The Envoy stood up and signaled to the shadows, and instantly, four armored figures—the Envoy's Elite Guard—emerged from behind the rusted siege engines.
They carried a heavy, obsidian-lined stretcher.
"Carefully," the Envoy commanded.
"He is more valuable than the city itself.
If a single Star-Iron plate is scratched, I will use your very nerves as the next set of strings."
As the guards hoisted Soren's paralyzed body onto the stretcher, the ground beneath them gave a final, massive
~Ba-Dump~.
The sound was louder now.
Closer.
The copper dust in the graveyard began to swirl, caught in a sudden, violent updraft of hot, sulfurous air.
From the center of the valley, a pillar of pale green light erupted into the sky, piercing the clouds and illuminating the entire region for hundreds of miles.
The "Vent" was open.
---
Far away, hovering just an inch above a jagged cliff overlooking the graveyard, a solitary figure watched the pillar of light.
He was old yet looked to bear no weight at all.
His back was perfectly straight, and his form seemed faintly ethereal—as if his true density existed in another dimension, leaving only a translucent projection in this lower world.
He wore sweeping, immaculate white robes that flowed against a wind that wasn't there.
His long, snow-white hair and pristine beard drifted around a face that held the profound, unfathomable wisdom from the stars.
This was the Patriarch of the Eden Clan; Soren's maternal grandfather, and a man whose bloodline hailed from a world far removed from the petty squabbles of the Ignis and Oman.
He didn't move to intervene, and neither did he flare any iota of his restrained, and concealed monstrosity.
Despite wielding unfathomable prowess, more than enough to crush everything in sight like an insect, He simply stroked his long, white beard, his deep, ancient eyes watching calmly as his grandson was carried into the heart of the enemy's lair.
He knew his daughter—the Heiress of the Eden Clan, Soren's mother— presumed dead, was currently in seclusion deep within the Clan's grounds.
Only if she was aware that the "purity" she so obsessed over was currently being tested in the dirt.
"The forge is not hot enough yet," The man whispered. His voice didn't carry on the wind; it was ephemeral in its cadence.
"Your poisoning, your experiences in the tribe, your banishment into the wastelands, has managed to stir your father's genes from slumber, now let's see which of these would stir mother's as well."
Your mother's genes gave you the stars, Soren. But your father's gave you the anvil. So let them meet in the darkness of your despair."
Then all of a sudden, something flashed through his mind, causing a brief change in his calm expression. But instantly, it faded into a confident smirk.
"As for those "Old Ghosts" who're all waiting to see if this steel of yours holds or shatters...
Make them understand that the best of "them" are ignorant, while the rest of them are ignorant of their ignorance."
---
Darkness, for a normal human, is an absence of information.
For Soren, trapped within the paralyzed shell of his own hyper-dense body, darkness was merely a different user interface.
His eyes were open, but the motor-cortex signals required to process the visual data were blocked.
The Envoy's "Ivory Needles"—those localized knots of high-frequency Qi—were buried deep in his spinal column, acting as a firewall between his brain and his muscles.
He could not twitch a finger.
He could not draw a voluntary breath.
But something suddenly stirred within Soren.
Though he was currently trapped in the darkness of his own mind, where no thought had managed to cross for a few hours now.
Deep within his fractured neural network, a single, tiny spark of orange light still remained.
And just now, it suddenly flared to life and seemed to be transmitting fury into him; an instinctive feeling he knew couldn't have originated from his Master Builder Gene.
But under the relentless barrage of unfounded emotional energy now barreling through Soren's veins, the Master Builder Gene suddenly paused its activity and instead triggered a new approach.
Without external visual and auditory inputs to process, it diverted all processing power inward.
It was done trying to fight the needles, and now it was learning and adapting to their frequencies.
Then his consciousness became a microscopic specter, floating through the vast, complex structure of his own biology.
