Myriad Heavens: Rise of the Rune God

**Chapter 293: The Paragon’s Clone**

The safety zone collapsed.

There was no sound, no flash of light, no dramatic shockwave. The invisible barrier that had kept the monsters at bay simply vanished, like a held breath finally being released.

The Mysterious Woman stood up in the empty void.

She did not brace herself. She did not circulate energy or prepare a defensive technique. She simply closed her eyes and expanded her spiritual sense without any restraint.

The entire layer unfolded before her in a single instant.

It was not a gradual spreading of perception. It was absolute. Every major signature, every high-tier monster, every residual structure, every faint distortion left by Runar’s earlier disintegration wave — all of it laid bare. The void became a perfect, three-dimensional map. Distance lost its meaning. Concealment became a joke.

She saw the scattered survivors as small, cautious lights trying to hide in the dark. She saw the clusters of weaker beasts gathering in the farther reaches. She saw the lingering, chaotic scars in space where Runar’s runic wave had erased an entire army only moments before.

*He used runes to simulate the Principle of Disintegration,* she thought, her mind processing the residual data with calm efficiency. *Clever. Very clever. The Rune Sovereign’s research notes are definitely in his head. That boy has a terrifying future.*

She also saw Vark, sitting in his barren stretch of ground, radiating cold annihilation. *A child playing with erasure. Crude, but effective for his age.*

But her attention did not linger on them. They were the future. She needed the present.

Her sense locked onto one specific point.

Far across the emptiness, a presence heavier than anything else on the layer pulsed with a quiet, ancient pressure. It sat like a dark star in the fabric of the trial ground. Pseudo-Paragon. The signature was unmistakable — dense, complete, and carrying the crushing weight of a being that had already stepped halfway beyond the Multiversal threshold.

She opened her eyes and moved.

Space folded around her without resistance. The void blurred into streaks of black and faint residual light. In a single, continuous blitz, she crossed a distance that would have taken the other survivors hours or even days of exhausting flight. The other survivors became distant points behind her and then vanished from her immediate concern.

Her only thought was urgency. The legacy was close. After so long, it was finally within reach.

As her sense continued to expand, it did not stop at the boundaries of the trial ground. It pushed through the hidden layers of the Reliquary’s architecture.

Even the carefully hidden location of the Ancient Will was laid open before her.

She felt the precise coordinates of its concealed core. She saw the layered defenses that were supposed to make it undetectable. She saw the quiet web of viewing threads it used to spy on the participants. She noted all of it with calm indifference and kept flying. The Will was not her target. It was merely the estate manager of the ruin.

Deep within that hidden architecture, the Ancient Will felt her sense brush across its position.

For the first time since the Reliquary had opened, pure, unadulterated terror ran through the Will’s runic consciousness.

The difference in existence was absolute. The Will had no power over a true Paragon — even a clone. Every restriction it could impose, every trial it could design, every rule it could enforce meant absolutely nothing against that level of being. If the original body had descended, the entire Reliquary would have been ransacked without a single second of resistance. The Sovereign’s legacy, the cores, the deeper inheritance, the Will itself — all of it would have been taken or erased in moments.

Instead, she had only sent a clone to participate in the challenge fairly.

*She sees me,* the Will realized, its processing threads trembling. *She knows exactly where I am. She could crush this core with a thought.*

That small mercy — the fact that she was playing by the rules — was the only reason the Will still existed in its current form. It remained perfectly still, suppressing every unnecessary fluctuation, praying that the clone would continue to ignore it.

The woman flew on, completely unconcerned by the terrified estate manager.

*Let it watch,* she thought. *As long as it doesn’t interfere, it can live.*

Her true nature settled quietly into the foreground of her mind as the void rushed past her.

She was a clone.

The original was a Paragon — a being who had long stood at the absolute peak of the Multiverse. The original had refined her foundation to the absolute limit of what the current realm allowed. She had comprehended principles that lesser beings could not even perceive, let alone understand.

