The smoke of Silverpass tasted like the end of a very bad dream. It clung to the back of Sai Ji's throat, a gritty reminder that his day had officially become a divine comedy with a body count.
He stared at the kneeling figure in front of him. Nyx. Silver-haired. Unfathomably earnest. Kneeling in battlefield muck with the posture of a man greeting his personal messiah.
"Your Majesty," Nyx repeated, his voice frayed at the edges with something perilously close to worship. "The Royal Council believed the line extinguished. The scent of your return… it's been a ghost in our scrying pools for months. We must return to the capital. Immediately."
Every word was a nail in the coffin of Sai Ji's desired mediocrity.
Before he could formulate a protest that was more than a wheeze, Aeliana inserted herself between them. She moved with the speed of a noblewoman defending her favorite decorative vase from a clumsy servant.
"Absolutely not."
Nyx blinked, the smooth fanaticism on his face cracking into pure bewilderment. "…Pardon?"
Aeliana jabbed a thumb toward her own sternum. The gesture was less 'declaration' and more 'property claim.'
"He," she announced, "is my party member."
Sai Ji flinched as if struck. "I am NO ONE'S party member—"
"Hush," she whispered, patting his shoulder with a condescension so pure it was almost art. "The adults are talking."
Nyx's left eye developed a minute, rhythmic twitch. "With the utmost respect, Lady Nightblossom, this is the Sovereign heir—"
"Temporary heir," Sai Ji corrected miserably, the words tasting like ash. "Provisional. Possibly a clerical error."
"—and protocol dictates he be escorted by the capital's elite guard for his own safety and the stability of the realm."
Aeliana crossed her arms. The motion made the singed edges of her sleeve flutter. "Says who?"
"The law."
"I am the law."
"You are a minor scion of a cadet branch with a noted history of… eccentric field reports."
"Semantics."
Sai Ji buried his face in his hands. The world, in its infinite cruelty, had granted him a wish—to be noticed—and was now punishing him for it with the pettiest, most persistent forms of attention imaginable. "I am surrounded," he muttered into his palms, "by professionally diagnosed lunatics."
Fen, ever the portrait of serene utility, stepped forward. His movement was a study in quiet grace. He didn't draw a weapon. He simply used the tip of his boot to draw a faint, unwavering line in the churned dirt between Nyx and Sai Ji.
"Agent Nyx," he said, his tone as calm as a pond at dawn. "Our Master's will is paramount. If you attempt to remove him against it, we will be forced to intervene."
Nyx squared his shoulders, the obsidian weave of his robes shifting like a bird ruffling its feathers. "Your loyalty is commendable. Truly. But you are overstepping your function. This is a matter of state—"
Then Lura pulled out a spear.
Not from a sheath. Not from a bag. Not with the telltale shimmer of an inventory retrieval.
She just… reached into the empty air beside her hip and pulled. The weapon slid into existence with a sound like a sharp, cold breath, its blade a dull, hungry grey.
Sai Ji's finger shot out, quivering. "WHERE DID YOU EVEN GET THAT—?!"
Lura sighed, the sound of profound, eternal suffering. "Master. I am always armed."
Fen added, his voice dropping to a grave, confidential timber: "And it is relevant to note… we are currently quite hungry."
Nyx blinked, the thread of the confrontation momentarily lost. "…How is your caloric intake relevant to matters of royal succession?"
"When we are hungry," Fen explained patiently, as if to a slow child, "we become irritable."
"And when we are irritable," Lura continued, giving the spear a lazy, wrist-flick spin that hummed through the air, "we have a regrettable tendency to… break things. Structures. Protocols." Her eyes, flat and dark, settled on Nyx. "Ambitions."
Nyx took one precise, infinitesimal step backward. It was the step of a man recalculating the structural integrity of his entire plan.
Sai Ji smacked the back of both his bodyguards' heads in quick succession. The sound was two satisfying thwacks.
"Stop! Threatening! The government! We are not fugitives! We are… confused tourists!"
"Apologies, Master," they chimed in unison, not sounding sorry at all.
"We meant it as a polite inquiry into his flexibility," Lura clarified.
"A negotiation tactic," Fen nodded.
Before Sai Ji could descend further into this administrative nightmare, something large and warm nudged his leg.
He looked down.
The mutated, carriage-sized boar had shuffled closer. Its glowing, pupil-less eyes were fixed on him. It nudged him again, the motion oddly gentle for a creature that could level a barn. Then it let out a soft, rumbling whine that vibrated up Sai Ji's spine.
