Chapter 531: At The World Council Summit [V / Bonus - ]

Chapter 531: At The World Council Summit [V / Bonus Chapter]

Stepping onto the floor with smooth noble grace were the two invited corporate titans with the first being Lohan Sterling, Patriarch of the Sterling Financial Conglomerate, clad in immaculate silver robes that shimmered with micro-enchantments, his cold calculating eyes immediately scanning the room and Etilga Bloom, the terrifying Matriarch of House Bloom, a breathtakingly beautiful woman in high-collared crimson silk whose mere presence caused the surrounding air to smell of scorched earth.

They approached the high table, offering deep polished bows toward the hooded World Council Heads.

"House Sterling extends its gratitude to the World Council for this gracious invitation," Lohan spoke smoothly, his voice carrying the oily confidence of a man who owned the debt of half the nations present.

"House Bloom honors the gathering of the realm," Etilga added, her tone cool and sounding unapologetic.

How could she...? When she knew the truth about some of those people under the hood...

They were directed to two wide high-backed chairs positioned at the secondary tier of the Grand Table, bridging the gap between the governing heads and the Council.

The hall began to settle yet, as Aki scanned the Grand Table, her breath caught in her throat.

There were three seats that remained entirely vacant.

At the very pinnacle of the table, elevated two steps above all others, was the Grand Imperial Throne... the seat of the King of the World.

And resting directly opposite the throne, positioned on the outer perimeter facing the gathered rulers of humanity, were two newly added chairs of dark walnut, upholstered in rich violet velvet.

Above them, hovering in crystalline light, were two holographic nameplates that made every diplomat in the room stare in quiet unsettled awe.

[LORD VESPERA — BLESSED LAND]

[LORD SKY — ALLIED LORD]

The two Lords who had the most successful broadcast that shattered every streaming record in human history and their seats were completely empty.

A suffocating tense silence gripped the Grand Assembly Chamber as delegates exchanged nervous wide-eyed glances.

’They haven’t arrived...?’ Aki thought, her heart hammering against her ribs. ’Silas and Evelyn... they’re late?!’

To arrive late to an imperial state assembly was an insult punishable by imprisonment but to arrive late to a World Council Summit...?

In the presence of the nine global heads of state, the ancient Council heads, and the Supreme Royal Family was an act of suicidal madness.

It was a declaration of disrespect!

Before the murmurs could erupt into open outrage, the air in the chamber died.

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

The temperature did not rise or fall and the lighting did not flicker but instead, the crushing concept of gravity seemed to multiply by ten thousand.

The massive quartz skylight overhead groaned beneath a sudden invisible atmospheric spike as the runic arrays along the Grand Table flared violently in blinding emerald panic, struggling to neutralize the incomprehensible ocean of power that flooded the room like a collapsing star.

In the stadium seating, several low-tier corporate aides and unawakened attendants collapsed forward against their desks with blood pouring from their noses as their lungs seized.

Even the high-tier Lords... men who commanded armies clutched the arms of their chairs with their faces turning pale as paper and their meridians groaning under the suffocating weight.

The private imperial doors swung open and walking through the threshold alone, was the King of the World.

He was a man who looked barely in his late forties with his physical aging halted at the pinnacle of human vitality.

He possessed shoulder-length, brilliant royal-blue hair that cascaded over his shoulders like liquid sapphire, framing a face of cold breathtaking majesty.

’Ah...’

His beauty was on another level... He was not dressed in ceremonial armor or heavy gold mantles like one would think, the man wore a bespoke double-breasted suit of midnight-navy wool instead, unbuttoned at the collar and tailored to perfection over a broad imposing frame.

Beneath his dark brows, his eyes were deep oceanic blue.

"Fuu...."

"Haaa.... I can breathe..."

"Long Life The King..."

"The Pressure... It’s Gone?"

He was the Sovereign of Humanity and the master of the ancient machines that kept the planet from sliding into the abyss.

He strode across the obsidian floor with his steps making no sound against the stone, The King of the World did not look at the bowed heads of the nine presidents and he did not acknowledge the standing salutes of the World Council Enforcers either.

