Stepping through the tattered portal into the donor world was not an act of travel; it was a constant physical assault, able to sowhat affect even my enhanced constitution. On Ferra, the air was a utility. Here, it was an adversary.
The atmosphere was thick and oily, slling of charcoal, copper-rich blood, and the distinct, sulfurous sting of a planetary heart being hollowed out. I landed on a crust of pulverized obsidian sand that shifted under my boots like ground glass. Overhead, the sky was the color of an old, deep bruise, swollen with heavy, charcoal clouds that didn't drop rain, but a constant, fine sift of hot grey ash.
Every ti a pulse of Essence travelled back up the mana-veins I had seen in the basent, the ground beneath shuddered. The world was being shaken until its marrow broke.
I imdiately tightened the [Nullifying Veil], burying my signature deep within the sub-layers of the Lattice. My first instinct was caution. A world this violent didn't tolerate outliers.
I drifted toward the sound of the drums.
It wasn't a military march or the sounds of battle like I had first expected. It was a rhythmic, collective heartbeat — the sound of ten thousand heels striking scorched earth in a cadence designed to keep the spirit from flickering out. As I rounded a jagged, bone-white ridge of petrified silica, I found the first camp.
It was a city of scrap. Thousands of hovels were constructed from the rusted hulls of crashed mining ships and the literal rib-cages of colossal beasts that must have lived on this planet before the siphons arrived.
I looked at the people, and a sharp, icy lump of pragmatism twisted in my chest.
They weren't the elegant manta-ray beings or the prosperous, Light affinity scholars of the Harmony world. They were gaunt, humanoid beings with skin like cracked basalt and eyes that held the glowing embers of dying stars. Their clothes were tattered rags stiff with gri and sweat. I watched a group of teenagers, their ribs visible beneath paper-thin skin, thodically sharpening jagged shards of black glass on whetstones.
Everyone was ard. A blacksmith with one arm and a face lted by mana-burns was hamring out the dents in a rusted breastplate, his rhythmic strikes adding to the percussion of the drums. Even the old and the infirm carried sharpened iron stakes.
They were starving, they were haggard and beaten, but they weren't broken. Their powerful resolve was physically emanating. Their auras were frantic, vibrating with a level of concentrated, internal heat that should have caused their hearts to detonate.
As I walked unseen through the alleyways, I began to feel the friction.
The air didn't just vibrate with anger; it felt saturated with it, as if the molecules themselves were tiny spikes of irritation. I felt my own [Domain] react. The white-gold Phoenix Fla, usually a cool, analytical fire of rebirth and deletion, began to thrum with a chaotic, serrated rhythm. It was reminiscent of the Entropic Fla of annihilation.
The injustice of the Aegis "Harmony" was palpable here. It wasn't just an academic paper on the effects of essentially sucking out an entire world's Essence reserves. It was in the hollow cheeks of the children and the jagged iron held by the soldiers. I felt the mories of my own struggles on Ferra — the desperation of the first days, the cold realization of the System's apathy — beginning to surface, mixing with the ambient fury of this world.
It was a symphony of wrath. I watched a group of soldiers performing a ritual dance in the central clearing. Their movents were jerky, violent, and utterly precise, their voices raised in a low, guttural chant that wasn't a song, but a verbal imposition of their will to survive.
They called themselves the Veresians — nad for the vengeful spirits of old that refuse to leave the field.
I followed the highest concentration of Essence toward a central command spire. There, standing on a dais of cooling lava, was their leader.
He didn't wear starlight silks or stardust armor like the usual planetary Lords I've gotten to et. He wore a tattered, heavy grey mantle over a torso crisscrossed with the scars of a hundred desperate defenses. His face was a mask of cold obsidian, and his eyes were twin pits of a raging, white-hot vacuum.
This was Alecton, the Lord of the Shattered Chain.
He was coordinating a planetary campaign on a series of rough-hewn stone slabs, moving piles of iron filings around with surgical, tiered authority. He was a Peak Tier 8, and through my [Lattice Perception], I realized he was standing right on the precipice of Ascendancy. His foundation was staggering, built not on ditation and high education, but on a thousand years of cultivating Primal Essence through conflict and unyielding survival against the drain.
My [Void Perception] locked onto his hand. On his primary finger was a ring forged from a tal I didn't recognize — a deep, charcoal alloy that didn't reflect light.
It pulsed with a terrifying, rhythmic intensity.
Gluttony let out a violent, tallic shriek in my mind. The sensation was territorial, jagged, and tinged with a predatory caution. The ring on Alecton's finger must have been another relic, carrying an absolute conceptual weight of a Curse. And if I had to make an educated guess, I would predict that this ring had to be a Vessel of Wrath.
As I analyzed the resonance, my Fla roared. The Fla of Ending didn't attempt to challenge or extinguish the Essence coming from the ring. It instead gave a feeling that felt eerily similar to a person tilting their head. I felt an almost submissive pulse from the relic, as if the concept of Wrath recognized the Fla of Entropy not as an enemy, but as a respected guest.
I stood atop a rusted crate ten yards from the dais, completely enthralled by the connection. The sensory feedback was overwhelming. The music, the drums, the raw injustice flowing through the mana-veins of the planet — it was pulling at my edges. I felt the cold, clinical distance I usually maintained beginning to evaporate. The fury was addictive.
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I leaned in, trying to peek into the internal "Script" of the ring through the Void.
A sudden, violent spike of resonance between the Ring and my Fla caused a montary overload in the sub-space layers.
For the length of a single heartbeat, the [Nullifying Veil] failed.
My conceptual existence manifested for exactly one second — a figure draped in black nothingness, wreathed in the white-gold fire of a Sovereign.
Alecton's eyes snapped to my coordinate instantly. There was no hesitation, no shock.
