Reborn before my betrayal

The Vacuum

The needle of silver light pierced the crimson smoke, moving too fast for human eyes to track.

Kaelen didn't try to roll away. He didn't call out to Vane or Mara. A decade of warfare had taught him that trying to dodge a high-tier tracking spell with an unawakened body was a fool's death.

Instead, he leaned forward, opening his arms wide, and met the light halfway.

THWACK.

The needle struck him dead center, right in the middle of his chest.

Mara let out a sharp gasp from behind the bone barricade, her hand instinctively reaching for her axe. High Mage Joshua began to lower his staff, his face a mask of absolute, professional indifference. He had executed hundreds of rogue mages; they all looked the same when a holy needle parted their sternum.

But the explosion didn't come.

The silver light didn't detonate Kaelen's heart, nor did it exit through his shoulder blades. The moment the high-tier imperial magic entered his chest, it hit the absolute, frozen void of his shattered core.

Kaelen’s body violently convulsed. Blood sprayed from his ears and nose, his veins bulging beneath his pale skin until they turned a terrifying, luminous silver. The pain was an ocean of white-hot needles scraping his insides, but a savage, monstrous smile broke across his bloody lips.

He didn't have a core to destroy. He had a vacuum. And a vacuum does not reject energy—it drinks it.

"My... my mana," Joshua muttered, his indifferent expression instantly shattering.

The seven-foot crescent staff in his grip began to vibrate violently. The faint, steady silver light radiating from his black dragon-scale armor wasn't just fading; it was being violently stretched, warping into a long, linear stream of raw energy that was being forcefully sucked across the black sand straight into Kaelen’s chest.

Kaelen clutched his own torso with both hands, his fingers digging into his own flesh until his nails tore. He used his willpower as a vice, trapping Joshua's holy magic inside his broken meridians, refusing to let it vent.

"You think your artifact makes you immune to this graveyard, Joshua?" Kaelen rasped, his voice vibrating with a dual resonance—his own gravelly tone mixed with the high-pitched hum of the stolen imperial light. "The dragon-scale doesn't block the anti-magic field. It just acts as a dam. And I just poked a hole in it."

"Release it! Break the connection!" Joshua roared to the remaining mages on the ridge, but his fingers were completely fused to the hilt of his staff by the sheer force of the magical suction.

The localized pocket of imperial law around Joshua’s body collapsed entirely.

The moment the silver protection died, the absolute, crushing anti-magic gravity of the Ashen Basin slammed down on the High Mage’s shoulders like a falling mountain. Joshua dropped to his knees, his breath exploding from his lungs as his internal mana circuits violently revolted against the sudden, unnatural suppression.

Kaelen didn't give him a single second to recover.

Having gorged his broken meridians on Joshua’s high-tier energy, Kaelen violently redirected the stolen power downward. He didn't use an imperial spell formula; he just dumped the volatile, clashing light and dark forces straight into the crimson-glowing base of the Second Obelisk.

"Return," Kaelen hissed.

The monolith didn't pulse this time. It erupted.

The massive, undulating bone storm that had been dismantling the vanguard infantry suddenly turned its collective orientation toward the ridge. Thousands of razor-sharp rib fragments and calcified skulls fused into three colossal, serpentine pillars of white shrapnel, launching themselves straight at High Mage Joshua and the columns of mages behind him.

BOOM!

The impact was cataclysmic. Joshua was completely swallowed by the swirling vortex of bone, his black dragon-scale armor shattering into a thousand useless fragments under the sheer kinetic force of the graveyard's awakening. The remaining imperial mages on the ridge line were swept away like dried leaves in a hurricane, their screams instantly drowned out by the thundering roar of tearing stone and grinding bone.

The silence that followed was absolute.

The bone storm subsided, dropping back into the black sand as dead, inert calcified dust. The crimson light on the Second Obelisk flickered twice before fading back into a cold, obsidian black.

Kaelen collapsed face-first into the sand at the base of the tower, his body entirely paralyzed, his skin covered in a mixture of his own dark blood and the silver residue of the stolen magic. His unawakened core was no longer empty; it was a chaotic, bleeding battlefield of internal injuries, but his violet eyes remained open, staring at the shredded remnants of the imperial vanguard.

The entire Western Division’s forward line had been wiped off the map.

Vane was the first to break the silence, his heavy boots crunching softly on the ash as he approached Kaelen's unmoving form. He stopped, looking down at the eighteen-year-old prince who had just orchestrated the slaughter of five hundred elite soldiers and a High Mage without a single tier of active cultivation.

"We need to move him," Mara said, stepping up beside Vane, her single eye tracking a new, deep-red glow rising along the far northern horizon.

The primary imperial legion wasn't dead. The three thousand mages and five thousand infantry were still marching, and the destruction of their vanguard had just signaled their exact coordinates to the main force. The sky to the north was turning a violent, artificial crimson as the legion's heavy artillery arrays began their synchronized ignition.

Vane reached down, carefully lifting Kaelen’s broken, bloody body onto his massive shoulder. He looked at Mara, then at the forty remaining rogue cultivators who had survived the deployment.

"Where to now, Prince?" Vane asked aloud, though Kaelen was barely conscious.

Kaelen’s fingers twitched against Vane’s armor. He raised his head by a fraction of an inch, his fading violet gaze fixed on the deep, unmapped darkness of the northern horizon, far past the approaching imperial lights.

"The Valley of the Sunless Sovereigns," Kaelen whispered, his breath hot against Vane's neck. "The third anchor is there. And the true monsters are waiting to be fed."