Chapter 95 95: Eternal Dragon
Lucia gently flipped his palm through the silver quiet, and twelve motionless figures draped in various traditional Glintstone Crowns and blue academy sorcerer robes materialized in a long, silent line directly behind Sellen's seat.
"Banish the internal tension. They do not represent any active colleague within your departments, and across the parameters of their soul matrices, their ledgers have long been closed," he spoke, a soft, detached smile formatting his syllables as his gauntlet signaled the floor, monitoring the bewildered, wide-eyed sorceress. "Consider these the initial batch of raw analytical materials my hand has allocated to your station."
Securing Lucia's tacit administrative authorization, Sellen slowly rose from her cedar chair, her boots clearing the gray sand to approach the silent facsimiles of the Raya Lucaria Grandmasters constructed from pure spiritual focus. She extended her fingers, casting a highly refined, low-frequency detection sorcery across their frames, her senses meticulously dissecting their biological readouts.
It was precisely as the mysterious, terrifyingly massive deity anchoring the far end of the obsidian table had stated—these sorcerers broadcasted absolute zero signatures of consciousness fluctuation, yet the base parameters of their organs, muscle rows, and deep venous pathways functioned under full compliance, exactly as if their individual souls had been systematically liquidated from the universe, leaving behind nothing but pristine, un-marked biological shells.
For the execution of her heavily restricted, forbidden research, these soulless master templates—who possessed zero capacity to launch a physical resistance, and whose somatic metrics remained frozen at the absolute most stable baseline imaginable—comprised nothing less than the single most optimized, flawless research material clutched across the continent.
"Abandon the original, un-optimized itinerary written across your laboratory logs," Lucia commanded, his tone dropping back into a calm, chilling authority. "My processors share zero interest regarding whether your research is exposed, revealed, or even systematically ruined by the high judges of the court. But losing your administrative position and personal freedom as a senior professor within the academy means losing the physical foundation required to mine the secrets of the cosmos—which implies your system has fundamentally lost its functional value to my vanguard."
With a secondary, casual wave of his gauntlet, a massive array of stone buildings violently erupted from the empty gray sand a short distance from the table. Cross-referencing the architectural data his vision had logged across Princess Ranni's courtyard and the layout of Sellen's private vault today, he engineered a complete, master-tier Sorcery Tower complex, packed with every single variant of advanced glintstone machinery, celestial alignment apparatus, and raw alchemical material required to conduct Primeval research.
"As the non-negotiable operational conditions governing this experimental trial, my voice will grant your spirit the right to freely clear the transit loops to enter and evacuate this pocket space at your own signature, and my network will continuously supply every material asset your equations lack—in direct return, your soul is conformed to register as my follower, exerting the absolute maximum output of your intellect to hand-deliver every single valuable research result your mind ever compiles to my archive."
"Naturally, your system preserves the legal right to choose whether to accept or decline the contract," Lucia murmured, his palms expanding slightly across the stone. "But my database demands that your memory permanently records this rule: for any intelligence across the cosmos, the door of sovereign opportunity will only clear its arches a solitary time."
Finishing the formulation of the layout, he simply desisted from further speech, his silver visors keeping a silent, un-blinking watch over the young academic before his table, waiting for the final data input from her lips.
At this specific watch, the entire immense volume of the Memory Battlefield appeared to drop into a state of absolute, suffocating silence, with only the slightly rapid, frantic respirations of Sellen's lungs vibrating through the silver quiet of the void.
Following what felt like an immense, crushing watch of psychological stagnation, yet scored as a mere handful of seconds across the chronological clock, Sellen slowly turned her chassis. She dropped her knees to the gray sand, executing a profound, absolute prostration before Lucia's boots—the supreme, un-chipped gesture of ultimate religious submission a mortal mind could project before the presence of an absolute deity.
Securing that posture, she desisted from forcing her spine upright, her robed form lying completely flat against the pitch-black flagstones as her frame shivered with a microscopic, intense awe, her voice emerging in a low, reverent rumble. "Sovereign Master... I petition your voice to disclose your divine registry across my ears."
