In a domain existing far beyond the borders of mortal universes, where the very concepts of time and space collapsed into an infinite sea of stars, silence reigned supreme.
It was within this cosmic void that the Multiversal System—the incorporeal entity designed to manage anomalies and distribute power templates—decided to condense its vast network of data.
For the first time in eons, it took a physical form.
The silhouette that materialized in the midst of nothingness was that of a human woman, cloaked in a veil of starlight and incomprehensible holographic code sequences.
She possessed no defined facial features, yet she radiated an aura of frigid, purely calculating authority.
However, in the presence of the figure standing opposite her, the System’s authority paled entirely.
Standing amidst the void was an existence that defied the very logic of creation.
She had long, impeccably straight silver hair that cascaded down to her knees, seemingly glowing with a faint, intrinsic light.
Her eyes, a pure and intense gold, showed not the slightest hint of cloudiness, emotion, or hesitation.
Standing exactly 169 centimeters tall and dressed in pristine white vestments, her body was so devastatingly beautiful that it embodied perfect divine proportions.
And yet, to look upon her was deeply unsettling.
There was a complete disconnect in her gaze—a clueless, apathetic benevolence that placed the destruction of entire worlds and a single grain of sand on the exact same level of worth.
The woman of light representing the System took a step forward, breaking the stillness of the void.
“Why do you interfere with my work?” the System asked, her voice echoing with a synthetic, accusing tone.
“Your jurisdiction does not permit you to alter the spatiotemporal anchors of my administrators in such a manner.
Why did you take such an interest in him as to intervene and throw him into another dimension prematurely?”
The golden-eyed deity tilted her head slightly.
Her expression did not change by even a fraction of a millimeter, completely impassive to the machine’s tone.
“I am merely advancing things a bit,” the entity replied.
Her voice was soft, ethereal, yet it carried the gravitational weight of a thousand galaxies.
“After all, I am not the only one interested in his soul.
You should have foreseen this by now.”
The System’s silhouette tensed visibly at the mention of that detail.
Her holographic circuits flickered with mild erraticism, denoting a flaw in her own predictive algorithms.
“Gaia…
and Alaya…” the System muttered, her voice filtering a rare trace of genuine frustration.
“Not only them,” the silver-haired deity corrected, maintaining her usual divine apathy, her gaze lost in the infinite loom of the multiverse.
“The board is much larger than your algorithms can calculate, little network.”
The Multiversal System, the network guiding Ed Rothtaylor, let out a loud, distinctly human click of her tongue.
Turning her back on the inscrutable, beautiful deity, she vanished in a torrent of data and light to resume the emergency monitoring of her administrator, unable to detain the deity for further answers.
Meanwhile, in the physical world of Dicathen, the mountain wind howled like an unleashed wild beast.
Ed Rothtaylor and Lucy Mayrill continued their free-fall down the interior of the massive, craggy ravine.
The gray fog swirled around them, devouring whatever little light managed to filter down from the sky.
However, unlike the paralyzing panic any normal human would experience when plummeting into the unknown, Ed maintained absolute, tactical calm.
With masterful control over his core’s reserves, Ed unleashed a concentrated torrent of wind magic.
An emerald vortex erupted beneath his heavy leather boots, acting as a retro-rocket that brought his terminal velocity to a screeching halt.
He maneuvered smoothly past the sharp, jagged rocks protruding from the cliff walls, descending with the lethal grace of an apex predator.
Finally, his feet touched the bottom of the ravine with a dull, controlled thud, kicking up a small cloud of grayish dust.
The environment was not filled with a toxic miasma or a suffocating darkness.
Instead, the bottom of the cliff was an ancient, silent, and overwhelmingly damp canyon, dimly illuminated by large formations of phosphorescent crystals embedded in the solid stone.
The air down here was incredibly dense, laden with a millennial pressure that would make the simple act of breathing difficult for any normal mage.
But Ed’s four fused souls effortlessly crushed that ambient pressure through sheer willpower.
Beside him, Lucy rubbed her deep purple eyes and adjusted the enormous witch hat she had inherited from her late mentor, Glockt.
The small, white-haired girl, who looked more like an elementary school student than a high school teenager, glanced around with mild curiosity.
Due to her absurd, catastrophe-level mana reserves, the dense ambient pressure did not affect her in the slightest.
“The wind messed up my hair…” the girl murmured, letting out a monumental yawn and rubbing her cheek against Ed’s coat.
Ed advanced with cautious steps, the tungsten katana drawn and ready in his right hand, keeping Lucy behind him.
Guided by his heightened senses, he walked through the dark underbrush and eroded rock formations until he found the entrance to a massive, hidden cavern at the base of the mountain.
