Chapter 135 Invitations Must Be Written in Blood

London. The Royal Opera House.

The backstage dressing room was so lavish it bordered on decadent, yet the air was colder than an ice cellar.

The velvet sofa, gilded mirrors, and expensive bottle of champagne on the table did nothing to dispel the bone-deep despair.

"Sign it, Sebastian." His agent, a man named Marcus, wore an oily, insincere smile.

He tapped an ancient parchment contract with a fingertip. The ink seemed to writhe faintly, like a living thing. "Think about it. After tonight, all of Europe will be wild about you. Your voice will become a legend."

Sebastian, a gifted but unlucky opera singer, stared at his hands in terror.

Moments earlier, he had merely tried humming part of an aria. Countless blood-red lines, each fine as a hair, had appeared in the air around him, forming a net that slowly tightened.

Worse still, his voice was slipping out of his control.

His high notes, once clear, ringing, and almost sacred, now held a strange distortion and allure. It was like a demonic voice from Hell, capable of stirring the deepest desires in anyone's heart.

"My voice... What's happened to my voice?!" Trembling, he looked at the contract on the table, one corner of which had burned away on its own. That was the first agreement he had signed, drunk, a week earlier.

Now he understood. It had never been a performance contract.

Marcus sneered, baring the fangs of his greed. "Your voice has caught the attention of someone important. He's willing to pay three million pounds for every song you sing after tonight. As for your soul... Heh. What do you think that's worth?"

He pushed the second contract toward Sebastian. The pen was already waiting.

The evil radiating from that contract sent the temperature of the entire room plunging several degrees.

"No... No!" Sebastian backed away in despair.

"You don't have a choice."

Invisible chains seemed to reach out from the shadows in the room's four corners. They instantly wound around Sebastian's limbs, pinning him to the chair.

An irresistible force was making his hand reach for the pen.

Just as its tip was about to touch the paper—

Creak—

An invisible force slowly pushed the dressing-room door open.

There was no crash, no dramatic entrance.

A tall, slender man in a long black coat quietly walked in.

His face was pale and handsome. In his deep eyes, an age-old night seemed to have settled.

Gideon.

He did not so much as glance at Marcus or Sebastian. He simply walked to the center of the room and stopped.

In an instant, the rules governing the entire space seemed to sink into a mire.

The writhing ink on the parchment contract froze. The blood-red threads drifting through the air went rigid. Even the savage smile on Marcus's face seemed to pause.

Every trace of magical energy bound to infernal contracts grew sluggish and heavy, as though crushed beneath ten thousand meters of seawater.

"Who... Who are you?!" Marcus discovered, to his utter horror, that he could not summon the slightest trace of magic.

He felt like an ordinary person thrown into a vacuum. Everything around him was rejecting him, suppressing him!

Gideon did not answer.

Still bound by the invisible chains, Sebastian was engulfed by that overwhelming presence, cold and majestic. Driven by the most primal instinct of fear, he summoned every ounce of strength and forced a heart-wrenching, high-pitched aria from deep in his throat!

Within the despair of his song lingered one last plea to the sacred.

Hummm!

These were no ordinary sound waves. Under the distorting influence of the magic, they accidentally reached a highly unusual frequency.

That frequency happened to resonate faintly with the "authority over contracts" inside Gideon, now undergoing a fundamental change after being tainted by the abyssal chains!

Deep in Gideon's eyes, a strand of black flame finer than a hair flashed and vanished.

In an instant, his body and Sebastian's song became conduits for a brief, invisible channel of resonance, forcibly brought into being!

Through that channel, Gideon's consciousness pierced layer after layer of magical disguise like an unstoppable blade. He glimpsed the contract's source: in a secret room far away, an intermediary sorcerer held a crystal ball, remotely controlling the signing ritual.

In the deeper darkness behind the sorcerer, a will named Molo Van watched it all with cold indifference.

Found you.

Without the slightest hesitation, Gideon sent a nearly imperceptible thread of Silent Flame through the channel of resonance and into Sebastian's song.

The aria's melody did not change. Its core, however, had been completely rewritten!

The ringing voice seemed to acquire the essence of judgment and incineration. It became an invisible fire of cleansing that swept through the entire room!

"No!" Marcus let out a piercing scream.

Before him, the evil parchment contract and the pen were instantly "ignited" by the song!