And still, the final step remained closed.

The bottleneck was absolute. The opportunity to break through and ascend to a higher lifeform had never appeared. No amount of personal strength, no accumulation of resources, no further refinement of existing principles could force the door open. It was like hitting a glass ceiling that stretched across the entire universe. Something external was required. A key. A legacy. A spark of higher law that did not exist within the Multiverse’s normal order.

So the Paragon had created clones.

Multiple versions of herself, each one carrying a fragment of her will, her memories, and a carefully calibrated portion of her power. She had scattered them across the Multiverse with a single, desperate purpose: search. Clues. Ancient ruins. Rare knowledge. Any fragment of a higher legacy that might contain the missing key.

Years had passed. Decades. Centuries. Millions of years. Most clones found nothing of value. Some were destroyed by forces they could not overcome. A few returned with incomplete fragments that proved useless against the bottleneck.

This particular clone had been traveling through a distant, unremarkable stretch of the Multiverse when she sensed it.

The opening of a Paragon-level ruin.

The aura should have been limited to the sectors it was in. That was the range that was set Will controlling the Ruin.

The spatial fabric of the Multiverse dampened higher-level signatures quickly. But her perception was that of a Paragon. She felt the ripple from several thousand sectors away — a faint but unmistakable resonance that carried the weight of a true Sovereign’s inheritance.

She had been ecstatic.

After so many fruitless years, the long-term plan had finally borne fruit. She changed direction without hesitation. The distance that would have taken lesser beings years to cross vanished in a single movement. She arrived at the entrance the moment the Reliquary fully opened and entered without pause.

Inside, she had been mildly surprised.

Two beings whose potential clearly pointed toward future Paragon status were already present. Runar, with his golden-white eye that carried layers of perception that should not have existed at his current level. And Vark, who carried annihilation like a second skin. Their talent was real. Their foundations were exceptional. Under different circumstances, she might have paid them closer attention, measured their growth, or even considered taking them as apprentices.

But they were not her concern.

Her only priority was the knowledge and legacy left behind by the Rune Sovereign. With that, the original would finally have the key she needed. Ascension would no longer be a distant, frustrating theory. It would become possible. Everything else — the trials, the other survivors, the points system, the monsters, the political games of the weaker participants — was secondary.

The Pseudo-Paragon monster was the clearest path forward. Its core carried the highest stated value in the Will’s announcement, and more importantly, a being of that level was likely tied to the deeper inheritance of the ruin. She would take it. She would claim whatever knowledge came with it. Then she would leave.

The void continued to blur around her.

Ahead, the pressure of the Pseudo-Paragon signature grew heavier. The territory it occupied began to take shape in her perception. It was a massive region of distorted space where the normal rules of the layer bent and warped under the weight of its presence. Spatial folds thickened into dense, invisible walls. Residual principles clung to the emptiness like faint, glowing scars. The void itself carried a density that would have crushed a normal Multiversal being just by stepping into it.

She did not slow down.

The other survivors could fight over Galaxy and Universal cores. They could scramble for points and temporary advantages. They could form fragile alliances or plot against one another in the dark. None of it mattered to her.

She had not come here to compete with them.

She had come here to finish what the original had started centuries ago.

The distorted region drew closer. The Pseudo-Paragon’s presence pressed against her sense like a steady, ancient mountain. It was aware of her now. She could feel the subtle, massive shift in its attention as her approach registered. The monster was waking up. It was turning its gaze toward the tiny, fast-moving light that was daring to enter its domain.

The Mysterious Woman’s expression remained calm, almost serene. Inside, the focused hunger of a being who had waited far too long sharpened to a single, lethal point.

She arrived at the edge of the Pseudo-Paragon’s territory and stopped for the first time since the safety zone had fallen. She floated in the heavy, warped space, her robes completely still, her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.

The true hunt, from her side of the board, was about to begin.