Upon crossing the threshold into the crystal-lit interior, Ed’s breath hitched for a fraction of a second.
Resting in the center of the immense cave, illuminated by the soft, ghostly blue light of the walls, lay a creature of incomprehensible beauty and majesty for the human mind.
It was a dragon.
But not a savage, irrational monster—it was a being of pure, absolute Asuran nobility.
Sylvia.
Her size was staggering.
She was covered in a coat of pearlescent white scales that reflected the cavern’s light as if they were countless polished diamonds.
Majestic, ancient golden runes marked her long, elegant neck, descending down her robust body and long tail like a sacred engraving.
Her wings, half-folded due to evident exhaustion, were pure white, adorned with delicate feathers that resembled ethereal leaves of light.
However, the imposing sight was tragically marred.
A massive, dark, necrotic hole marked the immense dragon’s side, the flesh withered by some kind of poison or destructive power, and her breathing was ragged, hoarse, and painfully heavy.
Lucy blinked, her purple eyes widening just a fraction more than usual, losing a bit of her habitual sleepiness.
“That’s…
really big,” the girl muttered softly, clutching lightly onto Ed’s sleeve.
The dragon’s enormous, beautiful lavender eyes slowly opened, fixing upon the two intruders who had just entered her final sanctuary.
“Human children…?” The voice did not echo through the cave, but directly within Ed and Lucy’s minds.
It was a telepathic female voice; extremely kind, warm, and deeply maternal, which contrasted brutally with the immense, destructive power still radiating from her dying body.
“It surprises me that you can even stand in my presence without fainting.
Especially you, little one.”
Sylvia’s lavender eyes glowed with arcane light as they scrutinized and evaluated Ed.
Suddenly, the ancient Asura let out a mental gasp, her shock being so great that it physically shook the dust from the cavern ceiling.
“You…
your soul.
It is not of this world, is it?
And it is not just one.
You are an anomaly that escapes the comprehension of my entire clan, young warrior.”
Sylvia peered deeper into the core of this strange human, her acute draconic senses analyzing the very fabric of his being.
Then, she felt it.
A faint, almost imperceptible resonance, anchored deep within him.
It was the unmistakable trace of her own Beast Will, a passive remnant left behind when Ed had utilized the System’s one-time skill months ago in his own world.
The revelation hit the ancient dragoness like a lightning bolt in the middle of a storm.
“I sense a trace of my own power sleeping within you.
A temporal and spatial paradox,” Sylvia thought to herself, her prodigious mind racing.
“You are the unforeseen anomaly.
The vessel…
the threads of fate have been violently altered by something superior.”
A grim but satisfying thought crossed her mind as she thought of her maddened, estranged husband, the lord of the Basilisks.
“Agrona…
that bastard’s grand plan is going to backfire on him completely.
The variable that has fallen into my cave is far beyond his control and his calculations.”
Ed sheathed his tungsten katana with a soft metallic click—a gesture of military respect to show he was not a threat—and took a tactical step forward.
“My name is Ed Rothtaylor,” he introduced himself, his tone remaining formal, cold, and unwavering as he evaluated the creature.
“And she is Lucy.
We fell down the precipice following an…
unexpected spatial intervention.
We harbor no hostile intentions toward you.”
Sylvia let out a soft, tired telepathic laugh, her lungs failing with every exhalation.
“I know, Ed.
I can feel the tactical firmness and the iron discipline in your strange soul.
My name is Sylvia.
I belong to the Dragon race, of the Indrath lineage.”
Over the next few minutes, Sylvia, sensing with painful clarity that her time was rapidly running out, decided to trust the anomaly fate had thrown before her.
With a patience and warmth Ed had rarely experienced, the Asura quickly summarized her desperate situation.
She spoke of her husband, Agrona Vritra—a powerful Basilisk whom she had deeply loved, but from whom she had to flee upon discovering the insatiable madness and horrific experiments he conducted by crossbreeding species, playing god with the lesser beings of this world.
“I escaped, severely wounded, to protect the only thing I had left in this world,” Sylvia explained.
With a slow, agonizing, and trembling movement of her immense claw, she shifted her large white wing aside, revealing a translucent, iridescent stone the size of a small boulder.
A dragon egg.
“My daughter.
Agrona’s hounds, the lethal Scythes, are approaching this mountain as we speak.
I can feel their foul mana tracking my blood.
I will not survive to protect her from them.”
Sylvia’s lavender eyes looked directly at Ed, transmitting the desperate plea of a mother out of options.
“Young warrior of the four souls…
I offer you a deal.
I will give you my Beast Will.
