The dust of Lord Iron-Gaze had barely settled before the world began to scream.
High above the Silent Zone, stealth satellites—owned by the world's superpowers and the hidden Martial Dojos—had been focused on the battlefield like the eyes of hungry vultures. The feed was being broadcast in real-time to the war rooms of the Earth's elite. They had watched a teenage boy, a "Student" only days prior, turn a Universe-Level Ancestor into a marble of compressed meat.
Kaelen Voss felt their gaze. It felt like a faint itch on the back of his neck.
"Peeping toms," Kaelen thought, his lips curling into a cold, sharp line. "They watch a fire and think they understand the sun."
He stood amidst the wreckage of the pharmacy, his new Star Rank body thrumming with a power that felt both alien and nostalgic. Inside his Dantian, the "Star Core"—a pulsing, sapphire-blue sphere of hyper-condensed Genetic Energy—was rotating at thousands of revolutions per second. It didn't just provide energy; it generated its own gravitational pull, anchoring his soul to the physical world in a way no mortal could comprehend.
With a thought, Kaelen rose.
He didn't use thrusters or wind. He simply negated his own weight relative to the Earth's core. He ascended slowly, his tattered cloak flapping as he breached the layer of smog that choked the ruins. Below, the Silent Zone looked like a cracked ribcage of a dead titan. To his left, three hundred miles away, lay Iron-Blood City—the private fortress of the sect he had just decapitated.
"It's time to collect the inheritance," Kaelen murmured.
He leaned forward, and the air around him shattered in a sonic boom.
The Fall of the Iron-Blood Citadel
Iron-Blood City was not a city for people; it was a city for soldiers. Its walls were reinforced with tungsten-alloy plates, and its sky-curtain was guarded by automated railgun turrets designed to shoot down High-Level Beast Lords.
In the command center, General Rakesh—the current leader of the Sect's terrestrial forces—slapped his console. "Target confirmed! He's moving at Mach 4! No... Mach 6! He's coming straight for the Hangar District!"
"Fire everything!" Rakesh roared. "He's just one man! I don't care if he killed the Ancestor, he can't survive a full-salvo from the 'God-Slayer' battery!"
The fortress erupted. Twelve massive railguns tracked the streak of blue light in the sky. Massive slugs, accelerated to five percent the speed of light, tore through the air, creating a vacuum in their wake.
Kaelen, flying at the center of the storm, didn't even blink. His Spirit Reader consciousness—the soul of a True God—was expanded in a three-kilometer radius. OHe saw the trajectory of every slug before it left the barrel.
"Spatial Ripple: Mirror Image."
As the slugs approached, the space around Kaelen warped, turning into a kaleidoscope of refracted light. The railgun rounds entered the distorted space and were redirected with a simple flick of Kaelen's willpower.
The projectiles didn't hit Kaelen. They turned 180 degrees and slammed back into the turrets that had fired them.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The walls of Iron-Blood City disintegrated. The "God-Slayer" batteries were silenced in a symphony of secondary explosions.
Kaelen landed in the center of the Sect's main courtyard. The ground shattered under his boots, creating a crater twenty meters deep. Hundreds of elite guards, Star Traveller Level 1s and 2s, rushed out with energy-shields raised. They were the cream of Earth's crop, the "Invincible" army of the Iron-Blood.
"Stay back," Kaelen warned, his voice carrying the weight of a collapsing mountain.
They didn't listen. They fired.
Kaelen sighed. He raised a single hand and swept it across the horizon, as if clearing dust from a table.
"Gravity Wave: Reaping."
An invisible scythe of gravitational force rippled outward. It didn't kill them through impact; it simply increased the weight of their own armor to fifty tons for a fraction of a second. The guards didn't even have time to scream before they were folded into the earth, their biological signatures extinguished like blown-out candles.
He walked past the carnage, his eyes fixed on the massive, pyramid-shaped structure at the end of the plaza: The Interstellar Hangar.
The Blood-Hawk
Inside the hangar sat the crown jewel of the Sect: The Blood-Hawk.
It was a C9-Grade Universe Cruiser, sixty meters of matte-black hull shaped like a predatory bird. In the Swallowed Star rankings, a C9-grade ship was the pinnacle of "Civic" interstellar travel. It could withstand the heat of a dwarf star's corona and possessed a "Dark Space" engine capable of jumping between solar systems in days.
Kaelen placed a hand on the cold hull. He felt the ship's AI—a primitive, cold intelligence—attempting to scan his palm for authorization.
[AUTHORIZATION DENIED. BIOMETRIC MISMATCH. INITIATING SELF-DESTRUCT IN 30 SECONDS.]
