Chapter 313 - 314: Vanished Prey

Chapter 313: Chapter 314: Vanished Prey

Several weeks passed.

In the scarred void where the Rune Sovereign’s Reliquary had once stood, the residual traces of its existence had long since faded. What remained was only empty space and the lingering memory of a peer’s decisive action. The battlefield that had once been filled with the ambitions of countless Multiversal beings was now silent, stripped of meaning, and reduced to a coordinate that no longer mattered. Spatial tears had healed. Broken domains had collapsed into dust. The faint echoes of old attacks had dissipated into the dark, leaving behind nothing that could be read, tracked, or used.

Multiple Paragons had searched without rest.

They examined every spatial scar, every residual fluctuation, and every faint echo left behind by the disappearance. They sent threads of causality into the surrounding sectors, traced the movements of the ejected participants, and dissected the memories of every survivor who had managed to escape the Reliquary. They analyzed the structure of the expulsion, the signature of the spatial authority, and the subtle residue left by the ruin’s removal. None of it led anywhere. The traces were either too faint to follow or too cleanly erased to reconstruct. Whoever had taken the Reliquary had done so with an authority so absolute that even peers struggled to find a starting point.

The Paragon who had taken the ruin remained hidden.

Runar remained hidden with her.

Among the Paragons, frustration settled into something colder. They did not know about the twin Supreme Principles. That knowledge was still sealed between Runar and the woman who had seized him, and not a single fragment of it had leaked into the wider Multiverse.

What they did know was simpler and, to them, already valuable enough: according to the reports from participants inside the Reliquary, Runar had displayed the highest comprehension of runes among every participant. He had been the one who dismantled the trial’s barriers, the one who survived under the most absurd disadvantages, and one of the main participants that lasted into the final layer.

If they could capture him and extract that understanding, their own foundations might advance. Their chances of eventually touching Transcendence might rise.

That possibility alone was enough to make them relentless.

For existences that had stood at the peak of the Multiverse for eons, progress had become a distant dream. Most Paragons had already refined their principles to the limit of what the Multiverse allowed. Resources, territories, bloodlines, and factions no longer mattered in the same way. What mattered was the final step, the impossible barrier that separated Paragons from Transcenders. Any clue that could raise the probability of crossing that barrier, even by the smallest fraction, was worth pursuing with absolute seriousness.

But they could not find him.

Every method failed. Every tracing technique returned nothing. Every attempt to lock onto his aura dissolved into emptiness. They tried causal lines, spatial imprints, soul resonance, and fate calculation. They tried using the ejected participants as anchors, but the connections had been severed too cleanly. They tried searching the personal domains of every Paragon known to have interests in the region, but no one revealed anything, and probing a peer’s domain without cause was tantamount to declaring war. After weeks of fruitless effort, the original hope of seizing Runar and claiming his knowledge yielded nothing.

They needed another approach.

Investigation into the relationships formed inside the Reliquary produced only one useful thread. Runar had not grown close to many people during the trial. His interactions had been extremely limited, deliberate, and mostly pragmatic. He had moved through the trial like someone who understood from the beginning that every participant was both a potential ally and a potential threat. The sole clear exception was the staff-wielding cultivator named Wukong. The two had moved together, fought together, and spoken with a familiarity that stood out against the general isolation of the other participants.

That familiarity became the only lead worth following.

If Runar could not be found, then the one closest to him would serve as both leverage and potential source of information. Even if Wukong did not know where Runar was, his memories might reveal habits, methods, hidden bases, or communication patterns that could be used to predict his movements. For beings at the level of Paragon, a single thread was often enough to weave a net.

For true Paragons, locating a single Multiversal existence across the infinite Multiverse was trivial.

They found Wukong almost immediately.

At that moment, Wukong was still traveling through unfamiliar sector regions, staff resting across his shoulders, trying to chart a path back toward his home sector. The Multiverse felt larger and more hostile than it ever had before. Every universe looked foreign. Every void spatial current carried a different texture. Every distant pressure made him tense, because he had already learned how casually existences at the top of this world could reach down and discard someone like him. He had no contacts, no backing, and no reliable way to reach the only person he trusted here. All he could do was keep moving in the general direction of home and hope the clone Runar had left behind still waited there.

He had been traveling for weeks, and the journey had done nothing to improve his mood.

"This place is ridiculous," Wukong muttered as he floated past the edge of a dead star system. "One minute you’re fighting for an inheritance, the next minute some unknown big shot throws you across the Multiverse like trash. No apology. No explanation. Just gone."

He adjusted the staff on his shoulders and frowned at the void ahead. His spiritual sense swept outward out of habit, but it found nothing familiar. The stars were too distant, the laws were too different, and the ambient energy carried no resemblance to the sector he had come from. He had already tried several methods of long-range communication, but every one of them had failed. The distance was simply too absurd.

His thoughts drifted toward Runar.

