"Vanguard Conscription?" Warden Silas spat, his scarred face twisting in a mixture of disbelief and absolute rage. The dim, red emergency lights of the Tartarus Block cast long, demonic shadows across his heavy armor. "You are First-Years! You do not have the military authority to conscript a Level-5 Heretic from a maximum-security Imperial vault!"
Prince Zhao Long did not draw a weapon. He didn't need to. He simply stepped forward, his violet eyes locking onto the Warden with the crushing, absolute authority of the Imperial bloodline.
"The Vanguard Elite charter, drafted by the First Emperor, supersedes all Academy disciplinary protocols during a Level-Alpha planetary threat," Zhao Long recited, his voice dripping with aristocratic venom. "The Exarch-Kin are a Level-Alpha threat. By Imperial Law, Initiate Hart has the right to conscript any asset, living or dead, to ensure the survival of humanity."
Zhao Long leaned in close, the ambient heat of his dormant magma-veins warming the freezing air of the dungeon. "So I suggest you open that glass box, Silas. Unless you want me to formally charge you with treason against the Imperial Crown in front of the War Council tomorrow morning."
Silas's jaw clenched so hard his teeth audibly ground together. He looked from the Prince to Kai.
Kai Hart stood perfectly still, his hands resting easily at his sides. The terrifying, hyper-dense gravity of his Tier 3 spherical core was completely contained, yet the memory of the pressure still made the bedrock beneath Silas's boots ache. The Warden knew he had lost. If he fought them, he would die, and the Imperial Court would likely pin a medal on the boy who killed him.
"Break the seal," Silas barked at his heavily armed guards.
The Warden-Class guards lowered their repeating-crossbows and keyed the runic sequence into the master console. The massive, two-foot-thick transparent runic glass of Cell 404 let out a deafening hiss. A cloud of hyper-chilled, stale air poured out into the corridor as the wall slowly slid open.
Elias Thorne didn't move immediately.
The mad Array Master remained sitting cross-legged on the frosted floor, his single, bloodshot eye staring at the open doorway. For three years, that glass had been his entire universe. Now, there was nothing between him and the outside world.
"Get up, Elias," Kai commanded, stepping to the threshold of the cell.
Elias let out a raspy, broken giggle. He awkwardly climbed to his feet. Without the passive circulation of Qi, his physical body had severely atrophied. His muscles were practically non-existent under the heavy grey straitjacket, and his bones looked fragile enough to snap in a stiff breeze. But as he hobbled out of the cell, his remaining eye darted wildly, absorbing every microscopic detail of the corridor.
"The air..." Elias rasped, his chest heaving as he took a deep breath. "It tastes like rust and fear. Beautiful."
"Unbind him," Kai said, looking at Silas.
The Warden pulled a heavy iron key from his belt and unlocked the intricate, rune-carved buckles of the straitjacket. The heavy canvas fell to the floor. Elias rubbed his wrists, his pale, scarred hands trembling violently.
Anvil, the tiger-sized black-diamond Qilin-hound, stepped forward and sniffed the madman.
Elias didn't flinch. He dropped to his knees, his single eye widening in absolute, manic fascination as he stared at the beast's armor. "Absolute zero light refraction," Elias whispered, reaching a trembling finger toward the hound's snout. "A biological lattice structure that defies kinetic energy. You feed it star-iron, don't you? Oh, you magnificent, heavy thing."
Anvil let out a low rumble, surprisingly tolerant of the madman, and gave Elias's face a rough lick that smelled of molten metal.
"We are leaving," Kai stated, turning his back on the furious Warden. "Keep him in the center of the formation. His meridians are completely dried out. If a stray burst of Qi hits him, his heart will stop."
The Ascent
The ride up the main elevator was tense.
As the elevator cleared the suppression zones of the Tartarus Block, the ambient Qi of the Academy began to flood back into the car. For Squad 7, it felt like taking a deep breath of fresh air after drowning. But for Elias, it was a brutal shock to the system.
The madman collapsed against the metal wall, clutching his chest as the raw spiritual energy forced its way into his shriveled, atrophied meridians.
"Don't absorb it," Princess Yan warned sharply, her hands glowing with a soft, soothing green alchemical light. She pressed a hand to Elias's back, forcefully regulating his intake. "Your pathways are like dry, cracked clay. If you pull too much Qi, they will shatter."
"I... I can feel the rotation of the planet," Elias giggled, blood trickling from his nose. "I can feel the friction of the elevator cables against the air. It's so loud. Everything is so incredibly loud!"
"Focus on the math," Kai commanded, his voice cutting through the madman's sensory overload like a blade. "Focus on the geometry of the Star-Forge Dilation schematic."
Elias's trembling instantly stopped. The madness in his eye receded, replaced once again by that terrifying, hyper-focused intellect. He began to trace invisible lines in the air with his dirty fingernails, muttering complex spatial equations under his breath.
When the elevator doors finally opened in the eastern wing of the Faculty Spire, Squad 7 swiftly escorted their new asset into the Vanguard Elite quarters, sealing the heavy oak doors behind them.
The Canvas
The sprawling suite was bathed in the warm, ambient light of high-tier gathering arrays.
Kai walked directly to the star-iron table in the center of the common room. "Bring it," he ordered Robert.
Robert Vance carefully stepped forward and placed the heavy, lead-lined containment box onto the table. He inputted the security code, and the heavy lid hissed open.
A mesmerizing, ethereal green glow instantly illuminated the room. Inside rested ten pounds of flawless Temporal Jadeite. Even raw and uncarved, the mineral actively warped the air around it. Dust motes floating above the box seemed to freeze in mid-air, while others accelerated, zipping around like panicked insects.
Elias Thorne stopped breathing.
