Chương 60: Chapter 26 Part 2

Ryu gripped the brass runic dial and brutally wrenched it three full rotations past the academy's recommended safety limits. The brass clicked loudly. The runes flared a violent, angry purple. Instantly, the ambient gravity inside the room tripled. Ryu's knees immediately buckled. The air was forcefully, violently driven from his lungs in a sharp gasp as a sheer, suffocating weight crashed down onto his shoulders.

The heavy oak floorboards beneath his feet groaned, splintering slightly under the sudden, localized pressure of his own body weight multiplying. It felt as though a solid, granite boulder had been strapped directly to his spine, pressing his internal organs against his ribcage. He gritted his teeth, his jaw locking so tight his gums bled slightly. He forced his spine straight, fighting the crushing force millimeter by millimeter.

He dragged his heavy, leaden boots across the floor, walking over to an iron weapons rack, and retrieved a solid ironwood training sword. The weapon, usually weighing a manageable five pounds, now felt like he was wielding an anvil. Stepping back into the center of the room, Ryu closed his eyes. He tuned out the lingering echoes of the Demon God's laughter. He tuned out the creaking of the floorboards. He sank into his starting stance. Whoosh.

Despite the tripled gravity anchoring his limbs to the earth, the heavy ironwood blade moved with a terrifying, lethal precision. There was no wasted energy. No wide, amateurish swings. Every parry, every rising strike, every precise, anchored pivot of his footwork was a masterclass in flawless efficiency. His muscles immediately began to scream. Under the crushing gravitational strain, the microscopic fibers in his arms, shoulders, and thighs actively tore with every single movement.

But the moment the muscle fibers ripped, Ryu's internal engine roared to life. He aggressively, violently cycled his Qi. He wasn't using the basic, elementary breathing techniques taught by the Academy instructors. He was utilizing the Breath of the Ashen King, a supreme, grandmaster-level accumulation method he hadn't formally discovered until year seven of the Holy War, ripped from the depths of a primordial dungeon.

He drew a breath, holding it for three agonizing seconds, and forcefully injected pure, concentrated mana directly into his tearing muscles. It was a process of rapid, forced cellular regeneration. He was essentially destroying his own biology and manually commanding his Qi to rebuild the tissue denser, faster, and infinitely stronger than naturally possible. The pain was blinding.

The friction of forcing an ocean of dense, grandmaster-level Qi through the narrow, fragile meridians of a sixteen-year-old boy felt like his veins were being flushed with liquid glass. Steam began to rise from his bare skin, his body heat skyrocketing as the ambient mana clashed with his physical limits. The blood vessels in the corners of his eyes popped, tinting his vision red. But Ryu simply gritted his teeth and pushed harder, using the physical agony to burn away the nightmare.

He pivoted flawlessly, dropping his center of gravity, and launched a brutal, horizontal cleave that audibly cracked the heavy air in the room. For the past ninety days, he had lived this grueling dual existence. By day, he played the role of Ryu Jin-woo, the quiet, intense, but fundamentally unremarkable noble student. He sat in the back of grand lecture halls, ignoring the petty aristocratic squabbles of his classmates.

Instead, he spent his hours writing in heavy leather journals, utilizing a complex military cipher he had invented in the future, meticulously mapping out the hidden dungeons, lost artifacts, and timeline of geopolitical collapses across the continent. By night, he locked his door, cranked the gravity dial to lethal levels, and tortured himself. He was completely overclocking his mortal chassis, desperately trying to close the ten-year gap between his current adolescent weakness and his future mastery.

He hadn't sent a single warning letter to Zareth. He hadn't tried to save anyone early. He hadn't triggered a single butterfly effect. He knew that the moment he altered a major event, the Cult would adapt, and his future knowledge, his only true weapon, would become compromised. He had meticulously ensured that the timeline remained perfectly, flawlessly untouched. He had bided his time, enduring the guilt of inaction, waiting for the board to set itself.

Ryu ended his kata with a sharp, concussive thrust, the tip of the ironwood sword stopping exactly one millimeter from the stone wall. He held the position, his muscles locking in absolute isometric tension for sixty agonizing seconds. Finally, with a sharp, exhaling hiss, he lowered the blade. He slowly reached out with his trembling left hand and twisted the runic dial on the wall back to zero. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The crushing gravity vanished. Ryu instantly collapsed, dropping to one knee. He dropped the sword, his hands catching his weight on the floor as he gasped desperately for breath. Sweat poured from his chin, pooling on the polished wood. His entire body trembled violently from the sheer, unadulterated physical overload. But as the initial shock of the weightlessness faded, a deep, resonant hum vibrated through his bones. He looked down at his forearms. He flexed his fingers.

He could feel the terrifying, condensed power resting just beneath his skin. His meridians had expanded yet again. He was already magnitudes stronger, faster, and denser than any senior instructor currently teaching at this academy. He stood up, his legs steadying. He grabbed a white linen towel draped over his chair, wiped the heavy sweat from his face and neck, and walked over to his massive mahogany desk. Resting on the polished wood, dominating the workspace, was a massive, highly detailed map of the continent.

