Chapter 517
He leaned forward, his dark eyes gleaming with bitter knowledge.
"The ancient records don’t lie. The mage-gods of old? Every one of them revered—then revered less. Praised—then controlled. Each one bowed beneath the will of the Arcanum, reduced to relics, their divinity bent to fuel the ambitions of mortal spellcasters."
He gestured broadly, almost mockingly.
"And that would have been you. A divine puppet paraded before the masses. Glorified... and then used. Your godhead would not have freed you. It would’ve become your prison."
The Ogre King said nothing at first. His jaw tightened slightly, eyes dark with memories of betrayals, of secrets and decisions made behind closed doors.
Vellok’s tone softened slightly—not out of sympathy, but conviction. "You should be grateful to us," he said. "We spared you that fate. This new path—uncertain, uncharted—it is yours. Painful, yes. But at least it is not a leash forged in gold and praise."
The Ogre King gritted his teeth. As much as he loathed to admit it, there was truth buried in Vellok’s words—hard, cold, undeniable.
The silence between them cracked under the weight of unspoken history. His fists clenched, not from anger alone, but from the sting of knowing that his struggle had been written centuries ago, by others who faced the same ceiling.
In the ancient records of the mage scholars, there were classifications—distinctions made not just by power, but by affinity. Some were born with a natural sensitivity to mana and its elements, capable of weaving spells with the ease of breath. And then there were those—like him—who felt mana not as a flowing stream, but as a distant pulse beneath the skin, ever-present but untouchable.
It was from this second group that the path of the knight was born.
They were warriors who refused to be left behind by the mage-dominated world. They turned inward, honing their bodies into vessels of power, aligning flesh and spirit with the elemental forces they could not command in spellcraft. Through rigorous discipline, they advanced—each stage a ritual of endurance and transformation. First by pushing past mortal limits. Then by bringing their bodies ever closer to the resonance of their chosen element—fire, stone, wind, steel.