But this was no mortal fire. It was the pure annihilation of rules!

The entire contract vanished from the air, vaporized and erased without so much as a trace of ash!

At almost the same moment, the intermediary sorcerer in the secret room across London spat out a mouthful of black blood. With a sharp crack, a web of fractures spread over the crystal ball in his hands.

Bang!

The dressing-room door burst open again. Constantine rushed in with a cigarette in his mouth. He stared at the lingering energy in the air, his brow tightly furrowed, oblivious to the ash falling onto his coat.

"You lunatic... You actually did it." He approached the empty table, pinched a wisp of air between his fingers, and brought it to his nose. Disbelief covered his face. "You made the 'law of cost' stop working here for a moment! That's not fucking breaking it. That's... rewriting it! You changed the underlying code of this place!"

Gideon slowly turned to the glittering nighttime view of the Thames beyond the window, his voice as indifferent as ice.

"When a judge comes to understand the relationship between sin and punishment anew," he said softly, "the old laws must learn to bow."

From the inner pocket of his coat, he took the still-warm crystal formed from Mary's final wax "tear."

As Constantine and Sebastian—newly freed and collapsed on the floor—watched, Gideon raised the crystal beside the window and flicked his finger.

The wax-tear crystal crumbled to powder at his fingertips. Night wind swept in through the window, scattering it among London's countless lights.

It was a declaration.

"Tell Molo." Gideon's voice dispersed with the drifting powder. "The next time we meet, I will no longer be a name you chose—"

"I will be the one rewriting the list."

At Court of Shadows headquarters, torrents of data raced across the holographic screens at unprecedented speed.

"Sir! Emergency alert!" Sam Reed's voice held a trace of irrepressible excitement and shock. He forced his way into several global supernatural-incident reporting systems. "Three minutes ago, at Arkham Asylum, three patients with severe delusions woke from nightmares at exactly the same time. They're all screaming that they dreamed of 'a judge in black robes tearing up Hell's ledger'!"

"There's more!" He switched the display. "At a century-old church in central Metropolis, the holy water in the font suddenly boiled for three minutes, and it still hasn't settled! The Amazon sentries on Themyscira have also sent an encrypted message. The temple's prophetic mirror, the one they use to observe the future... has cracked!"

Morris emerged from the shadows. On the main screen's enormous world heat map, a small red patch marking "disturbances in contractual rules" was spreading slowly from London across the globe, like a virus.

His voice was graver than ever. "Sir, the chain reaction has exceeded our projections. Can we... can we really still control this?"

Gideon stood before the enormous heat map, his expression unchanged.

He watched the spreading red, countless moving streams of data reflected in his deep eyes.

"We don't need to control it."

He extended the hand with the black fissure in its palm and lightly touched the center of the heat map.

"We only need to guide them," he said, his voice cold, clear, and filled with unquestionable authority. "All toward the same destination."

Late at night, on the shore of the North Sea.

Fierce wind drove icy seawater against jagged black cliffs with a deafening roar.

Gideon stood alone at the highest point, his coat snapping in the wind.

In his hand was the old, rust-covered iron key he had received from Albert, the elderly cemetery keeper.

He did not put it into a lock. He thrust it straight into the empty air before him.

Hummm—

Space rippled like water. The key seemed to have touched an invisible door.

As he slowly turned it, an ancient bridge of pure blue light began to emerge, bit by bit, from the churning sea mist. It crossed the raging waves toward the dark depths where the forgotten ruins of the sunken monastery lay.

He looked back one last time at the figure smoking in the nearby shadows.

"If you don't come, I'll assume you're afraid."

Constantine rolled his eyes, flicked his cigarette into the abyss below, and took another from his crumpled pack to light it.

"I'm just afraid you'll clean Hell out too thoroughly." He took a deep drag. The smoke ring he exhaled was instantly torn apart by the gale. "Then there'll be nobody left to play cards with."

Before he had finished speaking, he was already beside Gideon.

In silence, the two stepped onto the blue bridge of light, one ahead of the other.

Behind them, the clamor of Gotham and London was cut off completely. Only endless waves and howling wind remained.

Beneath their feet, in depths no mortal could see, the ancient stele bearing the original canon of infernal contracts slowly awakened as the bridge appeared.

At its summit, the blank space awaiting the name of the highest seat's occupant began to seep shocking, blood-red writing, stroke by stroke—

Gideon.