Chapter 126: Completely Empty
Priam heard Orlaith’s words, and the air in his lungs seemed to freeze instantly.
"What? How... how is this possible?!"
The words escaped his mouth automatically, without any strength behind them.
Orlaith took a deep breath, visibly fighting against a tremor rising through her shoulders.
She extended her hand and showed an emblem. Its surface was now completely covered by dark lines.
They were hundreds of tiny black fissures, like corrupt spiderwebs.
"Each one of these marks... represents an Elder or an important member of the clan," her voice failed. "They all appeared at the same time. A few hours ago..."
The blood completely drained from Priam’s face. His eyes fixed on those macabre cracks.
"Besides that... two hours ago, I received confirmation from the Aether-Wood Deer... All communication with our clan was cut off. They sent messages to the allies throughout the universe. Everyone discovered the same thing..."
She swallowed hard, her chest heaving while her facial features twisted into a grimace of pure pain.
"The inscription to the planet... was blocked. Then... they reported seeing an immense golden prison covering the entire planet. The power emanating from it... was beyond anyone’s comprehension."
Orlaith stopped for an instant, the silence in the room becoming suffocating.
"They watched from afar, powerless. Until... several Flying Boats from the Divine Plane approached. They looked like moths drawn to a deadly flame. All the main sects of the universe went there after detecting an energy..."
She hesitated, terror shining in her pupils.
"An energy far above a Sage. Possibly more powerful than anything they had in their clans... or even in the universe."
Priam’s hands began trembling violently. His fists clenched so hard that his nails almost tore into his flesh.
"I-Immortals..." he stammered, his voice barely coming out as a whisper.
Orlaith only nodded lightly.
"No one knew what was happening. But it didn’t last long... After a few minutes of waiting... everything disappeared. As if it had never existed."
Her breathing became uneven, erratic. Each word seemed to tear a piece from her soul.
"They entered... the planet..."
"And discovered... that all life... all races... everything was dead."
"The bodies... fallen everywhere. Without a single trace of struggle. Without any external damage. All of them... all of them..."
The words vanished. She shrank in place, covering her face, unable to contain the weight of reality.
She was the rightful leader of the clan. And, under her governance, the clan had completely shattered.
Behind Priam, the sound of despair broke the silence. Shione collapsed, giving in to sobs.
Only Lumiere and Priam remained standing.
Lumiere was pale as a corpse, but upon seeing the state of his sister and his mother, something changed in him. He pushed his own limits, searching for strength in the depths of his soul.
He supported his sister, guiding her to a chair. Then, he approached his mother.
The instant he got close, she hugged him desperately, burying her face in his chest. Lumiere endured the impact, gritting his teeth to remain firm with everything he had.
Meanwhile, Priam... remained completely static. A statue of ice and shock.
’I...’
’Killed...’
’Everyone...’
Those three words echoed like a funeral bell, reverberating endlessly inside his mind.
Why would the Immortals do something like that?
The answer was obvious and cruel: orders from the Sovereigns. They wanted to capture him again. At any cost.
But how had they found him?
The truth materialized before his eyes like a cold and merciless snap.
[Manifestation of Heavenly Will]
[Note: This Manifestation should not exist in this world. Use with extreme care and wisdom.]
The system’s warning shone in his memory with crystal clarity. He had been warned before.
This was the only logical explanation for the cataclysm.
To save his mother, he had activated that ability carelessly, without measuring the consequences. In that damned instant, his Anima and his Wheel of Fate, which should have remained sealed, were exposed to the cosmos.
He perfectly remembered what a Sovereign had told him when he was captured for the first time: he had been born in this world with Transcendental-level attributes. He was a beacon in the dark, easily identifiable.
By reactivating that now... the result couldn’t have been any different.
However, using it through the system seemed to have camouflaged part of the impact. Because of that, he hadn’t been taken immediately.
So, they wiped out the entire planet — because the beacon in the dark had shone exactly there before, then gone out again. Then, they couldn’t locate him with precision in the middle of the darkness once more.
It was simply easier to kill everyone at once.
’Mother... Father... Flora... Everyone... I killed them all...’
Priam remained there, paralyzed at the epicenter of his own ruin.
Once again, he had failed.
This time, on an inconceivable scale.
The death of an entire planet fell onto his shoulders.
Priam became so disturbed that he could no longer feel anything.
He felt swallowed by a complete emptiness.
...
...
...
A few hours later, when everyone had already stopped crying, a figure hurriedly entered the building.
It was an Elder of the Aether-Wood Deer race. He saw the dark and silent situation inside, then snorted lightly.
"The planet’s teleportation inscription has been reactivated. One of the allied clans of the universe has already moved there, and they’re protecting what’s left of the place." He spoke dryly, without any empathy.
"All the inscriptions that guarded the treasures were destroyed. The power that did that affected all the energies of the planet at once. You stored everything in spatial inscriptions and barriers, so the space inside them collapsed, and everything inside disappeared. Now, there’s practically only one place left with very little."
Orlaith heard all of that without reacting. She had already expected something similar.
The training fields and all important resources, for safety, were placed inside inscriptions that worked similarly to a spatial ring. When the ring was destroyed, everything inside also disappeared without leaving any trace.
Possibly, the only minimally good thing left in the clan was their library. But there were only low-level Magic Arts there, with one of them being almost Earth-class.
