Report
Alexander walked back into the sphere. The tiny leather bag, not one bit bigger than his fist, rested heavily in his right hand. He was still thoroughly dazed from the encounter. The Flaren prince was clearly a high-tier Royal Ranker; his armor felt like an ancient relic, and his voice carried the powerful force of nature. Yet, despite all the glory and world-shaping power he had just witnessed, Alexander felt a strange, unshakeable certainty.
He knew he would survive.
It wasn't a spark of arrogant confidence; it felt like a factual law of his reality. It was as if some unseen force or absolute concept would always step in to protect him. Was it the Emperor? No. It was something else—something just as ancient, deep, and primal.
Speaking of the Emperor, the Flaren prince seemed completely oblivious to Alexander's direct connection to the conceptual being.
"He didn't sense you, did he?" Alexander asked internally, his thoughts drifting toward his soul space.
'Yep. His Aura Beast wasn't aligned with my specific affinity, though it's an undeniably potent one,' the Emperor's voice echoed back, casual as ever. 'A conceptual being, most likely, albeit a minor one. Perhaps the Lord of Fire or the Lady of the Forest. Entities of that caliber are nowhere near sharp enough to detect my presence. Not while you're sitting at the Normal Rank, at least.'
"Why did you want me to take the Time Core so badly?" Alexander questioned, rolling the tiny pouch in his hand. "Is it really that much better than the Arcane one?"
'Because... it's fun,' the Emperor explained, his tone laced with a wicked amusement. 'Just look at it this way: you lay a localized time trap. A high-and-mighty Royal Ranker happens to fall into it. For you, it might only feel like a few months of waiting at the Normal Rank, but for the trapped Royal Ranker, those subjective moments would drain away his entire remaining lifespan. And poof! Suddenly, there comes ten free levels for you, and maybe even his entire soul space if he managed to cultivate one.'
Alexander raised a skeptical eyebrow. "I'm not entirely sure a seasoned Royal Ranker would just casually stumble into a trap commonly utilized by time affinity users."
'I am speaking of theoretical probability, boy, not immediate reality,' the Emperor retorted. Then, the ambient temperature inside Alexander's mind seemed to plummet as the being's voice turned deadly serious. 'Now, just for absolute clarification... never, under any circumstances, reach out to my church.'
"Why?" Alex asked, taken aback by the sudden shift in gravity.
'Why, you ask?' the Emperor spoke with a wave of pure, unfiltered disdain. 'Because they are nothing more than mindless, repetitive bastards. They waste away their entire mortal spans praying to an abstract concept, foolishly expecting me to grant them eternal immortality.'
"Can't you?" Alexander countered. "You are the literal manifestation of the concept of Mortality. By that logic, shouldn't you hold the absolute authority to decide who remains mortal and who becomes immortal?"
'Not really. The conceptual line dividing mortality and immortality is as vast as existence itself,' the being sighed, the weight of eons pressing behind the words. 'In truth, nothing is truly immortal. Divine Rankers can be killed, and so can the absolute Almighties. We conceptual beings possess a entirely different variation of immortality—one that is strictly linked to someone, somewhere, actively believing in our concept. Even if only a single sentient person in the cosmos holds knowledge of a concept, that corresponding being will continue to exist. But once time takes its toll... we will eventually be forgotten. We return to our hidden abodes to rest, waiting in the dark until someone inevitably rediscovers our concept again.'
"Enough of the heavy knowledge drop," Alexander interrupted, mentally raising a hand to halt the flow of cosmic philosophy. "I am pretty sure my brain won't remember anything you just said, except for the words 'immortality' and 'mortality' which you managed to repeat twice in every single sentence."
'Fair enough,' the being chuckled darkly, the connection beginning to recede. 'Just one small thing before I return to the depths of your soul space: you absolutely suck at fighting.'
Before Alexander could even formulate an insult, the telepathic link was cleanly severed.
