Chapter 162: The Jotuniels
The next time Uhtred opened his eyes, it was to a ceiling he had never seen before.
He was in a room, and the air in here was remarkably dense, saturated with the bitter, foreign essence signature of the otherworlders. It filled his lungs with every breath, cold and heavy against his chest.
That was the first thing he registered.
The second was that he felt no physical pain. His body was completely intact, even his memory too. He could remember every single detail of the encounter in the forest with clarity: the powerful dark angel otherworlder and his dark unicorn, his fight against the powerhouse... or rather, his futile last ditch feint that was more a statement than a significant attack, and the sudden, blinding speed of the final blow that knocked him out.
That last blow was particularly puzzling. Despite how powerful it was — enough to knock Uhtred out without him even realizing how — there was no lingering grogginess or internal damage. It felt as though his perception had simply been flicked off for a brief moment and turned back on.
That alone demonstrated the absurd skill gap between them. The otherworlder had applied just enough force to instantly knock him out cold, leaving him completely unharmed enough to wake up just a few minutes later.
Uhtred knew instinctively that no more than ten minutes had passed. He pushed himself up from the sofa he had been laid upon, sitting upright.
Across the room, the otherworlder was just moving to settle onto a dark, plush couch, pouring a deep blue liquid into a transparent goblet. He hadn’t bothered to bind Uhtred’s hands or restrict him at all. He simply didn’t need to anyway.
Before Uhtred could speak, the otherworlder spoke first without looking up from his bottle:
"Turn off your stream."
Huh?
Uhtred’s brow creased slightly at the odd request. Then slowly, he pulled up his multiversal stream panel to see what could possibly warrant such a demand.
The moment the interface expanded, a flood of unread messages from the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master filled the feed. The young master had been spamming the chat incessantly from the moment Uhtred had made contact with the otherworlder scouts back then.
Uhtred remembered it too. He had been puzzled by the young master’s abrupt gloating and unhinged excitement out of nowhere. He had even tried to understand the cause by reading his chat back then, but Krijn had interrupted him.
Reading through the fast-moving wall of text now, however, Uhtred finally understood everything.
The Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master was celebrating a stroke of unimaginable luck. The dark-winged otherworlders — the Jotuniels, as the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master referred to them in his messages — were an otherworlder species that had been integrated into the System several decades prior.
Following their integration, their world leaders and most powerful ascenders had pledged allegiance to a peripheral branch family of the mighty Nether Empire.
To an elite entity like the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master, who was of the main line of the great empire, a vassal species under a distant branch family was far too low to ever cross his radar under normal circumstances.
He had only encountered a few Jotuniel leaders by chance during a past travel through the outer territories.
Yet, by a stroke of impossible luck, it turned out that the otherworlder force deployed by the System for Earth’s third trial were exactly those vassals!
To the Jotuniel otherworlders on Earth, the Nine Nether Empire were the masters of their masters. A sovereign force capable of erasing their entire species with a single command.
In the chat feed, the young master was beside himself with glee, mocking Uhtred endlessly. He bragged about how Uhtred’s arrogance was finally coming to an end. He had originally promised to capture Uhtred and force him into the Nether star mines on the empire’s periphery worlds until death, but he had changed his mind. He wanted Uhtred dead right here, right now, at the hands of the Jotuniels.
Uhtred closed the chat log with a low snort. All the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. Everything made sense now. It explained why the Jotuniel otherworlder had ignored Krijn, Zara, and the female variant general to target him specifically. He was executing a direct order from his imperial master.
Yet, a sharper, more urgent question immediately arose in Uhtred’s mind.
If the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master had explicitly ordered his execution, why was he currently sitting on a comfortable couch in a private room? Why had the Jotuniel gone out of his way to capture him alive instead of executing him on the spot?
Disobeying an imperial young master was an act of insanity... treason, even. The Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master was not an entity to be trifled with.
Of course, Uhtred, who was thinking this was somewhat hypocritical. He himself had provoked the young master several times in the chat. But his bold defiance actually had a basis: his own strength over time. That was the key word — "over time."
He didn’t believe that the System would allow someone like the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master to simply come and decimate their world. There had to be things in place that protected newly integrated worlds, giving them time to develop. Things like the current five-year buffer period for example.
He trusted that, given enough time, he would be powerful enough to stand his ground even against someone like the Nine Nether Thirty-First Young Master. He was very aware that the young master was someone powerful, without a doubt. But at least he had the benefit of time on his side.
The Jotuniel otherworlder on the other hand, had no such safety net.
Was he really willing to risk the wrath of the Nether Empire? Was he thinking that because of how certain his victory of this third trial was, he could simply stay here for how long he liked? Do whatever he wanted?
Could he actually pull that off?
Uhtred kept his face completely neutral, hiding the rapid analysis firing through his mind. The Jotuniel sat patiently opposite him, his pale golden eyes glowing faintly in the dim lighting of the room.
Whatever the otherworlder’s game was, playing along for now was the only logical choice. Uhtred reached out and closed his multiversal stream feed, shutting off the broadcast entirely.
The moment the screen flickered out, a final wave of angry messages flashed from other viewers. Regular multiversal entities who had no stake in the Nether Empire were furious at being abruptly cut off from the stream, cursing Uhtred and demanding to see the outcome.
Uhtred ignored them all, rolling his eyes slightly at their dramatic reactions.
These multiversal entities have way too much free time, he thought dryly. Maybe cultivation at the higher levels takes so long that they just sit around watching integration streams out of pure boredom.
With the feed officially dark, Uhtred turned his full attention back to the Jotuniel.
The otherworlder was lightly swirling the deep blue liquid inside his transparent glass goblet, his grey wings tucked neatly behind his shoulders.
"I take it you have the full picture now," the Jotuniel said, his voice smooth and measured. "The Young Master is not particularly subtle with his words. He mocked you heavily, I presume?"