The moment the pillar of sickly green light erupted from the dome of the Night Rose Palace, a continuous low-frequency tremor shivered through Bell's spine.
It wasn't the physical vibration of the secret chamber's floor. It was the frequency of the inheritance stone pillar passing through the ley line array, traveling up the skeleton of the entire building and burrowing into the marrow of his bones.
The last dark red rune on the stone's surface turned sickly green. The entire pillar glowed an iridescent emerald, emitting a thick, putrid, sweet scent of decay. The hum shifted from low and heavy to sharp and piercing, its frequency climbing toward the threshold of ultrasound.
Dracula knelt before the pillar. The cavity in his chest was still seeping blood, trickling out by the inertia of residual mana without a heart to pump it. It fell drop by drop onto the emerald stone tiles, the red mixing with the green to form a nauseating shade of brown.
His right hand was finally forced out of the cracks in the stone pillar.
It wasn't a voluntary withdrawal; the pillar had spat him out. Viscous green threads stretched from between his fingers, snapping with a wet pop. A green film clung to his withered fingers, hardening rapidly in the air into a dark brown shell.
The pillar no longer needed him.
Bell's mind raced with high-speed calculations. The "reversal" of the inheritance stone pillar—the core that originally outputted mana was now acting as a funnel. No, not a funnel. A pump.
A pump that sucked inward.
What was it sucking?
Blood source mana. Every drop of blood source mana distributed through the inheritance stone pillar and flowing through the bloodlines of every Ancestor. After that "fake Leila" thread entered the core, it had rewritten the pillar's operating logic. Output had become recovery. Distribution had become plunder.
The three-thousand-year inheritance network had, in this instant, become a spiderweb being pulled tight.
It's too late.
The words slammed into his skull with a dull, throbbing pain.
A sound came from outside the secret chamber. It wasn't the creaking of withered husks. it came from further away—beyond the outer walls of the Night Rose Palace, from the direction of the front lines of Moon Phase City.
The sound pierced through hundreds of meters of stone walls and earth, flooding into the ruined stone doors of the chamber.
It was a scream.
Not the scream of an ordinary soldier. It was the sound made by an Ancestor-level being when they are being forcibly torn apart from the deepest part of their bloodline. Bell had heard Grant's roar, Elizabeth's cold snort, and Victor's suppressed whispers. But he had never heard a tone like this.
It wasn't pain. It was the sound of being hollowed out.
Inside the chamber, Valentine's body suddenly stiffened. Her legs lost all strength at the same time. Her knees hit the stone tiles with a heavy thud.
It wasn't because of the backlash from Desolate End.
Her blood source mana was being drained as well.
Bell saw it—Valentine's skin began to turn gray starting from her fingertips. The gray climbed from the base of her nails, over the back of her hands, her wrists, and up her forearms at an incredible speed.
The inheritance stone pillar was the root system for all Ancestors' blood sources. Tampering with the root's direction was equivalent to strangling the lifeblood of every leaf.
“Lilian! Pull her out!”
Bell's voice exploded in the chamber. Lilian's reaction was half a beat faster than expected. She dropped her dagger and wrapped both arms around Valentine's waist from behind, dragging her away from the stone pillar. Valentine's body was heavier than it should have been—not the weight of muscle and bone, but the reverse traction generated as the blood source mana left her body.
The pillar did not want to let her go.
Leon rushed in from the side. Ice Spirit spread across the floor, forming a low-friction layer of ice beneath Valentine. Together, the two of them managed to drag Valentine five meters away from the pillar.
The spread of the gray stopped. It didn't reverse, but it stopped.
Valentine's right hand had completely turned to ash, from her fingers to her elbow; the texture of her skin had become a dry, stony gray. She looked down at her arm, her lips pressed into a thin line, but she didn't make a sound.
Bell rushed to her side and knelt, pressing his hands against Valentine's wrist. There was no pulse beneath the skin. Under the ashen surface, the blood vessels had already withered.
“The Ancestors outside,” Bell said, looking up at Tia.
Tia was still pinning Cecilia down. Her barbed claws were embedded in Cecilia's shoulders, their posture shifting from combat to a static freeze—Cecilia had stopped struggling. She hung from Tia's claws, her feet off the ground, her body relaxed, the curve of her smile still lingering.
“They've been petrified.”
Silence fell over the chamber for a moment. It was so quiet that the only sound was the continuous, bone-piercing hum of the inheritance stone pillar.
Nine Ancestors. Grant. Elizabeth. Victor. All petrified. The front lines had collapsed. The domain suppression over Moon Phase City was gone. The withered husk tide—
Bell closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he pushed the pain in the back of his head and his fear into the deepest layers of his consciousness.
He couldn't think of a solution. The Soul Vibration Cannon couldn't hit a disguise that had already entered the pillar's core. The user of Desolate End was nearly petrified herself. Leon's ice magic was like a tickle against the tampering of a ley line array of this magnitude.
He mentally flipped through every trump card he could call upon.
He was finished.
It wasn't enough.
The ground continued to vibrate. The sound of continuous collapses echoed from the direction of Moon Phase City's outer walls. Without the suppression of the Ancestors' domains, the withered husk tide was crashing through the city's final defenses like a free-falling weight.
Bell stood up and turned toward the entrance of the secret chamber.
He didn't know what to do next.
But his feet were walking outward.
He took three steps. Then, from beyond the ruined stone doors and the end of the underground corridor, a sharp, sudden crack rang out.
It wasn't the sound of stone breaking. It wasn't the sound of husks colliding.
It was the sound of space being torn open.
Bell stopped in his tracks.
Above Moon Phase City.