It detailed the borders of the Nakterngard Empire, the sprawling, untamed eastern territories, and the coastal kingdoms. Pinned directly in the center of the parchment, marking the capital city of Elyndria within the Zareth Kingdom, was a heavy circle drawn in thick red ink. Ryu tossed the towel aside. His ash-grey eyes hardened, the exhaustion bleeding out of him, replaced by a cold, calculating veteran resolve. His ninety days of isolation and preparation were officially over.

Because according to his flawless, agonizing memory, today was the exact day the world was supposed to start ending.

Ryu Jin-woo stared at the heavy red circle drawn on his continental map. Elyndria. The crown jewel of the Zareth Kingdom. A few days ago, according to the agonizing timeline burned into Ryu's memory, a corrupt aristocrat named Duke Valerius Morvant was going to make the greatest mistake in human history. Bribed by the hidden cells of the Blood God Cult, the Duke was going to successfully smuggle an unhatched Ancient Gold Dragon's egg through the Blackwater Docks. It was the ultimate, catastrophic catalyst.

By noon, the mother dragon would realize her brood had been stolen. She would descend from the Sunlit Peaks with the fury of a dying star. Her initial breath attack would catastrophically overload and shatter the Aegis Array, the massive, runic dome that protected the capital from outside threats. In the ensuing chaos, with the Royal Guard desperately trying to fight off a Mythic-tier beast and the city burning to the ground, the Blood Priests would strike.

They would slip into the Royal Spire, assassinate the bedridden King Aldous, and trigger a continent-wide civil war that would ultimately allow the Demon God to safely anchor its dimensional rift a year later. Two million people were about to die, and today he would heard the news. And Ryu Jin-woo was letting it happen. He gripped the edges of his mahogany desk, his knuckles turning white, his ash-grey eyes completely hollow.

The guilt was a physical weight, a suffocating pressure in his chest that threatened to break his martial discipline. He could almost smell the ash again. He could hear the screams of the children who were waking up right now, completely unaware that their sky was about to catch fire. He could have tried to stop it. He could have stolen a horse three weeks ago, ridden to Elyndria, and tried to assassinate Duke Morvant himself. But Ryu was a veteran of a ten-year war.

He operated on cold, brutal, mathematical pragmatism. If he had failed, and as a sixteen-year-old boy, the odds of failing to infiltrate a Duke's heavily guarded estate were astronomically high, he would have died, and the world would have burned anyway. Even if he had somehow succeeded in stopping the egg from being smuggled, the Blood God Cult would have simply adapted. They would have found a new catalyst.

They would have changed their plans, moving into the shadows, and Ryu's future knowledge, the only advantage humanity possessed against the abyss, would have been instantly, permanently rendered obsolete. To save billion of lives tomorrow, he had to sacrifice two million lives today. It was the cruel, unforgiving logic of a Regressor. Ryu forcefully broke his gaze away from the map. He turned his back on Elyndria and walked over to his heavy leather travel pack resting near the door.

He knelt beside the pack, meticulously running through his inventory one final time. He was preparing for the aftermath. He checked the heavy, lead-lined vials of high-grade clotting agents and regenerative potions he had spent a small fortune acquiring from the academy's underground black market. He checked the dense, mana-infused survival rations that could sustain him for weeks in a dead zone.

Tucked into the false bottom of the bag were forged border passes, officially stamped with the Nakterngard Empire's crest, allowing him to bypass the military blockades that would inevitably lock down the continent by nightfall. He had a fast, magically bred warhorse reserved under a fake alias at the campus stables, already saddled and waiting. He was not going to Elyndria to fight the dragon. He was going to ride into the smoldering, lawless ruins of the capital in the dead of night.

His objective was surgical and entirely selfish: he was going to scavenge the legendary artifacts from the collapsed Royal Treasury before the Blood Priests could claim them. He needed those specific, world-class artifacts to forcefully power-level his own Dantian. He was going to use the ashes of Zareth as the fertilizer for his own Zenith. He strapped a pair of concealed, runic throwing daggers to his forearms and pulled on a heavy, ash-colored traveling cloak to hide his student uniform. He was ready.

Ryu stood up, slinging the heavy pack over his shoulder. He took a deep, steadying breath, hardening his heart, burying his empathy beneath a thick layer of icy, unyielding resolve. He reached for the brass handle of his dormitory door. Tap. Tap. Tap. Ryu froze. His hand hovered an inch from the doorknob. A sharp, rhythmic knocking echoed through the quiet room, coming from the tall glass window behind his desk. Ryu turned around.

Hovering just outside the glass, suspended in the crisp morning air by a pair of rapidly beating, articulated brass wings, was a small, intricately enchanted mechanical owl. It was a marvel of the Empire's magitech engineering, the premier courier service utilized strictly by the wealthy noble elite to deliver the daily Continental Tribune. Ryu checked the mechanical clock on his wall. It was exactly seven in the morning.

The paper had been printed three hours ago, utilizing the long-distance telepathic communication arrays connecting the major capital cities. If the timeline held true, the front page wouldn't report the dragon attack yet, that wouldn't happen anytime soon. But it should report the localized, rising tensions in Zareth. It should report the sudden, violent gang activity in the Blackwater Docks, or King Aldous's rapidly deteriorating health as the dark magic took its final toll.

It would be the prologue to the apocalypse.