The Betrayed Heir: Reborn To Rule The Star Domain

Chapter 9: The Bloodline Awakens

“You are weaker than you were,” said the Sleeping Sovereign, “and you are stronger than you will be. It is a good time to begin.”

Yulen stood in the star-chamber, breathing hard, with sweat soaking through his shirt, and wondered for the fifth time that night whether he had made a grave mistake.

It had been three weeks since the vault. Twenty-one nights, in which he had slipped down the seven hundred steps after midnight while the manor slept, and sat on the cold stone before the throne, and learned.

The Sovereign did not explain himself. He did not say who he was. When Yulen asked, the stars in the dome turned slowly and the voice answered, Later. And when he asked why it called him Valen, it said, Because you are carrying his name in your blood, child. Whether you know it or not.

It did explain the Legacy.

The Celestial Sovereign Legacy was not a technique. It was a door. Behind that door lay ten stages of power, each one locked behind a trial, each trial built to break the person who walked into it. The first patriarch had built it so only a descendant could open it, and he had built the trials so only a worthy descendant could survive them.

I can tell you how it works, the voice said. I cannot tell you if you will live.

That had been the most honest thing anyone had ever said to him.

Tonight was the first trial.

A circle of silver light surrounded his feet. The stars overhead had stopped turning. In the center of the chamber, the sleeping man sat in his throne with his eyes closed, and a single thread of starlight ran from his chest to Yulen’s forehead.

The First Gate is called the Gate of Mirrors, the Sovereign said. It does not test your strength. It tests whether you can bear to look at yourself. Do not turn away. If you do, the Legacy will close, and it will not open again in this lifetime.

“I understand.”

You do not. But you will.

The light flared.

Yulen was standing in Aurelith Square.

He knew it before he saw it. The cold. The smell of rotten fruit. A leg that wouldn’t straighten. His wrists were chained to an iron ring, and the stones beneath his knees were wet, and in the crowd, a child was laughing.

He was kneeling on the execution stones, and he was watching himself die.

Not from above. From the inside. Every detail, the way he had seen it, the way he had felt it. Isabella’s perfume. Her voice. You were so easy. The blade rising. The sky.

The vision ended. And began again.

And again.

Every time, a little slower. Every time, with a little more detail. The blade rising. His father at the treasury. Bram at the gate. His mother’s chains. And behind all of them, so faint he almost missed it, a small girl with a crooked braid, standing alone in the dark, calling his name.

He wanted to look away. Every part of him wanted to look away. His throat tore open on a scream, and he bit it back, and his teeth cut his own lip.

Do not turn away, said a voice, far off. Do not turn away.

He did not turn away.

This was the thing nobody had told him about grief. It did not shrink when you faced it. It simply stopped being a monster and became a weight, something you could pick up and carry. He picked it up. He carried it, all of it, the beggar, the cripple, the man who died hating himself, and he looked at that man in the mirror of the execution stones and thought, quite clearly:

You were not weak. You were loved wrongly. That is all.

The vision cracked like glass.

He fell to his knees on the star-chamber floor, gasping, his face wet. And his core, the golden wheel that had been turning in his belly since the day he woke, split apart with a sound like thunder.

Power rushed up through him. The Foundation wall shattered. For one second it felt as though every star in the dome was inside his skin. His Qi roared into a new and denser shape, a bright, burning sphere the size of a fist in the center of his body.

Core Formation.

The Sleeping Sovereign opened one eye.

It was the color of the night sky. It looked at Yulen for a very long moment, with something almost like sorrow.

One gate, the voice murmured. Nine remain. You are your father’s son. And I think, in time, you will be a great deal more.

The eye closed. The chamber went dark.

Yulen climbed the seven hundred steps on legs that would barely hold him. He emerged into the ancestral hall just before dawn, with the sun a thin red line along the eastern wall, and Bram sitting on the dais steps with a pot of tea wrapped in a quilt he had clearly been keeping warm for hours.

“Young master,” the old man said, in a voice carefully, deliberately casual. “I do not know what you have been doing every night this week. I want it understood that I do not wish to know. But you look like a ghost, and I made you tea.”

Yulen took the cup. His hands were shaking. He drank. It was oversweetened. It was perfect.

And then, from outside, a soft, long, shuddering sound, like a bell tolling in the sky.

He went to the door.

Above the Valerius manor, a pillar of pale starlight rose from the ancestral hall, a hundred feet wide, straight up into the dawn. It lit the whole capital. Rooftops, towers, temple spires, shining blue-white from the Palace to the poorest slum.

People were coming out into the streets. They stood in doorways, staring up.

On the mountain above the capital, in the white halls of the Heavenpiercing Sect, a woman in grey robes looked up from her morning tea and set it down very carefully on the table.

“That,” she said softly, “is a Sovereign light.”

She had not seen one in her lifetime. No one had, in thirty thousand years.