Chapter 1269: Eira, That Night’s Loser

After the long possession of her Master, the savage exhaustion that had arrested her soul and the obscene amount of power Phei and the Endless Void had squeezed out of her between them, Eira wanted absolutely nothing from existence except several uninterrupted days of sleep.

Several might even be optimistic.

If she closed her eyes now and truly surrendered to the exhaustion, she suspected a week or three could vanish before she opened them again.

’Perhaps longer.’

Her soul felt hollowed out, her reserves scraped so painfully thin that reaching for power produced little more than an ache where oceans of strength had once answered her.

Phei had benefited enormously from everything that happened.

The Endless Void had awakened and stretched itself through his body and displayed a fraction of what had always been hiding beneath the surface. Phei himself had survived, evolved and returned carrying more advantages than any nineteen-year-old Master Stage cultivator had a respectable right to possess.

Eira, meanwhile, had paid most of the bill.

Even flying had become torture.

Ordinarily she could cross Paradise with enough speed to make distance feel mildly embarrassed for existing; in a flash if she didnt want to just flap her wings and feel the wind in her wings and blushing her beautiful admirable body Phei had not touched since that time, yet tonight every attempt to accelerate sent vicious pain stabbing through her wings, meridians and soul.

It felt as though millions of needles had been buried throughout her tiny body and enchanted specifically to punish movement, each one twisting whenever she pushed herself faster than her depleted state wanted to tolerate.

Eira’s face scrunched as another wave of pain travelled along her back, forcing her to slow before muttering sourly: "Celestial-grade needles, if you will. Apparently ordinary-needles-like-pain wasn’t prestigious enough for what those two did to me."

That sounded much better.

If one had been drained half-dry by a Cosmic Dragon and that impossible Void that lived beneath him, the resulting suffering deserved at least a respectable rank.\

’Celestial-grade it is then.’

By the time Eira slipped quietly into Mother’s apartment, night had returned over Hell’s Paradise Island as though the previous one had never been torn apart by something the entire world still lacked words to describe.

Paradise glittered beneath the windows with almost insulting normality.

Towers burned gold and white against the darkness, streams of vehicles crawled along distant roads, restaurants continued filling, clubs awakened beneath violet signs and thousands upon thousands of windows held tiny ordinary lives whose greatest crisis tonight might be an argument, a missed reservation or someone discovering they had married an idiot.

The rest of Earth was considerably less calm.

What had happened to the small realm had survived the return of daylight and grown stranger with every hour people spent trying to explain it.

Observatories had filled with sleepless astronomers arguing over instruments that insisted stars had remained exactly where mathematics said they should be while every human eye had watched the sky become an absolute black nothing.

While Pilots had brought aircraft down with passengers still trembling from the memory of flying through a night where horizon, ocean and heaven had briefly become indistinguishable.

Sailors crossing open seas had returned with stories about compasses behaving normally while the entire universe above their ships appeared to have been extinguished, and ancient temples and religious houses that had been with no believers had found themselves crowded before sunrise by people who had not sincerely prayed in years.

’Humans can be funny.’ℯℯ𝘭.

Humans, naturally, responded to the unknown in the most human ways imaginable:

The frightened went searching for gods, the wealthy attempted to purchase certainty while private observatories received fortunes overnight from people suddenly desperate to know whether the sky could disappear again, while underground shelters that had spent years being advertised to paranoid billionaires found their waiting lists swelling before breakfast.

Charlatans were already selling fragments of supposed "night matter," pieces of meteorite claimed to have fallen during the phenomenon and beautifully packaged bottles containing air allegedly gathered during the three minutes when heaven vanished.

Eira was almost impressed.

Humanity had witnessed something primordial and still found a way to invent merchandise before understanding it.

Some insisted the phenomenon had been astronomical despite possessing no astronomical explanation for it, while others proposed hidden weapons, unknown atmospheric failures, mass sensory distortion or an interaction with some invisible layer of reality nobody had previously measured.

Religious leaders declared judgment, revelation, warning and blessing according to whichever interpretation attracted the largest congregation:

Add to that, several obscure cults announced with irritating confidence that everything had happened exactly as their scriptures predicted, despite those scriptures having apparently predicted six different endings of the world during the previous decade.

Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, conspiracy circles had managed to blame rival governments, an ancient civilization beneath Antarctica and, in one particularly ambitious theory, the moon itself.

Eira drifted deeper into the apartment with a faint smile.

’Ignorance really is bliss.’

Nearly ten billion people had watched something impossible happen and immediately begun constructing explanations around the holes in their understanding, but the funniest part was that ordinary humanity was not even the most ignorant group tonight.

The Legacy Families themselves had no idea how much they had lost.

They knew the previous night had gone catastrophically wrong. The Maxtons and Heavenchilds themselves knew the Coffer plan had not went according to plan, that Danton remained missing and the Chained had vanished.

They would already be moving people and waking hidden elders and searching through everywhere, yet none of them understood the full shape of the disaster waiting beneath their feet.

The Coffer alone was enough to turn generations of planning into ashes.

For centuries, the Legacy Families had poured wealth, rare cultivation resources, ancient materials and irreplaceable treasures into that collective treasury, each contribution made beneath an agreement old enough that most of the people currently benefiting from it had never questioned why it existed.

Heavenchild and Maxton had long ago decided cooperation had become less attractive than possession. They intended to take what everyone had built together, nourish their own forces with it, cultivate an army strong enough to place the other Legacy Families beneath them and turn centuries of shared preparation into the foundation of their private supremacy.

It had been an impressive betrayal.

Eira appreciated good treachery when she saw it.

Unfortunately for them, they had successfully stolen the Coffer from their allies only long enough for someone else to steal it from them, after which the entire treasure had somehow completed its humiliating journey into the hands of the Young Dragon they had been preparing to defeat later when they confronted him in a face to face battle.

Eira lowered herself onto the backrest of a nearby sofa and allowed her wings to sag behind her, too exhausted to maintain even the illusion that she still possessed proper posture.

Amusement remained stronger than fatigue for a few more minutes, however, because the longer she considered what Danton had lost, the more ridiculous the entire operation became.

The Coffer was only one wound.

The Chained were another.

Those World Transcendents had not appeared from nowhere. Heavenchild and Maxton had spent who knew how many years finding them, binding them, suppressing them and preserving them as weapons whose existence even most members of their own families probably never knew.

Danton had marched eleven such beings into Anarctica around the Coffer, a force excessive enough that even Eira had initially wondered whether he intended to transport a treasury or invade a small realm on the way home, after.

Not one of those eleven remained under his control.

Some had died beneath Phei’s hands and orders and the Endless Void’s hand, their World Transcendent Cores taken before even their corpses could become useless while the bodies themselves had gone to the Undead Queen, meaning Danton had achieved the almost artistic feat of losing soldiers so completely that even those who were dead might eventually return to the battlefield beneath the Queen’s command.