We eventually reached the deepest part of the castle.
At the end of a long, polished hallway stood a pair of enormous doors made of dark, metallic stone. They were covered in carvings that shimmered faintly under the ambient Spatial Energy coursing through the castle. But it wasn't the doors that caught my attention first.
It was the walls leading up to them.
Statues lined both sides of the corridor, made out of crystalline material. Each statue depicted beings I didn't recognize. Some had elongated limbs, others wore elaborate robes etched with symbols that seemed to shift if I stared too long and others were about too complicated to explain.
Between the statues, entire sections of the walls were filled with engraved text arranged in vertical columns. The script looked ancient and completely alien to me.
I've studied a lot of ancient languages during my time in Richinaria, even obscure dialects and fragmented pre-cataclysmic scripts had at least looked vaguely familiar. But this was nothing like anything I had ever seen.
I leaned slightly closer to Veneri, lowering my voice.
"Can you ask Nari what language that is?"
He didn't react but I knew he heard me. Since I existed as a digital ghost bound to him, only he could perceive me and relay my questions to others.
A second later, he spoke casually, as if the question had just come to him.
"What's written on the walls?"
"You noticed it already? That's actually the main reason I brought you here."
So she didn't understand it either, huh? Or at least, she needed Veneri to look at it.
Before either of them could elaborate, the massive throne room doors began to open. The Divine Rank guards stationed on either side pushed them inward.
I couldn't help the thought that Richinaria's throne room looked almost plain in comparison.
This room was perfectly symmetrical. The floor was a smooth design of dark stone. The ceiling was supported by floating segments of stone that hovered in place.
At the far end of the room stood two thrones instead of one, both carved from a shimmering white crystal. It felt less like a throne room and more like a sacred chamber.
"We didn't build this, by the way. We found it like this."
That only made it confusing. Someone built a throne room of this scale and complexity inside the Hidden Citadel long before Starisnova had taken over this location. And judging by the unfamiliar language outside, it hadn't been made by any civilization I knew.
As we approached the thrones, two figures rose from their seats.
The man was tall and pale with long silver hair tied loosely behind his back. His eyes were a cold, piercing blue that immediately reminded me of Nari's, though his expression was softer. Beside him stood a woman with similarly pale skin and long blonde hair. Her presence felt calmer but no less powerful.
"Welcome back, Narisva. And… is that who I think it is?"
Nari stopped a few steps in front of them. "Yes. Meriz, Quasa, this is Vastarael."
So this was them.
Meriz is Nari's half-brother, sharing the same father. The only reason he was alive was because she had spared him and his wife when she annihilated the other half-Celestials of Starisnova at the age of eighteen. Instead of taking the throne herself, she had left them to rule as the last surviving half-Celestials of their line.
Meriz's eyes widened as he studied Veneri.
"I have to admit, I didn't expect to see the Monarch of Richinaria in Frostdeath. Especially not during this time."
Veneri gave a small, polite smile. "I have my ways."
"He'll be staying here for a while."
From Nari's perspective, that made perfect sense. She had no idea about the Timeskipping Event and about our mission. To her, this was just him showing up out of nowhere to visit.
"Still as vague as ever," Quasa said lightly as she looked at Veneri. "It's been a long time."
"It has. Last time I saw you was when I came to deliver an invitation to your Dynasty."
That memory hit me like a punch.
Back then, before the Second Epoch Cycle had begun, Veneri had personally gone to multiple Dynasties to deliver formal invitations and proposals for the Dynasty Meeting and not a single one of them had allowed him to step inside their headquarters. They had treated him like a potential threat whose presence near their core territories was unacceptable.
They had sent messengers instead, refusing to meet him face-to-face. The thought still made my chest burn with anger.
Meriz seemed to remember it too, because his expression slightly changed.
"About that, I owe you an apology. We were… overly cautious."
Nari snorted. "Overly cautious? You didn't even let him within a kilometer of the Dynasty."
"It was a tense period."
"It was rude and pointless. He came with a diplomatic invitation, not an army."
"It's in the past, Nari. I didn't take it personally so no need to revive past memories okay?"
Well I did. But of course, he would say something like that.
Nari shook her head.
"Apologies now don't change what you did. Anyway, we have bigger problems. The K-Virus has already spread through the frost city."
Both Meriz and Quasa were stunned.
"How bad?" Quasa asked quietly.
"Over thirteen thousand infected. Veneri scanned the entire city and marked them. We have about five to ten hours before they begin turning into Sunderer Rank Krepsunas."
The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating.
"Then there's no choice."
