Chương 323: The Desolation Grid

The transition from a mile-long vertical plunge into a horizontal landing should have been jarring, but the Desolation Grid operated on a logic that treated momentum as a suggestion rather than a law. As I hit the frost-shrouded floor of the Western Quadrant, the kinetic energy that would have been enough to shatter my entire skeleton pre-integration simply dissolved into the mist, absorbed by the hungry floor. I was alone for exactly three seconds. The environment around me was a sensory nightmare.

Above, the sky was a churning sea of violet lightning and stagnant grey clouds, casting long, strobing shadows across a landscape of jagged obsidian pillars. To the east, the horizon glowed with the sickly orange light of a boiling silver sea. To my north, mountains made of semi-transparent blue crystal drifted aimlessly through the air, tethered to the ground by chains of solidified gravity. It was an amalgamation of various biomes, eerily reminding me of the early days of the Confluence.

The air was thick with the scent of ozone and ancient, frozen earth. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass — it was high-density funneled Essence, tuned to a pitch that would make a Tier 5's lungs collapse.

"Sector identified," Crys' voice resonated through our Void-link, her mental signature flickering into focus nearby.

"Eren, two degrees north-west. I see the spot we decided on. Should make it there from where I am in an hour. Also, the ice here... it's breathing." I moved toward her. I didn't use [Omnipresence]. I didn't want to resort to using my best skills unless absolutely necessary. Instead, I engaged the legendary-tier version of [Void Walk].

I stepped into the Lattice, feeling the familiar pull of the sub-space layers, and glided through the grey medium of non-existence until I manifested thirty feet behind a colossal, hunched pillar of frost-slicked stone. Crys stood there, her obsidian-violet armor reflecting the pale lightning above. She wasn't smiling like her usual cheerful self. With her solemn gaze, she looked like a predator made of polished amethyst.

"Look at the counter," she said aloud, her voice tight. I looked at the top-left of my vision. A shimmering screen, projected by the Viceroy's personal layer of the System, displayed the statistics. [Current Aspirants: 92/100]"Eight gone in the first few seconds," I noted.

"The 'falling' stage must have had some early-game elimination traps. Probably weeded out the ones who panicked or couldn't handle the atmospheric mana shift." We turned our attention toward the nearest landmark — a set of sprawling, sunken ruins that resembled an upside-down cathedral. The white marble of the structures was heavily cracked, but pulsating with an inner, rhythmic golden light.

As we approached, my [Lattice Perception] caught a small signature spike of Tier 8 authority coming from the center of the nave. Sitting atop a floating pedestal was a set of heavy, twin daggers forged from the condensed essence of a neutron star. They hummed with a physical vibration that rattled the surrounding debris.

"There's a Tier 8 artifact in these ruins," I whispered. I didn't step into the hall, even though my initial scans showed no traps. I just analyzed the weapon's frequency. It was a High-Legendary piece, firmly in the Tier 8 category but fitted with a 'systemic reducer' — essentially a magitech fuse that allowed a Tier 7 soul to wield it without exploding.

"The Viceroy is leveling the playing field," I mused.

"Any aspirants without preset gear can pick those up and suddenly hit with the mass of an Ascendant. It turns everyone into a glass cannon. One hit from those, and most people's protective barriers won't matter unless they dodge or rewrite the kinetic outcome."

"The Remorans won't care about these," Crys noted, scanning the distant sky.

"They brought their own. These are just lures to draw the mid-tier groups together so they can cull each other."

"People," I interrupted, pulling Crys behind a shelf of jagged, black glass. I masked our presence under the [Nullifying Veil], burying us beneath layers of conceptual emptiness. Two figures emerged from the fog on the opposite side of the ruins. One was a Stheno — a humanoid covered in intricate, gold-patterned scales with hair made of thick, independently moving mana-tentacles. Beside him was an Uruk — a massive, grey-skinned giant with four eyes and stone-like protrusions on his shoulders.

They weren't part of any group of wealthy Heirs, but their armor was sleek, customized with resonant shielding I'd seen in high-end auction houses.

"The daggers are mine, Stolos," the Stheno hissed, his mana-tentacles flickering with toxic green light.

"Use your mass-sink to anchor the vault guardian. If we secure the star-steel, we can crush the demons in the lava pits."

"If we don't get jumped by the shadow-scouts first, Rel," the Uruk grunted, slamming a heavy gauntlet against a pillar to test the resonance. They were coordinated and professional yet they seemed unable to detect us at all. They moved with a tactical caution that spoke of years spent fighting for their lives. But they were looking for traditional signatures — thermal traces, mana ripples, gravitational fluctuations, sounds in the wind and so on. They weren't expecting someone to be able to exist between the gaps.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I looked at Crys.

"Do we let them have the weapon?"

"If they pick it up, their power doubles," Crys replied through the link.

"I don't like those daggers being used against us in an hour. We clear them now while they're focused on the lure." I nodded.

"Don't use Chrono-Severance or any Time related abilities yet. Keep your temporal aura internal. I'll also be using basic Void-Walk and blades. There seems to be System Veiling blocking them from observing us fully but I don't trust it's enough." The Stheno, Rel, lunged for the daggers. As his fingers brushed the star-steel hilt, the pedestal let out a concussive blast of golden light. It was the guardian pulse — a programmed defensive routine.

