Dex sighed slowly and drew his blue-flaming hand gently yet firmly from the close proximity of his father, allowing the mana to settle. He stepped back a pace, creating physical distance between them to open space for dialogue away from the crushing pressure of his father's terrifying aura.
Dex knew this moment was inevitable, the moment of unavoidable confrontation in which he must explain the glaring contradiction between his weak past and his terrifying present. With his cold, chess-master mind and his memory carrying the events of this world, he had been preparing for this reckoning ever since his feet had first touched the soil of Seiron.
Dex artfully sculpted complex and contradictory features across his face, a blend of deep grief for a lost innocence, the pain of harrowing memories, and the harsh pride of someone who had survived the very bottom of hell. He looked directly into his father's golden eyes and began to narrate the story he had prepared and polished with the utmost care throughout his entire journey.
This was no naive lie, it was an extremely sophisticated white lie, a story that wove together the facts of geography and politics with a magical fiction impossible to disprove, making this narrative the impenetrable shield protecting his greatest secret: the secret of his transmigration and his knowledge of the future.
"Father, the story you are asking about is long, dark, and painfully shattering," Dex began in a quiet, measured voice carrying a subtle, calculated tremor, like someone suppressing an old wound. "When I was ambushed by treachery in the depths of Falus Forest on the covert orders of my traitorous uncle Sylvester, the purpose was not merely to kill me, it was to erase me from existence.
The Shadow Organization mercenaries showed no mercy. They tore my loyal guards apart before my eyes, and I was left to die slowly. My body was torn by their poisoned swords, my blood draining away, my soul dissolving in the forest's haunting cold. And in that decisive moment between life and dark oblivion, as I crawled attempting to survive, the ground beneath me, covered in rotting leaves, gave way."
Dex paused briefly, letting the words sink into his father's heart while watching Marcus's reactions. In the background, outside the circle of light, Lumia stood in silence, observing the scene with her customary cosmic coldness, yet hiding deep in her silver eyes a flash of admiration and a sardonic smile at Dex's terrifying skill in manipulating facts and weaving legends with a sincere tongue.
Dex continued, raising his right palm slowly to chest level, where a concentrated ball of pure blue flame suddenly ignited within it. It did not radiate random heat, but appeared as a piece of luminous ice that burned the soul.
"I fell into a deep and hidden cavity below the earth," Dex resumed in a hushed voice mimicking reverence. "A deep, dark geological fracture that no human eye had seen for thousands of years. And there, in that impenetrable darkness reeking of death and antiquity, I found something that did not belong to our age.
I found the remains of a great legendary creature, I found a glowing core, colossal and shattered, pulsing with a dying blue fire. It was the Celestial Phoenix's Core.
The entity the Empire believes to be nothing but a myth in children's books. The core was beating very slowly, dying, searching desperately for a physical vessel to continue existing, even as a single spark."
Dex looked at the blue fire in his hand with an expression full of veneration, as though it were simultaneously a harsh curse and a sacred gift. "And because my body was also dying, and my weak core stood on the verge of its final fracture, the inevitable fusion occurred. It was no peaceful merger, Father, it was an invasion and a consumption. The core abandoned its physical form and stormed into my chest with the force of an exploding star."
Dex's voice rose slightly, carrying the memory of his actual fusion with the phoenix core. "The heat emanating from the fusion was immense and catastrophic, to the degree that it didn't merely burn my outer skin and flesh, but penetrated my depths and incinerated my delicate mana pathways entirely. The phoenix is a creature that accepts no partnership, its flames are arrogant and absolute.
That blue fire boiled the veins of Water in my core until they evaporated completely, and melted the elements of Earth rooted in my bones until they crumbled and transformed into glass, then into scattered ash."
Dex clenched his fist with force, and the blue fireball dissolved, leaving behind a faint blue smoke and a pure scent resembling burning blizzards. "The phoenix's flames obliterated the nature I was born with entirely, erasing the canvas of my magical identity.
The Water evaporated, the Earth crumbled, and nothing remained within me but Ash... and from the womb of that dead ash, this fire was born. I am no longer a conventional mage, and I am not the Dex who possessed a weak affinity for Earth and Water. I am now a being with only one element, an absolute element that accepts no taming. Absolute Fire, the fire of destruction and resurrection."
Upon hearing these heavy words, Lord Marcus's eyes widened with an indescribable astonishment. His doubts and paternal rigidity retreated little by little, replaced by pure wonder and an amazement that paralyzed his tongue for moments. As a military man and Duke of a storied family, Marcus had read the classified volumes preserved in the family library and the Empire's archives. He knew what the word "Phoenix" meant.
"The Phoenix's Legacy?" Marcus whispered in a trembling voice, not from fear, but from absolute awe before the embodiment of legends in his son's body. He stepped back another pace as though regarding a sacred entity.
"That is no mere tale, it is a legend passed by word of mouth since the ages predating the founding of the Great Empire! The ancient manuscripts say that phoenix flames do not merely burn bodies and physical matter, they can burn mana itself, destroy the magical enchantments of adversaries, and grant their bearer the capacity for resurrection and symbolic immortality from the midst of ash."
Marcus's gaze changed entirely. He was no longer looking at Dex as a weak son needing his protection and concealment behind palace walls, he was looking at a devastating, independent geopolitical force standing before him in the vault.
"Do you realize, my son, the scale of what you carry between your ribs?" Marcus said in a tone laced with awe and terrifying pride. "You are no longer merely the heir of the Williams family. You now possess a power that, if refined and developed, will make the entire Empire of Vesos tremble. This fire, it may make the Emperors seated on their golden thrones shudder in fear of your wrath, and covet your enslavement."
Dex smiled a cold smile, his blue eyes gleaming with the confidence of a man who sees the future before him like an open book. "I am fully aware of that, Father."