[Last Episode: Fenris: We're done]
Chapter 138, Episode 138
『The Realm of Empire』
[The Realm of Empire did not sit inside any single universe]
『It existed as its own sovereign layer, threaded between the cosmological structures of a dozen adjacent multiverses, held together entirely by Siriusniyo's own authority』
『He had not been given this domain. He had carved it, personally, out of raw void-space in the ages following the Great Destruction, and every law that governed it — gravity, time, the very concept of a horizon — answered to him first and any deeper cosmic principle second』
『The Primordial Dragons who lived here were not ordinary dragons. They were the source-line — ancient, vast, each one carrying a fragment of the original conceptual fire the universe's very first stars had been forged from. Under lesser rulers, a population like this would have been ungovernable chaos』
[Under Siriusniyo, they were an empire]
[At the center of it, closest to his throne, stood Zeovar — a lightning dragon in human form, tall, sharp-featured, storm-grey eyes that crackled faintly even at rest, the single most trusted subordinate in the entire Realm]
[The Manipulator's Arrival]
[The moment The Manipulator crossed the boundary into the Realm, the air itself seemed to notice him]
[Dragons descended from every direction — dozens of them, then hundreds, forming a living wall between the newcomer and the distant silhouette of Siriusniyo's castle]
[The Manipulator smirked]
The Manipulator: Ah. The welcoming committee.
[A massive dragon at the front, scales the deep green of old copper, spoke first.]
[Vaelithar, Earth-Bound Ancient:]
Vaelithar: Intruder. State your business or be reduced to ash.
The Manipulator: Reduced to ash. Bold opener.
[Another, sleek and pale, wings folded tight with restrained tension, hissed a warning of her own.]
[Nyxandra, Frost-Wraith Dragon]
Nyxandra:You reek of another realm's authority. That is not welcome here uninvited.
The Manipulator: I've been invited plenty of times. Your lord just doesn't always remember to tell the staff.
[A third, squat and armored in living obsidian, growled low.]
[Grommash, Iron-Scale Warden]
Grommash: Enough talk. We don't need his permission to remove a threat.
The Manipulator: You really do, though.
[He didn't draw the One Wonder Sword. He didn't even fully raise his hand]
[A single, casual gesture — the same economy of motion he'd used against beings a thousand times more dangerous than any dragon in this courtyard — and Vaelithar, Nyxandra, Grommash, and every dragon behind them simply found themselves lying on the ground, stunned, unharmed, and thoroughly, completely beaten in the space of a breath]
[They were just overwhelming, absolute defeat, delivered with the specific mercy of someone who could have ended all of them and had deliberately chosen not to]
[The courtyard went dead silent]
[Siriusniyo's voice arrived a moment later, warm with genuine amusement, carrying from the castle steps]
Siriusniyo: You couldn't just knock.
The Manipulator: I did knock. Your guard dogs answered instead of you.
Siriusniyo: They're dragons, not dogs. They'll be very upset you called them that.
The Manipulator: They'll live. I made sure of it.
[Siriusniyo descended the steps, and as he approached, every fallen dragon in the courtyard stirred, rising, and — without needing to be told — bowed low, first toward their lord, then, more reluctantly, toward the being who had just handled all of them without breaking a sweat.]
[Zeovar, stepping forward from beside the throne, lightning crackling faintly along his shoulders]
Zeovar: My lord. This one—
Siriusniyo: Is an old friend, Zeovar. Stand down. All of you.
[The dragons obeyed instantly, the tension in the courtyard dissolving into curious, wary stillness.]
[Siriusniyo, grinning at The Manipulator]
The Manipulator: You've gotten sloppy in your restraint. That was practically gentle.
The Manipulator: I like your dragons. Didn't want to ruin the scenery.
[The Castle — Old Friends]
[Siriusniyo led him inside, past halls carved from something that looked like cooled magma, warm and glowing faint orange at the seams, and settled into a wide chair near a hearth that burned without fuel]
Siriusniyo: It's been a while.