A colossal pillar of deep crimson fla erupted from the dais, bridging the gap to my position in a microsecond. Space itself scread as the pillar of heat traveled, utilizing a spatial jump fueled by sheer, localized rage rather than traditional Space chanics.
Alecton appeared within the flas directly in front of my face.
He didn't strike. He simply stood there, his presence like the crushing weight of a collapsing moon. His aura of Wrath was absolute, yet strangely, he looked as calm as the eye of a storm.
"You aren't one of the leechers," he stated, his voice a gravelly, heavy resonance that felt like it was grinding my bones.
I didn't engage my Domain, hoping to gain more information. I kept my hands visible, slowly restoring the Veil as best I could. Besides, against a Peak Tier 8 holding a conceptual relic of Wrath, fighting probably wasn't the best first option.
"I'm not sure what you an by that, but I am not," I said, my voice echoing the authority of my core to match his volu.
He studied , his twin white-hot eyes narrowing. He sniffed the air, and for a second, I felt the sharp scrape of his Truth-Perception dragging across the surface of my soul.
"You sll of hard earth," he whispered, his aggression lowering by a fraction. "Your mana hasn't been scrubbed by a filtration machine. It's dense. It's scarred. It has been earned."
He spat the word toward the bruised sky.
"Not like the parasites above," he continued, stepping back and dismissing the flas. "The blood-sucking vermin who treat our very life-force as fuel for their silk curtains and their scholarly gas. Who are you and why are you here?"
I could tell through the Lattice that he had his relic pulsing with the vibration of my Soul. I instantly recognized it as a type of Mythic skill for detecting a person's honesty or intent.
"I walked through a gash in a cellar fifty miles beneath the shell-cities," I told him. "I was sent to fix a knot in a pipe. I didn't know what was on the other end of the tube."
Alecton let out a short, bark-like laugh. He looked out over the sprawling scrap-city, toward the lines of starving soldiers sharpening glass shards.
"They sent a plumber to fix the wound they gave us," he mused, a bitter irony coating the words. "And they sent a Sovereign of the Void to do their dirty work. The System is getting more efficient with its jokes."
I internally frowned, wondering about the reality of the situation. Were these people real? Were they just elaborate fignts constructed by the personalized dungeon to test my resolve? How did they know that I was sent by the System…?
Then I looked at a group of mothers in the dirt nearby, passing a single scrap of at between three children, their basalt-skin cracked from dehydration. I felt the heat coming from the ground, the scent of genuine misery, and the vibration of their anger.
I didn't care if the System built them. In this mont, they were more real than the Manta-ray philosophers upstairs.
"Who are you, and what world sired you?" Alecton demanded.
"Eren Kai," I said. "And I'm the Lord of a planet that would be in the dirt right now if I hadn't started burning the contracts."
Alecton nodded, the gesture solemn. "I felt a resonance echo coming from you. My Wrath and your… Chaos? They are like brothers in a dying house."
He stepped back toward the stone slabs, leaving himself completely unprotected. It was a shocking display of trust, especially since I could tell that he did not have a Perception skill to be aware of my movent.
"My researchers — the ones who haven't died of Essence starvation — have found the frequency of the bypass. We have cleared every leeching station from our continent. We have killed the wardens they parked in our sky."
He slamd a fist into a stone slab, the map beneath it shattering.
"We aren't dying quietly in the dark for another hundred years. We have found a way back into their plumbing. We are going to climb the tubes, Eren Kai. We are going to erge from the seashell palaces and drown their 'Harmony' in the blood they've stolen."
I received the ping in the back of my mind before I could start questioning why he was openly sharing his entire plan — System shenanigans probably.
[INSTANCE UPDATED: PLANETARY REVOLUTION.]
[Warning: Unique instance scenario outside standard paraters for Challengers. User will be permitted optional leeway due to unexpected variables and will have the option to completely reset the Challenge Dungeon.]
[New Objective (Optional): Assist the Lord of the Shattered Chain in the Liberation Campaign.]
[Secondary Objective (Optional): Expedite the collapse of the Harmony Protocol.]
A cold, familiar clarity washed over . This was a quest I could get behind. It definitely at least sounded a whole lot better than preserving the simulation of that dystopian leeching System.
The Veresians lacked the refined spatial manipulation required to safely traverse the high-pressure siphon portals without their bodies turning to soup. And I had the key to their problem with my [Void Omnipresence]. I didn't need to lead their armies' charge; I just needed to open the doors.
"That world has big cities," I said, looking into the Lord's unyielding white eyes. "I am sure they have so powerful actors hiding behind their Veils of peace and prosperity. I will help you, but I just want to make sure that you are prepared and know what you are up against."
I felt the Black Bracelet thrum, a final, greedy pulse of territory. My internal fire began to hum a rhythmic beat in sync with the war-drums.
Alecton walked to the edge of the dais, his voice booming over the scraping of obsidian sand.
"They look at our rags and think we have no teeth!" he roared to the sprawling camp. "They look at our blood and think it is just wine for their table! But tonight, it will be their blood that spills! And tonight, they won't be able to hide behind their walls!"
A cheer erupted from ten thousand gaunt throats — a sound that didn't hold hope, but an absolute, unbreaking determination.
I stood in the center of the scrap-city, watching the starving people rise with rusted iron and glass shards. I didn't know why, but I felt an imnsely powerful surge of desire to help them.
Perhaps because it was due to this world being a reflection of what Ferra could have beco. Or perhaps it was due to their palpable resolve that vibrated the air itself. Whatever the reason was, in that mont, I knew that I would try everything I could to make sure these people got their rightful justice.
"We are ready to open the portal," Alecton smiled, extending his scarred hand. "Take us to their Paradise."
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