After the last name vanished in the sky, I went back to the Castle.
Not because I was ready. Not because the mourning had ended or because the weight had lifted — none of that. I went back because standing still beneath that gray mural wasn't going to bring anyone back, and because the Oasis, in its usual administrative indifference, didn't stop charging just because I was in mourning. The world kept turning. The maintenance costs kept accumulating. And the kingdom that was now only mine — entirely, completely, terribly only mine — still needed someone in command.
So I went back.
And the silence that received me was different from any other.
It wasn't the silence of a battlefield after the dust settles. It wasn't the silence of a calm night. It was the silence of a place that used to have more people and now didn't. The kind that settles in the corridors, in the corners, in the spaces someone once occupied — and that now sit empty in a way you feel on your skin, like a current of cold air from a door no one closed.
Eris's units had disappeared.
All of them.
The instant her name rose in that sky, the Oasis took care of the cleanup. It was the rule — I knew the rule, everyone knew the rule — but knowing didn't prepare you. Without a Lord, summoned units ceased to exist. The workers she had, the soldiers who patrolled entire sectors of the wall, the operators who kept constructions running in territories she had annexed to mine — all of them, from one hour to the next, simply stopped being there. As though they had never existed. As though each one of them hadn't been part of a gear that allowed me to grow faster than any human without a name should manage.
The constructions stayed. The annexation kept the structures standing — that was the only benefit that remained. So what I had now was a territory nearly twice as large as before, full of buildings, full of walls, full of towers and warehouses and stables.
And empty.
A giant body without blood. Bones in place, skin whole, but nothing inside making it work.
I needed to see numbers. I needed clarity. I needed something in that world to give me cold, emotionless information so I could work with it without thinking about the reason I was needing it.
"Zeus. Bring me the kingdom's general data."
[ Understood. Bringing kingdom data. ]
SPARTA — Territorial Status
CONSTRUCTIONS
Castle ............ Lv.4 .... x1
House ............. Lv.5 .... x200
Defense Towers ....... Lv.5 .... x50
Magic Tower .......... Lv.1 .... x1
Thorn Wall ........... Lv.5 .... x1
Warehouse ......... Lv.5 .... x3
Iron and Steel House .... Lv.5 .... x2
Hero's Temple ........ Lv.5 .... x2
Stable ............ Lv.5 .... x4
Griffin Nest ......... Lv.1 .... x1
Potion and Magic House ..... Lv.5 .... x2
Market ............ Lv.5 .... x2
Incubator ......... Lv.1 .... x1
CREATURES & HEROES OF SPARTA
Morgana ...... Legendary ........... x1
Livina ....... Unique ........... x1
Zaridan ...... Mythic ........... x1
Arachne ...... Young Adult, A+ ........ x1
Prince ....... Adult Griffin, A ........ x1
Young Griffins ..... B+ ............ x8
Urskra ....... B- ............ x5
Pegasus ...... S- ............ x1
FireWood ........ Adult Owl-Bear, B+ ..... x1
Yokais ....... Adult ............ x200
BARRACKS SUMMONS
Warrior Inheritance ...... 500
Archer Inheritance ....... 250
Mage Inheritance ......... 200
Knight Inheritance ....... 50
Advanced Mage Inheritance ... 25
Heavy Knight Inheritance .... 2
MAINTENANCE SUMMONS
Trainer ...... 5
Workers ...... 100
The numbers hovered before me like a map of everything I had — and of everything that was missing.
I stayed looking for far too long.
On paper, Sparta was impressive. Two hundred houses. Fifty defense towers. Four stables. Two Iron and Steel Houses. Creatures that most Lords of the Oasis would never see in their entire lives — a Legendary heroine, a Unique, a Mythic who shouldn't even exist in the Oasis, Arachne with her eight healed legs and now with the cannon integrated again into the silk, Pegasus at level S, an adult Griffin and eight young ones. Quality that would make any human kingdom, even with double the time, still tremble.
But quality doesn't sustain a wall.
What sustains a wall is number. Workers carrying stone. Operators keeping gears turning. Labor making the wheel spin every day, silent, without glory, without status, without level classification — and that was exactly what I didn't have.
A hundred workers.
A hundred.
For a territory of nearly twenty kilometers in extension, full of constructions that demanded constant maintenance, a hundred workers was the same as nothing. Before, when Eris was alive, the number didn't matter as much. Her workers filled what was missing, and what was missing the market and her family sent constantly. Her soldiers covered sectors mine couldn't reach. Her father's money bought what my kingdom didn't produce. It was a perfect symbiosis — so perfect that I never stopped to think about what would happen if one of the halves simply disappeared.
Now I knew.
When I had Eris's help and the resources from the deal with her father, I focused all my summons on the new wave — warriors, archers, mages, knights that used my mana, Inheritance units I wanted to develop from zero. The logic was simple: she covered infrastructure, I covered war. The territory grew because the two halves complemented each other. And to invest headlong in the new units without dead weight, I ceded all the old wave units to Eris — all of them, including the mages, which was something valuable enough to strengthen the relationship not only with her, but with her family. All I asked in return was the maintenance cost. To me it was a double investment: I rid myself of units I no longer intended to evolve and bought trust with generosity that cost me little. For both territories, the effect was immediate — growth accelerated exponentially on both sides.
Now all those ceded units had evaporated along with her.
And what remained was the imbalance.
An army relatively strong by human standards — a little over a thousand units counting everything — but without the base to sustain itself. Without enough workers to extract supplies. Without operators to maintain constructions. Without the external income Eris's father channeled every week and that, alone, was worth more than everything my territory produced. I had swords without bread. Walls without anyone to repair them. A body too large for the heart that remained.