The Manipulator: Since the war ended. Longer, if you count actual conversation instead of shouting across a battlefield.
Siriusniyo: Fair point.
[He poured something dark and smoking into two cups, handing one across.]
Siriusniyo: So. What brings you to the Realm of Empire? You don't visit without a reason.
The Manipulator: The Nexus.
[Siriusniyo's expression sobered instantly.]
Siriusniyo: Voriath's little parasite?.
The Manipulator: That's the one. I've been thinking about it since it withdrew. Something's been bothering me — the way Meltryllis described it. An entity, created, capable of granting that kind of power and corrupting the host on a delay. That's not an accident of nature. Someone built that. Deliberately.
Siriusniyo: You think you know who.
The Manipulator: I do now.
[Before he could say more, the temperature in the room shifted]
[Siriusniyo rose to his feet slowly, eyes narrowing toward the hall's entrance]
Siriusniyo: That's not one of mine... what kind of immense pressure is this...
[A figure stepped into the firelight — tall, unassuming at first glance, dressed simply, and yet every dragon within the castle's walls had gone utterly, reverently silent, as if some part of them recognized, on instinct, that whatever had just entered outranked everything they understood about hierarchy.]
Siriusniyo: Who is that??
[The Manipulator's expression had changed completely — the easy, casual confidence from moments ago replaced by something taut, careful, genuinely alarmed.]
The Manipulator: That's Michael..
Siriusniyo: You know him.
The Manipulator: I know of him. I've never actually stood in the same room as him before.
[Michael]
[Michael inclined his head, mild, almost courteous]
Michael: The Manipulator. And Siriusniyo. I wasn't expecting company, but I suppose that works in my favor.
Siriusniyo: You still haven't said who you are.
[The Manipulator, quietly, before Michael could answer:]
The Manipulator: He's the Creator. Of the Demon King hierarchy. All of it. Every Demon King that has ever existed, every generational line, every throne carved into the darkness since the concept was first given shape — it all traces back to him.
[Siriusniyo's eyes widened slightly.]
Siriusniyo: The origin. The one even Leo's ancient bloodline supposedly traces back to.
The Manipulator: The very same.
Michael: Flattering to be remembered so precisely. Though I should clarify — I didn't create Leo's bloodline directly. I set the framework. The original primordial core the boy carries predates even me, in truth. What I built came after — the structure, the hierarchy, the generals, the thrones. I gave demonkind its shape. I did not give it its first spark.
[He said it plainly, without pride, the specific matter-of-fact tone of someone stating a historical fact rather than boasting.]
[The Manipulator set his cup down, untouched now]
The Manipulator: And the Nexus.
Michael: Also mine.... The Nexus power isn't in my palms. It's user is yet unknown yet...
[Siriusniyo went very still.]
Siriusniyo: I treating I must say
Michael: Of course, There's a meaningful difference, though I understand why the distinction feels academic from where you were standing during the war.
The Manipulator: Why.
Michael: The Nexus does exactly what it's built to do. It grants power, and it reveals, slowly, exactly what kind of being is underneath the power once restraint is no longer an option. Voriath revealed quite a bit about himself before Leo and Isaac ended the experiment... The user of the nexus must have known by now to take his or her next step
Siriusniyo: So the Nexus is the real deal
Michael: I manipulated one variable inside a war that was already happening for reasons that had nothing to do with me. I'd hardly call myself responsible for the whole of it.... so the Nexus is a different reality
[The Manipulator's jaw tightened]
The Manipulator: Explain the hierarchy. All of it. Properly. If you're standing in front of us anyway.
[Michael considered the request for a moment, then, with the air of someone indulging a reasonable curiosity, nodded.]
Michael: Very well.
[The Manipulator, seeing Michael's willingness, took the explanation on himself instead — the specific instinct of someone who preferred to control the framing of dangerous information rather than let the source of it dictate the terms.]
The Manipulator: The hierarchy runs like this. At the absolute root sits the original primordial core — the first Demon King, the true father of it all, whose bloodline predates the current structure entirely. That's Leo's line, though Leo himself doesn't fully understand what that means yet, and I'd rather it stayed that way a while longer.