Rel activated a shimmering, translucent shield of scales to tank the blast, while Stolos braced himself to grab the rebound. That was their moment of total distraction. I glided through the Void Lattice, reappearing in Rel's blind spot as the golden flash of the pedestal reached its peak. My hand moved through a simple [Void Strike] — a standard, high-level skill I had mastered years ago.

I pulled a regular set of black, essence-etched Void daggers from my Armory — formidable weapons for an average Ascendance candidate, not a sponsored Scion. I slid the blade through the gap in the Stheno's shoulder-guards. Rel's reaction was terrifyingly fast; he felt the atmospheric ripple and attempted to phase into liquid shadow. But my blade was already anchored in his causality. The [Void] completely erased the space he occupied. The black steel bit deep.

I injected a jagged pulse of neutral Void energy into his central core, disrupting his circulation, and rapidly consuming his Essence and mana reserves. Simultaneously, Crys manifested above Stolos. She didn't sever his timeline like her usual opening move; she simply manipulated the gravity of the falling fog around him. The giant Uruk looked up, his four eyes widening, and he attempted to throw a massive mass-crush at the air where she hovered. Crys twisted mid-air, a dance of lavender starlight.

She dropped her weight, her boots striking his chest with the force of a plummeting cliff. Stolos' internal shield shrieked, glowing red as it reached the threshold, and he was driven twenty feet into the rubble of the cathedral.

"Ambush!" Rel screamed, coughing green blood as he flailed a multi-colored mana whip at my face. I dodged with a simple lean, using my own raw, honed reflexes enhanced by Essence. I parried his whip with my dagger, letting the friction produce sparks of grey energy, and landed a heavy kick to his stomach that sent him tumbling toward his partner. They didn't give up. The Uruk, Stolos, roared, igniting a massive, earth-affinity aura that turned the surrounding marble into a liquid sludge of molten rock.

Rel spiraled around the periphery, firing bolts of acidic mana meant to corrode our vision. It was a beautiful, desperate coordination. Against any other duo, they would have been a lethal pair.

"Now!" Crys shouted. She landed, her amethyst form vibrating. She tapped the floor, sending out a ripple of Void energy that didn't consume matter, but rather 'isolated' it. The molten floor beneath Stolos froze instantly into obsidian, trapping the giant's feet in place. I stepped into the gap Rel was desperately trying to maintain. I bypassed his whip-line using a micro-jump of [Void Walk] and slammed my elbow into his temple. The Stheno's skull met the black obsidian of the frozen sludge with a jarring thud.

I didn't use any more skills or mana. There was no need to waste the energy to fully delete their avatars. The systemic parameters had a 'Fatal Wound' detection system. Rel and Stolos faded into white mist, their conceptual forms forcefully ejected from the arena. [Current Aspirants: 70/100] The numbers were falling fast. It hadn't even been three hours. I turned to the star-steel daggers still sitting on the pedestal, their golden light pulsing impatiently.

"Take them?" Crys asked, her armor returning to its calmer violet state.

"No," I replied, staring at the opulence of the blades.

"Leaving them there acts as a trap for the next team. If we carry them it'll be a risk since my [Lattice Perception] detects a signal they are broadcasting. It feels like a permanent, low-level signal that Scions with detection artifacts can trace across half the map. The Judge's 'Charity' is a tracer."

"Smart," a small, familiar squeak came from the shadows of a ruined archway. Forn drifted out of the mist, his rucksack slung low, his obsidian eyes scanning the battlefield with professional detachment. He had arrived exactly as planned, moving like a phantom through the frost.

"Those two were high-profile on my people's charts," Forn noted, nudging a fragment of Rel's shattered shield with his foot.

"Strong cultivators. Yet you handled them like they were toddlers. Very scary."

"The fewer people that we meet in this event, the better," I said, looking toward the northern horizon, where the mountain chains of the Silver Heirs were glowing with an ominous, aggressive brilliance.

"We don't need to show our cards here, we just need to ride out this event until 32 remain."

"They are clearing the northern artifact spires already," Forn whispered, his bioluminescent whiskers twitching with a nervous intensity.

"I watched a group of six. They didn't even use artifacts. They just flattened everyone who stepped near the tower using a mass-synchronization ritual. They aren't here for weapons; they're here to destroy other contestants' cultivation and show off for the Viceroy." I looked at Crys and then at the scavenger Gnoll.

"We have enough resources and we need a level of preparedness they don't understand," I told them.

"Fighting for artifact-weapons in the open just puts a bullseye on our foreheads for the mid-tier squads to try their luck. We aren't hunting for loot. Again, we just need to survive." I pointed toward the Western fringes, where a vast, petrified forest sat submerged under a shallow, bubbling pool of indigo mana-water. It was a region designed for stealth and attrition — a landscape where the Gilded Heirs' bright starlight chariots would struggle to maintain visual coverage.

"We hide out and we observe," I commanded, my voice sinking into a cold, lethal calm.

"Let the demons and the Scions grind each other down in the high-loot zones. We intervene only to break alliances or clear threats that wander too close to our blind spot." Forn nodded, a hungry amber light flaring in his eyes. Crysanthe cracked her amethyst knuckles, the excitement beneath her aristocratic mask beginning to boil. The 70 of us left weren't going to survive the night if the culling maintained this pace. I moved back into the shadows of the Lattice, my gaze fixed on the distance.

The Gilded Heirs believed they were playing a grand exhibition for their fathers. Making a circus of a cemetery.

"Here we go," I projected. We vanished into the fog, three phantoms slipping between the ribs of a dying galaxy.