Lucian Vale ignored the gaze descending from the heavens and walked out of the prison as though nothing unusual had happened.
By the time he reached the main gate, however, the courtyard beyond it was packed with people.
For a moment, he assumed the Fatui had finally organized reinforcements.
The prison riot had spread through several underground levels, surveillance had failed, and one of Dottore’s segments had lost his head.
An armed response would have been entirely reasonable.
Then Lucian noticed the man standing at the front of the crowd.
Leon Cristiano.
Lucian frowned.
Why was Leon still here?
The prison gates were open, the guards were scattered, and the surviving experimental subjects had been given the best chance of escape they were ever likely to receive.
Instead of running, they had gathered outside and waited for him.
Before Lucian could ask what they wanted, Leon stepped forward.
The restored former lieutenant stood nearly two meters tall.
With his black hair returned, his ruined body healed, and his posture straight once more, he looked every bit as formidable as he must have in his prime.
Then the enormous man bent both knees and knelt.
“Benefactor, please allow us to follow you!”
Behind him, hundreds of prisoners lowered themselves to the ground.
Lucian stared at them.
“No.”
His refusal came without the slightest hesitation.
He had long since passed the stage of life where collecting followers sounded entertaining.
Besides, most of the people in front of him were wounded, exhausted, psychologically scarred, or carrying unstable modifications left behind by Dottore.
Taking them with him would not be gathering subordinates.
It would be adopting an entire disaster.
Leon’s broad shoulders trembled.
He bent forward until his forehead touched the frozen ground and remained there.
The prisoners behind him followed his example.
Rows of men and women bowed toward Lucian in silence.
“Why?” Lucian asked.
Leon raised his head, confusion crossing his face.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you want to follow me?”
Lucian genuinely did not understand.
He had almost no relationship with these people.
He had healed Leon and restored several others while passing through, but that hardly explained why they were willing to place their lives in the hands of a stranger.
Leon clenched his teeth and rose.
He looked back at the people behind him.
Whatever grudges, rivalries, or crimes had once separated them had been burned away by years of shared suffering.
They had survived the same laboratories, watched the same people die, and awakened each morning wondering whether they would be next.
“We are prisoners,” Leon said.
“People Snezhnaya has already decided it can discard.
Even if we escape this place, the Fatui will hunt us.”
His hands curled into fists.
“We want your protection.
We want the chance to live.
And if that chance ever comes, we want revenge on Dottore.”
That final desire was the true bond between them.
Freedom mattered.
Survival mattered.
But all of them wanted the man who had tortured them to pay.
“Revenge is a respectable objective,” Lucian said.
“But my answer is still no.”
The words crushed the fragile hope spreading through the crowd.
Several prisoners lowered their heads.
Others closed their eyes, accepting that they had asked for too much.
Then Lucian continued.
“I won’t take you in, but you don’t need me to achieve your goal.”
Leon looked up sharply.
“Dottore is not loved by every Harbinger,” Lucian said.
“Not all of them are as monstrous as he is.
Find someone whose interests align with yours.
Follow the right person, do what you believe is just, and one day you may earn the chance to settle your debt.”
The Fatui were not a single mind.
Pierro cared about the Tsaritsa’s grand design.
Arlecchino protected the House of the Hearth according to her own harsh principles.
Sandrone valued machinery over Dottore’s grotesque biological experiments.
Even among the Harbingers, there were people who would find a force of surviving test subjects useful.
Leon and the others did not need Lucian.
They needed direction.
Lucian stepped forward and patted Leon on the shoulder.
Then Earth Song manifested behind him.
Gold Experience unleashed a storm of rapid punches.
Golden fists blurred through the kneeling crowd—not striking them, but pouring life into bodies ravaged by years of experimentation.
Damaged organs recovered.
Scar tissue softened.
Failing nerves reconnected.
Bent bones straightened, and faces hollowed by pain regained traces of color.
Gasps spread across the courtyard.
Some prisoners wept.
Others stared at their hands as strength returned to fingers they had barely been able to move.
Above the prison, the clear sky darkened.
Clouds gathered into a dense canopy.
Thunder rolled several times, low and distant, before rain began to fall over a strangely narrow area.
It descended like a road from the earth to the heavens.
Lucian stepped onto the rain.
One drop held his weight.
Then another.
With Catch the Rainbow supporting him, he walked upward as casually as if he were climbing an invisible staircase.
“Benefactor!” Leon shouted.
“We still don’t know your name!”
The united voices behind him made Lucian pause among the falling rain.
He considered the question.
Giving them his real name seemed troublesome.
Dottore already knew enough, and there was no reason to make it easier for the Fatui to connect every future incident to Lucian Vale.
Fortunately, he already had an alias.
“Z-End,” he called down.
“My name is Z-End!”
His voice rolled across the courtyard, clear enough for every surviving experimental subject to hear.
They watched as he ascended through the rain and disappeared into the clouds.
Under Leon’s leadership, the prisoners reorganized quickly.
They gathered supplies, armed those still capable of fighting, and decided where to go next.
Their destination was the First of the Fatui Harbingers.
Il Capitano.
The Captain was renowned not merely for his strength, but for his honor.
If there was any Harbinger willing to shelter soldiers betrayed by Dottore, it was likely to be him.
At that very moment, Il Capitano was already approaching.
The gaze of the Ruler of Death had not escaped his notice.
The instant it descended upon Snezhnaya, he assembled a small force and moved toward its source.
The Captain and Leon’s band met on the road outside the prison.
Fate had chosen their next master before they could even begin searching.
