Chapter 94 94: Knowledge
Rewind the chronological ledger by a tight ten minutes.
The precise microsecond Prince Lucia's spiritual focus bridged its energy with the azure star representing Sellen's registry inside the network, every single environmental parameter, alchemical reading, and physical action transpiring inside that academy laboratory thousands of miles away wove flawlessly before his optical centers.
The terrifying experiments engineered to forcefully bind a living vital spark into the crystalline veins of Star Amber, her dangerous structural research into the morphology of the Star-Child Core, and the deep administrative bottleneck paralyzing her long-term mission to resurrect the Primeval Current—every individual variable calculated across her desk made the young sorceress's identity and cosmic trajectory translucent to his strategic engine.
Beyond a solitary shadow of a doubt, this young female mage currently projecting an aura of pristine, hyper-refined scholastic discipline across the academy was none other than Sellen the Graven Witch—the exact entity who would later go down in the blackest archives of the continent as the absolute scourge of Liurnia, universally feared by the ministries as the most lethal, chaotic disaster logged across the history of the Carian Royal Court. Down the line of the fractured future behind the screen, she would function as the spectral, exiled mentor nesting within the subterranean basements of the Waypoint Ruins, un-reservedly hand-delivering her entire lifelong library of forbidden cosmic sorceries to an un-mapped Tarnished champion's inventory.
Yet, running the data through his processors at this specific chronological coordinate, Sellen's hands had not yet committed that heinous, systematic deicide—the historical massacre of her fellow academy grandmasters to harvest their brains for her Primeval research. Across the current watch of the calendar, whether evaluated by the high judges of the Carian Royal Family, the faculty of Raya Lucaria, or the wider intellectual baseline of the magical world, her name still occupied the rank of the most brilliant, universally respected young academic master drawing breath on the continent after the Full Moon Queen herself.
Right within that watch, an extraordinarily audacious, high-stakes tactical blueprint wove its shape inside Lucia's modern consciousness.
He mobilized the full processing power of his Memory Battlefield, forcefully restructuring the titanic, blinding nebulae representing the Dragon King and the Dragon God into an un-aligned, un-recognizable cosmic dust cloud at maximum rendering speed, before compressing his own digital avatar into a faint, blurred, and entirely indistinct spiritual phantom. Finally, cross-referencing the finest, most classic examples of high-level riddle masters and transmigrator con artists logged within the fiction archives of his past life, he assumed an permanent, elusive posture at the far end of the long obsidian council table, quietly awaiting the sorceress's consciousness to clear the transit loop.
Inside the endless grey void, Sellen executed a deep, mathematically perfect court bow to the phantom across the table, her small hands clasped against her robes as her processors desperately strained to suppress the violent, chaotic trembling vibrating through her vocal cords. "I petition your presence to overlook the un-vouched boldness of my mouth... but what specific classification of cosmic entity does your architecture represent?"
Her analytical network possessed zero data indicating that the entity keeping watch over her spirit comprised nothing more than a three-moon-old dragon youth—even if her intellect completely deleted the breathtaking, terrifyingly massive parameters of the star-choked sky arching across the upper vault from her calculus, the sheer qualitative volume of spiritual pressure radiating from that stationary phantom completely out-registered every single master operator she had ever audited across her life path. Primeval Master Azur, Grandmaster Lusat, and even the divine presence of Queen Rennala herself scored significantly weaker when measured against the latent weight of the entity anchoring the opposite end of the stone.
"Does your intellect calculate that projecting such a vague, yet highly effective diplomatic inquiry is sufficient to probe the baseline source code of my identity, sorceress?" Lucia chuckled softly, his voice echoing across the sand like a low, resonant tide.
