Sixty-three million, seventy-two thousand beats.
Three years had vanished into the absolute dark of the Leyline Nexus.
To the world above, Duke Arthur's heir was a tragic, dying secret, sequestered away in a heavily warded sickroom as a mysterious, terminal curse ravaged his body. In the capital, Inquisitor Vane had likely spun tales of demonic rot, while the King bided his time, waiting for the inevitable funeral to demand the Duke's submission.
But a hundred feet beneath the estate, there was no rot. There was only the forge.
Kaiser was twelve years old. The boy who had walked into the tomb was gone, replaced by a vessel that defied natural biology.
He stood naked to the waist in the center of the pitch-black chamber, his dark-silk blindfold contrasting sharply against his pale, flawless skin. He had grown tall—unnaturally so for a twelve-year-old—his frame stretching to accommodate the sheer density of his heavily reinforced bones. His musculature was not the bulky, rounded mass of a Vanguard Knight; it was corded, sharp, and tightly coiled like steel cables beneath alabaster. His pure white hair, entirely uncut, cascaded down his back, trailing across the cold stone floor.
He was breathing in a flawless, agonizingly slow rhythm. Ten seconds in. Twenty seconds out.
Silence rested in his right hand.
For the first two years, Kaiser had remained seated in the lotus position, doing nothing but observing. He had watched the ethereal ribbons of the Leylines—the heavy, dark grid of Earth, the jagged lightning of Fire, the smooth, cascading waterfall of Water. He had learned their currents, their tides, and their microscopic fluctuations.
In his third year, he had finally stood up.
"Observation is passive," Kaiser whispered to the empty room, his voice deeper, losing the high-pitched cadence of childhood. It echoed with a chilling, absolute authority. "A sovereign dictates."
He slowly raised the primordial blade.
Kaiser didn't just push his own pressurized Aura into the hilt to pacify the sword's gravity. He extended his consciousness outward, casting his continuous, flowing Aura into the room like a vast, invisible net.
He reached for the Earth Leyline.
It was like trying to grab the current of a raging, subterranean river with bare hands. The raw, unrefined mana of the world resisted him. It was heavy, stubborn, and completely indifferent to human will. But Kaiser did not use force. He used his past life's understanding of 'Ki'—yielding, redirecting, and guiding.
He slipped his microscopic thread of Aura underneath the heavy, dark frequency of the Earth mana, and gently pulled.
The ambient gravity in the Nexus instantly shifted.
The immense, crushing pressure of the room did not vanish; it relocated. Kaiser funneled the raw, terrifying weight of the Earth Leyline directly into the blade of Silence.
The dark metal hummed with a violent, catastrophic frequency. The sword, already possessing its own anomalous gravity, was now carrying the localized weight of the entire mountain range above it. It became so incomprehensibly heavy that the stone floor beneath Kaiser's feet began to fracture and groan simply from his proximity to it.
If an ordinary Knight attempted this, the sheer gravitational feedback would instantly pulverize their arm, tearing the bones from the shoulder socket.
But Kaiser had spent three years preparing the vessel.
His internal furnace flared. He pressurized his core to maximum capacity, turning his own body into a hyper-dense anchor. His bare feet locked onto the fractured stone, his toes gripping the floor with the immovable permanence of an ancient oak tree.
He didn't swing the sword with his muscles. Muscles could not move a mountain.
He engaged the Sightless Draw.
Kaiser smoothly rotated his hips, manipulating his own center of gravity. He acted as the sun; the mountain-heavy sword was his orbiting planet. He guided the falling, apocalyptic weight of the blade into a horizontal arc.
The physical displacement was terrifying.
Silence tore through the pitch-black air. The sword was moving so fast, and was so fundamentally dense, that it didn't just cut the air—it ripped the atmospheric pressure of the room completely in half. A localized, perfect vacuum formed in the wake of the dark steel.
VWOOM.
The concussive shockwave of the displaced air violently rebounded. The hurricane-force wind whipped Kaiser's white hair into a frenzy, blasting the heavy wooden crates of rations against the far wall of the chamber.
Kaiser completed the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree orbit, perfectly decelerating the massive weight of the blade and bringing it to a flawless, hovering stop an inch from his left hip.
He didn't stumble. He didn't gasp for air. He simply held the impossible weight perfectly still.
"The anchor holds," Kaiser analyzed, sweat beading on his pale forehead, instantly vaporizing against the heat of his skin. "The physical vessel can withstand the centripetal force of the Earth Leyline. The orbit is stable."
But stability was only half of the equation. A heavy sword could crush a shield, but Kaiser needed something that could bypass physical defense entirely. He needed an edge that did not rely on blunt force trauma.
