The God-Tier Beast Architect

Chapter 4 The Archivist's Secret

The silence inside The Burrow felt different now. Gone was the pungent smell of a damp cathedral, replaced by the sharp, ozone-heavy scent that lingers after a massive thunderstorm. Kenzo Julian sat at his workbench, cluttered with wire scraps and chunks of scrap metal. In front of him, Nihilus, the shadow dragon, hovered silently in the air. Its form resembled solid black smoke, occasionally shifting in consistency from obsidian scales to threads of somber light.

"Alright, we need to test your limits," Kenzo said, taking a deep breath.

He reached for a low-grade mana crystal from a storage box. It was dull, barely holding any light, the kind of trash discarded by the upper-class districts. Kenzo placed it in the center of the table.

Nihilus tilted its head. Without a growl or a hint of aggression, it slowly approached the crystal. Suddenly, Kenzo’s red eyes glowed intensely. The Eye of Origin began scanning the crystal from deep within his mind, deconstructing the magical atomic structure down to a microscopic level.

"System, provide an energy projection," Kenzo commanded.

In front of Kenzo’s eyes, a transparent holographic projection appeared, visible only to him. There, the mana flow inside the crystal, usually static and weak, suddenly crystallized.

Nihilus opened its tiny, dimension-like maw. Instead of biting, it swallowed the light radiating from the crystal. The dull stone instantly crumbled into tasteless white powder.

It wasn't raw energy that leaked out, but a pulse of pure aura that merged with the air and was absorbed directly into the pores of Kenzo’s skin.

Kenzo’s body tensed. His muscles, which had been exhausted from the fight against the Goldenthorn clan soldiers, now felt as if they were being surged with cold electricity. The pain in his shoulder healed in seconds. His strength felt doubled by that single bite from Nihilus.

"You're not just eating the energy; you're purifying it," Kenzo whispered, his eyes wide. "You're like a filter for reality. That mana crystal is nothing but garbage in the real world, but to you, it’s fuel that needs refinement."

Nihilus flapped its small wings and landed on Kenzo’s shoulder. Its body was now denser, its black hue deeper, as if it were sucking the light from the neon lamps in the corner of the room.

"Smart. You’re not just a Void Beast. You’re an Architect," Kenzo continued.

He grabbed Marcus’s ancient journal. On page 42, there was a diagram Kenzo had always dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. ‘Void is not empty. Void is the canvas where all rules of mana are rewritten.’

Kenzo began matching the data scanned by the Eye of Origin with Marcus’s handwriting. Suddenly, it hit him. The Neo-Berlin Empire had been distributing mana energy to the public through the Main Tower managed by the noble families. They kept energy levels for the lower castes, like the Zero caste, stagnant so that they could never evolve or wield any power.

They weren't just oppressing people; they had placed a genetic lock on the population to ensure they remained nothing more than passive batteries.

"Bastards," Kenzo hissed. A cold rage spread through his chest.

"Nihilus, if we can purify mana, can we also harvest it from other sources?" Kenzo pointed to the digital map projected on the wall, showing the Rejection Vault, the place where the Goldenthorn clan dumped the deformed beast eggs from their failed experiments.

Nihilus released a low vibration on Kenzo’s shoulder, a signal that felt like absolute certainty.

"The vault is our target," Kenzo said, standing up and pulling on his long black cloak, which concealed his athletic frame. "That clan thinks those deformed eggs are just biological waste to be tossed away. But they don't realize that the more we collect, the larger our genetic architectural database becomes."

Kenzo no longer moved like a fugitive. His movements were calmer, more precise. The Eye of Origin fed him data on every electrical current in the bunker walls and the density of the cathedral’s exterior barriers.

"Back then, I probably would have trembled just hearing the words 'Rejection Vault.' Their security uses high-grade aura sensors. If you have a strong mana aura, you're detected in seconds," Kenzo stepped toward the secret bunker door.

He paused in front of a large mirror. His eyes were sharper now, his gaze cold, as if he no longer saw the world as a home, but as a laboratory ready to be dissected.

"Fortunately," Kenzo flashed a thin smile, "to their sensors, I don't have an aura at all. I’m not just a meaningless zero. I am the void that is going to swallow your system whole."

Kenzo stepped out of the cathedral. Before him stretched the vast elite zone of Neo-Berlin, filled with golden towers and robotic guards.

His mind drifted to the espionage plan he had mapped out. If he could infiltrate the Rejection Vault as a waste disposal worker, he would have access to thousands of genetic samples. Nihilus would harvest them all. They would absorb the base structure of every deformed beast, recompose their code, and create something no clan in the Empire could ever dream of producing.

"We aren't just runaways anymore, Nihilus," Kenzo muttered, staring at the towers shining arrogantly in the distance. "Starting tonight, we are the architects of ruin for this world’s old order."

Nihilus hissed softly, hiding itself within the folds of Kenzo’s shadow. Kenzo’s footsteps grew steadier as he left the squalid corridors of the outskirts, entering the narrow alleys that connected the Waste district to the fake luxury above.

He was the archivist of an unwritten future. And with every step he took, the foundation of this city began to feel brittle, not from the force of an explosion, but from the presence of a Zero who had finally understood how the world’s machinery worked.

That night, amidst the blinding neon glare and the cold Neo-Berlin air, the Scrapper began his journey to steal the Ruler's secret code. He didn't want to topple the throne just yet; he wanted to eat the throne from the bottom up, one data block at a time, until all that remained in the Empire was a profound, hollow silence.

"Primary target within sensor range," the mechanical voice of the Eye of Origin chimed, providing him with coordinates right beneath the central tower.

Kenzo didn't hesitate. With a small push of Void energy from his heels, he darted into the darkness, a ghost ready to rewrite the fate of humanity, right under their arrogant noses.

This wasn't the end of the hunt, but the opening chapter for Kenzo Julian, the Genetic Architect who would make the world's rulers beg for mercy as their reality slowly crumbled under his design.

The first heist would begin in minutes. Kenzo knew that once he went in, he could never return to his old life. But to him, an ordinary life was a death sentence. And now, he couldn't wait to live.