Chapter 635: A Memory [Bonus - ]

Chapter 635: A Memory [Bonus Chapter]

Aki stared at the golden light and her vision blurred as hot heavy tears welled in her large sapphire eyes, spilling over her lashes and tracing silent burning tracks down her cheeks.

"It’s glowing," she choked out, a strangled sob tearing from her throat as she pressed her own trembling hand over his finger. "Silas, it’s actually glowing."

"You awakened a core, Aki," Silas said softly, his voice washing over her like a warm summer wave. "You always had one... The seal prevented the seed from recognizing it which is another reason why your blood is special and needed for the gloves... You couldn’t become a Lord because the lock severed your connection to the Sovereign Realm."

He leaned closer, his dark eyes locking onto hers.

"I can break the lock and I can forge the pathways but you have to trust me, Aki. Completely... Without hesitation..."

Aki clutched his hand against her chest, her fingers knotting into his skin as she wept openly, her head shaking in desperate affirmation.

"I trust you," she sobbed, her voice breaking with years of buried grief and newfound miraculous hope. "I trust you with my life, Silas. Even if you told me to jump into hell, I would jump, because I know you would catch me."

’Ah... isn’t that a bit too much?!’

She took a ragged trembling breath, looking up through her tears into his face.

"Why?" she whispered with her voice barely audible. "Why are you doing this for me? Why would you expend so much of your own core for someone who can offer you nothing in return?"

Silas smiled.

His hand shifted with his fingers gently wiping away the hot tears pooling beneath her eyes while his touch felt feather-soft and tender.

"Because I care about you, Aki," Silas said softly, the words were simple and honest, though they meant the world to him. "I gave you a name... and I stood behind you in front of everyone because I take responsibility for the people who stand with me but beyond that..."

He leaned in slightly, his lips mere inches from her ear. "I like you. A lot."

Aki’s mind stopped. The weeping hitched in her throat as her large blue eyes widened to their limits and her heart gave a violent acrobatic leap that sent the blood roaring through her ears.

’Is this a confession?!’ Aki’s brain lit up into a glorious, spinning supernova of pure ecstasy.

He liked her!

Silas Graves had just looked her in the eye and told her he liked her!

Her lips parted.

A radiant breathless smile broke across her tear-stained face, her hands reaching up to cup his jaw, the words rising from the depths of her soul.

"Silas... I... I like you too—"

"And besides," Silas interrupted smoothly, pulling back half an inch with a straight face, "you’re already twenty five years old."

Aki blinked, the confession freezing on the tip of her tongue.

"...What?"

"At this rate," Silas continued, speaking with the grave, solemn concern of a physician addressing a terminal illness, "if you stay unawakened, you’re going to grow into a frail wrinkly old woman by the time you’re eighty... Meanwhile, my Gold Core will keep me looking like a strapping twenty-year-old for the next three centuries. You’ll be sitting in a rocking chair with a shawl, seething with jealousy over my immaculate jawline!"

Silence descended upon the bedroom.

Aki sat frozen on the silk mattress with her hands remaining hovering in the air and her mouth remaining slightly parted.

Her brain took three full seconds to process the transition from a transcendent soul-stirring declaration of romantic devotion to an unprompted offensive lecture about skin-aging.

A tick formed beneath Aki’s left eye.

"You..." she hissed, her voice vibrating with enough fury to crack the windows. "...you... you... Id—"

Before she could finish the word, Silas’s open right palm flattened firmly against the glowing golden center of her chest.

His eyes snapped shut, his Gold Core roaring to life within his chest with the concussive intensity of an ignited star.

’System,’ Silas commanded. ’Target Aki’s Dormant Core and initiate an upgrade to Purple.’

He deliberately did not push for a Gold Core.

...Not yet.

A Gold core like him was an anomaly that drew the immediate, paranoid gaze of the world council and the World King.

If a second Gold Core suddenly detonated within the private residence of a daughter of the Royal Family, the fallout would bring an entire fleet of inquisitors to Rhyx City within forty minutes.

Once he dismounted those bloated old bastards from their thrones in the future, once Blessed Land possessed the authority to dictate terms to the entire planet, he would forge her into gold.

For now, an unblemished peerless Purple Core would grant her the staggering magical output of a noble.

A brilliant notification slate materialized before Silas’s mental vision.

[UPGRADE INITIATING...]

[CONSUMING 34,000 UP.]

[COMMENCING PURPLE CORE REFINEMENT...]

A massive torrential cascade of violent, royal-purple mana erupted from Silas’s palm, pouring directly into the golden seed behind Aki’s ribs.

Aki’s eyes dilated with her back arching off the mattress as a breathless silent gasp tore from her throat.

The spiritual seal locking her meridians unraveled completely at the molecular level, dissolved by the authority of the upgrade as new incandescent purple pathways branched outward from her chest like delicate crystalline lightning, weaving through her vascular system, revitalizing her dormant organs with a flood of pure vitality.

And then, right beneath the completion bar, a secondary pitch-black notification tab violently tore through Silas’s optic nerves, dripping with crimson-bordered glyph.

[SOUL-RESIDUE ACCESSED.]

[SEAL HAS UNLOCKED A MEMORY FRAGMENT.]

[YOU HAVE UNLOCKED ???’s MEMORY.]

Silas’s mental voice hitched in shock.

’Huh?’

Before he could pull his hand back, before he could even draw a breath, the sunlit bedroom of Rhyx City, the silk sheets, the lavender scent of the bath, and Princess Aki’s arching frame vanished.