Aeliana gasped, a hand fluttering to her chest. "Sai Ji… I believe it seeks… affection."
"No," Sai Ji whispered back, pure dread icing his veins. "It seeks to sample me. There's a difference."
To illustrate his point, the monstrous boar let its legs buckle. It collapsed onto its side with a ground-shaking thud, rolling slightly to expose its less-spiky flank. It looked, for all the world, like an overgrown, tumor-ridden puppy waiting for a belly rub.
This, apparently, was a signal.
The pack of infected wolves crept forward, tails giving hesitant, jerky wags. The corrupted stag, with a grace that belied its twisted form, bent its neck and carefully deposited the mangled remains of a small pine tree at Sai Ji's feet like a offering.
A passing adventurer, sprinting for the treeline, skidded to a halt. His eyes bulged. He pointed a trembling finger.
"SWEET MORADIN'S HAMMER—THE MONSTERS ARE COURTING HIM—?!"
Sai Ji felt his soul perform a neat, efficient evacuation from his corporeal form. He stood, a hollow man, staring at the herd of apocalyptic horrors now wagging, whining, and vibrating around his knees.
"I," he stated to the uncaring air, "am not a petting zoo."
Nyx cleared his throat, the sound delicately puncturing the absurdity. "Your Majesty… they are not 'courting' you. They are reacting to the passive Sovereign signal you emit. It compels obedience in all magical beasts touched by Aetheria's deeper currents. They recognize their king."
"They want PATS," Sai Ji snapped, gesturing wildly at the boar, which was now making a low, hopeful grumble. "This is a social interaction. This is different."
Everyone—Nyx, Aeliana, Fen, Lura, the retreating adventurer—stared at him. A unified wall of expectation.
Even the boar widened its luminous eyes, the glow intensifying hopefully.
Sai Ji's shoulders slumped. The fight drained out of him, replaced by a weary, cosmic resignation. He threw his hands up. "FINE! Fine! I'll pat one! One pat! And then you will all cease this pageantry and let me go have a quiet nervous breakdown in private!"
He approached the giant boar as one might approach a sleeping avalanche. He raised a hand, hesitated, and then gently, quickly, tapped the tough, scaled hide between its eyes.
The sound the boar made was profound. A deep, reverberating hrrooooooonnnk that shook Sai Ji's teeth and sounded like a church organ being murdered.
The effect was instantaneous. Every mutated beast in sight—boar, wolves, stag, even a few twisted rodents peeking from the rubble—immediately laid down, flattening themselves against the earth in total, blissful submission.
Aeliana brought her clasped hands to her lips, her whisper trembling with reverence. "He tamed them… with one… impossibly soft… pat…"
Nyx clutched at the fabric over his own heart, his fanaticism reforged into something even more unshakable. "Such effortless majesty… such innate command…"
My soul is leaving again, Sai Ji thought distantly. It's packing a small suitcase this time.
Sal Vera's sigh in his mind was long, dreamy, and utterly infuriating. "Your touch," she murmured, the words dripping with nostalgic syrup, "hasn't changed at all, My King. Still the same gentle tyranny."
Sai Ji choked on nothing. "Do NOT phrase it like that! That sounds like a line from a banned romance scroll!"
Just as the last shred of his dignity was preparing to wave a white flag and surrender—the sky answered.
A light, not of sun or magic, but of polished, judgmental gold, flared above the treetops. It was accompanied by the deep, resonant bong of a bell that seemed to ring from inside the listener's own skull.
Descending from this gilded tableau, as if lowered by an invisible, very pretentious crane, came a man.
His robes were white, lined with intricate, glowing sigils of gold that hurt to look at directly. His hair was a silver mane, his face ageless and severe. He landed on the churned earth with the gentle finality of a falling anvil wrapped in silk.
The entire battlefield stilled.
"The Oracle of Radiance…?" someone breathed.
"The High Priest himself?!"
Nyx dropped into a bow so deep his forehead nearly touched his boots. Aeliana followed, a perfect, practiced curtsey. Fen and Lura offered elegant, military-grade nods of respect.
The contagion beasts, attempting to emulate the gesture, became a tangled knot of limbs and plaintive grunts.
Sai Ji did not bow.
He was too busy attempting a slow, casual sidle toward the nearest large piece of rubble, the universal body language for 'I am not here, I am a shrub.'