He ascended the two marble steps, turning his imposing frame to face the assembly, and sat upon the Grand Imperial Throne.

The suffocating pressure stabilized properly, settling over the chamber like an iron blanket that permitted speech, but demanded submission as the King rested his elbows on the star-iron armrests with his fingers loosely laced together over his lap.

"Be seated," the King commanded.

His voice was not loud yet it resonated directly inside the skull of every single living being in the room, carrying the deep vibration of tectonic plates shifting beneath the ocean.

The nine presidents, the Council Heads, and the noble patriarchs took their seats with hurried trembling care.

The King let his cold gaze sweep across the vast chamber, lingering for a fraction of a second on Alexander, passing smoothly over Aki without a flicker of emotion, before settling directly upon the two vacant violet-velvet chairs at the foot of the table.

His dark brows narrowed by an infinitesimal fraction of a millimeter.

"It appears," the King spoke. "that our newly anointed ’Hero of Humanity’ has chosen to exercise her prerogative of punctuality."

A collective terrified gulp rippled through the throats of all of the delegates as nobody breathed and nobody dared to offer an excuse either.

The brazen disrespect of leaving the King of the World waiting was an offense that usually ended in entire cities being stripped of their charter!

The King held the silence for three agonizing heartbeats then, his expression smoothed back into that unreadable calm.

"No matter," the King declared, unlacing his fingers. "We do not stall the fate of nine nations for rogue Lords. Before we open the floor to the territorial petitions regarding the northern rift... there is an imperial matter of succession that requires the formal witness of this Council."

He turned his piercing blue eyes toward the gathered delegates, his lips curving into an enigmatic smile that carried zero warmth.

"As the rumors circulating the global communications networks have so eagerly speculated... the Supreme Royal Family does not allow extraordinary talent to languish in obscurity."

The King raised his right hand.

CLAP! CLAP!

Two crisp echoing claps reverberated off the obsidian walls.

At the far eastern flank of the chamber, the massive gold-embossed double doors of the Imperial Inner Sanctum ground open with a deep hiss and a soft collective gasp tore through the mezzanine tiers.

Emerging from the shadow of the archway, stepping into the harsh white luminescence of the assembly floor, was a young woman.

She looked barely twenty-two years old, walking with an exquisite hypnotic grace that commanded every pair of eyes in the hall.

Her hair was a cascading radiant mane of vivid royal-blue... the unmistakable pure-blooded hue of the imperial lineage, identical to the hair of Crown Prince Alexander and Princess Aki.

Yet, as she stepped into the light and raised her porcelain face, the breath died in Aki’s throat.

Her eyes were not the oceanic blue of the royal line, they were pure radiant gold.

A blinding luminous amber-gold that pulsed with the unmistakable frequency of an active Purple Lord Core, she had a spiritual signature so dense and potent it set the air around her skirts shimmering with visible violet heat.

The woman herself was dressed in an immaculate imperial court gown of layered white and amethyst silk, cinched at her slender waist with an embroidered sash bearing the twin-headed imperial phoenix as she walked to the center of the obsidian floor, coming to a halt directly before the Grand Imperial Throne.

With slow breathtaking perfection, she swept her amethyst skirts to the side, sinking into a flawless unhurried courtly curtsy before the King and the gathered rulers of the earth.

She lifted her chin, her golden eyes flashing with a bit of authority as her melodic voice rang through the absolute silence of the Great Assembly Chamber.

"I greet the Sovereign King, the honored Council, and the Heads of the Nine Nations... I am Princess Kiera. The Second Princess of the World."

The air inside the Great Assembly Chamber quieted down in an instant.

Down in the center of the obsidian floor, Kiera held her curtsy for three unbroken seconds before rising back to her full height.

Her chin remained lifted at an exact level angle, which showed that she was not acting insolent but she didn’t cow in front of their might either.

Silence held the room by the throat.

Up in the mezzanine, packed across four ascending tiers behind reinforced brass rails, several hundred aides, diplomats, and junior guild analysts were staring down with their mouths half-open but nobody spoke.

’Ah...’

The leaks on Y had been circulating for three solid weeks.

