The city lay still. Not with peace, but with surrender—ash drifting like falling petals, stone warm with aftershock. At its center, Zhen Hu knelt in the crater where the Regent's altar once stood, surrounded by silence and soot.
His fingers were dug into the earth. Not in pain. Not in prayer.
In absorption.
He had drawn in death. The corrupted Zen of the Humanios. The sorrow of the city's dead. The essence of every shattered oath and every broken bone. Nytherion churned within him now—not like a storm, but like a great ocean with no shore.
His breath shuddered.
Something had shifted.
Aelira stood nearby, her spirit-form barely coherent under the weight of what was unraveling around them. "Zhen… what are you doing?"
His reply came in a whisper, not to her, but to the air.
"I feel… them. All of them. The ones who bled. The ones who broke."
His spine arched. Zen surged upward, first in flickers, then waves. The Aethonix Realm's seal within him ripped open like damp parchment, Nytherion flooding through the wound. His body seized—not in agony, but in metamorphosis.
First came the shuddering collapse of old limits. Muscles tightened, bones crackled, the patterns of his breath distorted like a dying fire reborn as lightning.
Then came the second threshold. He hadn't even spoken the incantations yet.
The Nytherion within him—too vast, too ripe with ruin—pushed further. It tore through the next seal, uncoiling from his core like serpents of night.
Velkor Realm.
The moment it happened, the sky itself darkened. From the clouds, a low moan echoed—a reaction from the plane itself, as if the world was uneasy with what now walked it.
Zhen Hu rose slowly.
His feet didn't touch the ground anymore. The shattered stone beneath him cracked in veins of violet-black light. In every direction, death seemed to lean toward him—dust curving unnaturally, shadows slithering across stone, even time itself slowing in his radius.
Aelira's voice came again. "You… broke two seals at once. That's not—Zhen, this isn't normal. This isn't—"
"I know," he said simply. "But I'm not what I was."
His eyes opened. They were no longer dark. No longer human. They were glazed in Nytherion's eclipse—a dull gray glow with no reflection.
"I didn't ascend," he said. "I fell upward."
And somewhere deep inside, a new voice stirred. Not Aelira's. Not the Regent's. Not his own.
It was ancient.
It watched from within.
And it whispered:
"One more step, and they will not call you cultivator anymore. They will call you Sovereign."
Zhen Hu did not smile. But he did not tremble.
He turned toward the broken skyline—and began walking.