Chapter 1251: Lost Memories & Danton’s Meticulous Preparation

The Goddess was slowly awakening all her power.

Hayashi’s back bent deeper than Ashworth’s, one hand folded over the other.

"This old Hayashi greets the Nether Goddess."

Sienna regarded him with those impossible violet eyes. "Rise."

Only then did Hayashi straighten.

Even after doing so, his posture retained a subtle deference absent from the easy familiarity his daughter might have shown. He had lived too long and seen too much to confuse Sienna’s present age with the existence looking through it.

Her gaze moved toward the road again: "Phei advanced."

Hayashi’s expression sharpened immediately.

"He’s a Mortal Sovereign," she said. "His cultivation crossed into the later reaches of the Mortal Realm before he even awakened properly."

Hayashi’s brows rose.

He had known the Young Master would advance after what occurred but he had not expected the leap to be quite so obscene: "Four stages in a single night?"

Sienna’s violet gaze shifted toward him.

That was all.

Hayashi realized the foolishness of the question himself... a dry breath escaped him as his fingers rose toward his chin. "Of course."

Four ordinary stages would have been absurd but nothing about the previous night had been ordinary.

For three minutes, the Void had buried the world and even now, the mortal world was attempting to understand those minutes with the touching optimism of children examining the footprint of a god and arguing about weather.

Every major news network had abandoned its ordinary schedule before sunrise. Footage from thousands of cities played continuously across screens, although much of it consisted of three minutes of perfect blackness accompanied by frightened voices.

In regions where night had already fallen, the effect had been difficult to understand at first because people assumed electricity had failed and then they discovered the stars had vanished too where even flames still produced heat but no visible glow, phone screens responded beneath fingertips without giving off light. Headlamps, emergency beacons, streetlights and entire illuminated skylines became useless in the same instant.

The regions beneath daylight had understood the horror much faster.

Noon became absolute midnight instantly.

The sun remained mathematically present and physically warm enough for instruments to confirm, yet human eyes received nothing from it. Shadows disappeared because light itself seemed to have abandoned the world. Highways descended into confusion as drivers found themselves moving through perfect darkness despite clocks insisting it was afternoon. Aircraft continued flying beneath functional instruments while pilots stared through cockpit glass into an emptiness without horizon, cloud or sun. Solar observatories knew exactly where the star should have been and recorded an impossible absence where its brilliance belonged.

Then, after three minutes, creation returned to normal.

Light came back everywhere at once.

The sun appeared.

Cities reignited.

Stars returned to the night and yet no accident or any catastrophic event had happened despite the absolute darkness.

Humanity had spent the hours since inventing explanations.

Governments issued carefully sterilized statements about an unprecedented global optical anomaly. Scientists argued over solar interference, atmospheric behavior, electromagnetic disturbances and theoretical phenomena that became increasingly desperate the longer anyone asked how an event could affect every point on Earth at once.

Religion had naturally been less restrained:

So had the internet!

Within hours, people had blamed divine wrath, aliens, secret weapons, failed simulations, particle experiments, prophetic eclipses and at least three governments that did not possess the technology to turn off a moderately stubborn printer, much less the sun.

Hayashi knew what had happened.

The Void had opened its eyes.

Everything else had simply stopped being permitted to shine, against that memory, Phei leaping four stages suddenly seemed almost modest. Hayashi exhaled, then some of the solemnity around him loosened when another thought arrived.

"Yuzuki will take this very badly."

Ashworth glanced toward him.

Hayashi’s lips twitched. "That child has cultivated faithfully for years. Meditation, tempering, refinement, battles in ruins and forbidden zones the First Princess usually take her. Everything properly earned one painful step at a time. The Young Master disappears for a single night, nearly dies and returns four stages ahead."

Sienna’s face remained beautifully unreadable. "She can complain after she catches him."

Hayashi’s amusement deepened.

Then Sienna added, with the same mild indifference one might use to discuss tomorrow’s weather, "Assuming it is only four."

The amusement left his face... Hayashi slowly lowered the hand from his chin.

Sienna continued, "He hasn’t cultivated what he consumed; those four breakthroughs are just excess energy."