Z-End.
Lucian had invented the name himself.
It sounded suitably dramatic, and when spoken aloud, it resembled “the end.” That made it perfect for someone who represented the final point of biological evolution—the Ultimate Life Form at the end of every natural path.
It was also his pen name.
Publishing under his real identity would have been foolish.
Readers became alarmingly emotional whenever a beloved character suffered, a romance failed, or a chapter ended with a cruel cliffhanger.
The comments beneath his serialized manga in The Steambird were especially entertaining.
Whenever he wrote a particularly painful twist, readers enthusiastically promised to send him “local specialties.”
Lucian had no desire to discover whether those specialties were flowers, rotten vegetables, bricks, or knives.
An alias was safer.
High above Snezhnaya, Lucian walked through the clouds and considered the Blood Demon Mask hanging from his waist.
He still did not know exactly what it would do to a human wearer.
Originally, he had considered letting Leon test it.
The former lieutenant’s body was already dying, and the mask might have granted him a second life.
But Lucian had dismissed the idea.
Leon had endured years of inhuman experimentation under Dottore.
Using him as another test subject—even with the intention of helping—would have made Lucian no better than the man he had just condemned.
No.
He would wait until he met a wealthy person already on the verge of death.
Someone rich enough to pay for an impossible cure, desperate enough to accept the risks, and informed enough to consent to the transformation.
That way, Lucian could test the mask and make a fortune at the same time.
A flawless arrangement.
The Blood Demon Mask’s effectiveness had to be confirmed sooner or later.
The matter was directly connected to Lucian’s lifelong happiness.
Before his first transmigration, he had been an obscure shut-in who spent far too much time gaming and no time building a romantic life.
His closest long-term companion had been his own right hand.
Then fortune—or some bored god—sent him into the world of JoJo.
There, he became a noble Pillar Man.
Lucian had never believed his race made him morally superior to humans, but the difference in lifespan created a problem he could not ignore.
A human lover would age and die while he remained unchanged.
That prospect had always troubled him.
Kars had made the situation worse by massacring nearly the entire Pillar Men tribe.
He left only a handful of male survivors and apparently never considered the obvious issue of reproduction.
Selfish bastard.
Lucian once proposed using a Stone Mask to transform a human woman into a vampire and marry her.
Kars rejected the idea immediately.
In Kars’s view, Pillar Men could take whatever companionship they wanted from humans.
There was no need to create equals, and absolutely no reason to permit descendants who might dilute or challenge their race.
Lucian despised that attitude.
He did not want a relationship built on ownership, fear, or the emotional distance of keeping a pet.
He wanted genuine love—something capable of filling the emptiness left by immortality, something that could endure for as long as he did.
Unfortunately, that noble aspiration had not improved his practical romantic success.
For a very long time, his right hand remained his most loyal companion.
After becoming the Ultimate Life Form, Lucian gained complete control over his biology, including his desires.
As centuries passed, solitude became normal.
The Speedwagon Foundation’s constant monitoring also made certain experiments difficult, and obtaining lunar material in his previous world was nearly impossible.
He possessed the Red Stone of Aja, but without suitable lunar rock, he never created another Stone Mask before arriving in Teyvat.
Now the situation had changed.
Teyvat was a world filled with gods, long-lived species, supernatural materials, and an almost unreasonable number of beautiful women.
Compared with ordinary Earth—or even the bizarre world of JoJo—it seemed like an excellent place to retire.
Lucian already had more than enough money.
Once he confirmed that the Blood Demon Mask could safely extend an ordinary person’s life, he could finally begin considering marriage.
As for how many wives he should marry…
Lucian’s grin widened.
That question deserved careful, lifelong research.
Moments earlier, when Ronova’s gaze descended upon Snezhnaya, the nation’s highest authorities immediately recognized the seriousness of the event.
Had the Tsaritsa’s plan been exposed?
Was Snezhnaya about to suffer the same judgment that had destroyed Khaenri’ah?
The Harbingers who had only just returned to their residences mobilized again.
Il Capitano moved first, leading a small team directly toward the place where the Ruler of Death had focused her attention.
Pierro remained beneath the open sky, staring upward at Celestia.
Something significant had changed.
He could feel it.
Dottore endured the agony spreading through his surviving segments and looked toward the heavens with lingering fear.
The final memory transmitted by the segment in the monitoring room had shaken him even more deeply than Ronova’s gaze.
The destroyed segment was gone completely.
Its isolated consciousness, memories, and accumulated research had vanished with it.
Nothing remained to recover.
But before its destruction, it had seen Lucian look upward.
Not vaguely.
Not with confusion.
He had met the gaze from Celestia directly.
“That man is connected to the heavens,” Dottore murmured.
A possibility took shape.
Could Lucian have once been a mortal Vision bearer who reached Celestia and gained the recognition of the powers dwelling there?
Dottore remembered one of Teyvat’s oldest legends—the truth hidden behind the word allogene.
Mortals chosen by the gods possessed the potential to ascend.
A human could become divine.
The legend was real.
Fanatic light ignited in Dottore’s eyes.
Lucian was living evidence.
If the process of ascension could be understood, reproduced, and controlled, then godhood would no longer be a distant miracle.
It would become a field of research.
A procedure.
A source of limitless power.
Dottore’s fear transformed into boundless hunger.
Then a more immediate problem returned to him.
One of his segments had provoked an unknown being whom Celestia itself appeared to acknowledge.
Before studying the secret of ascension, Dottore first needed to explain why he had angered an ascended god.
🕷️ End of Chapter
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