[Michael inclined his head slightly, neither confirming nor denying, content to let The Manipulator continue.]
The Manipulator: Beneath that original core, Michael built the actual functioning hierarchy — six original generals, carved from monarch essence, each one ruling a division of demonkind under a unified infernal throne. That structure splintered and multiplied over the ages into the current sprawl of Demon Kings across every corner of the cosmology — dozens of thrones, hundreds of generals, thousands of lesser demon nobility, all of it tracing lineage back through Michael's original design to the one true root.
Siriusniyo: And where does Michael himself sit in all that.
The Manipulator: Above it. He is the creator of Demon Kings. He doesn't rule a throne within the hierarchy — he built the hierarchy, and by extension, everything in it answers to him whether it knows his name or not.
[Michael offered a small, approving nod.]
Michael: Accurately summarized. I'm impressed you've kept track this well.
The Manipulator: I make it my business to know what's above me in a room.
[Siriusniyo studied Michael carefully, his earlier hospitality replaced by something far more guarded]
Siriusniyo: What about your world??
Michael: The Wrath of End World. My own domain, built the same way Siriusniyo built this one — carved from raw void, shaped entirely under my own authority. I have a subordinate there. Shura. You'd find him interesting, I suspect — an extremely overpowered Demon King, one of the strongest I've personally cultivated, though even he sits several tiers beneath what I'm capable of myself.
The Manipulator: Why tell us this.
Michael: Because you were about to go looking for me anyway, once you'd finished piecing together the Nexus's origin.
[He looked between the two of them, unhurried, entirely at ease.]
Michael: Voriath was never the true threat in this cosmology. It's the user of the nexus power, it's ambitious, powerful, and deeply, personally motivated — but ultimately predictable, once you understood what he wanted.
Siriusniyo: That's not reassuring.
Michael: It wasn't meant to be. Merely accurate.
[The Manipulator's hand had drifted, almost unconsciously, toward the hilt of the One Wonder Sword]
The Manipulator: How can we find this nexus again??
Michael: currently right now i dont know, because hidden things eventually get found regardless, and Besides. I wanted to meet the being who talked down Voriath Luminael and lived to keep doing it. Leo Sebastián interests me a great deal, and anyone close to him is worth understanding properly.
[Siriusniyo's grip tightened on the arm of his chair.]
Siriusniyo: Stay away from him.
Michael: I make no promises about the future, Siriusniyo. Only about the present. For now, I've said what I came to say. We'll speak again — I imagine sooner than either of you would prefer.
[He turned, and the pressure that had settled over the castle since his arrival lifted the instant he stepped back through the entrance, the fire in the hearth flaring briefly before settling, the dragons throughout the halls exhaling as one.]
[The Manipulator and Siriusniyo sat in the sudden quiet, both of them processing exactly how much larger the board had just become.]
The Manipulator: Well.
Siriusniyo: Well.. Well.. another war is coming up....
The Manipulator: I suppose we should tell Leo.
Siriusniyo: Eventually. Not today. Let him have his month off first.
[The Manipulator, despite everything, let out a short, humorless laugh.]
The Manipulator: Fair enough...
[Meanwhile at th The Heaven of Origin — The Training Ground]
[Isaac stood at the center of the ring, Quinn beside him, both of them stripped down to bare focus — no fire, no dragon-forged techniques, nothing but stillness and the growing awareness of exactly how far out of their depth they'd walked]
Yuhwang: The First Sage asks nothing complicated. Stand still. Draw on nothing. Let the mind quiet itself until it stops wanting to move.
Isaac: That's it?
Yuhwang: That's it.
[Isaac nodded, settled his stance, and closed his eyes.]
[Thirty seconds in, his fingers twitched. A minute in, his jaw tightened. Two minutes in, his whole body was straining against the specific, maddening discomfort of doing absolutely nothing while every instinct he'd built across a war screamed at him to do something.]
