Chapter 3

Emerson's mind ripped the first seal off the Noetic doors.

A tsunami of ancient memories and raw power violently crashed into her fragile consciousness. Her soul felt like it was being torn into shreds. She gritted her nonexistent teeth and extracted a single, microscopic drop of the Architect's Essence.

Outside, Kamala's knees buckled. She collapsed face-first into the freezing mud.

A violent contraction seized the womb. Kamala let out a suffocated whimper. The pressure inside shifted dangerously. The amniotic sac was close to rupturing.

"I can't die here..." Kamala's fingers clawed at the dirt, her nails breaking and bleeding.

Before Kamala could pass out, a terrifying, blistering heat erupted from deep inside her stomach.

Emerson injected the Architect's Essence directly into her fragile Mana Core. She forced it to compress.

Novice. Adept. Expert.

The fetus's magic level skyrocketed in a matter of seconds. The sheer gravitational pull of her core instantly sucked the surrounding forest dry of all ambient magic. A visible vacuum of Aether formed around Kamala's body.

The falling raindrops froze in mid-air. A split second later, the intense magical pressure vaporized the water into thick white steam.

Emerson's core stabilized with a silent, internal boom. She was at the Master-tier.

The universe noticed.

A fetus reaching the Master-tier violated the fundamental laws of existence. The Reality Correction mechanism engaged instantly.

High above the forest, the ordinary storm clouds violently twisted into a massive, dark purple vortex. The sky roared. The thunder sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates. The ground beneath Kamala shook.

Josue stopped running. He pushed through a thicket of thorns and stared up at the swirling purple sky, his chest heaving.

"A high-tier beast advancing?" Josue muttered, his eyes widening with greed. "Or an artifact?"

He looked down and saw Kamala bleeding out in the mud.

Josue laughed. It was a wet, ugly sound. "The heavens are blessing my Ascension."

He raised his blood-soaked dagger. Thick, black Shadow Aether dripped from the blade.

Kamala saw him. She curled into a tight ball, wrapping her arms and legs around her stomach to take the blade in her back.

Inside the womb, Emerson felt the vibration of Josue's footsteps.

You know nothing of power, insect.

Emerson carefully extracted a single thread of dark, abyssal magic from her brother's dormant core. She pushed it out through Kamala's skin, mixing the dark essence directly into the localized Reality Correction storm she had just triggered. The thread acted as an invisible, magnetic beacon, guiding the heavens' wrath to lock onto the nearest, most concentrated source of matching dark energy-Josue.

The Reality Correction storm above was blindly searching for the source of the anomaly. It instantly locked onto the massive spike of Shadow Aether radiating from Josue's dagger and the thread on his leg.

The targeting shifted.

A pillar of blinding purple lightning, thick as a redwood tree, tore through the sky.

The static electricity made Josue's hair stand on end. The air around him tasted like copper. He looked up. The purple light consumed his pupils.

"No-!"

Josue screamed. He shoved all his magic into his defensive shields.

The lightning struck him dead center. The world vanished into a blinding white flash.