Aiden brushed aside the thought of Alaric. Whether the "Scholar Boy" was suspicious or just curious didn't matter yet. If Aiden reached the Font first, he would be the one holding the leash of destiny, not good brother.
He moved toward the far corner of the attic, where the dust lay undisturbed by the wind from the windows. He pushed aside a heavy, rusted iron chest filled with moldy ledgers, revealing a narrow gap in the stone wall—a passage so small even a servant would have struggled to fit. To a ten-year-old, however, it was a grand entrance.
Aiden stepped through.
The air shifted immediately. The smell of old wood and dust vanished and was replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone.
[System Warning: High Mana Density Detected.]
[Boss, we're entering the "Deep Infrastructure." This is the place where I can sense the most relentless, uncontrollable, and honestly quite terrifying mana flow in this entire zip code.]
"Yeah," Aiden whispered, "I can feel it."
Even though his voice was lower it still echoed flatly against the damp stone of the tunnel.
He stepped further into it. The pathway sloped downward at a sharp angle which lead deep into the foundations of the manor—and beyond. As he descended, the faint moonlight from the attic vanished entirely. The darkness became absolute.
Aiden stopped. He couldn't see his own hand in front of his face. He reached deep into his pressurized mana core, pulling a single, refined thread of energy to his fingertips.
Fwoosh.
A tiny flame materialized, hovering an inch above his palm. It wasn't the roaring orange of Julian's magic; it was a deep, crystalline blue, burning with a steady, quiet intensity. Though the flame was barely two inches high, the light it emitted was blindingly pure. It sliced through the black atmosphere to reveal the surrounding passage.
[Whoa,] the System's voice carried a rare note of genuine awe. [Look at those patterns. This isn't just a basement, Boss. This is a containment vessel. Someone didn't just build a house here; they built a lid on a volcano.]
Aiden's eyes followed the glowing lines downward. These lines weren't carved into the stone; they were etched into reality itself.
His finger hovered just an inch from the wall. This wasn't standard elemental shielding or the flashy, inefficient barriers the Mage Tower used.
This was a Void Lock.
In his previous life, Aiden had seen these used to cage the literal nightmares of the cosmos—entities so ancient and vast that they didn't just break normal magic, they ignored it.
A Void Lock didn't just block a path; it removed the path from existence. It was a seal meant to contain things that were either too demonic to live or too powerful to die.
'Who could have put such a strong spell here?' Aiden wondered.
He pressed his fingertip against the etched surface. The moment his skin made contact, the lines didn't just brighten—they shone with a deep, crystalline blue, identical to the flame dancing above his palm. The resonance was so perfect it felt like the wall was breathing in sync with his own pressurized mana core.
[Yeah,] the System's voice chimed in. This time its usual snark voice was replaced by a cold, analytical tone. [To even create a 'Void Lock' spell for small things, you have to be at least a 9th Class Magician. But to apply it to a landscape this massive? To seal a Primal Font itself? Boss, you're looking at the work of a 10th Class Archmage, maybe even something higher. There is no way some nobody court mage pulled this off.]
Aiden's eyes narrowed as the blue light from the 'Void Lock' reflected in his pupils. "The Veynar family has been here for five hundred years," he whispered, "Did the founder, or even the ancestors, not know what this was? Or did they just go on with building the house, oblivious to the fact that they were laying their foundations over a cosmic nightmare?"
[Probably the latter, Boss,] After hearing Aiden voice, the system's voice was once again heard in his head, [People are surprisingly good at ignoring the 'Do Not Disturb' signs of the universe if the real estate is cheap and the mana view is good. They likely thought they found a 'blessed' land with high mana density. They didn't realize the 'blessing' was actually a leak in a high-security prison.]
Aiden traced a sharp geometric curve where the lines intersected. The Veynars were one of the kingdom's proudest noble families, famed for producing generations of knights and warriors.
They walked their halls with chests puffed out, boasting of their "divine right" and ancient lineage.
"They aren't lords," Aiden's lips curled into a cruel smirk. "They're just the guards sitting on the lid of a coffin they don't even know exists. Five centuries of 'glory' spent playing house on top of a tomb."
After a moment of complete silence, "And now," Aiden's eyes flashed with a cold, predatory light, "I will take it all away. Their blessings. Their 'divine right.' Then I will see for how long can they stay at the top."