"I'll be issuing orders for the Divines to begin eradication protocols soon, Quasa."
Meriz turned to Veneri and slightly bowed his head.
"Thank you for your assistance. Without you, we would have been blind to the full extent of the spread."
"It's not a problem. It was the most efficient option."
Quasa let out a slow breath, then faced towering architecture of the hall.
"Well, since that's settled for now, we should talk about the throne room."
Nari's shoulders slumped slightly as she let out a long, tired sigh.
"Yeah. We need to figure this out. This place doesn't match any known construction style. And those inscriptions outside? None of our scholars can read them. But before we get into what we've discovered, Veneri should explain something to you first."
All eyes turned to him. Veneri rubbed the back of his neck slightly, like he wasn't thrilled about being put on the spot, but he still spoke.
"The Hidden Citadel was created by my grandfather."
Meriz blinked. Quasa's expression went completely still.
What followed was Veneri explaining everything he knew about the Hidden Citadel. I heard this explanation before, so in my head it felt like a summary of something familiar, but for Meriz and Quasa, it was clearly new information. From my perspective, he explained it in simple, straightforward terms. Since Nari had already known this, his words weren't for her. They were for her half-brother and his wife, to give them a clearer picture of where they were actually standing and why this place existed in the first place.
Once he finished, the throne room fell quiet again.
"I see. By the way, this entire realm, Convergence, is essentially a training ground?"
"Was," Nari corrected Quasa. "According to the records we found."
She turned at one of the side pillars, where several preserved documents were displayed behind it.
"The oldest texts we recovered were written in Spheran. They mentioned that this winter region used to be called Vienshternhein."
I repeated the name silently in my head. Vienshternhein.
"In Convergence," Nari continued, "there are four major regions, each based on a different climate. The realm was a military realm where people came to train. Vienshternhein is the winter zone. Zerzura is the desert region. Obnoveshad is the volcanic territory. And then there's Suluve, the infected lands."
Veneri's eyes narrowed slightly at that last one.
"Suluve wasn't always like that. It used to be a vast grassland. According to the records, it was considered the safest of the four regions. When the Krepsunas first breached this realm, they entered through Suluve. They wiped out everything there. The grasslands were turned into the most heavily infected wasteland in the entire Hidden Citadel."
She went on.
"Vienshternhein was attacked next. The inhabitants tried to defend it but they couldn't hold the line. They all died. The winter storms we see now came later. The climate shifted and buried most of the ruins under layers of ice and snow. Frostdeath is the only major city that survived in any recognizable form."
That part I already knew. What I hadn't fully grasped before was just how unnatural Frostdeath's current state was.
"It's strange, though," Quasa said, glancing around the throne room. "Out of every location in Vienshternhein, the damage is only external. The buildings look ruined from the outside, but when you go inside, everything is pristine..The interiors are untouched. It's as if the Krepsunas never stepped inside."
It was deeply unsettling when I thought about it. The outside of the city was cracked, buried and scarred by time and conflict, but the moment you crossed a threshold, it was like stepping into a preserved moment of the past.
"And they've been restored," Nari agreed. "Furniture, fabrics, even decorative objects are in perfect condition. It's like someone rewound time inside every building."
She glanced up at the twin thrones.
"The throne room is the worst example. It's too clean."
The two thrones stood side by side. There was nothing to indicate that thousands of years had passed since they were last used.
"They clearly belonged to a ruling pair," Meriz said. "A king and queen or maybe an emperor and empress tiled this realm. But we never found any bodies here."
Nari's lips pressed into a thin line.
"Our current theory is that they were turned into Krepsunas. That's why there are so many high-grade ones wandering the outskirts of this region."
That would explain why the throne room felt so empty despite being so meticulously preserved. Veneri, who had been quiet for a while, suddenly stepped away from us and walked toward one of the pillars near the right side of the hall. His gaze was onto a set of vertical engravings carved deep into the stone.
I followed him with my eyes as he leaned slightly closer. He went silent for a few seconds, scanning the characters.
Then he chuckled.
The sound was so out of place in the eerie stillness of the throne room that everyone turned toward him at once.
"You know what this is?"
"You can read it?"
"Yeah. I actually know the history of the people who built this place, Meriz."
"That's impossible. The language here is different from Spheran. Our scholars couldn't even identify its origin."
"That's because it's not from Spheraphase. It's from another world entirely. It's written top to bottom, right to left in columns. The characters are logographic, not phonetic."
He turned back toward us. A small, almost nostalgic smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
"It's Chinese. That means that Frostdeath was home of the Chinese."