He did not know whether Runar was alive, captured, or hiding somewhere beyond reach. He only knew that Runar had been at the center of whatever happened inside the Reliquary. The way the ruin vanished, the way the suppression disappeared, and the way they had all been ejected at the same instant pointed to something enormous. Wukong did not like thinking about it too much, because every conclusion made the Multiverse feel more dangerous than before.

I’m going home, he thought, and that decision had become the only thing keeping him calm. I don’t care what kind of treasure or inheritance is out here. I’m going back to the home sector, finding Runar’s clone, and waiting. If he’s alive, he’ll come back. If he’s not... then at least I won’t die wandering around this monster-filled place.

He let out a breath and forced himself to keep moving.

He never sensed the Paragons until they arrived.

Space folded at several points around him. Powerful auras descended without concealment, because beings at that level had no need to hide from a Multiversal cultivator. The pressure of true Paragon-level existences settled over the region like a lid closing on a jar. Stars dimmed in the distance. Spatial currents froze. The ambient principles of the surrounding sectors bent inward, forming an inescapable cage of authority. Wukong’s golden eyes sharpened. His grip on the staff tightened until his knuckles whitened. He understood at once that these beings had not come for conversation.

They had come for him.

Wukong’s mind raced, but his body remained still. He could not fight. He could not run. He could not even call for help. The gap between them was so vast that resistance would not even be considered a joke. If they wanted him dead, he would already be dead. If they wanted him alive, he would be alive only because they allowed it.

Great, he thought bitterly. First the ruin throws me out, now the big shots decide to show up. What did I do? I was just trying to go home.

The Paragons did not speak. They did not introduce themselves. They did not offer demands or explanations. They simply moved to seize him, because to them he was not a person worth addressing. He was a lead, a tool, and a possible key to something far more valuable.

In the exact instant before their authority fully locked down the space, the void itself convulsed.

A Multiversal storm erupted without warning.

It was not a normal spatial disturbance. It was vast, chaotic, and fundamentally wrong — a sudden tear in the fabric of the Multiverse that swallowed light, sound, and law alike. Colors that had no names bled across the darkness. Spatial layers folded and inverted. Time stuttered in places where it should have flowed smoothly. The pressure of the storm erased every attempt to stabilize the surrounding area, and even the Paragons’ authority was forced to retract slightly as the anomaly expanded with impossible speed.

Wukong had time only to widen his eyes.

"What the—"

The storm took him.

One moment he stood in the open void with Paragon auras closing in from every side. The next he was gone, completely swallowed by the raging anomaly. No residual aura remained. No spatial trail. No fragment of his presence lingered for even a breath. The storm did not carry him away in the way a spatial current might carry debris. It erased his location from the region entirely, as though he had never existed there at all.

The storm continued for several more seconds, then collapsed in on itself and faded as suddenly as it had appeared.

Silence returned.

The Paragons stood in the empty aftermath, their capture attempt left with nothing. The region where Wukong had been was now only quiet, scarred void. Every tracing method they applied returned the same result: absolute absence. There was no path to follow, no coordinate to calculate, and no residue to analyze. The Multiversal storm had not merely taken Wukong somewhere else. It had removed him from their reach.

For a long moment, none of them moved.

Then one of the Paragons spoke, her voice cold enough to freeze the surrounding laws. ℯℯ𝑙.

"A storm."

Another replied, tone equally flat, "No storm appears by accident at such a precise moment."

"Then someone acted."

"Or something."

The distinction mattered. A peer could have intervened, but a natural anomaly of that scale was also possible in a Multiverse as vast and ancient as theirs. The problem was that neither explanation offered a solution. If a peer had taken Wukong, then another variable had entered the board. If the Multiverse itself had swallowed him, then the situation had become even stranger. Either way, they had lost their only lead.

Cold irritation settled among them. First the Reliquary and Runar had been taken beyond their reach. Now the only remaining lead had been erased by a Multiversal storm that none of them had predicted. For beings who stood at the peak of the Multiverse, successive failures of this kind were rare — and unacceptable. They were not used to being denied. They were not used to chasing prey that vanished before their hands could close around it.

They remained only a short while longer, confirming that no trace of Wukong could be recovered. They scanned the collapsed storm, searched for dimensional residue, and tested the surrounding causal lines for any sign of where the anomaly had led. Every method failed. The void gave back nothing. Finally, one by one, they departed. Some returned to their factions to begin broader searches. Some chose to monitor the ejected survivors more closely. Others started investigating whether any ancient forces had recently awakened in the surrounding sectors.

None of them expected those efforts to produce immediate results.

Far from that location, in a direction none of them could determine, the aftermath of the Multiversal storm left no clear sign of where it had carried its single captive. There was no trail, no beacon, and no echo. The storm had acted with an completeness that felt deliberate, even though no will had been seen guiding it.

Wukong was gone.

And for the second time, those who sought to control the threads connected to Runar found themselves holding nothing at all.