Houses were the first bottleneck. Two hundred houses sustained a limited population, and each new unit summoned — whether worker or soldier — needed housing. Building more houses required workers. Summoning workers required houses. The cycle bit itself.
I knew that, in absolute numbers, Sparta was still a small kingdom. Far, very far from the main empires of the human race — those composed of hundreds of thousands of units, with territories that stretched across entire plains within the Oasis. Empires commanded by families with unlimited resources, lineages of Lords passed between generations, infrastructure accumulated over decades. Compared to them, I was a dot on the map.
But I also knew — and this was the only currency I had left — that when it came to quality, the game changed. Each of my units was elite. Forged on the Gargantua wall, tempered against Burmans, trained in a territory where you were either good enough or you died trying. My fewer-than-a-thousand would easily face five times their number, maybe more.
Maybe.
Because I still needed to keep in mind that this meant nothing when there existed races that operated on another scale. Races with hundreds of thousands of combat units. There were those who said some reached the millions — I doubted it, because I saw no need for that many, but against the great ones… maybe there was a reason. The Oasis still held entire regions no one had explored. Inhospitable, vast, dangerous territories, where the knowledge of the strongest races was still purely theoretical. Places about which even the nobles spoke softly.
Either way, before thinking about facing anyone, I needed to solve a more basic problem: how to get out of there.
✦ ✦ ✦
There were ways to transport a kingdom within the Oasis.
I had known that for months, but knowing and managing were things separated by a chasm the size of my empty territory.
The cleanest option was the one every Lord received a single time upon surviving the Purge: the right to choose a transfer. Simple, safe, direct. You chose the region, the system processed it, and your kingdom appeared in the new location with everything intact. It was the reward — the carrot hung before each Lord so they would risk themselves in the Purge and survive.
I had already used mine.
When I came back from the Purge, I used my transfer to position myself near the Gargantua wall — the place where everything began and that, at the time, seemed the most intelligent strategic decision. Safety, known resources, mapped terrain. A rational choice.
Now I was trapped in it.
Without the free transfer, only the other option remained: transport items.
They existed on the market. They were traded openly — at least the common ones, those available to any Lord regardless of race or title. The specific ones, the precision ones, those that allowed choosing exact coordinates… those never reached the market. They stayed locked in the leadership circles — available only to nobles, family heads, figures of influence within each race. Or between them, in deals that happened in rooms people like me didn't even know existed.
The common items, the ones I could buy, did one thing and one thing only: transport your kingdom to a random location in the Oasis.
Random.
The word seemed harmless until you stopped to think about what the Oasis truly was.
The map of that world was immense in a way the human mind wasn't made to process. Entire regions that no race had even catalogued. Biomes that ranged from deserts without a drop of water to subterranean territories where light never reached. Forests so dense the sky vanished before the second step. Mountains where the air froze in your lungs. And territories — territories already dominated by races that had no interest whatsoever in sharing space, and that would treat the arrival of a human kingdom with the same courtesy a farmer treats a pest.
Being transported randomly to any of those places was, for many, the same as signing your own sentence.
The mortality rate was never officially released — the Oasis didn't have that kind of transparency, much less the leaders of each race. But the numbers circulated among veteran Lords as whispers. My estimate was at least fifty percent. Maybe more. Half of those who used the item simply didn't appear again. Their names were never seen again in any market, any negotiation, any registry. They fell into holes in the map from which no one came out — places so inhospitable and isolated that not even the market worked, which meant you couldn't buy, couldn't sell, couldn't ask for help. Places where the Lord had to face unknown creatures with what they had, or have the monumental bad luck of materializing on top of a territory already dominated by something that wasn't interested in negotiating.
Many Lords preferred never to use the item. Even trapped in a precarious territory, even surrounded by scarcity, the idea of risking everything on a cosmic roulette was frightening enough to make misery seem acceptable. To them, the calculation was simple: better to live poorly in a known place than to die well in a place nobody knows the name of.
I understood the reasoning.
But I couldn't stay.
Not there. Not on that gray plain where every corner was mist and desert. Not near that wall I had defended with blood, but that was now merely an enormous scar on the horizon.
There were so many things that needed solving — workers, walls, houses, resources, transfer, each one pulling the next like links of an endless chain — that my mind got lost trying to order priorities. The strategist in me wanted a plan. The Lord in me wanted a path. The human in me wanted to leave.
But there was a problem that came before all the others.
One I couldn't solve with numbers, with summons, or with constructions. One that didn't appear on any screen of Zeus's and that no item on the market could buy.
I descended to the lowest level of the newly upgraded Castle.
The corridors grew narrower as I advanced — and darker, as though the light itself understood it wasn't welcome there. The air changed. It grew heavier, older, carrying a smell I could never name: something between iron and wet earth, with an undertone that resembled the air before a storm. A constant pressure that came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
I finally managed to exit the castle — which had at least doubled in size and complexity since the last upgrade, new corridors crossing corridors I didn't yet know, rooms I had never opened, staircases leading to places I hadn't yet had a reason to visit. I advanced toward the Temple.
I felt him before I saw him. It was always like that. His presence occupied the space in a way that no creature — none, in all the time I spent in the Oasis — had ever managed. It wasn't just size. It wasn't just power. It was the sensation of walking toward something that existed on a different scale from yours. Something that, out of courtesy or out of chains, simply chose not to destroy you.
The construction opened before me.
The chains that held him were thick as tree trunks, made of a material not even the Oasis's system identified — I had already tried. Each link shone with an extinguished light that pulsed slowly, at the rhythm of something that seemed almost a breath. They climbed the walls, crossed at the ceiling, descended back to the floor, holding that immense body in a labyrinth of steel that seemed afraid of what it held.
Zaridan wasn't sleeping.
"Zaridan."
My voice came out lower than I wanted.
"How are you?"