"Self-destruct?" Kaelen chuckled. It was a dry, raspy sound. "You poor, simple machine. You're talking to the architect of the Nine-Cloud Galaxy."
He didn't use a hacking tool. He closed his eyes and sent a thread of his God-Level Willpower into the ship's mainframe. To the AI, it was like a drop of ink entering a glass of water—sudden, total, and irreversible. He bypassed the firewalls, the encryption, and the hard-coded locks by simply overwriting the ship's reality.
[OVERRIDE SUCCESSFUL. NEW MASTER DETECTED: KAELEN VOSS.]
[WELCOME, SUPREME COMMANDER. STATUS: ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.]
The hangar doors groaned open, revealing the darkening sky of Earth.
Kaelen stepped into the bridge. The interior was plush—white leather, holographic displays, and a command chair that looked out through a floor-to-ceiling crystalline cockpit.
"AI," Kaelen commanded, sitting in the throne. "Scan the local star-charts. Locate the nearest wormhole to the Ganwu Universe Kingdom."
"Processing," a cool, feminine voice responded. "Master, the nearest stable wormhole is located behind the planet Saturn. Estimated travel time at sub-light speeds: 4 hours. However, I must warn you—the Earth's 'Global Security Council' has already locked their nuclear silos onto this location."
"Let them fire," Kaelen said, his eyes reflecting the glow of the holographic charts. "I'm done with this cradle. It's too small, and the air smells like stagnation."
The Great Escape
As the Blood-Hawk ignited its thrusters, blue fire lanced out of the hangar, vaporizing the surrounding buildings. The ship rose, a black needle piercing the clouds.
Below, on every continent, missiles were launched. Thousands of them. They streaked upward, white trails crisscrossing the blue sky—a desperate, final attempt by the old world to stop the birth of a new god.
Kaelen watched the monitors. The missiles were closing in.
"Master, shall I engage the point-defense lasers?" the AI asked.
"No," Kaelen said. "I want them to see."
He stood up and walked to the cockpit glass. He reached out, his fingers splayed.
"Domain: Absolute Stillness."
In a sphere encompassing five kilometers around the ship, the laws of physics simply... paused. The missiles, still burning with rocket fuel, stopped mid-air. The explosions that had already begun were frozen in time, orange fire-petals hanging motionless in the sky.
The Blood-Hawk glided through the frozen graveyard of Earth's best weapons, silent and majestic.
As they broke the exosphere, the blackness of space rushed in to greet them. The sun, unfiltered by the atmosphere, shone with a blinding, golden ferocity.
Kaelen looked back one last time. Earth was a beautiful, fragile marble. Somewhere down there, people were still arguing over borders, money, and rank. They had no idea that a few light-years away, there were races that could swallow their sun for sport.
"Goodbye, Earth," Kaelen whispered. "I'll be back when I need a footstool."
The Dark Space Jump
The Blood-Hawk accelerated past Mars, then Jupiter, its engines humming a low, vibratory song. As they approached the rings of Saturn, the AI spoke again.
"Master, we are approaching the 'Dark Space' transition point. Please secure yourself. The gravitational shear can be... uncomfortable for Star-Rank lifeforms."
"I am the shear," Kaelen replied.
"Very well. Engaging Dark Space Drive in 3... 2... 1..."
The stars didn't just blur; they stretched into long, white threads. The universe felt as if it were being turned inside out. This was "Dark Space"—a dimension where the speed of light was a suggestion rather than a law.
In this space, Kaelen sat in deep meditation. He needed to prepare. The Ganwu Universe Kingdom was one of the 1,008 kingdoms of the Human Race in the universe. It contained over a billion galaxies and countless "Universe Masters."
To win the Genius Battle, he would have to compete against the most monstrous talents of an entire civilization—youths who had been raised on dragon meat and starlight, who possessed weapons forged from the hearts of dying stars.
"AI," Kaelen called out. "Access the Virtual Universe Network. Register me for the Ganwu Selection."
"Name for registration, Master?"
Kaelen paused. Voss was the name of a ruler. Voss was the name the Aeon Emperor would be searching for.
"Register me as... The Void-Eater," he said, a dark wit dancing in his eyes. "Let's give them something to worry about before I even arrive."
[REGISTRATION COMPLETE: THE VOID-EATER.]
[LOCATION: GANWU EMPIRE - BATTLE ZONE 0041.]
[TIME UNTIL COMMENCEMENT: 12 STANDARD GALACTIC DAYS.]
Kaelen closed his eyes. Twelve days. In that time, he would master the second level of his Gravity Law. He would refine his Star Core until it burned white-hot.
The King was no longer fallen. He was rising, and the multiverse was about to find out exactly how he was.