The world turned pitch-black.

...

"I want to die."

The voice carried the thin dry scrape of linen dragging across sand and Silas blinked.

The suffocating dark did not roll back like a curtain or shatter like glass.

It simply frayed, the blackness thinning into pale morning haze that smelled a bit of salt air as the world gathered its weight around him.

He was standing on the flagstones of a wide private terrace that jutted out over an empty blue bay.

Below, the sea was glass-still, undisturbed by tides or wind, framed by chalk-white cliffs that rose toward an unblemished, empty sky.

There were no maritime bells ringing in the distance either, it was just stillness.

In the center of the terrace, framed by trailing vines of pale star-jasmine, an old wooden rocking chair moved with a slow monotonous rhythm.

Sitting in it was a woman.

At first glance, Silas felt his breath catch behind his ribs.

Her silhouette was so startlingly familiar that for half a second he thought he was looking at Aki if she was older but as the haze settled, the differences sharpened.

Her long hair was not the bright aquatic lapis lazuli of the princess... it was thick, ink-black, falling over her shoulders in loose waves that caught the flat morning light and when she turned her profile toward the bay, her eyes were not sapphire.

They were deep violet, the color of twilight over a cold mountain pass.

"It really doesn’t matter," she murmured softly, leaning her cheek against her palm with her knuckles resting on the arm of the rocker. "All this dying, and dying again... What will it matter at the end of the day if I just come back?"

She swallowed, her throat working with a dry click, her violet gaze drifting down toward her own lap.

Her hands moved slowly, settling over the broad heavy swell of her belly.

She was heavily pregnant, the linen of her loose white gown stretched taut over the curve, rising and falling with her slow shallow breaths.

"I don’t want this for you," she whispered to the swelling child, her voice trembling, stripped of self-pity and carrying only the quiet exhausted weight of fatigue. "Not the throne... Not the bloodline... Not the endless, stupid butcher’s work... I just want you to be normal."

Silas remained motionless at the perimeter of the terrace, his boots making no impression on the flagstones.

’A memory,’ he thought, his jaw setting hard. ’Her mother.’

It was obvious.

The bone structure, the stubborn tilt of the chin, the quiet melancholy that Aki carried beneath her royal manners, it was all rooted right here in this woman’s frame.

Yet, as Silas looked down at his own hands, he realized he had no physical weight.

He cast no shadow against the white stone so he was a foreign observer dropped into an old echo etched into a broken seal.

’Why would my core breaking her lock pull me into this?’ he wondered, his mind turning over the pieces. ’A dormant seal placed before birth. Was it an enemy of the World King, or was it—’

"But you don’t want her to be normal, do you?"

Silas froze.

The woman didn’t tilt her head to the empty air, and she didn’t murmur it to the sky.

She turned her neck slowly, her deep violet eyes locking squarely onto Silas’s face...

She was looking right at him.

A cold prickle crept up the back of Silas’s neck.

From what he was aware, memories were fixed things that happened before... so... How? How was this woman was looking directly into his pupils.

’She sees me? How the hell can a recording see me?!’

The woman didn’t scream or reach for a weapon, instead a tired smile curved her pale lips, though her violet eyes remained sharp, piercing through the illusion of time with eerie clarity.

"This is an imprint I carved into my daughter’s spiritual foundation," she said, her voice steady and melodious despite her weariness. "A lock forged from my own soul to keep her dormant and since you are standing here inside the inner sanctum of that seal, I can only assume you are the one who took a chisel to my work..."

Silas parted his lips to speak.

"I didn’t mean to pry, I was only—"

"Save your breath," she interrupted gently, waving a limp hand through the air. "You really don’t need to explain yourself to an echo. What’s done is done... Every soul born under the sun has a right to choose its own path, I suppose."

Her hand returned to her belly with her thumb tracing small soothing circles over the linen.

A sudden sharp bitterness flashed across her features, hardening the soft lines of her face.

"Just so you know, I locked her core out of spite, you know," she admitted with dry honesty. "To spite that good-for-nothing man since he wanted another weapon... Another sovereign to march across the dust of the Sovereign Realm under his banner... what a man he is, I want to give him nothing... An empty vessel, maybe a daughter who would live a quiet mortal life, useless to his grand ambitions since he’s so weak to do so himself since he’s such a bitch."

She paused, her rocking chair slowing to a halt.

"If you’ve spent the blood and mana to dismantle a seal of that power that went from her soul to her core," she said, looking Silas up and down with her gaze lingering on his broad shoulders and the dark immovable stillness in his eyes, "that must mean you love her very much."

The woman placed her palms flat on the wooden armrests and pushed herself up from the chair.

Silas instinctively flinched, shifting his weight into a defensive half-step before he remembered he was an incorporeal phantom.

She walked toward him.

Her bare feet made soft damp scuffs against the flagstones with her loose white gown swaying around her ankles as she stopped barely two paces away, tilting her head back to look up at him.

"That’s very good," she murmured softly, her violet eyes softening until they shone with a maternal warmth. "I’m glad. If she must walk the bloody path after all, at least she won’t be walking it alone."

Silas stared down at her, his brow knitting into a bewildered knot.

"How is this even possible? You’re a memory right... A memory can’t adapt to an external intruder, let alone hold a conversation."

The woman’s lips parted into a small playful smirk, a look so identical to Aki’s mischievous grins that Silas nearly blinked.