Chapter 316 - 316: Crystalline Reunion
The fast-travel corridor leading out of the Spire towards Crystal City was a profoundly different experience than the violently contested bypass into Ignis-7. It felt less like prying apart rusty bars and more like stepping through an expensive, heavily lubricated lock mechanism.
I emerged onto a flawlessly polished platform constructed entirely of pale lavender crystal.
The most immediate change was the sheer physical weight of the air. The gravity felt intentionally heavier than usual, tuned for beings naturally dense enough to withstand immense temporal and spatial pressures. For most non-Sovereigns, taking a breath here would feel like trying to inhale underwater with an elephant sitting on your ribs. For my inherently over-compressed, neutron-dense physical form, it honestly just felt like someone finally handing me a well-fitted blanket.
Before I could properly analyze the geometric spires glittering endlessly in the background under an ambient, endless sky, the air ten feet in front of me audibly fractured.
Space shattered into hundreds of shimmering, mirror-like polygons as a figure bypassed linear distance altogether.
A pair of very sharp, translucent amethyst ears cracked directly against the dense armor of my chest plate. An immense kinetic force tackled me into a deeply undignified bear hug.
"Eren!"
I grunted, actively throwing my center of mass forward just to avoid being bowled completely off the portal pad by the impact.
I looked down, expecting the eccentric, hyperactive girl I had last visited – the one who spends centuries locked in training with her mom. Instead, I met a terrifying monster beneath a well hidden Veil. Crysanthe was still wearing her customary, absurdly cheerful grin, her crystalline structure shifting through gradients of excited violet and soft blue. But her physical presence was now much more… mature. Standing tall, elegant, and vibrating with an internal Void-capacity that genuinely made the internal engine of my soul flutter in an automatic, defensive response.
"It has been a slightly longer year for you than it has for me, hasn't it, Crys?" I laughed, peeling the incredibly dense young woman off my ribs.
She grinned, crossing her smooth, gem-like arms. She casually floated a few inches off the solid ground to assert dominance over the local gravity.
"One hundred and forty-two years inside the Deep Compression Ward, actually," she stated, vibrating with smug pride. "Mother says I am officially old enough to leave Crystal City whenever the Veil on your sector drops. I hit the ceiling, Eren! I'm sitting exactly at the peak of Tier 7. All I need is to gather a fifth Mythic and find a random mountain somewhere to await my summoning. I'm really hoping we can do it together! Meeting spoiled snobs in a competition of who's more snobby alone sounds completely miserable!"
"It's definitely on my schedule," I admitted, intensely glad that the time-distorted nature of her cultivation chamber and the fact that she was almost unaffected by dilation meant I had a formidable, growing ally.
Before we could continue, the air grew absolutely silent. The conceptual authority of an Ascendant smoothly locked the region.
Syntheia manifested near the edge of the platform. She simply decided she was there, and reality quietly arranged the local physics to accommodate her entry.
She was an imposing beauty, draped in intricate ribbons of localized temporal distortion rather than physical clothing. While Crys treated me like a long-lost friend, her mother operated under a very different context. Syntheia believed that my unnatural, System-banned combination of Void and Entropy marked me as the literal messianic scion of an ancient Hybrid Primordial bloodline.
She didn't run or shout like her daughter. Syntheia gracefully knelt, bowing deep, showing immense respect that felt mostly unearned.
"You honor our humble sanctum with your return, Lord Scion," her voice chimed. It possessed a heavy, layered harmonic tone that forced respect entirely bypassing the ears to echo inside the bone. "We felt the great ripple. Ferra has awoken fully into the System's grim eye. I see you bear the weight of war heavily upon your shoulders."
"Indeed I do, Syntheia," I sighed warmly, stepping forward. I offered a hand I sincerely doubted she needed to rise. "We've had an eventful fourteen months back home. Or, a dozen decades in your case."
Syntheia stood smoothly, ignoring my offered hand to maintain a reverent physical distance. Still, a distinctly motherly affection radiated from her posture when she glanced from me to her bubbly daughter.
"Crys told me about your impending wall," Syntheia transitioned cleanly into the role of cautious advisor. "The barrier between the physical plane and Ascendancy is ruthless, demanding conceptual completeness. Since the flow of Ferra requires you there presently, I assume you have come seeking usage of our temporal sanctuaries? If you sit inside our deep ward for a standard local month, your body could safely endure the accumulation of another decade's worth of conceptual processing without advancing the universal timer ticking above your homeland."
