To rule the Continent of Dinatis, diplomacy was an option. Absolute violence was a requirement.
King Adrian Adenca Adrek embodied the latter. He stood at the head of the war table, staring down at the sprawling maps of his undisputed territory. The generals surrounding him held their breath, their eyes fixed firmly on the polished floor. Nobody dared to meet the King's gaze.
Adrian was the greatest swordsman the world had ever produced. The blade resting at his hip was a relic of sheer, catastrophic destruction. The tales of his conquests were etched into the very geography of the continent. He had once cleaved the Black Peak mountain cleanly in two to end a rebellion. During the Southern Crusades, a single downward strike of his sword had parted the Varisian Ocean to allow his army to march across the seabed.
The Essence rolling off his body was monstrous. It filled the massive war room with a sharp, suffocating pressure, feeling less like energy and more like a field of invisible, microscopic blades scraping against the skin of everyone present. He managed his kingdom with an iron fist, tolerating absolutely zero incompetence. Men feared the crown. They were terrified of the man wearing it.
A timid knock broke the oppressive silence of the room. A royal servant slipped through the heavy oak doors, trembling as he approached the King. He whispered a single sentence into Adrian's ear.
The terrifying warlord vanished. The suffocating aura of blades dissolved instantly into nothingness. Adrian's broad shoulders slumped, the weight of his wife's recent death returning to hollow out his chest. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, softened with a desperate, vulnerable relief.
"Lucien has finally spoken," Adrian murmured, his voice cracking slightly. He looked at his two highest-ranking Royal Guards stationed by the door. "He wishes to see me. Go to his chambers. Bring my son here immediately."
The guards bowed deeply and marched out of the room. They were veterans, men who had survived wars and mastered C-rank defensive techniques. They walked swiftly through the grand halls of the palace, determined to safely escort the grieving eight-year-old prince to his father.
They reached the heavy door of Lucien's royal chambers. The guard on the left reached out and turned the brass handle. He pushed the door open.
They did not see the boy. They only felt the weight.
It hit them like a falling citadel. The raw, unfiltered density of the Grayverse leaking from Lucien's chest crashed into the hallway. The guard on the left instantly dropped to his knees, his femurs shattering under the impossible gravitational spike. The guard on the right tried to ignite his defensive Essence. His collarbone snapped, followed immediately by the sickening crunch of his spine giving way. Both men were flattened against the marble floor, completely paralyzed, gasping for air as their ribs cracked under the passive, crushing existence of the anomaly inside the room.
Footsteps echoed from the shadows.
Lucien walked into the light of the hallway. His frail, scarred body looked completely pathetic, yet the space around him warped and shuddered. He looked down at the broken elite guards bleeding on the floor. He tightened his mental grip on the singularity in his chest, sealing the 4D leakage. The crushing gravity vanished.
Lucien stepped over the paralyzed men without a single change in his expression and made his way to the war room.
King Adrian stood near the throne, having dismissed his generals. He waited eagerly to embrace his grieving son. The heavy doors swung open.
Lucien stepped over the threshold.
Adrian took a step forward, his arms opening. Then, the King stopped.
The air in the throne room died. A primal, screaming instinct ignited in the back of Adrian's mind. The greatest swordsman in the world felt a cold, paralyzing dread wash over his skin. The boy standing before him was small, pale, and incredibly frail. Yet, the ambient, suppressed weight radiating from the child was entirely alien. It defied the laws of Essence. It defied reason.
Adrian's knees buckled.
The King of Adrek, the man who had split an ocean, found himself sinking toward the floor in his own throne room. His muscles locked. His 3D vessel instinctively recognized the presence of a god and prepared to submit.
Adrian gritted his teeth, a roar tearing from his throat. He ignited his S-rank Essence. A massive, blinding aura of golden light erupted from the King's body, shattering the floor tiles beneath his boots. He pushed back against the crushing, invisible void radiating from his son. Using every ounce of his legendary power, the King barely managed to force himself to remain standing.
He stared at the frail boy. He looked into those vibrant, rainbow eyes. There was no innocence. There was no grief. There was only a cold, mechanical abyss that had cataloged infinity.
Adrian gripped the hilt of his sword, his knuckles turning white.
"Who Are You?"