The High Priest's head turned. His eyes, glowing with an ethereal, uncomfortable light, scanned the scene. They passed over the kneeling agent, the noblewoman, the prostrate monsters…
And landed on the shrub-like young man trying to become one with a broken cart.
The Priest froze.
For a second, the divine serenity on his face shattered into pure, unvarnished shock.
Then—
He fell.
Not a stumble. Not a graceful kneel. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, hitting the ground with a thump that kicked up a small cloud of dust. He stayed there, forehead pressed to the earth, his entire body trembling.
"Your… Majesty…" The voice that emerged was raw, scraped hollow with an emotion so vast it had no name. "We have waited… lifetimes for this moment."
Sai Ji slowly removed his hands from where they were attempting to camouflage his face. He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. "What," he asked, his voice flat as a tombstone, "is it this time? Am I secretly the lost god of pastry? The chosen one of the laundry spirits? What?"
The High Priest lifted his head. Tears carved clean tracks through the dust on his cheeks. He wasn't looking at Sai Ji's face. He was staring, transfixed, at the space around him.
"Your aura…" he whispered. "It expands even as I speak. The final seal upon your soul… it frays. It unravels."
A cold, sharp spike of pure fear drove itself straight into Sai Ji's heart. It was a different fear than that of monsters or bureaucrats. This was the fear of something ancient, locked away, and very, very angry.
"What seal?" The words were out before he could stop them.
Silence.
It was a thick, heavy thing. Nyx's head came up slowly. Aeliana's eyes widened. Fen and Lura went preternaturally still. Even the tangled heap of beasts ceased its squirming.
Everyone was looking at him. At the blank, genuine confusion on his face.
The boar let out a soft, worried snuffle.
Sal Vera's voice cut through the static in his mind. It held no teasing warmth now. It was sharp. Clear. A warning klaxon.
"Sai Ji." Her tone brooked no argument. "Step back. Now."
"Why—?"
"Something is awakening."
He felt it then. Not a surge of power. Not an aura leak.
A thrum.
Deep in the marrow of his bones. In the rhythm of his own pulse. Something vast, heavy, and older than the stones themselves was stirring from a long, long sleep.
The amulet at his chest—the cheap, fake-feeling thing he'd woken up with—gave a sudden, violent shudder. It flickered, blue, then silver, then a black so deep it seemed to suck the light from the air around it.
His control—the tenuous, white-knuckled grip he kept on the 'Sai Ji' he understood—slipped.
And his aura erupted.
Not the passive, pacifying field. Not the silver mist.
This was a detonation.
The air visibly bent around him, warping like heat haze. The sky above Silverpass didn't darken—it cracked, a jagged, silent split appearing in the firmament as if the world were a painted plate someone had struck. The ground underfoot didn't shake—it curved, dipping downward in a perfect, ten-foot circle centered on him.
Every single living thing in the vicinity—human, beast, insect—dropped flat. Not in obedience. In terror. Primal, soul-deep, run-or-die terror.
Nyx, still on his knees, managed to lift his head just enough to whisper-scream, the sound torn from his throat: "SOVEREIGN ASCENSION PROTOCOL?! AT LEVEL ONE?!"
Aeliana, fighting the pressure, lunged forward and grabbed his arm with both hands. "SAI JI! PLEASE! CALM DOWN—!"
Fen and Lura had weapons in hand now, but they weren't aiming at anyone. They were staring at the warping air, at the cracking sky, their faces pale. The High Priest was weeping openly, great heaving sobs of joy and terror.
Sal Vera's voice trembled, not with fear, but with a devastating, agonizing recognition:
"My King… your true form is calling. It has heard the bell."
Sai Ji clutched his own head, fingers digging into his scalp. The pressure inside his skull was building, a symphony of ancient memories and power threatening to blow the doors off his sanity. "No—no—NO—NOT NOW—NOT IN PUBLIC—DO I NOT GET A BACKROOM FOR THIS?! A DISCREET COSMIC CLOSET—?!"
The aura surged again.
The air became syrup. Time seemed to slow. His heartbeat was a war drum in a hollow chamber. The amulet sparked one final, furious time—
—and shattered.
Not into pieces. Into motes of null-light that winked out of existence.
A single, perfect drop of liquid silver welled from the skin over his sternum, beaded, and fell. It hit the curved earth and sank in without a sound.
His pupils elongated, stretching into vertical slits of impossible black.
His fingernails darkened,thickened, and pushed out into short, curved points of obsidian.