[Isaac, through gritted teeth]
Issac: This is — harder than it has any right to be.
Yuhwang: Everyone says that.
[Quinn, beside him, hadn't moved either — arms folded, jaw set, entirely uninvited into this particular trial and yet standing there anyway, matching his stillness out of sheer stubbornness.]
Yuhwang: Your Grace. I told you this Sage isn't compatible with your bloodline.
Quinn: You told me the thirty-five aren't compatible with my bloodline. You didn't say I couldn't stand next to him while he tries.
[Yuhwang studied her for a moment, something unreadable in his ancient expression.]
Yuhwang: No. I suppose I didn't.
[Five minutes became ten. Ten became twenty. Isaac's stillness kept fracturing — a shift of weight, a twitch of the jaw, the specific restlessness of a body built for constant motion being asked to simply exist without purpose]
Yuhwang: You keep breaking.
Isaac: I keep noticing myself trying not to break, which is somehow worse than actually breaking.
Yuhwang: That's the First Sage teaching you something already. Most beings don't even notice the trying. You do. That's further than most arrive on their first attempt.
[Isaac exhaled slowly, some of the tension easing from his shoulders.]
Isaac: How did you master this, Your Majesty? All thirty-five, I mean. Not just this one.
[Yuhwang settled onto a low stone bench at the ring's edge, and for the first time since they'd arrived, allowed himself to look, briefly, tired — the specific weariness of someone remembering something very old.]
Yuhwang: I was not always the Jade Emperor. Before this throne existed in its current form, I was simply a cultivator — one among countless others, scattered across realms that hadn't yet organized themselves into anything resembling the structure you know now.
Isaac: What were you cultivating toward?
Yuhwang: Nothing, at first. Survival. The realms I came from were violent, chaotic, governed by whoever held the most raw force at any given moment. I watched entire lineages of cultivators rise and collapse because they mistook power for permanence. I decided, early, that I did not want power. I wanted order. Something that would still hold after I was gone.
Quinn: That's a very different goal from most people who chase strength.
Yuhwang: It is. And it is precisely why the throne eventually came to me instead of someone stronger. Strength alone cannot maintain order. Order requires patience, humility, and the willingness to be corrected by principles greater than yourself.
[He looked at his own hands, weathered despite their apparent agelessness.]
Yuhwang: I mastered the first five Sages over the course of forty years. The next ten took another sixty. By the time I reached the twentieth, I had already outlived every rival cultivator I'd once measured myself against, and I understood, finally, why the previous Jade Emperor had chosen the slow path rather than force it.
Isaac: How long did the last five take?
Yuhwang: Two hundred years. The final Sage alone took nearly as long as everything before it combined.
[Isaac's face went slightly pale.]
Isaac: And I have a month.
Yuhwang: You have a month, because your circumstances demand it, and because I believe — cautiously, that what took me centuries of scattered effort can be compressed for someone who arrives already carrying as much raw capability as you do. Compression is not the same as ease. It will simply be difficult in a shorter span rather than a longer one.
[Quinn's Defiance]
[Isaac returned to his stillness, and Yuhwang turned his attention fully to Quinn, his expression growing more serious]
Yuhwang: Your Grace. I want to be plain with you about something before you commit further to standing here.
Quinn: I'm listening, Your Majesty.
Yuhwang: Dragons are forbidden, by the oldest laws your own kind maintains, from mastering any ancient power structure outside your bloodline's natural inheritance.The distinction matters.
Quinn: I'm aware.
Yuhwang: Are you aware of why?
[Quinn was quiet for a moment.]
Yuhwang: Dragon blood carries its own accumulated weight — generations of inherited power, structured very specifically around your species' own natural laws. Introduce a foreign power system into that structure, and the two do not simply coexist. They compete. Your bloodline may reject the intrusion outright, which would be, relatively speaking, the fortunate outcome. Or it may attempt to integrate it, and in doing so, unmake the very inheritance that makes you what you are. Dragons who have attempted this in the past — and a few have, across the ages — did not survive it intact. Some lost their draconic nature entirely. Others lost considerably more.
