Reincarnated Grandmaster

Chapter 10: The Sovereign's Arrival

"Headmaster, you must listen to me!" Vance’s voice shrieked, losing every ounce of its former composure. He pointed his trembling elderwood staff at the boy in the mud. "The slave... he opened a spatial tear! He redirected the Ignis Manifest directly into the campus vaults! It wasn't my doing! He framed me!"

The Headmaster did not look at the burning forest or the shattered slate. His eyes remained fixed on Vance's staff, which still pulsed with the exact residual heat signature that had just vaporized three centuries of imperial history. Behind him, the twenty elite Imperial Guards moved with mechanical synchronization, their heavy silver halberds lowering until the razor-sharp tips were inches from Vance’s throat.

"Silence, Vance," the Headmaster said, his voice dropping to a temperature colder than the mountain wind. "The Imperial Treasury was protected by seventy-two layers of high-grade anti-spatial wards. Not even a Prime Mage could open a localized gateway inside those vaults from three miles away. To suggest that a branded slave candidate with an unawakened core bypassed the empire's greatest defenses is an insult to the council's intelligence."

"But I saw it!" Vance roared, his eyes bloodshot as the crushing weight of high treason settled onto his shoulders. "Look at him! He isn't hurt! He’s faking it!"

The Headmaster finally glanced down at Christian.

The boy lay collapsed in a pool of mud and fresh, dark blood. His white examinee tunic was shredded across the chest, exposing a jagged, smoking burn laceration that looked dangerously close to his heart. His breathing was shallow, a faint, pathetic rattle escaping his lips every few seconds. His vacant eyes were half-closed, staring mindlessly into the dark canopy like a creature that had accepted its imminent death.

To the forensic eyes of the mages, the evidence was absolute. A corrupt instructor had attempted to murder a high-performing slave candidate in the deep woods to cover up an illegal student guild monopoly, and when the slave resisted, the instructor unleashed an unrestricted forbidden spell, accidentally back-surging his own core into the network array connected to the treasury.

"Arrest him," the Headmaster commanded, turning his back. "Strip his core, seal his mana channels with black iron spikes, and throw him into the subterranean dungeon. The Emperor will personally demand his head by morning."

"No! Look at his eyes! Look at the slave!" Vance screamed as the silver-armored guards slammed him into the mud. A heavy iron suppression muzzle was violently clamped over his jaw, cutting off his frantic denials into wet, muffled chokes. Within seconds, the guards activated their teleportation scrolls, vanishing from the clearing alongside the disgraced professor.

The Headmaster stepped closer to Christian, his golden robes dragging through the dirt. He reached into his sleeve, pulling out a small, glowing green vial of high-grade spirit elixir. He poured three drops onto Christian’s feigned chest wound. The skin immediately began to knit together, the artificial laceration fading into a shallow scar.

"A miserable piece of luck," the Headmaster muttered to himself, his expression dark with political anxiety. "If the Erat family is implicated in the destruction of the treasury, the entire northern faction will collapse before the winter solstice. We must keep this livestock alive until the investigation concludes."

He waved his hand, signaling a pair of medical mages who had just materialized at the edge of the clearing. "Take him to the private sanctuary recovery wards. Isolate him from the rest of the campus. No one speaks to him without my explicit written seal."

By midnight, the internal landscape of the Imperial Academy had completely fractured.

The news of the treasury's destruction had reached the capital via rapid-transmission arrays. Lord Byron Erat, sitting in his grand estate hundreds of miles away, had reportedly executed three of his own head counselors in a fit of absolute panic. His family's sponsored instructor had not only failed to assassinate a single slave, but had also managed to commit the highest form of treason imaginable, dragging the Erat name into the mud alongside him.

The economic blockade against the D-Class pavilion vanished within hours. The student guilds, terrified of being linked to Vance’s fallen faction, immediately sent carts of fresh meat, high-grade grains, and spirit stones down into the sunless ravine as an unprompted gesture of goodwill to the surviving students.

Christian sat upright on a plush, velvet-lined bed inside the heavily guarded sanctuary ward. The room was silent, illuminated only by a single tallow candle burning on a silver tray.

He reached up, his long, slender fingers tracing the contours of the heavy iron slave collar around his neck. The fake wounds on his chest had completely vanished, his lightless void mana having already dissolved the foreign traces of the Headmaster’s green elixir. His heart rate was back to its perfect, unbothered sixty-four beats per minute.

Vance was gone. The Erat family’s political capital was broken. The Academy elders were too terrified of an imperial audit to interfere with his status. The board was clean, and his resource acquisition path was completely unimpeded.

Suddenly, the cold iron of the slave collar grew violently hot.

Christian’s eyes narrowed as a faint, toxic purple light began to seep from the welded seams of the metal. Deep inside the iron matrix, an ancient, forbidden runic sequence began to spin.

It was the Grave-Pulse.

Lord Byron Erat, realizing that the survival of Slave 704 was a direct thread that could lead the imperial inquisitors straight to his personal ledger, had chosen the ultimate option. From across the empire, using a high-tier bloodline resonance key, the patriarch had remotely triggered the collar's absolute self-destruct mechanism.

The iron band began to contract with terrifying speed. Four hidden, three-inch spikes of enchanted obsidian slid out from the inner rim, aiming directly for Christian’s carotid arteries and cervical vertebrae. The metal groaned under the pressure, the toxic purple mana filling the small bedroom with the scent of burning copper and death.

Christian didn't panic. His mind immediately accessed Kaelostra, preparing to project a miniature spatial fold directly inside his own neck to let the spikes pass through an empty dimension while he reconstructed his throat's atomic layout. It was an extremely risky maneuver that would exhaust his current core entirely, but it was mathematically viable.

He raised his hands to align his fingers.

Before his fingers could meet, the candle flame died.

The heat from the toxic purple runes didn't just fade; it froze. The entire room plummeted into an absolute, lightless zero. The ambient air turned into a solid shroud of frost, the velvet curtains stiffening into glass, and the frantic grinding of the mechanical slave collar stopped mid-millimeter.

This wasn't the mathematical grid of Kaelostra. This was something older, heavier, and completely separate from the laws of the current world.

The shadow in the furthest corner of the room detached itself from the wall.

It didn't glide or walk; the space simply redefined itself to place the figure right beside Christian’s bed. It was a woman clad in a plain, tattered gray mourning dress, her face completely obscured behind a thick veil of woven, shifting starlight.

She reached out with a pale, translucent hand, her fingers casually brushing against the glowing iron slave collar.

With a soft, melodic click, the indestructible, imperial-grade enchanted iron shattered into a handful of gray, lifeless dust, falling silently onto the frozen velvet sheets. Lord Erat’s ultimate bloodline curse had been neutralized like a flickering match under an ocean wave.

Christian did not move. He sat perfectly still, his pitch-black eyes locking onto the starlight veil. For the first time since his awakening on this world, his core hummed with a faint trace of recognition.

The gray woman didn't strike. Instead, she slowly sank to her knees onto the frozen stone floor. She lowered her head, placing both palms flat against the ground before bowing until her forehead touched his bare feet.

"The seven keys have turned to rust, and the eternal engine has stopped," she whispered, her voice echoing not in the quiet room, but directly inside the deepest chambers of his soul. "We have waited ten thousand years in the dark for your return... Emperor."