---
[Diagnostic Mode: Active]
[Vessel Integrity: Paralyzed. Motor functions at 0.00%]
[Foreign Intrusion: Five nodes of high-frequency kinetic energy.]
[Analysis: The 'Ivory' frequency is operating at 40,000 Hertz. It is matching and canceling the bio-electric signals of the central nervous system.]
[Destructive interference.]
---
Soren "looked" at the needle buried in his lower spine.
To the Envoy, it was a profound martial technique, a "Puppeteer's Thread" woven from the very essence of the waking Beast's blood.
To Soren however, it was nothing more than a localized vibration.
If it has frequency, this new, cold, logical spark in his mind calculated, then it can be reverse-engineered.
It can be matched.
It can be shattered.
But he needed fuel to calculate the counter-frequency.
He needed energy, and his "Black Sun" heart was currently suppressed, its thermal output clamped down by the Envoy's overarching aura.
He was a sealed engine, waiting for an external source of energy to jumpstart.
Externally, the journey downward continued.
He felt the shift in gravity, the subtle incline of the stretcher as the Envoy's Elite Guard carried him deeper into the earth beneath the Sword Graveyard.
The temperature was rising, shifting from the cool, ozone-tinged night air to a thick, humid heat that smelled of sulfur and ancient, rotting vegetation.
And as always, there was the rhythm.
~Ba-Dump~
~Ba-Dump~
It was louder now.
The heartbeat of the "Beast" was no longer a vibration in the teeth; it was a physical force that made the dense Star-Iron plates beneath Soren's skin hum in sympathetic resonance.
"Careful with the threshold," the Envoy's voice echoed, smooth and chillingly calm.
"The ambient pressure here can crush a mortal's lungs. Keep the warding spheres active."
Soren felt a sudden shift in the air density.
They had passed through some sort of barrier—a geographic choke-point.
The ambient temperature spiked.
Even paralyzed, the sweat evaporated off Soren's skin before it could pool.
Then, he was roughly dumped onto a hard, perfectly smooth surface.
It was freezing cold, a stark contrast to the stifling air.
It felt like polished glass, but infinitely denser.
He was on an altar of some sort.
"Bind him with the Leadened Silk," the Envoy commanded.
"Though he cannot move, the death-throes of a vessel this heavy could crack the obsidian.
And bring the girl. Let her watch."
There was the sound of a body being dragged, followed by a sharp gasp.
Liora.
She had been brought down with him, paralyzed by a secondary, weaker application of the Envoy's ivory aura.
"Soren..." her voice was a ragged whisper, terrified and small in the vastness of the cavern.
With a massive effort of will, the Master Builder Gene managed to create its first microscopic bypass in Soren's optic nerve.
It wasn't full vision, but it was enough to pierce the grey static.
The world flooded back in a hazy, red-tinged wireframe.
The Antechamber of the Void was a cathedral built by madmen.
It was a subterranean cavern so massive that the ceiling was lost in the gloom.
The walls were not carved from stone, but seemed to be grown from a dark, petrified wood.
But the true horror—the centerpiece of the Oman House's dark empire—was the Root.
It descended from the unseen ceiling, a colossal, twisting pillar of pale, sickly wood that pulsed with a violent green luminescence.
It was as thick as a fortress tower, covered in throbbing, vein-like vines that pumped the "Green Rot" upward to the surface, and in return, sucked the lifeforce of the Ignis Tribe downward.
The Altar Soren lay upon was positioned directly above a massive, open fissure in the earth, positioned to funnel anything on the slab directly into the Root's primary feeding vine.
The Envoy stood at the head of the Altar; his arms raised in a posture of divine ecstasy.
His pristine white silks glowed in the green light, making him look like a phantom of ivory and rot.
"For three hundred years, the Oman House has watered this seed," the Envoy proclaimed, his voice echoing off the petrified walls.
"We fed it the weak. We fed it the sick. We allowed the Matron to cultivate the 'Pink Dream' so the herd would not stampede while they were being sheared."