I will grant you the latent power of an Asuran dragon so you may survive whatever this strange fate has in store for you.
In exchange, I beg you to take care of my little one.
Protect her from the madness of her father.
Take her far away from here.”
Ed observed the iridescent egg, analyzing its beautiful patterns, and then looked back at the dying dragoness.
In his mind, forged by war and the brutal pragmatism of his incarnation as King Grey, the tactical calculation was obvious: an Asura’s Beast Will would catapult him to immense levels of power, making him an incontestable lethal force.
However, accepting the deal exactly as presented meant allowing an ally of immense strategic value and a genuinely kind being to die pointlessly.
And Ed Rothtaylor never took the easy path if a superior tactical alternative existed.
«System,» Ed called out in his mind, his will focused like a razor blade.
«Requesting immediate tactical analysis.
Is there a viable route to save her life?
I refuse to let a high-tier asset perish if an optimal alternative exists.»
The Multiversal System, still processing its frustrating encounter with the deity in the cosmic void, responded immediately by projecting text directly onto Ed’s retina.
[Analysis Complete.]
[Response: Affirmative.
A survival route exists utilizing an Advanced Aether Art (Vivum Branch).]
[Procedure: Sylvia must physically sacrifice her dying Asuran vessel to reconstruct your human body from the cellular level.
By doing so, her soul will not perish; it will remain intact and enter a state of latent stasis within your core and her Beast Will, deeply tied to her own daughter in the egg.]
[System Support: To prevent a lethal genetic rejection and complete your transformation into a perfect anatomical hybrid, this System will inject and synthesize the necessary percentage of Basilisk lineage (subtly extracted from her daughter’s Vritra heritage) during the assimilation process.]
Ed didn’t waste a single second of his time.
He looked Sylvia directly in the eyes.
“I decline your offer to let you die, Sylvia,” Ed stated with an absolute firmness that echoed off the cave walls.
The massive dragoness blinked, visibly taken aback by the sharp, cold refusal.
“I will take your Will and protect your daughter at the cost of my life,” Ed continued, his voice assuming the authority of a king issuing an edict, “but you will live to see her hatch.
I know an Advanced Aether Art of the Vivum branch.
If you sacrifice your dying physical body right now and use it to reconstruct my anatomy, your soul will be preserved within my core alongside your Will.
You can rest and recover there, safe, until I acquire the level of power necessary to restore you completely.”
Sylvia raised her enormous, heavy head, her lavender eyes widening in genuine stupefaction.
“You…
you know the paths of Aether?
A young human?
That is…
fascinating.
I see the forces backing you from the shadows have charted a miraculous and terrifying path for you.”
The dragoness closed her eyes, her senses picking up the lethal presence of the Vritra demons reaching the foothills of the mountain, destroying everything in their path.
There was no other option.
“I accept your proposal, Ed Rothtaylor.
I entrust my soul, my lineage, and my daughter’s future into your human hands.
Brace yourself.
The pain of rebirth will make you beg for death.”
The gigantic body of the dragon began to glow with a blinding golden and lavender light.
The ancient Aether Art had been activated.
Sylvia’s pearlescent scales, flesh, and indestructible Asuran bones began to dissolve into millions of motes of pure elemental light.
It became a massive hurricane of divine energy that illuminated the underground cavern as if a burning sun had been born within it.
All that energy swirled in the air and shot forward like a torrent straight into Ed’s chest.
The impact was, in a word, devastating.
Ed fell to his knees instantly, letting out a choked gasp that, under the unbearable weight of the power, quickly transformed into a hoarse roar of pure and absolute agony.
The pain was not a simple wound on the skin; it was simultaneous genetic and cellular destruction and reconstruction.
His human bones were breaking into a thousand pieces inside his flesh, only to be replaced by the impenetrable density and weight of dragon bone.
His muscles tore from the tendons and rewove themselves with absurd biomechanical strength.
His human blood boiled and evaporated, being purged and replaced by the overwhelming power of Aether and the purest mana.
And just when his fragile human vessel seemed on the verge of collapsing and exploding from the draconic overdose, the System silently intervened.
It injected the lethal trace of Basilisk lineage into his bloodstream, stabilizing the violent and chaotic fusion, mathematically balancing his anatomy into a flawless Asura-Human Hybrid.
About ten meters away, the gruesome scene utterly shattered Lucy Mayrill’s habitual apathy and laziness.
The girl, who always seemed half-asleep and oblivious to the horrors of the world, opened her purple eyes as wide as they could go.
The purest, most primal terror painted her childish features as she watched the only person who genuinely cared for her writhing in extreme pain, screaming, and enveloped in a golden fire that seemed to be consuming him.
