Chương 418: A Siphon’s Origin

Stepping through the scorched, bleeding rift I had torn with my [Voidflame] was like plunging directly into a broken, non-Euclidean kaleidoscope. The space inside Crysanthe's trial-chamber was a shattered ruin of silver-blue and purple starlight, the temporal coordinates wreathed in a violent, chaotic friction. I wove my newly ascended Domain tightly around myself, my star-cores spinning in a maximum, compressed tempo as I used my [Voidflame] to carve a path through the screaming spatial-shears.

In the center of the shattered chamber, I found Crys. She was encased in a giant, vibrating cocoon of golden-pink crystal — her Crystalline Vibration technique pushed to its absolute, desperate limit. The white-gold stone of her shell was refracting the surrounding starlight in a frantic, defensive shield, creating a powerful, localized pocket of temporal stasis around her body. Clawing at the outer boundary of her crystalline cocoon was the parasite.

It was a massive, squirming growth of a purple-tinged, slimy liquid — a parasitic, unaligned entity that looked like a nest of writhing, light-absorbing obsidian worms. It was wreathed in the same affinity and logic of the High Courts' attack on Elyon, its jaws systematically scraping against her gold-pink shell. I could feel, through my [Lattice Perception], that the parasite was slowly, methodically attempting to erode her soul-gate's defenses.

It wasn't trying to kill her outright; it was systematically extracting her memories, her family's spatial archives, and the coordinates of her House, trying to siphoning her raw Essence to fuel its own trace-engines as it extracted as much information as possible from her. They had probably targeted her because of me, possibly already aware of our connection.

They wanted to read her memory-lattice to find out details of our plans and what we were up to, and to map then dismantle the defenses of the House of Opal to dismantle any potential allies before the quarantine veil could drop. But they had failed. Crys' magnificent crystalline technique had held strong, her physical and spiritual density too stable for their parasitic code to pierce. Rage, cold and heavy in its weight, flared behind my ribs, my [Crown of Pride] pulsing with a sudden, lead-red light.

I raised my hand, the black-red liquid fire of my Voidflame beading on my fingers, ready to systematically incinerate the writhing mass of purple worms into ash. But as I prepared to strike, I stopped. My analytical mind, now operating with the hyper-accelerated cognitive power of an Ascendant, calculated a different option. The parasite was currently trying to transmit the information it was scraping from her shell back to its masters.

That meant there was an active, un-systemic communication thread — a thin, silver line of causality — stretching from this very chamber back to their location. If I burned it now, I would destroy the only link we had to the enemy.

"Hold on, Crys," I projected through our soul-bound connection. I didn't hear her voice, and I couldn't see her face behind the gold-pink crystal shell. But a fraction of a second later, a soft, reassuring message of absolute trust and safety vibrated through my soul-gate. She was okay. And she was telling me to go on and do what she already sensed. I sat cross-legged on the basalt floor of her chamber, completely ignoring the writhing purple parasites clawing at the space three inches from my face.

I wove a tight, passive Humming [Symphony] around myself and entered a deep, quiet state of void-meditation, my perception and defenses maximized to their absolute limit as I entered the Deep. I had to find the transmission line amidst the chaotic, screaming static of the shattered chamber. It was an incredibly difficult task.

The un-aligned mana in the room was a sensory mess, like trying to isolate a single, microscopic grain of unrefined saffron or ground-clove inside a highly complex, exotic dish that had been simmered in a hundred separate oils. Every wave of spatial-shear carried a thousand un-coded data-packets that threatened to drown my perception due to the sheer amount of information.

After many various attempts of isolating the other threads or trying to hyper focus on a single line that somehow immediately disappeared, I found a strange method that seemed to work. To isolate the thread, I reached into the quiet, forgotten memories of my childhood on Earth, before the Integration had ever rewritten our world. When I was younger, I experienced sleep paralysis a few times.

I woke up unable to move a single muscle, staring at a giant, shifting shadow that hovered wreathed in the dark of my ceiling. Instead of fearing the experience, I grew obsessed with inducing it again. I spent hours lying flat on my back, completely still, practicing tiny, microscopic mental and physical vibrations to convince my brain my body was asleep while keeping my conscious mind awake.

I had to let my muscles go completely limp, yet maintain a sharp, high-frequency awareness in my optic nerves, tricking my own physiology into opening the doorway to my sub-conscious. I applied the exact same method here. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I let my physical presence go completely limp, my unyielding density settling into a state of absolute, zero-friction stasis, while I wove my star-cores into a microscopic, high-frequency core-vibration.

I was tricking the local Lattice, letting my consciousness slip past the noise of the physical room into the quiet, un-coded sub-layers of the Deep. If the core code behind Reality actively avoided being witnessed through my Perception, perhaps the trick was not allowing it to realize it was being observed. My perception expanded. The multi-layered non-Euclidean reality of the chamber became clear. And there, wreathed in the dark, I saw it.

