Chapter 836: The World King’s Plan [Bonus - ]

Chapter 836: The World King’s Plan [Bonus Chapter]

The black sea battered the basalt cliffs of the nameless island in slow, endless violence, throwing plumes of salt foam hundreds of feet into the midnight air.

…There were no shipping lanes for five hundred miles in any direction.

The island had been erased from every navigational chart in the world, an isolated blister of volcanic rock rising out of the deepest trench on the planet.

On the highest cliff stood the palace of the King of the World.

It was a sprawling structure of dark obsidian and steel.

Its corridors were vast vaults of polished black stone where no hearth fire had ever burned, and the air inside smelled of ozone and the heavy salt that seeped through the granite.

Silence ruled the halls… the cold suffocating silence of an execution chamber before the hood came down and in the study at the northernmost point of the palace, the King sat alone.

He wore a high-collared double-breasted coat of dark navy wool, its sleeves turned back once over his wrists.

His oceanic blue eyes, deep as the trenches surrounding the island, stared up into the shadows along the vaulted ceiling.

He let out a slow tired sigh and ran his fingers through his hair as the air three paces in front of his desk twisted.

A ripple passed through the candlelight, and a figure in matte-gray composite armor stepped out of the shifting dark.

He was one of the World’s Elite Guard, his face hidden completely behind a smooth featureless white mask with no eye slits and no vents.

The guard dropped to one knee, and his greave clicked against the black stone.

“Report, Sire,” the guard said, his voice hollow through the mask. “The surveillance arrays have confirmed the movement on the novice Leaderboards… Lady Aki’s territory, Aki’s Wonderland, climbed to Number Two as of yesterday evening.”

The King didn’t sit up.

He lifted his right hand and gave a lazy dismissive wave.

“I know,” he said flatly.

The guard hesitated.

Behind the mask, he blinked, thrown off balance by the complete absence of any reaction… He stayed on one knee with his armored fingers resting on the floor.

“What… what are our orders, Sire?” the guard asked carefully. “Her Highness’s territory is growing at a rate that would normally call for Council intervention… Should we send the containment divisions to watch the perimeter if we do find the location of her territory? What should we do about it?”

The King didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed fixed on the far wall, where the shadows pooled beneath an old faded banner.

“You’re dismissed,” the King said.

The guard froze.

“Sire—”

“You’re dismissed for the night,” the King repeated, his deep voice lowering by half a degree.

…It was final.

The guard bowed his head until his knuckles pressed against the stone.

“Understood, Sire.”

HUMMM!

The air warped, the shadows folded inward, and the guard vanished without a breath of wind, leaving the study as dark and empty as a tomb.

The King stayed in his chair, his eyes half-closed against the cold draft creeping in from the balcony doors.

’I’ve had this information since yesterday…’ he thought, a faint, bitter sneer tugging at his lips. ’Fools think they need to cross an ocean to tell me what happens under my own sky…’

He didn’t reach for the crystal decanter sitting on the side table six feet away.

He simply twitched two fingers.

The heavy bottle unstoppered itself with a soft pop and rose into the air… It drifted across the room with smooth unhurried grace and tilted gently above the empty crystal glass beside his elbow.

GLUG! GLUG!

Dark wine poured in a thick stream, smelling of crushed blackberries, bitter plum skins and oak.

The bottle floated back to its silver coaster and settled there without a sound, and the glass glided across the desk into his open palm.

He took a slow sip and let it burn the back of his throat as his oceanic eyes narrowed into the dark.

…He couldn’t imagine it…

Aki.

That girl was twenty-five years old.

For a quarter of a century, she had lived under the eyes of the royal household and the most advanced core-testing facilities on the planet, and she had never shown a single scrap of talent in her life.

She had not even one drop of awakened mana… She had been useless.

While her brother claimed command ranks across the planet’s defenses, she had been the princess with no name, a fragile decoration the Council expected to be married off one day to settle some ledger then she had spent some time with Lord Vespera.

A few days in the company of that one-armed woman, and her whole life had been turned upside down.

Aki had awakened… She had become a Lord.

Her territory was growing so fast that it had set off outrage across social media, with every pundit and analyst on the planet screaming into their feeds about whether the reclusive princess had faked her weakness for years, or whether she was secretly the one pulling the strings behind Blessed Land.

’And now she’s a vassal of Blessed Land too…?’ the King thought, his fingers tightening around the glass until it creaked. ’My own daughter, kneeling as a sworn vassal to a territory nobody had even heard of a year ago…’

The thought soured in his mouth, colder than the wine and behind Aki stood the real problem.

…Kara White.

The King took another long sip with his jaw grinding as he swallowed. Why did it feel like that woman was deliberately getting on his nerves?

Every time he sat in this chair, every time he read through the intelligence reports and convinced himself that he finally had the measure of her abilities, she did something that threw everything he knew straight into the gutter all over again.

’She can awaken people who have no potential…?’ he thought, watching the shadows crawl along the walls.

If she could force a dormant talentless body into a full awakening, where did her limits even end…? Could Kara White ascend all of humanity into Lords…? Could she take the billions of unawakened people crammed into the lower city sectors, the factory workers and the dock hands and the street sweepers, and turn every single one of them into a core-bearing Lord…?

He would have suggested trying it… but the moment the idea crossed his mind, a cold shudder seized the base of his skull, and the King flinched away from it.

The memory flared behind his eyes in perfect terrible clarity.