The Envoy stepped closer, looking down at Soren's immobile face.
"But the Beast is greedy," the Envoy whispered.
"It is no longer satisfied with the thin, watery blood of the commoners.
It demands a catalyst.
It demands density.
It demands the unfulfilled potential of the Eden line."
The Envoy produced a dagger from his robes.
It was not made of steel or Star-Iron. It was carved from the same pale wood as the Root, radiating a sickening, parasitic green aura.
"To the Withered Hand, you are a secret weapon," the Envoy said, resting the flat of the wooden blade against Soren's chest, directly over the Black Sun.
"To the Beast, you are a three-course meal.
And to me... you are the key to Apotheosis.
When the Beast digests your mass, it will bloom. And I, its chosen gardener, will harvest the fruit."
"You are... mathematically... incorrect," Soren managed to rasp. The effort to speak nearly ruptured his vocal cords.
The Ivory Needles flared, sending a shockwave of agonizing, high-frequency interference through his brain.
The Envoy merely smiled, a condescending curve of his lips.
"Still trying to analyze the world, little builder?
Analysis is the tool of those who cannot control. I do not analyze the world. I command it."
The Envoy raised the wooden dagger.
He didn't stab Soren. Instead, he drove the blade directly into the obsidian Altar beside Soren's shoulder.
[Technique: Sacrifice of the Sun - The Ivory Siphon]
Then the Antechamber erupted.
The Envoy channeled the entirety of his Qi reserves through the dagger and into the Altar.
The obsidian slab lit up with hundreds of geometric, ivory runes.
They crawled across the stone, snaking up the Leadened Silk bindings and digging into Soren's skin like glowing white leeches.
To a cultivator, this was the ultimate extraction—a forced inversion designed to rip the innate talent and life-force out of a vessel and funnel it into the Root below.
To Soren, it was a massive, uncontrolled influx of foreign thermal and kinetic energy.
[Catastrophic Energy Spike]
[External Kinetic Force exceeding structural integrity by 400%.]
[Core Temperature Critical]
[Extraction Methods Ascertained.]
[Foreign entity attempting to vent the 'Black Sun' core.]
The pain was soul-needling.
It felt as though a thousand iron hooks had been buried into his marrow and were being pulled by a team of wild horses.
The ivory runes burned through his dermis, seeking the dense, gravitational center of his heart.
"Scream!" the Envoy roared over the deafening hum of the energy.
"Scream, and let the Beast taste your despair! It flavors the essence!"
Liora was sobbing, turning her face away from the blinding light, struggling against her own paralysis.
But Soren didn't scream.
Inside his mind, the Master Builder Gene was not registering pain; it was registering opportunity.
The Envoy was pushing his energy IN to pull Soren's energy OUT, Soren's new primal instincts calculated.
He is using a high-pressure differential. But his math is flawed. He assumes my internal volume is finite.
"Begin..." Soren thought, his mental voice cold and razor-sharp amidst the raging fire of his nervous system. "...Core Supernova."
He didn't fight the extraction. He didn't try to push the ivory runes away.
He opened the gates.
Soren deliberately deactivated the suppression effects around the Black Sun.
He let the Envoy's massive influx of Ivory Qi flood into him. But instead of letting it cycle back out, carrying his life-force with it, Soren's Jade-Alloy bones seemed to enter lockdown mode.
He turned his body into a biological pressure cooker.
[Physiological Override: Containment Protocol]
[Trapping foreign kinetic energy.]
[Using Ivory Qi as external energy source.]
[Commencing 'Jumpstart'.]
Suddenly the Envoy's triumphant smile faltered.
The extraction that had been a flowing river of energy as it was meant to, suddenly felt like it had suddenly hit a dam.
The ivory runes on Soren's body stopped moving outward toward the Altar.
They froze, and instead began to vibrate violently, and then sink deeper into Soren's flesh.