Sellen's countenance suffered an immediate, sharp transition, her pathways frantically firing to compile a sequence of elaborate courtly justifications to beg for absolute administrative amnesty—only to freeze as the phantom casually shrugged his shoulders, his delivery dropping into a tone of complete, un-fused indifference. "Banish the alarm; the movement is nominal—"
"Across the vast, un-measured watches of the thousands of winters my vanguard has tracked across the stars, my center has permanently maintained an absolute axiom: strictly un-varnished sincerity can function as the primary prerequisite to authorize a communication link between two un-aligned intelligences. Empty deceptions and decorative court lies comprise nothing more than temporary masks deployed by the weak to obscure their internal bankruptcy—assets that are legally conformed to suffer an absolute collapse the exact microsecond they intersect the erosion of time and systemic truth."
"Consequently," he continued, a soft, highly amused smile formatting his syllables as he surveyed the trembling female academic across the marble, "there exists zero requirement for your nervous system to log a single point of structural tension. Sharing an appropriate volume of restricted secrets with an entity who commands a verifiable intellectual value is a perfectly logical, entry-level transaction across my spectrum."
Lucia rose from his stone seat, his right gauntlet executing a casual, weightless sweep through the starlight. Before Sellen's processors could track the displacement, she registered a sudden, shocking shift in her spatial coordinates—her physical form was now seated firmly at the absolute opposite end of the long obsidian table, and the high-backed cedar chair supporting her spine wove a one-to-one material symmetry with the exact, ink-stained research seat she routinely occupied inside her academy laboratory!
"My tracking networks have verified that across the brief, thin history characterizing this specific material world, a sequence of reckless, undisciplined cosmic pioneers have initial cleared the high void to visit their presence upon your soil. Regrettably, the absolute majority of those entities were rigidly compromised by the narrow parameters of their own vision—hand-delivering nothing to your populace beyond a baseline layer of primitive barbarity, endless provincial war, civilizational destruction, and deep moral depravity. Their lineages did not merely fail to harvest a single point of progression data across this theater; their own structures sustained massive, irreversible trauma."
"The solitary operator anchoring the active lists who commands a minor fraction of praise—the entity who, following the lapse of several centuries, finally managed to engineer a narrow, yet relatively complete structural order across these fields—comprises the consciousness your current libraries are conformed to register as the... Greater Will?"
Hearing the calculation clear the phantom's teeth, Sellen felt an absolute, ice-cold spike of raw horror shoot straight down her spinal column. What specific tier of primordial existence was this entity casual cross-referencing across his vocabulary?
Did the phrase "reckless pioneers" define the movements of the Full Moon, the ancient Black Moon of the Nox, the Dark Moon of the rifts, or even the radioactive parameters of the Scarlet Rot, and the legendary, subterranean Formless Mother clutched by the blood cults?
Unlike the material identity of Eternal Queen Marika—who had been manually crowned and integrated into the godhood apparatus by local treaties—these specific Outer Deities descending from the deep stars had securely occupied the absolute peak of sovereign status and metaphysical power across the Lands Between for thousands of winters preceding the dawn of the Erdtree. They commanded the absolute authority to independently cultivate their own material gods, guiding their respective cohorts of fanatical believers to systematically unify the borders under their private geometry.
If the billions of living minds drawing breath across the soil comprised nothing more than primitive chess pieces on a board, then these stellar intelligences functioned as the true, sovereign players managing the game.
"Has your presence cleared the high void to lunge your mass into the Lands Between... explicitly to construct an independent baseline Order separate from the geometry enforced by the Greater Will?" Sellen asked, the syllables clearing her dry throat with immense, heavy difficulty.
"An independent Order?" Lucia's courtly mask suffered a briefwatch of mock calculation, a playful, highly ironic smirk breaking across his features. He shook his blurred skull, his head executing a slow negative. "Banish the simulation; it is mathematically incorrect. My long-term blueprint shares zero common goals with their primitive architecture. To imitate their linear design—enclosing a restricted territorial boundary across the dirt and executing endless, petty attrition wars against each other like a group of stingy, provincial landlords, remaining smugly satisfied because their name administers a tiny, isolated fraction of a single material continent... that scores as an exceptionally low-yield enterprise across my spectrum."
"In this endless, un-measured journey across the cosmic void, there manifests strictly a solitary asset class that preserves the capacity to interest my processing focus—Knowledge."