A decade?
I strongly considered it. Synthesizing four legendary spells directly into my new zeroth-tier connection inside a hyper-accelerated timeline sounded like an easy answer to my current plateau.
"Are you certain his Soul can handle the strain?" Crys looked toward her mother, her enthusiasm tempered by concern.
"His blood is not mortal. The Scion's form is bound to the eternal dark. I only need to test the outer edges of his current foundation to match the ward's frequency correctly," Syntheia explained, walking forward with analytical focus. "If you would simply lower the ambient barriers of your aura for a fraction of a second, my Lord…"
I shrugged, releasing most of my grip on the Nullifying Veil and relaxing my guard.
Syntheia's eyes flared with blinding temporal mana. She projected an analytical probe, sending a golden thread of tracking magic to trace the boundaries of my Soul capacity.
It brushed gently against the invisible edges of the Symphony wrapping my core, touched the swirling depths of the hungry Void-Star parked where my heart should be, and then simply vanished. It didn't bounce off a shield or register a measurement. The data dropped into an untranslatable, quiet nothingness entirely unsuited for standard physics.
Syntheia physically recoiled.
She took a harsh step backward, fracturing a floor tile under her crystalline heel. Her composed exterior broke, replaced by raw, unveiled existential shock.
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"What... what exactly is maintaining your existence currently?" Syntheia murmured quietly, genuinely pale. "Your internal foundation is... hollow. It is structurally sound but entirely absent to any methodology of measure I can apply. You are echoing across concepts I physically cannot observe, even as an Ascendant with an Affinity to the Void..."
"Been branching out from standard destructive elements," I grinned tightly, not wanting to explain the fundamental reality-editing lessons I ripped off the dying World-Soul of Sylvaris. "Picked up some esoteric resonance magic meant specifically to turn System constraints back into white noise."
Syntheia completely froze. Her expression shifted from deep alarm to a fervent, terrifyingly deep religious validation.
She breathed hoarsely, treating my evasive answer like a holy decree, muttering quietly. "And as it was… He shall step fully beyond the Parameter… consuming casualty from lost eras to weave a truth unmeasured by their brittle laws…"
"Mom is doing the creepy prophecy voice again," Crys sighed, interrupting the reverent atmosphere. She nudged my ribs with a sharp elbow. "Since your soul is essentially an infinite black hole of mystery now and mom is busy treating you like a museum exhibit... you have absolutely no excuse for turning down a fight."
"We haven't each other for over a century and the first thing you want to do is spar?" I raised an eyebrow, adjusting the collar of my armored coat. "You were strong back when you barely knew how to punch properly. Think you got any better?"
"Oh, I fully intend to put you on the floor," Crys grinned fiercely, abandoning her aristocratic grace as she walked backwards toward the sprawling training ground behind the platform. "Come on. These fields are made by Ascendants so we can break them as heavily as we want without consequence. Prove to me that the 'ancient Scion' can keep up."
There wasn't a practical, tactical reason for this. But feeling the gravity pull heavily on my muscles alongside someone fighting simply for the thrill of it, rather than trying to enslave my planet, felt entirely freeing.
I unclasped my heavy cloak, handing it silently to the quietly staring Syntheia before stepping onto the dense gray crystal arena.
The environment immediately adapted. Translucent containment fields flared to life, sealing us away from the residential architecture. We stood roughly fifty yards apart.
Crys' crystalline structure hummed so aggressively the atmosphere between us began to whine out of phase.
"Just for clarity, Crys," I called out over the accumulating static of breaking dimensional threads. "Are we holding back?"
"If you throw a single punch that holds anything back just because I am technically younger…" Crysanthe bared bright teeth. "I will explicitly feed your localized mass into a subspace anomaly."
"Younger…? Aren't you…"
Crys attacked.
There was zero kinetic travel time spanning the distance. She bypassed linear stepping altogether, leveraging her new Void abilities to essentially delete the fifty yards. Coupled with temporal distortion, her fist arrived directly upon my right flank a fraction of a second before the light could reach my eyes.
I tanked the heavy hit, utilizing the blow purely to gauge her raw stats. I grunted loudly as her knuckles collided with my null-steel ribs. The kinetic impact sheared my superficial wards, sending me sliding backward thirty feet. I forcefully deployed a localized gravity well directly onto the heels of my boots to act as an anchor, stopping my momentum short.