The throne room trembled. The golden light of King Adrian's S-rank Essence clashed against the invisible, suffocating density radiating from the frail boy standing before him.
"Who are you?" Adrian demanded, his voice echoing like thunder off the marble pillars.
Lucien looked up at his father. His cracked, pale lips twitched into a small, calculating smile.
"I am the mistake you and Mother brought into this world," Lucien replied, his voice a dry, scraping rasp that sounded entirely too old for an eight-year-old throat. "I simply solved the puzzle the Academy told us to ignore. I reached into the 4D leakage in my chambers. I folded it into a tesseract."
Adrian's golden aura flickered. The King's eyes widened in absolute horror. The Order had outlawed formless casting two centuries ago. It was supposed to detonate the caster instantly.
"The anomaly acted as a beacon," Lucien continued, taking a slow, agonizing step forward. He forced his body to hold together. "A cosmic flare. An otherworldly entity saw it. He pulled me into a dimension outside of time, threw me into a void, and left me there to rot. I survived. I calculated a way out."
Adrian lowered his sword. The terrifying intellect, the utter disregard for the rules of the Order—it was undeniably Lucien. The grief-stricken prince hadn't cried in his room; he had casually shattered the laws of physics and paid an incomprehensible price.
"You brought something back with you," Adrian whispered, feeling the crushing weight of the Grayverse locked inside his son's chest.
"A survival mechanism," Lucien stated coldly. "Father. I need information. Who is the King of Freedom?"
Adrian frowned, the name entirely foreign to his ears. The King of Adrek knew every ruler, every hidden deity, and every ancient warlord documented in the history of the continent. He shook his head slowly.
"There is no such king in the annals of the Order," Adrian said. "If this entity exists, his name is buried in the ashes of the forgotten eras. There is only one place in existence that holds records preceding the Order. Cromwell's Library."
Lucien cataloged the name instantly. "I will go there."
"You cannot," Adrian replied, his voice hardening back into the tone of a warlord. "Cromwell's Library is sealed by the ancient covenants. Royalty holds no power over its doors. Gold cannot buy the key. To understand the lock, you must understand the true scale of our world."
To call Dinatis a world was a gross understatement. It was a cosmic anomaly. The realm spanned nearly four hundred billion kilometers in diameter, a structure so unfathomably colossal it rivaled the size of the largest black holes in the universe. Entire solar systems could fit within its oceans.
Because of this incomprehensible scale, the cycle of life and death created a catastrophic byproduct. Over millions of years, the tainted, rotting Essence of quadrillions of dead souls pooled in the dark corners of the realm. It bled back into the physical world, mutating the ambient energy and giving birth to demons. They numbered in the trillions—an endless, ravenous tide of corrupted 4D entities seeking to consume the living.
"Every twenty years, humanity must push back the tide," Adrian explained, stepping down from the dais. "We initiate the Crusades. We march into the corrupted zones and slaughter them by the millions to prevent the world from being overrun. During the last Southern Crusade, I cleaved the Varisian Ocean down to the bedrock to drown a demonic hive."
Adrian stopped a few feet from his son, looking down at the frail, scarred body holding a universe inside its chest.
"The covenants are absolute. The doors of Cromwell's Library open for one person and one person alone," Adrian said. "The Champion of the Crusade. The single warrior who wades into the horde and claims the highest kill count across the entire continent."
Lucien absorbed the data. A planetary structure of impossible size. Trillions of targets. A continent-wide slaughter.
"When is the next Crusade?" Lucien asked.
"Twelve years from now," Adrian answered.
A heavy silence fell over the throne room. Lucien looked down at his trembling, ash-scarred hands. His vessel was currently too weak to handle a single sustained blast of his true power without crumbling to dust. He needed to forge his body into something capable of channeling the infinite pressure of the Grayverse. He needed a physical form that wouldn't shatter when he plucked the strings of reality.
Twelve years to build a god-tier vessel. Twelve years to prepare for the greatest massacre the Continent of Dinatis had ever seen.
Lucien's gaze snapped back up to his father. The predatory, unhinged smile stretched across his face, wider and more terrifying than before. The King of Adrek instinctively took a half-step back.
"Twelve years," Lucien whispered, his vibrant rainbow eyes glowing with cold, mechanical anticipation. "Perfect."