He un-clasped his arms, his palms expanding outward as his face lifted toward the vast, swirling constellations defining the sandbox, his baritone scaling to a magnificent, passionate volume across the rafters. "The fundamental alchemical laws governing the orbital tracks of the stars, the absolute thermodynamic cycles dictating the sun's sequential brightness and darkness, the deep, un-mapped mysteries hidden within the dual formatting of vital energy and absolute death, the raw metaphysical voltage clutched within the dual matrices of the physical chassis and the eternal soul, and crucially—the systematic pattern of structural progression, industrial prosperity, cultural decay, and ultimate civilizational liquidation that detonates the exact watch a nascent mortal species links its network with the boundless starry sky... Knowledge! Is this not the absolute, ultimate dividend that every single living mind across the cosmos is legally conformed to pursue?"
Listening to the immense, crushing volume of Lucia's structural speech, the young sorceress—whose spirit was already fanatically obsessed with her private research tracks—gradually allowed the last remnants of her biological fear to dissolve from her center. The familiar, deeply complex, and highly advanced technical vocabulary clearing the teeth of this unknown deity did not merely encapsulate the rudimentary calculations she had spent her winters scratching onto her parchments; the data violently brought a vastly grander, more infinite, and breathtakingly broad cosmic macrocosm crashing down directly before her sensory network!
Operating as a pure academic scholar whose entire existence was dedicated to maturing into an Origin Sorcerer, her intellect maintained zero baseline fidelity toward the gold of the Erdtree, nor did her spirit preserve an un-broken loyalty toward... the Full Moon of the academy, or even the material starry sky that the absolute majority of her fellow sorcerers were conformed to passively revere and worship—if there existed a single asset class across the universe that scored sufficiently high to justify the total sacrifice of her lifelong passion, her aristocratic dignity, her professional loyalty, and her personal faith, it comprised precisely this pure, infinite, and un-alloyed manifestation of absolute Knowledge.
Faced with the piercing, poignant final question echoing from the end of the table, she drew a deep, chest-expanding breath. Armed with an unparalleled, reverent awe and a microscopic sliver of burning academic expectation, she mounted her counter-prompt across the stone. "The parameters my own lineage chases align a hundred percent with the goals written into your vocabulary, Sovereign... but by what calculation could a humble, shallow, and mortal mind of my tier ever offer a valuable piece of knowledge capable of interesting your archives?"
"Nesting currently beneath the palm of your right gauntlet is a heavily restricted, forbidden research manuscript detailing the precise alchemical logistics required to systematically transmute living sorcerers into dense, blocky, or spherical geometric matrices to artificially simulate the baseline frequency of a... Star-Child Core, historically cataloged across your files as the Star Vigor project, correct?"
Hearing the exact archival registry of her work, Sellen's head snapped downward with an explosive, panicked velocity. Her long-hidden, private research manuscript was currently pressed flat beneath her trembling palm across her laboratory desk. Even restricting her vision strictly to the untitled, dust-covered parchment cover, she possessed the tracking to verify every line of the content from the thousands of watches her fingers had spent rubbing against the grain.
"There exists zero intelligence across this material substrate that can legally be recorded as omniscient or omnipotent, sorceress—not even the calculations clutched within my own baseline framework," Lucia spoke, his tone smoothing back into a calm, detached academic frequency. "Exactly as my vocabulary initial stated across the line: ever since the primeval watch that golden meteor fell through the atmosphere to strike this land mass you call the 'Lands Between,' monitoring your species' rudimentary understanding, analysis, and structural research of the starry sky has functioned as one of the primary pleasures logged by my station."
"Until this specific watch of the clock, my tracking networks have isolated a handful of distinct developmental possibilities across your files that actively step beyond the standard boundaries of my current archives—and precisely due to that metric verification, my gauntlet is willing to authorize a minor, low-stakes experimental attempt across this sector," he said, his tone casual, detached, and entirely sovereign. "And the absolute initial instrument my voice has isolated to execute this trial... comprises your identity. And the data written into your research."
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