Most people in high-tier administrative circles had treated the entire thread as clickbait nonsense.

The platform was a toxic unmoderated swamp of manufactured court scandals, fabricated guild bounties, and fake territorial squabbles cooked up by commodity speculators to tilt the quarterly futures markets.

Anyone with half a brain knew how dangerous the site could be when it drifted too far into real bloodlines.

Five months ago, an anonymous ring of digital agitators out of the southern river basin had tried to run an illicit generative-rendering campaign targeting High Marshal-President Valeria Da Silva... flooding regional feeds with high-resolution nude composite images of the Amazonian leader.

The operation hadn’t lasted twelve hours.

Da Silva hadn’t bothered with formal diplomatic inquiries, civil injunctions, or communications tribunals as she had requisitioned a river gunboat, ignored four regional flight corridors, and personally flattened the offshore server installation with seismic charges, executing every programmer involved behind the burning concrete pilings before the local fire boats even cleared their slips.

The global tech cartels had spent the following week aggressively stripping generative visual models out of civilian operating systems, terrified of having Amazonian void-gunners breach their penthouse boardrooms next.

Because of that bloodbath, almost nobody believed anonymous forum threads anymore.

Yet here she stood.

Right in the dead center of the most heavily fortified room on Earth, breathing the sterile air of the inner perimeter as she was living proof that the rumors on the board had been dead accurate.

And she wasn’t some frail hidden bastard tucked away in a country villa to rot... the pressure radiating from her chest was vibrant and fully awakened.

Down in the lower semi-circle, several diplomats from the Albion and Europa delegations glanced across the Grand Table toward Aki.

The looks were thick with pity as Aki saw them out of the corner of her eye.

She didn’t turn her head, but her ribs tightened until it hurt to breathe.

It was ugly.

Everyone in the chamber knew the basic arithmetic of the royal family... The First Princess was Unawakened.

She had lived twenty-five years with inert, empty veins, unable to ignite a single spark of mana, an ornamental bloodline asset with zero military value.

Now, without warning, an Awakened spare had stepped out of the fog, carrying pure imperial blood and a vibrant spiritual signature.

Aki was going to be replaced and sidelined too.

She was perhaps going to be stripped of whatever ceremonial budget she still drew from the royal household, relegated to some forgotten coastal manor, or married off to someone the moment her father needed to grease a treaty wheel.

Even with that execution hanging over her head, she was still technically the secondborn so she held higher legal power than ninety percent of the people sitting in the hall.

But the looks remained and Aki’s jaw tightened with her back teeth meeting behind closed lips.

The King broke the quiet.

He remained rested against the dark star-iron backrest of the Grand Imperial Throne with his bespoke double-breasted navy wool coat hanging open and his oceanic blue eyes looking flat though they showed a little bit of emotion.

"Kiera Zel Castellian," the King spoke.

The middle syllable dropped like an anvil onto stone.

...Zel.

A collective sharp hiss of air swept through the stadium tiers and Aki’s knuckles clicked beneath the heavy velvet of her midnight-blue gown.

Zel was the royal blood-seal.

It was the ancestral middle name granted solely to legitimate heirs of the Royal line who possessed combat awakening.

Alexander had it... Alexander Zel Castellian. It was stamped into the wax of every military deployment he authorized, announced by the heralds at the gates of every citadel, and etched onto the silver scabbard at his hip.

Aki didn’t have one.

When her sixteenth winter had passed without a core igniting behind her ribs, the imperial scribes had quietly omitted the syllable from her civic papers as she was simply The First Princess.

She was someone with no name.

From the edge of her peripheral vision, Aki saw two more junior aides from the Columbia delegation nudge each other, glancing her way with that sickening sympathetic tilt of their heads.

Aki let out a slow silent stream of air through her nose, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizontal seam of the titanium wall across the pit.

’Aki is cooler than Kiera anyway,’ she thought, the words firing through her mind with childish venom. ’It’s a garbage name... You can walk down any commercial boulevard in any city, shout the name Kiera, and half a dozen shop girls selling knockoff perfumes will turn around. How many girls in this world have the name Aki? Just one... and it’s me.’