From the base of his spine,a phantom weight flickered—a lupine tail of shimmering ether, there for a heartbeat, gone the next, snapping back into the faltering illusion of his humanity.
Aeliana's grip was the only anchor in the roaring void. "SAI JI! LOOK AT ME!" Her voice was a blade of sheer, stubborn humanity, hacking through the cosmic noise. "LOOK. AT. ME!"
He dragged a ragged breath in. Then another. The transformation shuddered, slowed…
But did not stop.
A new sound trembled down from the cracked sky. A ringing, high and clear and impossibly old. It was not a sound of this world.
The clouds parted, not by wind, but by decree.
And a symbol burned itself into the open air.
A sigil the size of a town square, woven of pure, cold moonlight. It rotated slowly, gears within gears of celestial geometry, a clock marking an epoch's end. Its light fell upon the land, painting everything in monochrome silver and deep, profound shadow.
Every adventurer who had managed to stand collapsed again, this time unconscious.
Nyx stared upward, his professional composure utterly obliterated. "THE SOVEREIGN MARK… IT'S APPEARING IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?! THE ACCORDS FORBID—!"
Aeliana's awe was now pure, unadulterated dread. "That symbol… the archives… it hasn't been seen since the last Wolf-King ruled the seven continents…"
The High Priest made a sign in the air, a warding gesture older than prayer. "No… this is purer… this is stronger…"
The sigil pulsed.
BOOM.
A shockwave of silent force rippled outwards. Not wind. Not magic. Authority. It washed over the land, and the land heeded.
Distant mountains shivered, snow sliding from peaks.
Birds in flight simply folded their wings and dropped,stunned.
In the deep forests,in the mountain caves, in the dark places of the world, every monster with a drop of Aetheria's magic in its veins instinctively turned toward Silverpass and pressed its body to the ground.
Beneath their feet, hidden veins of magical ley energy lit up like neural pathways suddenly firing, a brilliant, interconnected web glowing through the soil, all leading back to the epicenter.
Him.
And then, as if the universe itself required a memo, glowing, blue-hued system prompts flashed into existence in the air around the clearing, visible to all:
⚠ WORLD ANNOUNCEMENT ⚠
[SOVEREIGN SIGNAL DETECTED]
[AETHERIA HAS RECOGNIZED A NEW KING]
[ALL REGIONS: PREPARE FOR DOMAIN SHIFT]
[SOVEREIGN RANK ENTITY: ???]
[TRUE NAME: SEALED]
Sai Ji's stomach performed a perfect, nauseating somersault. His blood turned to ice.
"No." The word was a puff of air. Then it gained volume, fueled by sheer, undiluted panic. "NO. NO NO NO NO NO—WHY IS THERE A WORLD ANNOUNCEMENT?! WHAT IS THIS, A RAID EVENT?! I AM A PERSON, NOT A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!"
Nyx was prostrate again, forehead pressed to the humming earth. Aeliana's face had lost all color. The realization in her eyes was no longer awe or curiosity. It was the grim, absolute understanding of someone staring at a natural disaster wearing a friend's face.
"You're not just an heir…" she breathed, the words barely audible over the silent ringing. "You are the Sovereign. The only one."
Sai Ji's voice cracked on a scream of pure, existential frustration: "I JUST WANTED TO DO A SLIME QUEST!"
And in that moment, as the world broke and reassembled itself around his unwanted divinity, Sal Vera's voice returned. It held no humor. No warmth. Only the grave, solemn tone of a historian reading a fate from an unchangeable stone.
"My King… listen. Now. There is no more time for gentle lies."
Sai Ji strained, fighting to form a coherent thought. "Wh-what now? What more could there possibly be?!"
"When you arrived in this world… dripping with amnesiac confusion and cheap inn ale… I awoke. Not by chance. I awoke because you awoke. I am bound to the core of your soul. Your predecessor—the King whose shadow you feel—sealed me away when he died. He thought he was protecting what remained."
A new kind of cold seeped into Sai Ji's bones. "Sealed you… why?"
"Because I am the last remnant. The final echo of the era he ended. The only living memory of what you were before the seal. Before the death. Before… Earth."
The word hung in the air, heavier than the sigil in the sky.
"My… original…?" The question was a ghost of a sound.
Sal Vera's next words fell with the finality of a tombstone sealing shut.
"You are not inheriting a vacant throne, Sai Ji."
She paused, letting the silence and the screaming sky fill the space.
"You are returning to your own."