[Quinn absorbed that in silence, and then, after a long moment, met his gaze steadily.]
Quinn: I don't care.
Yuhwang: You should.
Quinn: I've spent my entire life being told what a Queen of Dragons is allowed to want. What she's allowed to become. I've broken most of those rules already, quietly, in smaller ways nobody noticed. This is just a bigger version of the same thing. He's about to try to become something bigger than himself for the sake of people he loves. I'm not standing here to watch. I'm standing here to do the same thing, whatever it costs.
[Yuhwang studied her for a long, quiet moment — not the studying of judgment, but of genuine, careful reconsideration.]
Yuhwang: Your bloodline may not simply reject the Sages, Your Grace. It may fight you the entire way through. Every step further will be a battle against your own nature, not merely against the discipline itself.
Quinn: Then I'll fight it.
Yuhwang: You understand this could cost you your draconic form permanently. Your fire. Your flight. Everything that makes you, biologically, what you currently are.
Quinn: I understand.
Yuhwang: And still you want to proceed.
Quinn: Still.
[A long silence stretched between them, broken only by the faint, distant sound of wind moving through the golden gardens beyond the training ground.]
[Yuhwang, finally, quietly:]
Yuhwang: Then I will not forbid you from trying, though I cannot promise you the same guidance I give him. The Sages were never built with dragon blood in mind. Whatever path you carve through them will be your own, discovered rather than taught.
Quinn: That's all I'm asking for.
[The Thirty-Five Sages, Explained]
[Yuhwang rose again, gesturing toward the ring of thirty-five pillars surrounding them]
Yuhwang: Understand what you are actually attempting, both of you. The Sages are not simply techniques stacked atop one another. Each one represents a complete cosmic principle, refined by a being who dedicated the whole of their existence to it, and then folded permanently into this throne's inheritance.
[He gestured to the nearest pillar, etched with a symbol resembling still water.]
Yuhwang: The First — Stillness, which you're currently attempting. The Second — Patience, which tests whether you can want something and refuse to reach for it before its proper time. The Third — Compassion, which requires you to extend mercy to something that has genuinely wronged you, and mean it.
[He moved down the line, naming them in turn.]
Yuhwang: The Fourth, Discernment. The Fifth, Restraint — knowing the full weight of your strength and choosing, deliberately, not to use all of it. Beyond these five, the path grows considerably more demanding — Sages of Balance, of Sacrifice, of Judgment, of Renewal, of Silence, and onward, each building on the foundation the ones before it laid.
[Isaac, still holding his stillness, spoke without opening his eyes]
Issac: And the last few. The ones that took you two hundred years.
Yuhwang: The Thirty-Third Sage, Transcendence — learning to release attachment to your own individual existence without losing the will to protect what that existence was built to protect. The Thirty-Fourth, Unity — recognizing that every law you maintain serves beings who will never know your name, and finding that this is enough. And the Thirty-Fifth—
[He paused, and something in his ancient face grew, for just a moment, genuinely solemn.]
Yuhwang: The Thirty-Fifth Sage has no name that translates cleanly. The closest approximation is Origin — understanding, completely, that you are no longer separate from the cosmic order you maintain. That the throne and the being sitting in it become, at the end of the path, a single, indivisible thing.
[He looked between the two of them, Isaac still fighting his own restlessness, Quinn standing resolute beside him.]
Yuhwang: You will not reach the Thirty-Fifth in a month. I want you to understand that plainly, so neither of you mistakes partial progress for failure. What matters is how far the foundation holds, and whether what you build on it, however incomplete, is honest.
[Isaac, quietly, still not opening his eyes]
Issac: I understand, Your Majesty.
Quinn: So do I...
[Yuhwang nodded once, settled back onto the stone bench, and let the silence of the training ground stretch on — the First Sage's lesson continuing, patient and merciless, while somewhere beneath Quinn's steady stillness, her own bloodline had already, quietly, begun to notice the intrusion.]
To be continued...