It was an incredibly thin, silver-lead thread of causality — far less visible than the standard Lattice, resembling a hair-thin fiber of translucent silk that stretched from the parasite's core, crossing the unintegrated coordinates of Sector Z-99. I followed the line, my omnipresence tracing its path across light-years in a fraction of a millisecond. The line ended at a small, barren asteroid belt located just outside the outer boundary of our quarantine veil.

Hidden inside the deep, basalt caves of a hollow asteroid was a high-tier, un-systemic scouting outpost. It was wreathed in a stable, pale-blue gravity-grid, containing several High Court sensors and data-receivers. They weren't on a different "Plane", and they weren't in any of the "Central Systems". They had established a forward operating base right on our doorstep, waiting quietly in the dark for our ten-year silence to end so they could initiate the purge.

"Got you," I whispered, locking the exact spatial coordinates in my mind. I instantly cut the scrying connection, snapping my consciousness back to Crys' chamber before their sensors could register my tracking ripple. There was no reason to let them know we had identified a forward camp of theirs. I stood up, my boots producing a silent, heavy stasis on the obsidian floor, my eyes churning with a starless black and arterial crimson fire. It was time to clean the room.

I raised my right hand, launching a series of high-speed gravity-slopes and spatial-shears to crush the writhing nest of purple worms. But to my surprise, the kinetic strikes simply dissolved on contact. The parasitic uncompiled code was wreathed in a mana-drinking, self consuming logic; it didn't block my spells, it simply broke down then devoured the essence of my attacks, its purple body-segments swelling with a greedy, golden light.

"An energy-leech," I muttered.

"You like to eat mana, don't you?" I reached into my soul, and willed my [Voidflame] to flare. A viscous, black-red liquid fire coated my hand. I drove my fist directly into the center of the parasitic nest. The Voidflame didn't carry standard mana; it was a primordial, unaligned current of absolute entropy. The moment the black-red fire touched the purple worms, their "mana-drinking" logic completely collapsed.

The flame didn't feed them; it systematically deleted their coordinates from the Lattice, the entire parasitic nest disintegrating into a cloud of inert, black soot within a single second. With a soft, chime-like sigh, the stasis-bubble around Crys dissolved. The gold-pink crystalline shell rippled and shattered into a thousand harmless, glittering shards of quartz, and Crys fell forward, her knees trembling from the eons of subjective strain. I stepped forward, catching her shoulders to stabilize her footing.

"You took a while, Eren," she gasped, her telepathic voice tired but carrying a warm, teasing amusement. Her scales flared with a happy, blue-pink light as she looked up at my black carapace.

"You did amazing, Crys," I said, offering a genuine, proud smile.

"That parasite was significantly tougher than I expected. Most cultivators I know would have had their memories stripped immediately…"

"I tried fighting it," she said, leaning her head against my shoulder as she caught her breath.

"But the thing kept drinking every attack I threw at it. Nothing was working. If you hadn't arrived with that 'special' flame of yours... my soul would have eventually collapsed."

"My special flame does have its benefits, I'm just glad you are okay," I laughed, guiding her toward the open, violet-starlight portal I had torn in the wall.

"They wove a Runic Parasite into your gate through a System dungeon somehow though… We need to update our security measurements… But I think they had to create a special, close by base for this attempt so I'm not sure how likely this is. Either way, I have to do some scouting around our sector. And I've already mapped the first destination." She looked at the scorched, bleeding hole in the space, her giant black eyes wide with a sudden concern.

"Will they... will they find out you used that power? If they trace the Voidflame's signature, they'll know you're here."

"They won't," I reassured her, walking through the portal beside her.

"The moment I entered your trial-chamber, I wove a tight Humming Void-bubble around us, leaving only a microscopic pinhole to trace their line back to the asteroid belt. I closed it the second I got the coordinates. Nothing should have leaked out after I obtained the address." We stepped out of the portal, landing back on the massive, dark basalt platform of the real world. The rifts of the trial-basin were quiet, the howling winds settled into a serene, silver starlight.

Crys stood straight, her energy-channels slowly re-knitting, a deep, stable Tier 9 Ascendant presence beginning to bloom within her soul gate. Suddenly, the purple crystal shards of my Void System wreathed my vision once more, the runes shifting with a low, telepathic chime. [Trial concluded.] [Density check: Passed.] [Crysanthe: Ascendant-Tier stabilized.] [Rewards pending... awaiting final compilation.] I stared at the purple shards, my star-cores spinning in a slow, confused circle. Why did it wait?

I thought, my mind running through the variables. The unaligned system had measured our individual baseline data during the co-op run, yet it hadn't shown me a single reward before Crys was done with her own trial. It was as if the system's logic was purposefully holding my rewards until we were both standing on the same coordinate. I looked at Crys, who was currently laughing as she practiced her newfound power, her face glowing with the happy, excited light of a newly Ascended of the Deep.

The road ahead was still long and filled with unforeseeable danger. The forward operating base of the Court was waiting just outside our door, and, although I initially intended on doing the scouting alone or by clone, one look at the fire in Crys' eyes, waiting for the rewards to finally register, I knew that she would be coming along.