Divine Realm Calamity Begins I

The sky of the Divine Realm split open.

The crack spread from the deepest reaches of the Divine Realm Prison, dark-gold light crawling across the Divine Realm's barrier like veins. With every pulse, the entire Divine Realm shuddered. This was no ordinary energy leak, but contamination at the level of laws—the Golden Dragon King's power was rewriting the underlying rules of the surrounding space.

Huo Yuhao stood atop the dome of the Emotion Temple, his Spirit Eyes fully open, countless streams of data reflected in the depths of his pupils. He analyzed, calculated, searched for the weak point in this disaster. But the results made even his godhood run cold—the level of power displayed by the Golden Dragon King far exceeded any recorded rampage in history.

"All Second-Level Gods, withdraw three million divine miles from the prison zone!" Poseidon Tang San's voice resounded through every corner of the Divine Realm via the Divine Realm Core. "First-Level Gods, construct the Immortal Bastion defensive formation! This time... it's different."

Before his words had faded, the prison exploded.

No, it was not an explosion, but a quieter kind of collapse. Nine thousand nine hundred Divine Punishment Chains shattered at once. Their fragments did not scatter, but floated in the air before turning in perfect unison, their pointed ends aimed at the enormous figure slowly rising at the center of the seal. The next instant, every fragment became a dark-gold torrent and was absorbed into the Golden Dragon King's regrowing scales.

It was absorbing the seal.

"Interesting." A voice rang directly within the consciousness of every god, hoarse and deep, carrying the layered resonance unique to dragons. "After ten thousand years, you still only know these same old tricks."

The Golden Dragon King fully stretched out its body.

It was three times larger than it had been ten thousand years ago. Every dragon scale was as thick and heavy as a shield, crimson patterns flowing along their edges like lava. Most terrifying were its eyes—its left pupil burned with pure golden flames of destruction, while its right was an icy-blue expanse of clear reason. Madness and rationality, two contradictory traits, coexisted perfectly within the same being.

"Welcome to... my new era." The Golden Dragon King raised its right foreclaw and lightly clenched it toward the void.

A thousand miles away, three divine surveillance towers guarded by First-Level Gods shattered simultaneously. They had not been attacked; rather, the material laws forming the towers had been temporarily rewritten—the property of solidity had been replaced with "fragility," and stable structures had been exchanged for "disorder." The towers collapsed like sandcastles, and the gods guarding them were buried beneath the ruins before they could even react.

"Law rewriting..." The God of Destruction appeared above the battlefield, violet-black divine lightning of destruction coiling around him. "You've actually mastered power of this level?"

"Mastered?" The Golden Dragon King let out a low laugh, filled with mockery. "Destruction, you are still as arrogant as ever. This is not 'mastery.' It is 'reclaiming'—reclaiming everything the Dragon God should have possessed in the first place."

It opened its jaws, not to breathe fire, but to speak.

Every word transformed into tangible dark-gold runes, arranging and combining in the air to form a complete declaration of laws:

"In the name of the Dragon God, I proclaim:

The space of this realm shall be under my command.

The matter of this realm shall be shaped at my will.

The laws of this realm shall obey my command.

Wherever dragon might reaches shall be my domain."

The instant the declaration was complete, the space within a radius of one hundred thousand divine miles around the Golden Dragon King began to "submit." The Divine Realm's inherent silver-white backdrop was covered by dark gold. The divine power in the air no longer obeyed the gods' command, instead flowing voluntarily toward the Golden Dragon King to replenish its expenditure.

It was establishing a divine kingdom—another divine kingdom within the Divine Realm itself.

"Stop it!" The Goddess of Life appeared beside the God of Destruction, emerald life light surging like a tide toward the Dark-Gold Domain, attempting to counter that deathly erosion with the laws of life.

The Golden Dragon King's response was to raise its left claw.

The life light suddenly froze a thousand miles away from it, then began to... flow backward. It was not pushed back, but reversed at the level of time—the stream of light retreated to its point of origin and reentered the Goddess of Life's palm, as if it had never been released.

"Time reversal?!" Huo Yuhao's Spirit Eyes caught that unbelievable sight. "That's impossible! Even at the Dragon God's peak, it never displayed authority over time!"

"That is why I said," the Golden Dragon King replied, turning its enormous head as its gaze swept over every God King present, "this is a new era."

It began to walk.

With every step it took, the Dark-Gold Domain expanded outward by a thousand miles. Wherever the domain passed, Divine Realm buildings were assimilated, divine plants withered and were reborn in twisted dark-gold forms, and even rivers of flowing divine power changed course toward it. It was not destroying the Divine Realm. It was "digesting" it.

Tang San finally made his move.

Poseidon's Trident tore through the sky. Its blue-gold radiance did not spread outward, but instead condensed inward without end, ultimately gathering into a single point at the trident's tip. Wherever that point of light passed, the Dark-Gold Domain's expansion stopped—not because it had been blocked, but because it had been "frozen." Tang San had invoked the authority of the Divine Realm Core, temporarily solidifying the laws of that region and making them reject all rewriting.

"Oh?" For the first time, the Golden Dragon King showed interest. "Using the Core's authority? Good. Let me see how much this generation's enforcer has improved."

It used no flashy technique, simply slapping its right claw toward the trident.

The instant claw and trident collided, no sound emerged.

Because the space at the point of impact shattered completely, forming an absolute vacuum sphere a hundred miles in diameter. Within the sphere, light twisted, time flowed abnormally, and even the most basic physical constants fluctuated violently. This was a direct clash between two supreme laws, a savage collision of authority against authority.

Three seconds later, the outcome emerged.

Tang San took three steps back, each step leaving spiderweb-like cracks across the Divine Realm's foundation.

The Golden Dragon King remained where it was, but a single dragon scale at the center of its right claw had developed a faint crack.

"Not bad." The Golden Dragon King looked at the crack on its claw, and there was even praise in its tone. "To wound one of my scales, you are far stronger than those trash from ten thousand years ago. Then... the warm-up is over."

Its aura changed.

If the Golden Dragon King had just been a volcano ready to erupt at any moment, then now it was the apocalyptic ash that blotted out the sky after the eruption. Dark-gold light seeped from every pore of its body, condensing in the air into hundreds of millions of runes. The runes spun, combined, and nested together, forming a three-dimensional formation that covered the entire battlefield.

The instant the formation was complete, every First-Level God and those below simultaneously felt their godhood being "suppressed." It was not a weakening of power, but a lowering of their very level of existence—as though before the Golden Dragon King, they were no longer eternal gods, merely somewhat stronger mortals.

"Godhood Suppression..." The God of Destruction's expression darkened completely. "It has developed the Dragon God's pressure to the level of laws."

"Not just that." Huo Yuhao's Spirit Eyes spun at high speed, analyzing the composition of those runes. "It is reconstructing the battlefield's fundamental rules—here, only 'dragon laws' take priority. All other laws must be downgraded and obey. The output efficiency of our divine power has dropped by at least forty percent."