Down below, Reina was staring fixedly at the fracturing world-tree. Her mind was a turbulent storm of anxiety and awe. She knew very little about the true background of Ketovan Motsari, but one definitive fact she had gathered was that the man had completely skipped the Soldier Rank entirely. His patron god had bestowed a rare knowledge and power blessing upon him—a miraculous event usually reserved exclusively for those who had already reached the Noble Rank.
The influx of divine power had been so immense that it violently compressed the ambient mana concentrated within the Church of Hegemon's holy compound, forcibly pushing Ketovan straight into the Commander Rank. And immediately following that ascension came his legendary kill against a Royal Ranker. He had systematically slaughtered a true apex entity while operating as an inexperienced, fresh Commander who was still actively trying to get a firm grip on his newly merged skill sets.
While the Motsari bloodline was world-famous for producing historical anomalies, Ketovan was something entirely... more interesting. To Reina, he wasn't just a powerful vanguard; he was the specific man who had saved her, her master, and a revered Noble Rank adventurer from absolute doom.
Sitting isolated inside the Sun Chariot, a deep, suffocating fear clawed at her throat. She was afraid of being blindsided by wandering dragons, afraid of becoming a useless burden as the three powerhouses below grew exponentially stronger, and deeply afraid that she would permanently fall behind Ketovan's stride. She was terrified that a day would come when she might lose him, left with nothing but her own weakness to blame.
Her eyes snapped wide in sudden shock as she glanced back toward the pale blue sphere. Alexander hadn't been gone for even a full second before he suddenly walked right back into view, entirely healthy and unscathed. In his hand, he held a simple leather pouch that radiated the dense, terrifying aura of a beast she had never even fathomed seeing in her lifetime.
Still locked inside the chariot without any direct communications, Reina seized her privileges. She began aggressively calling Hakon's communication array every three minutes, desperately begging to be brought down to the lower leaves whenever an interesting, manageable beast appeared. She didn't want to wait anymore. She wanted to reach the Commander Rank, no matter what it took.
Alexander ignored the chaos, training his gaze down onto the tree. The battlefield hadn't shifted an inch, and the branches were falling at the exact same trajectory. This was definitive proof that his spatial detour into the void hadn't cost him more than a single second of real time.
With a quiet sigh, he tossed the tiny Flaren pouch into his system's storage space. For now, he chose to focus on the immediate horizon: he just wanted to successfully break through to the Soldier Rank and explore this massive, unpredictable new world he had been violently thrown into.
In his previous life on Earth, he had lived entirely devoid of a true path. His father's catastrophic financial decisions had made his family's lives an absolute living hell, culminating in the proud, elite Sobriviente family officially announcing a humiliating bankruptcy. A five-decades-long, global trade monopoly had vanished into thin air in a mere five years, all because an incompetent, weak man had been left in control of the reins. Alexander, for all his credit, had never been interested in inheriting the family business. But once everything collapsed into the dirt, he had learned the brutal, cold importance of money... and of absolute influence. He had seen firsthand how hard the people at the absolute top of the world shatter when they finally fall.
As he stared down at the fading tree, Alexander realized two distinct paths lay open before him.
The first was a path of absolute dominion: a road paved with raw power, unimaginable wealth, and crushing political influence—the life of a ruthless kingmaker. The second was a path of quiet, absolute simplicity: a road where he became a silent, unstoppable entity, a ghost so profoundly powerful that no sovereign nation or empire would ever dare to cross his bad side. One path demanded he hoard everything the world had to offer, while the other dared him to find true value in raw, lived experience rather than material possessions.
Yet, amidst the deep confusion of his future, one single truth remained absolute across both destinies.
He would survive.
Whether he walked the path alone or surrounded by trusted friends, whether he was remembered across history as a benevolent god or a catastrophic demon, a builder of magnificent worlds or the ultimate destroyer of them—Alexander knew he would endure until the very end.
Why, you ask?
Because he wanted to.
***