The sky over Planet Almond was the color of a fresh bruise, choked with the smoke of burning cities and the shimmer of shattered defensive arrays. The air, thick with the coppery scent of blood and the ozone crackle of spent mana, carried the symphony of an ending: the roar of collapsing edifices, the screams of the dying, and the cold, triumphant bellows of betrayers.
At the heart of the storm, atop the fractured balcony of the Almond Family's ancestral spire, stood Nova Almond. Silver hair, usually impeccable, was matted with ash and gore. His royal gold eyes, famed for their icy intelligence, now burned with a fury so cold it seemed to leach the heat from the very air. His ornate armor, a masterpiece of dwarven rune-smithing and phoenix feather weave, was rent and scorched. In one hand, he held Frostbite, his S-Grade sword, its blade weeping a cold that slowed the blood of nearby foes. The other hand was clenched into a fist, the veins beneath his skin pulsing with a dark, internal light—the sign of his SSS-Rank Blood Manipulation holding his ravaged body together.
Before him lay the broken, yet defiant form of his father, Alistair Almond, Patriarch of the family, a peak 9th Order Imperial. Around them in a grim circle were the silhouettes of their once-allies: the heads of the Valos, Carnell, and Sheng families, their expressions a mix of greed, fear, and fanatical obedience. Above it all, hovering on a platform of solidified light, was the distant, implacable visage of the Great Emperor, the ruler of humanity. His edict had been simple: Extinguish the Almond line. Their light has grown too bright.
"Why?" Alistair's voice was a guttural rasp, his lifeblood seeping into the family crest carved into the floor. "Four centuries of loyalty… my son, your finest general…"
The Emperor's voice echoed, devoid of humanity, amplified by a fundamental law. "A prophecy glimpsed in the Tapestry of Fate. A gold-eyed shadow upon the throne. I prune the branch before it can bear poisoned fruit."
Nova didn't waste breath on pleas or curses. His mind, a genius tactician's engine, calculated trajectories, mana reserves, enemy weaknesses. He had already ordered the retreat. His Shadows—his generals—were fighting a desperate rearguard action to get the non-combatants, his little sister Nora, to the hidden astral ships. He could feel their signatures fading one by one through their soul bonds. Number Six… gone. Seven and Eight, extinguished together holding a chokepoint.
"Go, Nova," Alistair choked, pouring the last of his catastrophic mana into the family's ultimate defense array—a suicidal technique that would turn his own crystallized mana core into a black hole of gravitational force. "Live. Remember. Make them drown in the blood they've spilled this day."
With a final, thunderous roar that was part defiance, part love, and part unimaginable pain, Alistair Almond detonated his existence. The world compressed, then exploded outwards. The spire vaporized. The encircling family heads were thrown back, shields cracking. Nova, protected by his father's last act and his own instant domain of frozen blood, was catapulted through a撕裂的 spatial tear.
The next years were a blur of ash, survival, and cold fury. He regrouped with the remnants of his Shadows: Benimaru, his scales charred but black flames burning hotter in his grief; Alpha, her elegant elf ears torn, analytical mind now focused solely on vengeance; Geralt, his rune-covered body a tapestry of new scars; Megan, her myriad demon heritage the only reason she'd survived a soul-rending blast; and Alexander, "Coldblood," whose light had grown harsh and unforgiving.
And Nora. His brilliant, gentle sister, her hands made for alchemy, now stained with the soot of ruin. Her eyes, the same gold as his, held a void where her innocence had been.
They hid, they plotted, they gathered strength from the shadows. But the Emperor's reach was long. Betrayal, it seemed, was a universal constant.
It came from the one smile he had trusted outside his family and Shadows. Genesis of the Brando family. A brother in arms, or so he'd thought. Their meeting on the neutral, barren planet of Kharos was supposed to be about a new alliance, a hidden resistance.
Genesis's smile was the same. His laugh was the same. The dagger he plunged into Nova's back, laced with a poison that devoured mana and vitality from the 7th Order Sovereign who had crafted it, was not.
"The Emperor's offer was simply too generous, my friend," Genesis sighed, as his elite guard emerged from cloaking arrays. "Your head, and the coordinates of your sister, for the lordship of three solar systems. A pragmatic trade."
Pain, white-hot and consuming, erupted from the wound. Nova's blood, his to command, turned against him, boiling with the invasive poison. But he was Nova Almond. The Cold Prince. The Bloodlord. With a snarl that ripped from his throat, he seized the blood around the wound, flash-freezing it into a jagged, internal armor. He wouldn't die quietly.
What followed was a masterpiece of brutal, efficient slaughter. He moved not like a warrior, but like a calamity. He'd snap a finger, and the blood in a guard's head would expand into sharpened crystals. A glance, and the moisture in the air around another would freeze, then shatter, driving ice shards into lungs. He used Frostbite to bisect, to impale, his movements a grim ballet. But for every one he felled, the poison bit deeper. His domain flickered. His mana core, once a swirling galaxy of power, guttered.
He escaped the immediate ambush, a trail of crimson ice and corpse-dust marking his path, before collapsing in the rust-red sands of a dead valley.
Genesis found him there, as he knew he would. Nova was propped against a rock, Frostbite across his knees, breathing in ragged, shallow gasps. The gold in his eyes was dimming.