"Hm," Lucia lifted his face, his silver eyes casually tracking the magnificent, blinding golden nebula that had historically mapped the heraldry of the Dragon King and the Dragon God, a smirk of deep interest breaking across his mask. "Your thoughts may record my signature as the... Eternal Dragon."
Sellen drew a deep, trembling breath of the void air, her torso executing a secondary, absolute incline against the stone. "In that event... I—the humble seeker who walks the jagged tracks of the Primeval Origins, Sellen—deposit the highest loyalty of my soul into the custody of my Lord."
The exact watch her eyes lifted to re-verify the table, she discovered that the massive obsidian council board and the indistinct, blurred silhouette of the master had completely vaporized from her tracking field, while the vast Sorcery Tower infrastructure and the line of soulless Raya Lucaria grandmasters remained anchored to the coordinates of the gray sand.
Sellen drew her internal focus back to manage her own center. Without a single warning from her nervous system, her pathways appeared to have unlocked a mysterious, permanent energetic tether binding her focus directly to the substrate of this pocket macrocosm. She tentatively wove her mental intent to test the link—and the entire immense, starlight-choked scenery before her eyes vanished like flowing, liquid starlight.
She found her physical form standing firmly back inside the parameters of her private academy laboratory, her fingers still resting against the leather cover of her forbidden text.
Her head snapped with an explosive velocity to audit the brass magic clock mounted across the masonry wall, her processors going completely dead-still as her eyes logged the position of the gears. Less than thirty seconds of objective time had bled off the material calendar since her consciousness had initial dropped into that starlight abyss!
She spent the next few minutes aggressively testing the transit loop, executing several consecutive entries and evacuations between the two realities, desisting from the drill strictly after her network verified that crossing the civilizational barrier required nothing more than a solitary, microsecond flash of her mental intent. She vented a long, chest-cleaning sigh of relief, her physical body—which had been wound as tight as tempered iron bars beneath the silks of her mage robes—slowly relaxing its posture against the desk.
Even though her intellect had fanatically pursued the mysteries of the Primeval Current across her entire life cycle, causing her mind to completely omit the standard mortal reverence or religious terror that ordinary men projected toward the various star-born gods of the Lands Between, forcing her face to maintain its alignment directly before an absolute, elusive sovereignty of that scale had extracted a massive psychological toll from her center.
"The... Eternal Dragon?"
A soft, profoundly thoughtful sigh escaped her lips as her eyes tracked the dust. If the destiny of her lineage conformed her to isolate a single divinity across the cosmic void to receive her faith, perhaps strictly a sovereign intelligence who pursued the absolute accumulation of Knowledge was worthy of her lifelong loyalty and ultimate devotion.
"Phew... the countdown finally cleared its watch; it is permanently concluded!"
Deep within the central rafters of the Memory Battlefield, Lucia reached up his gauntlet to wipe a thick layer of cold anxiety sweat from his forehead plates, his human form dropping straight down onto the gray sand. "If that woman's linguistic processors had logged even a half-minute delay before returning her compliance syllable across the table, my entire baseline courtly composure would have suffered an absolute structural collapse!"
His modern programming had, naturally, desisted from granting Sellen the legal authority to freely clear the transit loops to explore the entirety of his Memory Battlefield. Backed by his current developmental control over the starry sky, his interface had successfully carved out a completely independent, permanently sealed Parallel Sandbox Sector for her exclusive clinical use. That partitioned laboratory space and the main training void his own avatar deployed operated like two separate parallel universes, sharing zero common data nodes and remaining entirely independent of each other's networks.
Across that brief, high-voltage conversation that had consumed less than an hour of the internal clock, his mind had not merely utilized every single environmental function developed by the sandbox interface; he had pushed his personal skills of structural deception, theatrical showmanship, high-court bluffing, and absolute semantic nonsense to the absolute maximum threshold of his statistics. Especially during that watch his lips had casually, confidently commented on the geopolitical alignments of the star-born outer deities—his heart had been gripped by a cold paranoia that if the Greater Will's monitoring networks caught the frequency of his voice, a secondary Astel would be violently dropped through the atmosphere to liquidate his entire palace grounds deep into the bedrock.
