Chương 400: The First Sin

The cobalt-obsidian skin of the Planetary Lord slowly settled, the violent blood-red glow of his horizontal visor dimming as my words registered within his internal channels. He didn't lower his massive kinetic-quartz claymore, but the suffocating gravity-shear of his Domain receded by a fraction, the air pressure in the grand throne room returning to a manageable level.

"You ask why the High Lith-Chord has banned the gravity currents?" the Regent's voice resonated through the crystal pillars, a deep, mechanical hum that carried a defensive weariness.

"Because gravity is a contagion, traveler. Our ancient records and historical archives speak of gravity cultivators as an uncontrollable plague. In the hands of a common citizen, gravity mana disrupts the atmospheric balance, fractures the tectonic plates, and tears our defensive relays to silt, if they choose to not simply ignore them." The Lord took a slow, heavy step forward, his crystalline robes rustling against the starlight-marble floor.

"There must always be a single, assigned Regent who carries the burden of gravity on Oros. It is my duty to maintain our spatial rifts, to open the regional portals, and to establish trade routes through the Spires for our people. But if the general population is allowed to cultivate the mass-affinity... they become impossible to restrain.

If they develop even a minor resonance with the Void layers, they can bypass our boundary veils, slip through our prisons, and escape our laws entirely unless they are completely, violently overpowered." I had to suppress a dry, internal chuckle. Impossible to restrain, indeed, I thought, my mind tracing the mechanics of my own [Omnipresence] and [Temporal Slide]. He wasn't wrong. A gravity-user wreathed in Void logic was a structural nightmare for any planetary authority.

We were simply too difficult to box into a grid.

"I understand your administrative concerns, Regent," I said, my voice level and quiet in the vast room.

"And I'm not here to start a rebellion. You can run your world's restrictions however you see fit. I am only here because I am looking for a specific man." I turned, pointing a finger toward the silent, dark shadow pool resting near my boots.

"Nyx. Go ahead." The Regent's horizontal visor flared with a sudden, cautious confusion. From the shadow at my feet, Nyx glided upward, her dark silk robes unfurling like a cloud of ink. She didn't draw her daggers, although she clearly enjoyed how every movement caused the Regent to flinch. Instead, she wove her shapeshifting shadow-flesh into a perfect physical replication of the shadowed figure from my visions.

She took on the exact height, the long draped hood, and the heavy, eclipsing posture of the Master sitting upon the basalt throne, even imitating his own signature, albeit at a much weaker scale. The moment the Regent's eyes locked onto her transformed shape, the throne room of Reson-Alpha went absolutely, deathly silent.

The massive, two-handed claymore of kinetic quartz slipped from the Regent's long, four-jointed fingers, crashing into the starlight-marble floor with a deafening, echoing shatter that produced a network of fine cracks in the basalt tiles. The Planetary Lord stumbled backward, his tall, nine-foot cobalt frame trembling with an absolute, primal terror that made his internal core spin with a high-pitched, metallic shriek.

"The... it's him..." the Regent whispered, his telepathic voice completely losing its authoritative nasal pitch, cracking with a frantic, chaotic static.

"The... Silent Executor..." With shaking hands, the Lord reached into the collar of his silver robes, pulling out an ancient, tarnished copper-and-lead sigil that carried the exact same uncompiled geometric scratches as my own soul gate.

"How do you... how do you carry his signature," the Regent stammered, dropping his head as his horizontal visor flashed through a sequence of panicked defensive alerts.

"Our line has kept his sigil for eighty cycles. Please, Sovereign... we have not violated the covenant! We have kept the gravity ban absolute! No citizen of Oros has touched the skies! Why has his eye returned to our dark coordinate?"

"Calm down," I said, taking a step closer, my posture completely relaxed.

"I told you, I am only investigating a private curiosity. He isn't here, and I have no interest in your covenant. But I want to know why you fear him. What is the story of this sigil?" The Regent let out a slow, trembling breath, his large, nose-less face bowing in absolute, terrified deference.

"It is... the biggest sin of our people, Sovereign. A tale of betrayal that we have kept wreathed in our religious sanctuaries for centuries so that we may never forget the price of his wrath." He gestured for us to follow, his movements stiff and frantic as he led us out of the crystal throne room toward the rear balconies of the capital spire.

"Eons ago, during the early cycles of our integration," the Regent explained, his telepathic voice hushed.

"A woman came to Oros. She claimed she was a traveler from the Deep, wreathed in a silent, beautiful grace. She did not seek to colonize us. She helped our early cities, taught our ancestors the methods of Acoustic Mana Tuning, and helped our agricultural spires flourish. Our people treated her as a living goddess. She was beloved, and she showed an absolute, naive trust in us." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The Regent's visor shifted to a sorrowful, muted grey.

"But prosperity breeds greed, Sovereign. The strongest cultivator of our planet — Grand Chord Mas — grew tired of being overruled by her presence. He was used to being the one in command, and he did not want to share his authority with a foreign traveler. He organized a highly elaborate ambush. They used heavy, non-organic gravity anchors to bind her coordinates, and they managed to... they managed to injure her."

