was wrong. He leaned forward, his violet eyes locking onto Lu Cen's left index finger.
Wrapped around the finger bone was a scrap of coarse, blackened rawhide. Under the glare of the lightning, a faint, black ripple of "anti-shock" patterns seeped through the gaps in the leather. The patterns moved like liquid parasites, undulating beneath the skin in rhythm with his pulse.
That frequency... it's not the tremors of pain. He's absorbing the energy? Cedric's heart skipped a beat.
He immediately dismissed the absurd thought. Mortals had physical limits. Even an adult dragon wouldn't dare to swallow pure lightning elements of this magnitude directly.
"Increase the voltage!" Cedric's voice carried a hint of urgency he hadn't noticed himself.
The executioner hesitated for a moment before slamming the forbidden lever on the rack.
BOOM!
The entire hall was washed in a blinding glare of white light as the whip transformed into a massive, surging violet dragon. The air was ionized into a searing plasma. The brilliance was so intense it momentarily blinded everyone in the room.
This was power enough to incinerate a Third-Tier Mage into ash.
As the dust settled, shattered marble tiles rolled across the floor. Lu Cen was still standing.
His linen trousers were tattered, but his once-slender shoulders had perceptibly broadened. His skin took on an unnatural metallic sheen, every muscle line defined as if chiseled by the hand of a god.
"One hundred lashes," Lu Cen said, slowly lifting his head. His face was young, yet etched with a profound, weary stoicism. He looked directly up at the high-seated Cedric. His voice was hoarse, but it carried the resonant toll of a cathedral bell.
"Keep going. I can... take more."
He opened his mouth. A stray spark of electricity danced between his teeth before flickering out.
The sight sent a biological chill down the spines of every noble present. This man was truly treating the Empire's ultimate punishment as... a meal?
"Impossible! He is a confirmed Zero-Mage!" someone shrieked from the gallery. "He has no mana! How can his body withstand that pressure?"
Cedric's face turned deathly grim. He felt a sense of provocation unlike anything he had ever known.
"Executioner, do not hold back. Use 'Götterdämmerung' power levels."
"I want to see if his muscles can truly shatter the laws of magic."
By the two-hundredth lash, Lu Cen's knees were buried deep into the obsidian floor. The ground had spider-webbed outward from his position, shattering into a thousand cracks. The veins in his temples bulged, and his heartbeat was so loud it sounded like war drums thundering in the ears of the spectators.
[Warning: Stamina Reserves at 95%. Physical defense intensity is reaching the threshold for 'Thermodynamic Inversion'.]
[Internal evolution accelerating. Preparing to initiate 'Biological Breakthrough'...]
Lu Cen felt his blood growing heavy, as if millions of tons of liquid mercury were rushing through his veins. The rawhide wrap on his left index finger began to emit wisps of white smoke—a result of the metallic anomaly beneath the skin overheating.
Underneath that leather, he no longer had a fingernail. In its place was a silver, needle-like spike etched with gear-like structures.
"Final lash!" the executioner screamed, throwing his entire weight into the strike.
The moment the Thunder-Magnetic whip touched Lu Cen's skin, it let out a sharp, crystalline crack.
It wasn't Lu Cen's bones that shattered. It was the priceless magical instrument of torture that disintegrated.
Lu Cen let out a low, guttural roar like a wild beast. He slammed his fists together, and the cold-iron shackles binding his wrists snapped instantly. The flying iron rings whistled through the air like bullets, embedding themselves half a meter deep into the distant stone pillars.
Lu Cen stood up.
He chanted no incantations. He simply stood there. Yet, the aether concentration in the room began to plummet vertically. He had become a physical "Anti-Magic Zone," causing the surrounding illumination arrays to flicker and die.
The hall fell into a deathly silence. Only the heavy, oppressive thud of Lu Cen's footsteps echoed through the dark.
Cedric's fingers instinctively gripped his armrests, his nails tearing through the expensive velvet.
"A three-thousand-gold whip... is worth very little, it seems."
Lu Cen walked to the front of the judgment seats, stopping beside a massive anti-magic pillar etched with the Imperial crest. He reached out with his rawhide-wrapped left index finger and pressed it gently against the stone.
This was a sacred relic of the Empire, used for a thousand years to test and suppress malevolent magic.
Crackle.
A tiny, microscopic fissure appeared where his fingertip touched the stone. The crack spread with lightning speed, spider-webbing across the entire pillar. Before the horrified eyes of the assembly, the symbol of Imperial majesty crumbled into a pile of gray dust.
Lu Cen didn't look back. He simply picked up a stray shard of stone from the ground.
"Archmage Cedric," he said, looking up into the shadows. "This pillar was too light. Not enough to train my strength."
Cedric's pupils dilated violently. He suddenly realized that he wasn't exiling a piece of trash.
He was exiling a monster that would trample the old world into the dirt.
"Execute the exile order immediately!" Cedric stood up abruptly. "Take him to the heavy water mines! Now!"
He didn't dare let this man stay in the capital for another second.
Lu Cen smiled, turned with lingering arcs of electricity dancing on his skin, and walked toward the great doors and the swirling snowstorm outside.
But the moment he left, the puddle of silver blood he had left on the floor began to pulse. As if it had a life of its own, it slowly seeped into the foundations of the Hall of Judgment.
Deep beneath the hall, a mechanical resonance—something buried for two hundred years—groaned quietly into life.
Cedric looked down, but he saw only a void of darkness.
What exactly was hidden within that silver blood?