The Grand Assembly Chamber of the World Council… More than five hundred people seated around the celestial marble table, every ruler and delegate of the nine nations watching.

Kara White had been lounging in a violet-velvet chair with her legs crossed and her lenses glinting, her single right hand tapping lazily against the armrest.

She had looked him dead in the eye in front of all of them and called him a cowardly father and she had told the whole world that he was a monster to his own blood.

He had let the void-light bleed into his irises.

The temperature around the throne had dropped until frost crept across the star-iron, and every person in the chamber had held their breath, waiting for him to erase her however she had only smiled wider.

“Go ahead and try it, King… Bring out that ancestral Destruction passed down from the First King… It won’t work on me.”

And the void-light in his eyes had wavered.

It had thinned out into smoke and sunk back into his pathways, and in front of five hundred witnesses, the King of the World had sat there with his hand trembling against the marble.

His knuckles went white around his wine glass… It was the only time in his entire reign that a chill had ever run down his spine.

’With growth that insane…’ he thought, his breath catching, ’what if she’s already condensed a domain…?’

A cold shiver crawled down between his shoulder blades.

That woman was too crazy to underestimate… Pushing her into a corner would invite a catastrophe the world might not survive.

He rose from his chair with the glass in hand, the heavy wool of his coat falling to his shins, and walked across the dark study to the balcony.

He pushed the iron-framed glass doors open.

SCREEECH!

He stepped out onto the open stone balcony hanging over the abyss.

The night wind slammed into him like a wall and the surf roared three hundred feet below against the rocks.

His coat whipped around his legs as he leaned his forearm against the cold granite railing as his eyes swept out over the barren mountainous ridge of the island.

’She managed to use Destruction, though…’

His jaw set into hard rigid lines.

The report had come from Aki’s maid, delivered through an encrypted channel that bypassed the Council servers. She had seen Aki use it..,

That was supposed to be impossible.

The King slowly lifted his right hand and pressed his fingers gently over his eye.

’It’s the power passed down to us by the First King, isn’t it…?’

The thought throbbed through his skull like a slow migraine.

Destruction couldn’t be studied in an academy or refined with pills and meditation… It was an ancestral authority, carried down the royal bloodline in a single golden spark, and only one living vessel could hold it at a time.

The King closed his eyes beneath his fingers and felt the dark, heavy pulse behind them.

He remembered the cold stone floor of the ancestral crypt… He remembered the weight of the blade in his hand, the smell of blood drying on his knuckles, and the sound of his predecessor’s last breath rattling out of an opened throat.

He’d had to kill to inherit it.

’This power I had to kill for…’ he whispered into the howling wind, his fingers trembling slightly against his brow. ’This burden that blackened my soul… and she uses it so easily.’

Did that mean she could use the First King’s power without the First King’s… without him dying yet?

How could one authority exist in two places at once…? Had Aki found the source itself without paying the price?

And if she had touched the First King’s authority…

’Then can she use the second power too…?’

The King dropped his hand from his face.

His eyes opened and fixed on the jagged mountain peaks of the island’s northern ridge, two miles away, tearing up into the low clouds.

A sudden violent surge of something hot ripped through his chest and tore his cold composure open as his oceanic eyes flashed.

The void-light bled into his irises, swallowing the blue, and a pinprick of lightless black bloomed at the center of each pupil.

VUUUUUUM!

The northern ridge ceased to exist.

Three entire mountain peaks, millions of tons of basalt and granite and ancient pine forest spanning miles, vanished from the face of the earth in a single instant.

One heartbeat, they stood dark against the clouds however the next, the horizon was perfectly flat, and a clean impossible gap hung between the ocean and the sky where the mountains had been.

The sea below the cliffs didn’t even ripple.

The air, on the other hand, rushed into the emptiness with a soft hollow sigh, like an old tomb door swinging shut.

WHOOOSH!

Moonlight poured through the gap in the torn clouds, streaming silver across the black water and washing over the balcony, bathing the King’s face in cold pale light.

He stood rigid at the railing, staring at the empty horizon as his chest heaved.

A small dry sound escaped his throat.

“Heh…”

His shoulders twitched beneath the navy coat.

“Hehehe…”

’This is good…’ the King thought, his pupils dilating as the moonlight reflected off his skin. ’This is… this is really good…’

The chuckle broke loose and swelled into loud, unhinged laughter that rolled out over the crashing surf.

“Hahaha… HAHAHAHA!”

It grew louder and louder, tearing at his throat and echoing off the obsidian walls of the palace and across the black empty ocean.

“THIS IS REALLY GOOD…!” the King shouted into the wind, throwing his arms wide toward the moonlit void.

He laughed until something that had been coiled tight behind his eyes for longer than he could remember finally found a way out.

…Perhaps the weight was finally shifting.

Perhaps the curse of that woman he had gotten pregnant, the cold silent phantom that had haunted his dreams and poisoned every victory he’d ever claimed, was finally beginning to leave him.

He lowered his arms, his chest rising and falling in deep, ragged breaths.

If Aki carried that power without the rot of the old rite, then the ceiling that had trapped every King since the founding era could finally be broken…

Now he would ascend.

…He would cast aside the Council and the nine nations and the ancient limits of his bloodline, and he would become the true King of the World.

He lifted his glass and drained the last bitter drops of wine as the sea wind whipped his coat against the stone.

’She…’ the King thought, his oceanic eyes burning with a dark ravenous ambition that pierced the night, ’she’s the key… the key to me reaching the peak.’