However, the divine registry of the Eternal Dragon wasn't a random, hollow sequence of syllables his mind had assembled out of thin air; the title had been selected based on two highly calculated strategic considerations.
First and foremost anchoring the choice was the current architectural mutation of the starry dome. Lucia had isolated a clean parameter while tracking his connection targets: the living minds his spiritual focus could reach through these newly igniting stellar amber nodes appeared to share a direct historical link with the primordial meteor showers that had descended upon the Lands Between at the ancestral dawn of the Age of Stars. This specific variable explained the immediate inclusion of Sellen—an academic master who clutched an encyclopedic data log regarding the Eternal City's ancient civilization and the deep laws of the Primeval Current. If his network managed to establish a communication tether with alternate constellations further down the chronology, his outriders would likely intersect even more ancient entities who truly belonged to the un-diluted Nox lineages.
The secondary parameter functioned as a calculated piece of long-term foreshadowing targeting his material identity in reality. Sellen undeniably represented one of the most outstanding, world-class magical intellects generated across this entire epoch. If his interface managed to recruit more and more top-tier ancestral geniuses of her caliber to serve as loyal followers beneath this divine mask, his strategy could mathematically never leave these valuable, high-yield human assets permanently locked inside the virtual sandboxes of his mind. Their true, high-voltage calling lay in administering the structural restoration, technological development, and military preparation of Farum Azula—specifically to secure a defensive ceiling before the continent collided with the highly probable, inescapable cataclysm of the Shattering War.
Lucia's true, ultimate objective was to establish a terrifyingly powerful, un-monitored research and engineering organization directly under his personal signature—an elite technical department capable of providing a continuous, infinite stream of technological advancements, weapon matrices, and alchemical innovations to fuel the civilizational revival of the Ancient Dragon Dynasty. Consequently, migrating Sellen and her future peers from the virtual nodes of the sandbox into his real-world command structure comprised an absolute, inevitable milestone down the timeline. The exact watch that transition cleared the field, his intellect would seamlessly bridge the identity of the Eternal Dragon—which vaguely hinted at an ancestral draconic lineage—with the material presence of the Ancient Dragon Demigod... ensuring the connection to Luciassax would register across the court archives without a single point of abrupt structural friction.
The entire blueprint had been conceived in a highly hurried, desperate manner, its parameters scoring as exceptionally audacious on the board. Fortunately, his house had successfully locked more than half of the strategic objective into his ledger across this initial phase. However, executing the secondary tiers of behavioral alignment targeting Sellen's consciousness and harvesting further high-value zealots across the constellations wasn't an enterprise that could finalize its metrics across a single day or night watch.
Standing beneath the vast, shifting starlight of the dome, Lucia monitored the three distinct, yet beautifully balanced energetic forces—Vitality, Divine Grace, and Primal Sorcery—streaming through his channels, before slowly venting a long breath of mist.
From this exact watch of the clock forward, his personal strategic plans and developmental speed inside the walls of Leyndell had legally cleared their introductory cycle to enter a brand-new phase of progression. The overt, violent military friction targeting the New Faction ministries had temporarily hit a stable ceiling; the explosive, bleeding confrontation dividing the Carian House from the Golden Dynasty's court had been temporarily eased across the board. His personal stats, his high-level diplomatic connections, and the raw volume of structural power clutched within his gauntlet had all registered an immense, horizontal expansion.
But exactly as the solitary, un-varnished truth his lips had hand-delivered to Sellen's ear stated: every single asset class across the cosmos is legally conformed to extract an absolute price from the operator. Having pushed his boots to this advanced coordinate of the game, his name had been entirely, irrevocably drawn into the turbulent, suffocating undercurrents governing the Golden Dynasty—his life ledger deeply entangled within the macro-scale game of the gods, leaving his center completely unable to extricate its mass from the board.
Since the parameters of the setting left his shield zero alternative to execute a retreat... his choices were restricted strictly to forcing his boots to march forward across the line.
The rule remained absolute—for humans, as well as dragons.
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