The madman slowly walked toward the table, completely ignoring the rest of the heavily armed squad. He stared down at the glowing green stone, tears welling in his single, bloodshot eye.
"I have dreamed of this," Elias whispered, his voice trembling with profound reverence. "To touch the frozen blood of time itself. The Imperial Guilds hoard this to preserve their petty elixirs, completely blind to the fact that it is the canvas of the gods."
Kai stepped up beside the array master. He reached into his spatial inventory and pulled out a heavy leather roll. He unrolled it on the table, revealing a set of flawlessly forged, pitch-black carving tools. They were made of hyper-dense dark meteor steel—the same material as the Sovereign's Edge.
"These tools will not break under the friction of spatial carving," Kai said. "The blueprint is in your mind. The canvas is on the table. How long?"
Elias picked up a heavy, curved carving chisel. The moment the dark steel touched his hand, his posture completely changed. The hunched, twitching madman vanished. In his place stood a master artisan, his hands perfectly steady, his remaining eye narrowed with absolute, surgical precision.
"To carve the primary dilation lattice and embed the Jadeite nodes into the bedrock of this room?" Elias calculated, his voice completely level. "Three days. But without the Tier 3 Spatial Core to act as the central anchor, the array will be incomplete. It will be a hungry, open circuit."
"Three days is acceptable," Kai said. "The Dean will not be back by then anyway."
"Clear the room," Elias suddenly barked, his authority absolute in the presence of his craft. "Move the furniture. Rip up the carpets. I need bare stone. And stay out of the perimeter! When I start cutting the Jadeite, the localized temporal friction will cause extreme chronological anomalies. If you step too close, your left leg might age thirty years in ten seconds."
Sparks of Time
For the next seventy-two hours, the Vanguard quarters became a terrifying, highly volatile construction zone.
Kai ordered the squad to confine themselves to the outer perimeter of the suite. Princess Yan barricaded herself in her alchemical lab, furiously brewing stabilizing elixirs to keep Elias's fragile heart beating. Prince Zhao Long and Robert meditated near the windows, watching the madman work with morbid fascination.
Elias was a force of nature.
He didn't sleep. He barely drank the nutrient-rich elixirs Yan left at the edge of his workspace. He moved across the massive, sunken combat ring in the center of the room with a piece of Temporal Jadeite in one hand and a meteor-steel chisel in the other.
With every strike of his hammer, a blinding spark of green light erupted.
These were not normal sparks. They were fragments of displaced time. When a spark hit the stone floor, the rock in that specific centimeter instantly weathered, looking as if a thousand years of wind and rain had eroded it. When a spark floated up and hit a wooden chair near the edge of the ring, the wood rapidly decayed, collapsing into a pile of grey dust.
[Warning: Extreme Temporal Volatility Detected.]
[Localized chronological distortion is increasing by 400%.]
Kai sat cross-legged at the absolute edge of the danger zone, his molten-gold eyes tracking every single rune Elias carved.
Kai's Celestial Marrow Ignition was running at full capacity, his perfect spherical core processing the massive influx of ambient Qi. He wasn't just watching Elias; he was using the Transmigrator System to memorize the stroke order, the depth of the cuts, and the specific angles required to bend spatial-temporal laws.
"The nodes... they must bleed into one another," Elias muttered to himself, his hands moving in a blur as he carved a massive, ten-pointed star into the bedrock, embedding small chunks of the glowing green Jadeite at each point. "If the flow of seconds is bottlenecked, the pressure will rupture the anchor. It must flow like water."
By the end of the third day, Elias looked like a walking corpse. His white hair was falling out in clumps. The skin around his right eye was deeply bruised, and blood was continuously leaking from his nose, painting his chin crimson. The sheer mental toll of holding the complex, multi-dimensional array in his mind was actively destroying his brain.
Clink.
Elias dropped the carving chisel. It hit the floor and shattered into dust—the meteor steel had finally succumbed to the temporal friction.
The madman collapsed backward, lying spread-eagle on the floor.
"It is done," Elias wheezed, staring up at the ceiling.
The Open Circuit
Kai stood up and cautiously walked to the edge of the carved perimeter.
The center of the Vanguard suite was completely transformed. A massive, incredibly complex geometric array, thirty feet in diameter, was carved deeply into the stone. The lines were filled with crushed Temporal Jadeite, glowing with a pulsing, hypnotic green light.
It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
But in the absolute dead center of the massive ten-pointed star, there was a perfectly circular, empty indentation.
"The anchor point," Kai murmured, feeling the intense, vacuum-like pull radiating from the empty hole.
"It is starving," Elias giggled weakly from the floor, coughing up a spatter of blood. "The array is perfectly balanced, but it has no heart. If you activate it now, without the Tier 3 Spatial Core to regulate the temporal flow, the chamber won't dilate time. It will just instantly age everything inside this room to dust. It will kill us all in a microsecond."
[System Alert: Blueprint Construction Halted.]
[Star-Forge Dilation Chamber is at 85% Completion.]
[Missing Component: Tier 3 Spatial-Attribute Beast Core.]
[Warning: Array is highly volatile. Do not attempt manual Qi insertion.]
Kai looked down at the empty center. They had achieved the impossible. They had bought the materials, extracted the architect, and carved the array. They had built the gun.
Now, they just needed the bullet.
"You did well, Elias," Kai said, his voice calm and validating. "Yan, get him to a medical cot and put him in a forced sleep-coma. If he stays awake, his brain will hemorrhage."
As Princess Yan carefully pulled the exhausted, giggling madman out of the array zone, Kai looked toward the window.
The sky over Sky City was dark, filled with the glittering lights of the bastions.
We did our part, Dean, Kai thought, feeling the immense gravity of the ticking clock pressing down on his shoulders. 516 days left. Where is the core?