"Speed is terrifying," I admitted, my ribs already stitching themselves together with Syntropy. "Decades of time manipulation have treated you well."
I firmly decided not to try matching her raw velocity. It would be a foolish, stamina-draining game against a pureborn cultivator.
Crys reappeared instantly above me, actively stepping outside normal dimensional causality yet again, bringing down a crystalline leg packed with the kinetic weight of a meteor.
I reached outward with [Apex Mana Authority], commanding a mandate not from within my Core, but into the local ambiance.
"Rebound."
I dropped the [Domain of the Ashen Phoenix] strictly upon the empty air positioned three inches above my head. Instead of raising a shield, I temporarily dictated that the spatial property of the localized pocket violently repelled temporal mana.
Crys' foot slammed into the concept, entirely unable to penetrate the semantic firewall I established. The dissonance shattered her downward trajectory, violently throwing her momentum back upward into the air.
"Hey! What was that? I didn't sense any mana weaving or spell casting…" she asked mid-flip, correcting her posture perfectly in the air and launching four localized gravity wells specifically designed to rip my joints in opposing directions.
I flicked my fingers, feeding a drop of absolute Void-Hunger directly into the converging wells. My skill ate her spells before they could expand, returning the energy directly to my core as clean fuel.
"Just a little thing I'm testing out," I shot back, manifesting two identical, shimmering Void-blades in my hands.
She blurred, attacking from six simultaneous temporal shadows. She essentially became an unavoidable shotgun blast of blunt trauma, forcing me backward. I danced between her projections, letting the Authority weave an aggressive web of friction adjustments just to make her slide on the air and stumble mid-strike, disrupting her rhythm perfectly whenever a fatal blow neared my guard.
The sheer ferocity forced me to sweat. She possessed deep mana reserves, almost reaching my own not counting the Void Star. Her inner world foundation also seemed a lot calmer than mine. While my structure was a spliced paradox holding together an impossibly demanding toolset, hers was a serene, still lake of unending resolve.
In the final exchange, she attempted to bypass my spatial control entirely. She formed a Chronos-shift around her own frame, rendering her body completely intangible to standard physical matter as she phased a spear-hand aimed perfectly for my solar plexus.
I grinned. That was exactly what the System hated about Primordial logic. It was brilliant.
I stood perfectly still, offering zero resistance.
As her fingertips cleanly phased into the null-steel armor of my chest without friction, my internal engine snapped its jaws shut. The Void-Star actively flared. I essentially commanded the absolute, primordial Nothingness residing inside my chest to greedily anchor the active, temporal energy of her arm, threatening to pull her entire physical timeline inward.
The threat of absolute consumption immediately triggered her survival instincts. She frantically scrambled the time-shift, turning physical again while stumbling backward to violently rip her hand free, leaving her wildly off balance.
I calmly leveled the tip of a Void-blade precisely at the base of her throat.
She stood still, her chest heaving as the arena static settled. She looked from the tip of my blade up to my face, wide-eyed. Then she started laughing.
"That is cheating on a cosmological scale," Crys wheezed, sitting directly onto the crystal floor in a huff of exhausted amusement. "I threw an unblockable, out-of-phase temporal spear directly at your heart and you essentially just told your internal organs to threaten my magic with cannibalism?"
"My heart is basically a junkyard dog right now," I banished the blades, extending a hand to haul her up. "You have grown much stronger, Crys, truly. That move was also very impressive, I just happened to have a good counter."
"It was a brilliant countermeasure, my Lord," Syntheia's voice cut cleanly over the ambient silence, the mother entirely re-asserting her authority. She glided onto the training grounds. "You possess a tactical ingenuity the Prime System attempts to forcibly filter out."
The mother's gaze lost its fanatical edge, solidifying into the hardened, political pragmatism I needed right now. She studied my posture.
"You did not travel across the quarantine simply for a polite reunion and a sparring session, Eren," she noted. "If your world has drawn the scrutiny of a Tier 8 occupying an integrated realm as a forward colony... you stand blind against whoever genuinely funds their Crusade outside the wall."
"That is exactly the issue," I said softly.
Syntheia swept her hand toward the towering city architecture.
"Then the time for theological adoration can wait," she announced. Her voice hummed with a quiet, sharp severity. "I have connections within the buried strata of this galaxy who thrive exactly on collecting the forbidden schematics of the Cinder Throne's puppet-masters. Wash up, Scion. It is time for you to meet the librarians of the Deep."