The ground fell away. Not literally. But in his soul. Sai Ji stumbled backward, the world tilting on its axis. Aeliana caught him, her arms the only thing stopping him from folding to the ground.
"Sai Ji—HEY—STAY WITH ME—!"
He was shaking violently, a leaf in a hurricane of his own making. "I… I'm not… I'm not even from here… How can I be… returning…?"
"Because you were never from Earth," Sal Vera said, her voice softening with an ancient, aching pity. "You were sent there. A soul in a bottle, cast across the void. The greatest seal ever woven. To hide the last king in the last place anyone would look. A world without magic. A world without a throne."
A memory—not his, not the boy from Earth's—pierced.
Wolves of silver and shadow, kneeling on a plain of stars.
A crown, not of metal, but of captured moonlight, cool upon his brow.
An empire, silent and vast, bowing as one.
Sal Vera, in a gown of night, weeping at his feet, her tears like quicksilver.
A throne of polished moonstone, cold and waiting.
And then… pain. A betrayal. A sealing. A casting away.
"You died," Sal Vera whispered into the memory. "You died to save the echo of your people. And when the world needed its heart again… when the rifts began to tear… it called its king home. It remade you. From the memory in the throne. From the wish in the ley lines. It brought you back."
Sai Ji's knees gave out.
Fern and Lura were there in an instant, catching him under the arms, holding him up. Fern's usually impassive voice trembled. "Master… your pulse… it has changed rhythm. Your blood… it sings a different song."
Nyx tried to speak, to offer some protocol, some plan, but could only manage a choked, reverent whisper: "Your Majesty… I beg you… do not complete the awakening here… the strain on the mortal plane…"
Aeliana shook him, her fingers tight on his shoulders. "SAI JI! FOCUS! Don't let it take you! Don't let this be the story!"
But the story was already written. The world had chosen its protagonist, and it was a role with no opt-out clause.
The sigil in the sky pulsed a second time.
BOOM.
⚠ WORLD ANNOUNCEMENT #2 ⚠
[SOVEREIGN AURA UNLEASHED]
[AETHERIA'S MONSTERS HAVE ENTERED 'PROSTRATE' MODE]
[ALL KINGDOMS: IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUIRED]
[SOVEREIGN DOMAIN EXPANSION: 6%… 9%… 12%…]
Aeliana paled, reading the numbers as a countdown to oblivion. "Sai Ji… if that reaches one hundred percent… you won't just have an aura… you'll create a Domain… a piece of your own reality… here… in the middle of a kingdom…"
Nyx's eyes held the bleak horror of a tactician watching an inescapable strategy unfold. "The territorial overlap would unravel local physics. It would crush this city into a theological footnote."
Sai Ji gasped, vision swimming. He clutched at Aeliana's arm, his new claws pricking the fabric. "STOP IT—STOP IT—HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP—?!"
And Sal Vera, his guide, his ghost, his burden, whispered the terrible, simple truth:
"Calm, My King. Let it come. You cannot stop a tide by begging it to be water."
The scream in Sai Ji's mind was silent, atomic, and utterly futile. THIS ISN'T A TIDE! IT'S A REALITY-WRITING EVENT AND I DIDN'T BRING A PENCIL!
Above, the celestial sigil shivered. Then it bloomed.
The light became blinding, pure, and absolute. The system prompts glitched, fragmented, and dissolved into static.
And behind Sai Ji, towering over the broken field, the crushed barricades, the kneeling and unconscious forms, a shadow took shape.
It was woven from the silver light and the deep cracks in the sky. Half-wolf, of impossible, elegant proportions. Half-celestial being, crowned with a diadem of cold, silent moonfire. It did not move. It did not roar. It simply was, an image projected from a throne a hundred years empty, a promise etched across the sky.
Its head tilted down. Void-dark eyes regarded the tiny, trembling figure at its epicenter.
Return.
The voice was in the wind. In the earth. In Sai Ji's own marrow.
Everyone still conscious kneeled—not by choice, but by the sheer, unbearable weight of presence.
Nyx, in ultimate supplication.
Aeliana,in defeated awe.
The High Priest,in ecstatic union.
Fen and Lura,in sworn, silent fealty.
The world held its breath.
The Domain Expansion ticked upward.
15%...18%...
And Sai Ji, the boy from another world, the king from a forgotten one, stood at the collapsing point between them, his humanity a small, fading candle in the gale of his own awakening.
The throne was no longer cold.
It was calling.
And it would not be refused.