He needed to sharpen the void.
Maintaining the immense weight of the Earth mana within the sword, Kaiser cast his internal net out a second time.
He reached for the Fire Leyline.
This was infinitely more dangerous. The Earth mana was heavy but predictable. The Fire mana was pure, volatile chaos. It was the subterranean heat that melted rock into magma. To combine it with the crushing gravity of the Earth mana was to actively trigger a volcanic eruption within a closed circuit.
Control, Kaiser commanded himself. Do not let it explode. Compress it.
He snared a jagged, crackling thread of the Fire Leyline. He dragged the violent, static heat toward Silence.
The sword violently rejected it. The primordial blade's cold, abyssal gravity clashed catastrophically with the raw, explosive heat of the Fire mana. The dark metal began to vibrate so violently it became a blur in Kaiser's grip. The hilt scorched his palm, the smell of burning flesh filling the pitch-black room.
Hold the flow! Kaiser gritted his teeth, refusing to let go.
If he dropped the blade now, the conflicting energies would detonate, instantly vaporizing him and likely collapsing the entire Catacomb structure above.
He needed a binder. He needed a coolant.
Without breaking his concentration on the Earth and Fire leylines, Kaiser split his mind into a third, distinct thread. It was a feat of multitasking that would have shattered the psyche of any Grandmaster Mage. He reached upward, into the smooth, cascading waterfall of the Water Leyline.
He pulled the cold, heavy pressure of the subterranean aquifers down into his own body. He routed the Water mana through his meridians, mixing it perfectly with his continuous 'Ki' flow, and pushed it into his burning right arm.
The soothing, hyper-cold mana washed over his scorching flesh, instantly healing the burns. He pushed the Water mana into the hilt, wrapping it around the violently clashing Earth and Fire energies.
He used the Water mana as a conceptual sheath.
Compress, Kaiser demanded, his will descending upon the sword with absolute, tyrannical force.
He forced the heavy Earth mana to form the core of the blade. He forced the explosive Fire mana to coat the absolute edge of the steel. And he used the Water mana to lock them together in a state of suspended, agonizing tension.
Suddenly, the violent vibration stopped.
The heat vanished. The room plunged back into its freezing, abyssal temperature.
Kaiser stood in the dark, his chest heaving with exertion. He slowly raised Silence to eye level.
To his physical senses, the sword looked the same—a dark, unremarkable slab of metal. But to his Magical Senses, the weapon had fundamentally transformed.
It was no longer just a heavy piece of steel. The edge of the blade was now coated in a microscopic, invisible ribbon of violently compressed, superheated mana, held in place by crushing gravity. It was an edge of pure, contained annihilation.
Kaiser turned his blindfolded face toward a massive, solid lead pillar supporting the arched ceiling of the Nexus. The pillar was three feet thick, designed to withstand the tectonic shifting of the mountain.
He walked toward it. He didn't swing the sword. He didn't use an orbit, or a stance, or any kinetic force at all.
He simply extended his arm, and lightly, casually pressed the edge of Silence against the massive lead pillar.
There was no sound of metal cutting metal. There was no resistance.
The microscopic ribbon of hyper-compressed Fire and Earth mana on the sword's edge simply erased the molecular bonds of the abyssal lead on contact. The blade passed through the three-foot-thick pillar as effortlessly as a shadow passing over a wall.
Kaiser pulled the sword back.
For a long moment, the massive lead pillar stood perfectly whole.
Then, the top half of the pillar slowly, silently slid diagonally off the bottom half, hitting the stone floor with a world-shattering CRASH that shook dust from the ceiling. The cut was so perfectly smooth, so flawlessly sheared on a microscopic level, that the metal practically looked polished.
Kaiser lowered the sword, releasing the complex weave of Leyline mana back into the room. The oppressive weight lifted from the blade, returning it to its normal, dormant state.
His legs finally gave out. He dropped to one knee, driving the tip of Silence into the floor to keep from collapsing completely. Blood dripped steadily from his nose, painting the stone red. His meridians were screaming in absolute agony, feeling as though they had been scrubbed with wire brushes.
He had held the tripartite Leyline weave for less than thirty seconds, and it had nearly killed him.
But as he knelt in the dark, wiping the blood from his face, Kaiser smiled.
The Knights of the Vanguard spent decades learning to push their internal Aura out to cut steel. Mages spent lifetimes reading dusty tomes to summon fireballs that battered castle walls.
At twelve years old, Kaiser had just learned how to hold the raw fabric of the earth in his hand and use it to erase physical matter from existence.
Ten more years, Kaiser thought, pushing himself back up to his feet. He sheathed Silence and turned toward the crates of dense, ashen rations.