"They betayed her," I murmured, my star-cores spinning in a cold, quiet rhythm.

"Yes," the Regent clicked weakly.

"The injury was minor, but the betrayal destroyed her trust. She was horrified by our greed. She broke the gravity anchors, wove her spatial-channels into a stasis, and left our world, promising to never look back. We call it the First Sin." He paused, his cobalt shoulders tensing as the memory-lattice of his ancestors wreathed his mind.

"But the story did not end with her departure. A cycle later... that man arrived." The Regent pointed a trembling finger at the shape Nyx was still impersonating.

"He was asking about her whereabouts, asking why she left so abruptly. After getting confessions out, and still unsure of her whereabouts, his anger grew. He appeared in our sky wreathed in a colossal, planet-shattering dome of a powerful flame that turned our oceans to steam. He systematically hunted down the Grand Chord, his entire squad of betrayers, and their entire lineage — from grandfather to grandchild, erasing anyone who carried a single drop of their bloodline from our world's history."

The Lord looked down at his copper-and-lead sigil.

"He promised to completely disintegrate Oros if any of our people ever dared to cultivate gravity-mana or attempt to leave this world's atmosphere again. And as a promise to this threat... he casually annihilated ten percent of our planet's total population in a single snap of his fingers, turning our northern continent into a crater of glass and sand. Since that day, the Regents of Oros have maintained the gravity ban, keeping our nurseries quiet and our eyes fixed on the dirt, hoping to appease his wrath."

"Are you sure it's the same man?" I asked.

"His likeness is carved into our basalt sanctuaries," the Regent said, his visor flashing.

"I can take you to the Cathedral of the First Sin. You can see the records for yourself." We boarded a floating, silver-slate kinetic glider, translating our coordinates down from the capital spire to the basalt ridges below. The Cathedral of the First Sin was a colossal, mountain-sized temple carved directly into the black volcanic cliffs of the southern continent.

As we landed on the basalt steps, a group of fifty elite Temple Knights — wreathed in heavy crystalline armor and holding quartz staves — instantly rushed toward our position, their visors flaring with a defensive, pale-pink light.

"Intruders!" the lead knight declared, his staff flaring.

"You have approached the sacred cliffs without—""FALL BACK!" the Planetary Lord roared, his voice carrying the full, unyielding weight of his Ascendant-tier authority. The guards instantly froze, their staves lowering as they stared at their Lord in absolute, mouth-open shock.

"Banish yourselves from the ridge!" the Regent commanded, his cobalt frame trembling as he stepped in front of me.

"If any of you raise a single finger against this Sovereign, you will bring His shadow back to our skies! Move!" The Temple Knights didn't ask questions. They bowed their heads deeply, stepped back into the shadows, and retreated into the volcanic canyons, their posture wreathed in a sudden, cold panic. The Regent led us into the vast, light-absorbing inner hall of the cathedral. The walls were wreathed in giant, non-System murals painted with a highly dense, uncompiled mineral ink.

I walked down the long corridor, my [Void-Lattice Perception] tracing the lines. The murals depicted the entire tragedy — the goddess teaching the early tribes, the jealousy of Grand Chord Oros, the ambush, and then... the executioner. The depiction of the man from my visions was incredibly accurate. It showed his giant, multi-winged shadow dividing the copper sky of Oros, his hand raised as a wave of liquid flame cascaded down upon the northern continent, deleting the cities from existence.

"This is him," I muttered, my optical cores flaring with black-and-crimson starlight.

"The likeness is an exact match."

"The goddess," I turned to the Regent.

"Where did she stay during her years on this planet?"

"Her ancient shrine is located in the secluded valley of the Whispering Chords," the Lord replied.

"It has been meticulously preserved and tended to by our high priests for eight thousand cycles, in hopes that she might one day forgive our ancestors and ward off his return."

"Lead the way," I said. We translated our coordinates once more, appearing within a deep, glowing volcanic valley wreathed in ancient, silver-leafed willows. The air here was warm, carrying a gentle, uncompiled wind-frequency that resonated with my zeroth-tier [Symphony of the Animus Arch]. In the center of the valley sat a small, elegant pavilion carved from a single, continuous block of light-absorbing white marble. The moment my boots touched the grass of the valley, my star-cores gave a sudden, excited thrum.

The uncompiled current here was exceptionally strong. It wasn't the cold, destructive gravity of the Master, and it wasn't the silent, unbending mass of the Progenitors. It was a clean, warm, and highly comfortable Void-signature that matched the exact, uncompiled frequency of the G-42-Epsilon archives. A dry, pleased smile found its way onto my lips.

"This is the place," I murmured, walking toward the white marble pavilion. I entered the quiet, pristine shrine. Sitting on a low, stone altar in the center of the room was a single, untouched object — a small, carved piece of kinetic quartz shaped like a starlight-lily. I raised my hand, my fingers wreathed in a soft, white-gold [Syntropy] light, and gently touched the crystal flower.

Through my [Lattice Perception], the uncompiled lines of the quartz began to unravel, revealing a hidden, pre-System data-packet that had been left behind in the dark, waiting for someone who carried the proper signature to find it.