A spatial rift tore open on the eastern side of the sky. The edges were jagged and uneven—not naturally formed, but violently ripped apart by external force. The cut of the rift glowed with a silver-blue light, creating a piercing contrast with the sickly green emitted by the inverted, withered World Tree hanging nearby.
A hand reached out from the edge of the rift.
Antinoia stepped out of the rift. There was a tiny crack on the left lens of her gold-rimmed glasses. She pushed the frame up with her middle finger; the crack didn't fix itself, but the eyes behind the lens swept over the entire battlefield below.
Behind her, Horn hovered at the exit of the rift. His red engineering goggles were perched on his forehead, revealing a pair of bloodshot gray eyes. He hadn't shaved in three days. His left hand was in his pocket, and on the index finger of his right hand, he wore a brass ring. The ring's design was incredibly complex, covered in micro-gears and rune slots, with every gear spinning at a different speed.
He looked down at the scene below.
The withered husk tide covered the streets of Moon Phase City. Fragments of defense arrays flickered with residual light amidst the ruins. A third of the northern city wall had already collapsed. Withered wooden figures fell incessantly from the sky's rift, smashing into buildings, shattering, reassembling, and continuing to crawl.
Horn pulled his right hand out of his pocket and flicked the tip of his nose with his middle finger.
“Crude, direct, and utterly devoid of aesthetic,” he remarked.
His evaluation was brief. Then, he glanced sideways at Antinoia.
He raised his right hand, pointing the brass ring on his index finger toward the sky ahead. Within two seconds, the gears' rotation speed climbed to its limit, and silver-blue light surged from the rune slots.
He spoke. There was no chanting, no incantation—just a single sentence. But amplification magic poured his words into every street that hadn't yet collapsed, every window that wasn't yet shattered, and into every ear that was still running, fighting, or dying.
“The Ancestors can no longer be relied upon. So, let the world see—what the supreme wisdom of humanity looks like.”
He turned the ring.
The sound of brass gears clicking together exploded in the high altitude. The silver-blue light from the ring's surface expanded into a geometric array that covered half the city's sky. Every node of the array cracked open simultaneously, forming portals.
One. Ten. A hundred.
The interiors of the portals glowed with the cold sheen of metal. Heavy footsteps echoed from the other side, their rhythm perfectly synchronized.
The first golem stepped out from the nearest portal.
It stood three meters tall, cast entirely from a gray-black alloy. A fist-sized crystal core was embedded in its chest, with a faint light pulsing inside—the soul of a high-level monster, forged into a driving hub. Its head had no features, only two horizontal slits through which an icy blue light shone.
It wasn't the light of a dead object.
It was the light of information being processed.
The golem's eye-slits swept over the withered husk tide below. The color of the light shifted from icy blue to orange-red—identification complete, marked as hostile.
Its right arm deployed. The alloy shell of its forearm split along preset lines, and a high-frequency vibration blade extended from within. The blade's surface didn't reflect light; the extreme frequency of the vibration turned the blade's edge into a blurry gray shadow.
A second golem followed. Then a third. Then thirty.
The portals continued to vomit golems. Silver-blue pillars of light wove a net over Moon Phase City. As each golem landed, the sound of alloy soles crushing stone tiles joined the increasingly dense symphony of metal colliding with stone.
Horn pulled his left hand out of his pocket. His ten fingers moved rapidly in the air, tracing gestures. Every gesture corresponded to a tactical command. The golems' electronic eyes captured the commands, and their heads tilted to calibrate their angles within 0.2 seconds.
They didn't just charge in blindly.
The first echelon of twelve golems arranged themselves in a wedge formation, their high-frequency vibration blades slicing into the flank of the withered husk tide. The second echelon of eight golems hovered at a height of thirty meters, the light from their chest cores converging into shoulder-mounted cannons—blue-white beams of mana fire slammed down, precisely striking the black fruit cores embedded in the husks' chests. The third echelon split into four groups, each sealing off a main street's advance route for the husks.
Antinoia stood at the edge of the rift. Her gaze behind her gold-rimmed glasses didn't linger on the golem legion. She was looking at the ground.
In the northern district of Moon Phase City, she saw the petrified Ancestors. Nine gray-white statues were scattered among the ruins of the front lines. Some were frozen in combat poses—fists locked in mid-air, the remnants of ice mana condensed into white frost between their fingers. Others were frozen at the moment they fell—knees buckled, upper bodies leaning forward, their expressions caught between pain and confusion.
The speed of petrification had been too fast. They hadn't even had time to react.
Antinoia put away her metal plate and turned to Horn.
“How long can you hold out?”
Horn's fingers were still tracing tactical commands in the air. His gaze tracked the collision line between the golem legion and the withered husk tide through the rune projections on his goggles. The silver meat grinder was swallowing the black rain, the sound of alloy blades shredding withered wood merging into a continuous hiss.
He didn't turn to look at Antinoia.
But his fingers paused for 0.3 seconds between the forty-seventh command.
“Look at that.”
He gestured with his chin toward the rift in the sky.
The branches of the withered World Tree were still reaching downward. It wasn't falling; it was growing. The dead black branches were extending toward Moon Phase City at a visible speed, with three to five ripening withered husk embryos hanging from the tip of every newly grown twig.
The source hadn't been cut.
Horn sent out the forty-eighth command. Three golems broke formation and soared toward the sky's rift. Their chest cannons aimed at the nearest extending branch, and blue-white beams of light severed it.
Sickly green fluid oozed from the branch's stump. The fluid solidified with extreme speed. Three seconds later, two new branches sprouted from the cut.
Horn's fingers froze in the air.
Antinoia pushed up her glasses. The crack on the lens refracted a tiny, shattered rainbow in the silver-blue light.
Rate on N.U.