World Transcendent life essence... the Soul Energy from the souls he’d enslaved and their and the energy of the Souls he’d snuffed out.

Also the World Transcendent Cores that had entered Phei’s possession as well, though those remained separate treasures rather than already refined cultivation. Beyond even that, something incomprehensible had passed through his soul and body during the awakening of the Void, leaving behind changes none of them had yet properly measured.

What Sienna sensed now might simply be the cultivation his body had absorbed by surviving.

Once Phei deliberately refined and cultivated what remained inside him, another rise was not merely possible.

It was likely.

Hayashi’s earlier amusement became contemplation.

"This will complicate matters."

Sienna’s gaze moved to him: "Prepare for it."

There was something unmistakably divine in the simplicity of her command.

She offered no explanation of what preparations should look like or nervous speculation about whether Phei’s foundation could endure another ascent; she had already examined him and she knew his soul was wounded, knew his body had changed and knew enough to conclude that whatever came next required readiness rather than fear and once he was back with Melissa, he’ll be ready.

Hayashi bowed his head: "As the Goddess commands."

Sienna looked beyond him toward the gardens. "What did Grandma say?"

Hayashi understood the change of subject immediately. "Her Majesty received the Coffer safely last night."

Sienna’s eyes sharpened.

He continued: "The two women delivered it and the Empress has already begun... after Phei removed the hardest formations places on it she believes the Coffer can be opened within several days, perhaps sooner."

"What do the two women know?"

"Very little beyond what the Young Master already knows. They were given the task, the route necessary to complete it and only enough information to ensure they could obey. Neither was entrusted with the greater designs surrounding what the Maxtons or Heavenchilds are planning."

Sienna remained quiet.

Hayashi added, "The Blood Elf possesses fragments from her years beneath them, but nothing that presently gives us the shape of the entire scheme."

"And the others?" The old Immortal’s expression changed. It was subtle, yet the trace of amusement left from Yuzuki disappeared completely. "Danton," Ashworth sighed and said after a moment, "deserves considerably more respect than I would prefer to give him."

Sienna’s eyes became colder.

He continued, "The five Elves were examined after their release. At first we believed their memories were intact. They remember captivity with remarkable clarity. They remember everything and what the Eternal Prison Gates and many of the things they were forced to endure."

A small current of Nether slid from beneath Sienna’s feet.

The morning shadow cast by the hotel entrance deepened as it touched the black-violet essence, stretching several inches toward her before going unnaturally still.

"But?" she asked.

Hayashi looked directly at her: "Anything truly sensitive for the two families is gone."

Sienna said nothing.

"They remember everything but the moment they attempt to tell us what those were, there was absence; everything was cut away so precisely that the surrounding memories remain untouched."

Ashworth’s expression hardened. "Their minds have not been confused, Goddess. Their memories were not damaged broadly; someone selected what they were never allowed to carry and indulge in case of freedom."

"Danton," she said. "We cannot yet be certain but whatever he safeguard may have been woven through their soul seals or something Danton added without the Maxtons themselves fully understanding it and we didn’t bother to look before we asked too much. But whatever the method, the result is elegant in a particularly cruel way. Captivity allowed them to remember enough to remain useful. Freedom triggered the final price."

Sienna’s violet eyes brightened.

Very slightly: "What about Althea?"

Hayashi’s silence answered first.

Sienna looked at him.

The old Immortal’s jaw tightened: "Nothing useful survived."

The Nether Goddess remained motionless beneath the newborn sun, though the warmth around her suddenly seemed very far away.

Hayashi continued carefully. "Some of them know they encountered the child... but anything that could tell us where she was taken afterward, who received her, the path used to move her or the destination itself..." He shook his head. "Gone."

Sienna’s expression revealed nothing. "Danton must’ve anticipated their freedom one day."

A long moment passed.

Then Sienna spoke with the calm of something that had once pronounced sentences upon souls rather than men. "So he made forgetting part of the chains."

"Yes, Goddess."

Hayashi’s expression grew somber as he looked toward the bright city beyond Infinity Chaos, where millions of people were already arguing about the darkness of the previous night without realizing how many older cruelties had moved beneath it.

"We freed the witnesses," he said quietly, "and discovered that Danton had already murdered the testimony inside them."