The floor was cold. Not the clinical, absolute-zero cold of the Void, but the gritty, unforgiving chill of cheap linoleum. My cheek was pressed against a sticky patch of spilled beer, and the air... God, the air didn't smell like ozone or burning stars anymore. It smelled like cheap lavender air freshener and the heavy, musky scent of Marcus’s cologne.I gasped, my lungs burning as they pulled in the thick, humid air of the slums."Still alive, little prince?"That voice. It was a jagged glass shard to my psyche. I rolled onto my back, my vision swimming. My head throbbed with a rhythmic, dull ache—not the psychic scream of a collapsing Moon-Anchor, but a plain, human concussion.I looked at my hands. They weren't obsidian. They weren't silver. They were thin, pale, and trembling. I could see the blue veins through the skin—vulnerable, mortal veins."Marcus," I wheezed."Oh, so we’re on a first-name basis now?" Marcus stood over me, silhouetted against the flickering neon of the city

The heat of the prehistoric desert was a physical blow, a shimmering haze that tasted of salt and untapped potential. I stood on the white sand, my modern rags fluttering in a wind that had never known the scent of smog. Ahead of me, sitting by a fire of star-iron embers, was a man who looked like a god carved from obsidian."Sit, traveler," the man said. His voice didn't just vibrate in the air; it hummed in my marrow. "You have the smell of a thousand storms and a very familiar failure about you."I walked forward, my legs heavy. "Aethel, right? You said the Bank doesn't open for ten millennia. Faceslap of reality: I don’t have that kind of time."The man laughed, a sharp, arrogant sound. He looked up, and the breath died in my throat. He didn't just look like my father, the High King; he *was* the prototype. Younger, leaner, and possessed of a vanity so dense it had its own gravity."Aethel is a name for the dirt," he said, tossing a piece of raw meat into the fire. "Here, they cal

"Drop the staff, Selene! Now!" I roared, my voice cracking the sudden, unnatural silence of the dunes.The white jade in her hand was no longer pure; a vein of pulsing, violet rot crawled up the wood, turning her knuckles a bruised obsidian. Selene’s eyes weren't clear anymore. They were flickering like a dying screen."Sovereign... it’s so cold," she whispered, her body swaying."Get back, Master!" Aethel stepped forward, his hand glowing with that arrogant, unstable Qi. "I’ll handle this. It’s just a surge from the rift!""Faceslap of ignorance, Aethel! Get back or you’ll be the first casualty of a war that hasn't started yet!" I shoved him aside, my eyes locked on the horizon.The air didn't just ripple; it tore.Three figures stepped out of the shimmer. They wore armor made of shifting chrome and liquid shadow—tech that shouldn't exist for another ten thousand years. Their helmets were smooth, faceless visors, but I recognized the sigil on their chests. A weeping moon."Time-Assas

The ground didn't just shake; it groaned with the weight of a billion tons of prehistoric earth being forced into a geometry it didn't understand. We were three levels beneath the limestone cavern, in a space carved out by raw Nil-frequency and the desperate labor of the first "Employees"—tribesmen who had traded their spears for shovels the moment I showed them how star-iron could buy a year’s worth of grain."The silver vein is bleeding, Sovereign!" the lead excavator screamed, his torch flickering in the damp air."It’s not bleeding, it’s reacting!" I roared back, stepping over a pile of slag. "Keep digging! If you hit the obsidian layer, stop. If you hit air, run. We’re not looking for a cave; we’re looking for the anchor point!""Faceslap of logic, Master," Aethel’s voice echoed from the shadows of the tunnel. He stepped into the torchlight, his violet eyes pulsing with the Third Heaven’s rhythm. He was carrying a crate of raw ore like it was a feather. "Why are we burying the we

The scent of scorched jade and ozone still clung to my skin as I stepped out of the smoldering ruins of Selene’s temple. On the horizon, the night was no longer dark. It was lit by the rhythmic, orange pulse of a thousand torches. The Southern Lords hadn't just brought their cavalry; they had brought their entire civilizations, driven by a desperate, starving hunger for the "Stars' Blood" I had hoarded in the mountain."They aren't here for the Charter, Master," Aethel spat, wiping a mixture of soot and violet blood from his brow. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated from the feedback of the Altar's explosion. "They’re here to liquidate us. Faceslap of strategy: We’re outnumbered twenty to one, and our 'Hidden Sect' is half-dead in the sand.""They aren't here for the iron, Aethel," I said, my voice sounding like grinding stones. I looked at the red crack in the sky, which was now pulsing in sync with the fires of the approaching army. "They’re here because they’ve realized that the