The Elder looked at the four of them there and nodded.
"Your race is very important to us, so we’ll give you as much support as possible. Fortunately, five of you are still alive. You can multiply again. As for everything you lost... indeed, it’s problematic. Mainly because you’ll need to look for a new home."
His words sounded completely dry and indifferent.
Of course, this race wouldn’t abandon its slaves. But there was no way to quickly rebuild something that had been built over thousands of years with their support.
As for his final words, they were simple to understand: all life on the planet had died.
Nature had completely disappeared, and that planet had practically become uninhabitable at the moment. Ordinary people without a minimum level of power wouldn’t survive there normally. Because of that, the planet would have to be abandoned until life returned naturally.
"Anyway... if you want to take a look, go ahead. The Great Leader authorized your departure."
Priam turned to Orlaith. She sighed and nodded lightly.
Shione and Lumiere moved to the room at the back. Flaris was still sleeping, so the two carried her out together.
The news of what had happened in that universe reached the Fem-Ignis demon race, and they sent desperate messages to Flaris to know if she was alive.
While Priam was still absent, they took her emblem, which was always on her body and not in her spatial ring. Then, they sent a message saying that she was fine.
Without delay, everyone left the building, being guided by the Elder to the teleportation inscription at the center of the clan.
That would take them to another planet in the same universe, inside a clan of the alliance.
When they arrived, they were received by a few humanoid Elders and taken out of that clan’s secret underground inscription.
They didn’t waste time going to another inscription.
...
It was noon on the planet Verdant Star.
The first thing Priam and the others noticed was the silence.
An absolute, heavy, unnatural silence.
Then came the cold. A cutting cold that seemed to completely ignore the sun shining at the top of the sky.
The sunlight was strong, but everything around them seemed stripped of color, sunk in a melancholic gray mist.
They looked around.
Near the newly rebuilt runic inscription, a few humanoids from the alliance watched in silence. They had just built this inscription under orders from above. Those 5 were the first to use it.
Priam looked around. They were in the middle of the clan’s territory. The imposing central building stood right ahead, like a funeral monument.
Priam didn’t wait. He shot forward like a gust of wind, without looking back.
The buildings hadn’t collapsed. In theory, everything looked perfect and intact. But the grass beneath his feet, the trees, all of nature, were completely dry and dead.
It didn’t take long for him to see the first body.
It was a clan soldier. The man looked like he had simply fainted in the middle of walking, but his skin showed a terrifying, corpse-like pallor.
Priam kept running until he reached the surroundings of the annex...
"!"
His feet abruptly locked, skidding across the dirt.
He petrified in place.
He saw Flora.
The young woman was lying on the dry grass. Her eyes were closed, showing an almost serene expression, and her hands rested softly over her abdomen. She looked like she was only sleeping deeply.
Priam swallowed hard, a painful and suffocating knot tightening his throat. He forced his legs to move.
But when he arrived before her, his knees simply lost their strength.
He collapsed to the ground beside the body, trembling violently from head to toe.
The one before him... was no longer the young and dedicated maid who clearly had feelings for him that went far beyond duty. Now, she was only a cold, empty, soulless shell.
As he looked at her face... tears overflowed from his eyes, streaming silently down his pale face.
’Why...?’
When he had awakened with his memories, he saw himself blessed with a system and an endless sea of possibilities.
He had genuinely believed his future would be glorious. The excitement and pride of someone predestined could barely fit inside his chest.
But now... There was reality.
He was seeing, firsthand, the devastating price of his actions.
And the crushing weight of his own weakness.
First, he had been treated like trash by his own clan.
Then, he had been sold by that merchant demon clan, only because he wasn’t a threat.
And now, he was being torn apart by life itself again.
Priam cried without holding back his sobs, bent over the corpse of the girl who only wanted to stay by his side, feeling the world collapse onto his back.
Shione and Lumiere, who was carrying Flaris in his arms, finally approached and witnessed the scene.
Everyone felt as if an invisible blade had pierced their hearts.
At least for the two siblings, their mother was still breathing, even if weakly. But Priam... the aura of pure agony and despair emanating from him was simply indescribable.
...
Priam remained there, kneeling for several minutes. Then, suddenly, he stood up.
His gaze was completely empty. His steps were trembling, guided by a blind despair he was trying to turn into courage.
He hadn’t searched before, out of pure fear of facing the truth... but now, he had to go.
He ran into the annex, passing straight by other servants fallen in the corridors, all in the same position of eternal sleep. The air inside seemed thin, heavy.
The first destination was the dining hall.
When he threw the door open, the empty room brought a brief and suffocating relief. They weren’t there.
He turned around, climbing the steps two at a time to his parents’ room on the upper floor.
The door was opened forcefully.
Empty.
Priam’s heart instantly raced. Panic began to truly suffocate him.
This time, he rushed down the stairs and ran outside.
His lungs burned. He ran like a madman to the training field, then to the garden... searching every corner his parents visited daily.
Nothing. No sign of them.
Completely deranged, his vision blurred by panic and cold sweat, he ran toward the clan’s main building.
Without hesitation, he stormed through the halls, desperately searching in every direction, pushing open rustic doors and screaming mentally, feeling like he would faint from lack of air at any second.
Until...
"PRIAM!!"
A deep, heavy voice filled with urgency echoed through the stone corridors, cutting through the funeral silence and freezing his steps on the spot.