"No grand last words?" Genesis asked, pacing slowly, his own weapon—a whip of woven spacetime—coiled in his hand.
"Only a promise," Nova whispered, each word a labor. "When I return… I won't just kill you. I will kill everything you love. I will salt the ground of your legacy. Your name will become a synonym for regret."
Genesis laughed, a sound devoid of warmth. "Poetic. But you won't be returning. I will make sure of that."
The spacetime whip snapped forward. Not aiming to maim. Aiming to erase. Nova, with the last of his strength, threw Frostbite in a final, defiant arc. It clipped Genesis's shoulder, shearing through armor and bone, before embedding itself in a distant cliff.
Genesis screamed, more in rage than pain, and drove the whip's point through Nova's chest. It pierced his frozen blood armor, his sternum, and found his heart. A pulse of annihilating spatial force erupted within, turning the mighty organ to mist.
The light in Nova's gold eyes went out.
They arrived too late. Nora felt the severing of the soul bond through her own SS-Rank Soul Manipulation power. A sound escaped her— a whimper of absolute desolation. Benimaru's roar of anguish shook the valley, black flames erupting uncontrollably from his maw.
Genesis was gone, a spatial teleportation talisman smoking in his remaining hand. Only Nova's body remained, eerily intact save for the空洞 where his heart had been.
"No… no, no, no…" Nora fell to her knees, her hands hovering over her brother. His soul—that brilliant, complex, vicious, and fiercely protective soul—was fraying, dissipating into the astral winds.
"Megan!" Nora's voice was raw. "The ritual. The one in the Eclipse Sutra. The Forbidden Rebirth!"
Megan, her demonic heritage granting her knowledge of abyssal and celestial taboos, paled. "Lady Nora… it requires a foundation of ten thousand souls. And a vessel of matching blood. The cost… the karma…"
"DO IT!" Nora screamed, the void in her eyes filling with a maelstrom of madness and resolve. "I don't care about the cost! I don't care about karma! He is my brother! Gather the souls! Use my blood as the template! Find a vessel! NOW!"
What followed was a dark pilgrimage. The surviving Shadows became reapers. A remote penal colony here, a pirate fleet there, a village that had sheltered an Imperial informant elsewhere. Ten thousand lives, guilty and innocent alike, were extinguished in a series of silent, brutal raids. Their soul essence was drawn into a cursed artifact, a screaming black jewel.
Nora, her health failing as she poured her own soul-force and Almond bloodline essence into the matrix, directed the ritual. They couldn't use Nova's original body—it was a beacon for the Emperor's seers. They had to create a new one, a blank slate infused with Almond vitality, and lure a fragment of his shattered soul to it.
The ritual, conducted in the screaming silence between dimensions, was a blasphemy against the Universal System's natural order. It tore a hole in fate. It sent a sliver of Nova's soul, the largest fragment, cascading across the astral bridge towards the most mana-impoverished backwater in the galactic spiral: a recently integrated planet known as Earth.
They tried. For ten long, desperate years, they tried. They would locate a potential vessel—a newborn with some latent spiritual sensitivity. They would guide the soul fragment to it. And watch, helpless, as the infant's body, too weak, too mundane, would burst into a fine crimson mist, unable to contain the sheer density of a Monarch's soul, even a fractured one.
Nora grew gaunt, her hair streaked with white, her alchemist's spark dimmed by endless grief and horrific acts. The Shadows were haggard, hunted, their loyalty the only fuel keeping them going.
Then, a final, desperate gambit. Using the last of the captured soul-essence and half of her own remaining lifespan, Nora didn't just find a vessel. She made one. She located a dying, pregnant woman on Earth, in a grimy city called Havenbrook. With Megan's demonic precision, they infused the womb with a concentrated elixir of Nora's own blood, soul, and stolen vitality. They overwrote the fetus's developing spiritual signature, making it a perfect, bespoke receptacle for an Almond soul.
The mother, a woman named Eliza, alone and desperate, felt a sudden surge of health and strange, vivid dreams. She attributed it to a miracle.
The birth was unremarkable to the outside world. A healthy boy with a shock of dark hair and eyes that, for a moment, flashed a fleeting, unrecognized gold before settling into a deep, ordinary brown.
There was no explosion. No rejection. The soul fragment settled in, a king returning to a ruined but familiar castle. The other two major fragments of Nova's soul, too volatile to risk, were sealed away by Nora—one in the heart of a dying star in a forgotten system, the other deep within the temporal chaos of a freshly spawned SSS-Rank dungeon on Earth. The Emperor's cosmic scans would find nothing.
As Eliza held her son, named him Sam (a simple, safe name), and wept tears of exhausted joy, a spaceship bearing the last of the Almond line and its protectors vanished into the deeper cosmos, pursued by the hounds of the empire.
In a small apartment in Havenbrook, Sam opened his infant eyes. Behind the brown, in the deepest recesses of his nascent mind, a sliver of royal gold glinted. A memory, faint as a ghost: the taste of cold betrayal, the feel of a glaive's haft, and a single, all-consuming directive buried beneath the layers of a new life:
Remember. Survive. Converge. Reign.
The story of Nova Almond was over.
The chronicle of Sam—the puppet who held a king's shattered soul—was about to begin.