Chapter 1314: The Void Beneath the Hanging Blade

For most of the world, the darkness had already become yesterday’s mystery.

Humanity was remarkably talented at that.

Give people three impossible minutes in which every light upon Earth vanished at once, let noon become absolute night without sunset, let the sun remain somewhere above the clouds while refusing to shine, entire cities disappear beneath a darkness deeper than the ordinary absence of electricity, and within a week the event would somehow acquire documentaries, conspiracy channels, academic panels, religious debates, merchandise and several thousand people online confidently explaining what had happened despite understanding absolutely nothing.

The phenomenon had been given names.

Too many names, naturally, but while the ordinary world argued; the hidden world did not.

At least not about whether something had happened.

The few beings upon Earth whose perception extended far beyond mortal senses could still feel it.

The Void had left.

Yet its presence had not vanished completely.

Something faint remained woven throughout the Earth Realm; it was a residue so subtle that most cultivators would never notice it even if they spent their entire lives meditating beneath the open heavens. Those who stood high enough, however, felt it whenever their perception stretched too far beyond themselves.

It was a cold absence between distant spaces—

Or a strange hollowness beneath familiar spiritual currents—

—sometimes, during particularly quiet moments, the surrounding world seemed fractionally deeper than it had before, as though reality itself had been stretched by something enormous and had not completely returned to its former shape.

The Void had encompassed the entire Earth.

Three minutes; that was all.

Three minutes had been enough to leave the world remembering.

The Lord had reflected upon that fact many times during the week and the three days that followed; he had considered the timing first, Danton’s disappearance, the Coffer, the sudden silence from the World Transcendents accompanying him—

Then the Void.

Separately, each incident possessed enough uncertainty to encourage patience; but together they formed a pattern too ugly to ignore:—

Danton had vanished without leaving behind the sort of evidence a being at his level should have produced.

That alone was nearly impossible.

The Prince of Jörmungandr was not some careless mortal who could be dragged into a car, driven into the night and erased through money and influence. He stood at the Saint Stage, possessed the Flames of Beginning, carried a bloodline whose ancient heritage and he possessed arsenal of abilities and experience that allowed him to survive enemies strong than himself that should have buried lesser cultivators of the same stage, and had lived long enough to make deception feel less like a skill and more like another organ.

Danton was difficult to surprise.

More difficult to hold.

And nearly impossible to make disappear quietly.

Yet he had disappeared.

The strange conclusion the Lord kept returning to offered the smallest amount of comfort:

Danton was probably alive.

If whoever had confronted him wished him dead, there were simpler ways to express that desire. A corpse could have been left behind. His Family Flame might have vanished too; that was something connected to his soul that should have broken had he been dead.

Instead, there was absence.

The Lord believed someone had taken him.

That should have been reassuring.

Unfortunately; it was not.

Because the thought following it was a nightmare to imagine:

Who could take Danton and keep him hidden for more than a week?

The possibilities were not numerous and whenever the Lord allowed his awareness to brush against that faint residue still threaded through Earth, one answer kept returning with increasing insistence.

The Void.

Or whoever commanded it.

He was not foolish enough to claim certainty.

Ancient beings who survived long enough learned to distrust certainty most of all. The universe enjoyed humiliating those who thought they understood it too completely.

Still, the Lord had an inkling.

They all did.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat had stood too close to too many impossible things during the past months for coincidence to remain a comfortable explanation. His Void-Ice and his powers kept developing in directions that the two ancient families failed to understand properly. Those closest to him too were becoming stranger, older and considerably more dangerous. Wherever the boy appeared, abilities that should have belonged several realms above him somehow followed shortly afterward.

Then there had been Anactica.

Danton disappeared.

The World Transcendents disappeared.

The Coffer disappeared.

And for three minutes the entire Earth disappeared beneath darkness.

Only a fool would refuse to consider the possibility that these things had touched one another.

The Lord was many things—

A fool was not among them.

Unfortunately, accepting the possibility made the situation much more frightening.

Whoever had commanded that Void had taken the strongest among them and made him vanish for more than a week. Then the World Transcendents accompanying him, beings whose cultivation alone could crush most hidden powers currently walking Earth, had disappeared as well.

Some had not merely vanished.

They had left nothing behind like bodies, trails or anything useful.

World Transcendents were not supposed to disappear like that.

Their corpses alone could remain terrifying long after death. Their blood carried power; heck their bones could survive ages and ages. Neither could their souls simply dissolve because someone struck harder than they expected. Killing one cleanly required enough power to to take entire towns or a chuck of that winter regions in the domino, and erasing one so completely that ancient families could not recover anything meaningful afterward belonged to an entirely different category of horror.

Yet several were gone.

The knowledge about the Void had also spread quietly through the Legacy Families.

Although the great houses of Earth still smiled before cameras, attended meetings, released statements and continued operating corporations large enough to influence entire nations. Their estates remained beautiful, their heirs remained proud and their servants continued arranging flowers in hallways beneath portraits of ancestors who had probably committed unspeakable crimes while wearing magnificent clothing.

Behind those walls, however, the atmosphere had changed.

Every Legacy Family possessed something hidden:

Protectors, an ancestor like a guardian who had stepped away from ordinary affairs.

Some slept beneath estates, others lived inside sealed spaces attached to the families they guarded and had withdrawn from Earthly politics so completely that younger descendants knew them only through titles whispered during emergencies.

Those beings had now been getting more active and alerted.

But their reactions varied; some dismissed the panic at first, until they stretched their perception across Earth and encountered the lingering Void themselves, others immediately started preparations.

Several of the older families had already begun digging through everything they knew about Phei Ryujin Tiamat and the two families from little grudges, the women, the time he’d beat Harold or humiliated Marcus did seem more purposeful that before and every ugly thread tying the Young Dragon to the Heavenchilds and Maxtons.

Elders who normally slept through decades of family affairs were disturbed from seclusion. Ancestors whose names younger descendants only heard during ceremonies opened their eyes again had began humming beneath ancient estates.

One old protector listened to everything his descendants knew for nearly an hour.

He asked no questions.

When they finally finished, the ancient man gave them only one command:

"Do not provoke the Dragon."