Lucy dropped her beloved, enormous hat to the cold stone floor.
She didn’t care in the slightest.
The traumatic, repressed memory of watching her mentor and adoptive grandfather, Glockt, die flashed violently in her mind like a recurring nightmare.
“ED!!” Lucy screamed, her high-pitched voice cracking from pure desperation.
She sprinted toward him at an incredibly fast speed, throwing herself onto her knees by his side.
Completely ignoring the scorching residual energy radiating from the boy’s body that lightly burned her skin, Lucy grabbed Ed’s hand with both of hers, squeezing it with all the physical strength her small body possessed.
Tears began to well up thickly from her purple eyes, tracing wet, glowing lines down her pale cheeks.
“Ed!
What’s happening?!
Don’t you dare die!” the archmage sobbed, her small body trembling violently like a leaf in a storm.
“Don’t leave me alone!
You still have to make me dinner and brush my hair!
Ed!”
In an act of pure, overwhelming survival instinct, seeking to save the only thing that mattered to her, Lucy completely unleashed her monstrous mana core.
The power she constantly kept repressed to honor the promise she made to Glockt exploded outward; not to attack or destroy, but to protect unconditionally.
An absolute, spherical barrier of incredibly dense, heavy, and vibrating mana erected itself around them.
It completely isolated them from any external magical disturbance, from any beast or demon approaching, ensuring that nothing and no one in all of Dicathen could interrupt the assimilation.
She clung to his right hand, weeping openly as she stood vigil over his agonizing transformation, her heart clenched by the absolute terror of losing the second person she truly loved in her life.
The brutal process felt like an eternity of scorching torture.
Slowly, the golden and lavender light began to fade into the air, absorbing completely under the boy’s skin.
Silence returned to the cavern like a tomb.
The immense white dragon had vanished entirely, leaving behind only dust, and the iridescent egg, now resting safely on the cold stone.
Ed Rothtaylor took a deep breath, a dense, heavy sound that resonated with the force of a massive forge bellows.
He opened his eyes.
His physical appearance had undergone a drastic and irreversible change.
He no longer looked like a simple school teenager; his facial features had sharpened, maturing to give him the appearance of someone in his early twenties, with a sculpted, strong jawline.
His skin, previously marked by scars and calluses from countless battles and training, was now a creamy white tone, immaculate and perfect.
His hair had lost its dark blond shade, transforming into a dazzling, wheat-colored ashen blonde.
Although his body under his clothes was slightly leaner, his musculature was toned and drawn with an unreal perfection, brimming with a physical strength capable of crushing steel with bare hands.
But the most striking change was in his eyes.
His irises, once a dull gray, were now a brilliant, pure gold, radiant and piercing, retaining only a subtle hint of gray at the edges.
It was a gaze that radiated the crushing, cold authority of an apex divine predator.
He was a hybrid.
Part human, part Asuran dragon, and with the dark resilience of a Basilisk flowing through his new veins.
Feeling the small, trembling hands still clinging tightly to his own, Ed looked down, his new golden eyes focusing on the girl.
Sylvania’s most powerful archmage had a red face, completely streaked with tears, and was breathing raggedly, hiccuping weakly.
With a smooth and fluid motion, demonstrating absolute bodily control and a total absence of his previous agony, Ed reached out and used his thumb to delicately wipe a tear from the girl’s cheek.
“I’m alive, Lucy.
I’m not going anywhere,” Ed said.
His voice was now much deeper, resonating with a calm and unbreakable authority, like a mountain that refuses to be moved.
Lucy stared at him, her still-wet purple eyes analyzing him from head to toe, noticing every change in his perfect face and hair.
She let out a muffled whimper and, without a second thought, lunged forward, hugging his new, hard torso tightly and burying her face in his coat to hide that she was still crying out of sheer relief.
Ed gently stroked the girl’s white hair, letting her vent, while directing his golden gaze toward the cave’s exit.
His analytical mind was already drawing up plans.
He observed the iridescent egg resting on the floor, holding Sylvia’s soul safe inside, and felt the immense latent power of his new core pulsating in unison with mana and Aether.
He knew nothing about this world, its wars, or who the Vritra were exactly.
He lacked the history and context that any other reincarnate might possess.
However, Ed Rothtaylor was King Grey.
Surviving, adapting, assimilating power, and conquering his enemies was all he knew how to do.
He would find a way to return to Sylvania eventually.
For now, he had a divine body to master, a child prodigy to protect, and the egg of a god in his hands.
«The rules of survival have just changed,» Ed thought, with the cold determination of a predator ready to hunt.
«This power is the absolute key.»