Chapter 704: The Truth
Chapter 704: The Truth
Alex sat in a car driven by one of Zero’s AI units, efficient, silent, offering nothing beyond the function it had been sent to perform. The destination was unknown, but the purpose of the trip was not.
He had spent nearly eight hours with his family after leaving the guild house because he needed that much time atleast to be among indiviauls who knew and saw him as just Alex, reminding him who he was and not what he had been, to offset the nightmarish memories of his past years, to know for certain he trully was what he belived himself to be, he was Alex and not the Dark King.
He needed that certainty before he walked into whatever came next.
The road ahead stretched long and straight, carrying them further from the city with each passing minute, the density of buildings thinning, the familiar geometry of urban space giving way to something older and quieter.
Alex watched the road and let his mind work. Not on the war that was ravaging the Ancestral Realm, not the ones he had tormented, the ones who had fallen at his own hands in the years when his hands had not been entirely his own, or even the armies he had sent to their deaths because they served a purpose he deemed right.
And not even on what awaited him when he returned to the Ancient world; the weight of that future was real, and he knew its shape, and he had already decided he would carry it.
No.
The center of his thinking, the place his mind kept returning to no matter how many paths he tried to walk away from it, was a single question.
’How much can I trust her?’
He had been turning this question over for hours, going at it from every angle available to him, every piece of information he had.
He had walked every path that led to trust and found the cracks in it, and he had walked every path that led to suspicion and found the gaps in that too.
He had tried to find the answer that resolved it cleanly and had not found one, and the problem remained exactly as tall as it had been when he started.
So Alex sat with that question in silence.
The road changed beneath the car, city asphalt giving way to something older, the smooth surface roughening into the quiet certainty of a dirt road, tall trees rising on either side.
They were now in the middle of nowhere, arrived at after nearly two hours of unbroken driving, and finally the car came to a stop.
A beat of silence and the floor beneath them shifted.
The descent was smooth and immediate, solid metal walls rising on either side as the mechanism carried them downward, the ceiling sealing shut above. Light filled the shaft around them, clean and neutral, illuminating the walls as they dropped, ten meters, twenty, the count continuing until nearly a hundred meters of earth separated them from the surface above.
Alex let his senses expand.
His eyes shifted, the ancient quality of them moving past the function of ordinary sight, pressing through the metal walls around him and into the space beyond, the tunnels that branched and spread in every direction, the depth of the construction, the scale of whatever this place actually was beneath its walls.
And then, approximately three hundred meters from his current position, he found it.
He had encountered this particular kind of disturbance enough times, and closely enough, that recognition arrived before analysis. He knew what he was looking at before his mind had finished confirming it.
A rift in space.
It was not a portal. The stability wasn’t there, but it was also not a pure rift, because it was radiating mana. The reason being a natural rift would simply be a radiation anomaly or be connected to the void realm and would have released mana, yes, but it would also have carried chaotic energy alongside it.
’What is even going on here?’ Alex thought, turning the anomaly over without reaching anything that fully satisfied him. ’What is that madman doing?’
The car reached the bottom, and the door swung open, and standing at arm’s length, waiting calmly with a smile on his face was Zero.
The same tuxedo. The same composed, unreadable presence. The same quality of someone who existed slightly outside the ordinary rules of how people occupied space.
"I had a few surprises planned for you," Zero said, his voice carrying its usual warmth. "One less is no big deal."
Alex said nothing, not one bit surprised he could tell Alex had already sensed the rift.
"Oh, come on." Zero’s tone shifted into something that managed to sound genuinely wounded, which was an impressive accomplishment given everything Alex knew about what Zero actually was. "Don’t give me that look. I am doing what is best for both worlds."
The levity left his voice as cleanly as a light being switched off. What replaced it was the other Zero, the authoritative one, the one that wasted no words, the voice of something ancient that wore charm the way other things wore armor and set it aside when the moment stopped requiring it.
"Come. I’ll show you." He said, pointing to a dimly lit passage. He took the lead, and Alex followed without speaking.
His mind was already moving, pulling at the threads of every theory he had constructed over months and years about the connection between Earth and the Ancient World, about what Zero was actually building toward, something that had always been larger than any single piece of it suggested.
The passage opened up into a spacious area, and stepping through, they were welcomed by the sight of vast glass stretching fifty feet high to a blackened iron ceiling, covering a circular space around a cavity at the center.
And at the center of that cavity, a massive rift.
A jagged-edged wound torn through the fabric of space itself, its edges alive with fractures that grew and shifted and retreated and grew again, a thousand arms flickering outward in every direction, the wound itself neither stable nor closed, caught in the permanent violence of something that had been forced open and was being held that way.
The rift itself was a mix of shifting colors, anomalous and strange, nothing static, nothing settled, the kind of thing that refused to be looked at directly without changing while you looked.
A circular platform stretched at the bottom, light running through its million circuits in patterns that moved too fast to follow. Above it, suspended at what must have been fifty meters in height, a disk of gray metal and black strips loomed, the two of them oriented around the rift between them, anchoring it from above and below.
Alex pressed his hand against the glass and stared into the rift with his ancient eyes, seeing more than naked sight could ever reach. Turbulent and twisted. Nothing like a stable rift connecting two places, and yet, even in its instability, it was a rift and rifts led somewhere.
This one led to the Ancient World.
The silence stretched for a long moment.
"You are using these to artificially infuse mana into Earth," Alex said. Not a question, a conclusion arrived at and stated plainly. "This explains the rising number of Awakened individuals."
"There are seven of them," Zero confirmed, stepping to stand beside him, his voice carrying the casual ease of someone confirming something they appear to be proud of. "Distributed across the world, and yes, your deduction is correct."
He looked at the rift with the expression of someone regarding their own work.
"The region of space your planet occupies falls under what is classified as barren space. The presence of mana, cosmic energy, as it is more accurately known, is negligible in this area naturally, so connecting it to a rich source is the only viable path to making your space begin to grow accustomed to it, to eventually start generating its own."
The silence that followed was a different kind.
Alex stood at the glass and let the information settle into him, not fighting it, not reaching for the next question before this one had fully landed. A new reality assembling itself around the one he had already understood, expanding its edges outward into territory he had not previously been able to see.
The mana rising in the world was not by accident, and not by some natural shift in the cosmic order, but by design, slow, deliberate, engineered toward a future that for most people would arrive without context and without warning, as something that simply seemed to be happening to them.
For the common population, that future was already larger than they knew. Larger than they were equipped to understand yet.
For him, the future had always been turbulent and vast and entirely its own thing, unknowable in its specifics, certain only in its difficulty. That much hadn’t changed.
But the scale of what Zero was building- that had just become something considerably larger than he had allowed himself to imagine.