Chapter 137: Red Alert
An officer in a dark blue uniform — middle-aged, sharp-eyed, no-nonsense — led the thirty-eight students through a checkpoint and into a restricted district in the city’s north. The buildings here were older than the rest of New Geneva, constructed from the same smooth, ancient stone as the temple hidden in the nameless mountain. No one knew who had built them or when.
"You have six hours in the pool," the officer said without looking back. "This is one of the most valuable resources on Earth. Do not waste your time. Do not attempt to remove anything from the pool chamber. Do not damage the pool or its surroundings. Violations will result in permanent banishment from all IAR facilities and potential criminal charges. Understood?"
Nods all around.
They entered the tower.
It was taller inside than it looked outside — the ceiling vanished into soft white light overhead, the same impossible architecture as the ancient temple but on a different scale. The walls were lined with pale inscriptions that pulsed faintly, absorbing the ambient mana radiating from the center of the room.
The Silent Star Pool dominated the chamber.
It was not a normal pool. The water — if it could be called water — was a deep, translucent blue that glowed from within, as if stars were suspended beneath the surface. The pool was roughly oval, sixty meters long and thirty wide, and the glow extended upward in a soft pillar that reached the ceiling. The light didn’t illuminate the room so much as fill it — a gentle, pervasive radiance that seeped into skin and bone and something deeper than bone. The air above the pool shimmered slightly, like heat haze, but cool rather than warm.
The students stepped into the pool one by one. The liquid rose to chest height on most of them. It was quite warm and comfortable. And the moment Lucian’s body was fully submerged, he felt it.
Comprehension.
Everything he’d been struggling to understand — the flow of mana through his Blood Palace, the structure of his sword intent, the intricate weave of his Light Weaving spell — became clearer. Not fully understood, not mastered, but clearer. Like someone had cleaned a foggy window.
The pool was large enough that everyone had their own space. Lucian drifted to a corner, settled into a cross-legged position, and closed his eyes.
He focused on two things: his Blood Palace and his sword intent.
The Blood Palace came first. The Crimson Origin Palace hung in his Sea of Consciousness, two stars alight, the third socket dark and waiting. He poured his comprehension into understanding its structure — how blood energy circulated through the palace, how the stars connected to the spells they governed, what the third star would unlock and what foundation it required.
Progress was slow. The bloodline palace was fundamentally different from the Light Palace — it wasn’t built on comprehension alone but on the seal itself. No amount of understanding could force open a socket that the bloodline had deliberately locked. He could prepare the foundation, smooth the path, make the ignition faster and cleaner when the seal finally dropped — but he couldn’t force it.
He arrived at a bottleneck in his comprehension of his blood manipulation ability.
He shifted focus to sword intent.
That was different. The Sword Intent Comprehension Shard from the Wei Chen quest reward had done exactly what it promised — stabilized the infant-stage Dark Light and given him a foundation to build on. In the pool’s enhanced comprehension state, that foundation grew.
He visualized the dark light along Aethon’s blade. The way it bent space.
He didn’t try to force it stronger. He tried to understand what it was. Not sword intent as a concept — he understood that. Why it bent space instead of cutting matter. Why it felt connected to his bloodline in a way he couldn’t articulate.
Five hours passed in what felt like minutes.
Lucian opened his eyes. The pool’s glow was unchanged. Around him, other students meditated in their own spaces — Wei Chen sat perfectly still at the pool’s center, his sword laid across his lap, his expression serene.
Lucian sighed.
His Blood Palace hadn’t budged. The bottleneck remained. But his sword intent — he could feel the difference. The Dark Light was no longer a flickering candle flame. It was steadier. More defined.
He climbed out of the pool. The comprehension enhancement faded the moment he left the liquid, leaving behind a faint sense of loss — like stepping out of warm water into cold air.
He dried off, dressed, and walked out of the tower into the New Geneva afternoon.
Grey sky. Cool breeze. The city hummed with its usual disciplined energy — vehicles moving in organized lanes, people walking with purpose, mana-tech infrastructure humming beneath the streets.
Then his communication device buzzed.
Lucian pulled it from his pocket. The ID read: Knights of the Horizon — Encrypted.
Miss Solstice, he thought. He picked up.
"Lucian, where are you right now?" Miss Solstice’s voice came through — panicked. Not her usual calm, not her usual sardonic detachment. He was quite shocked to hear this indifferent woman feeling genuine panic.
"New Geneva. The Silent Star Pool. I just finish—"
"Get ou—"
Her voice distorted. The signal became erratic — fragments of words cutting in and out, static overwhelming the channel.
"—now—can’t—under—"
Then something landed on Lucian’s cheek.
A raindrop.
He looked up. Grey sky. No clouds moments ago. But now they were rolling in from the north — dark, heavy, moving fast. And the rain was already falling. Not normal rain. The drops were a faint green.
Lucian touched the raindrop on his cheek. His fingers came away tinged with green. Not water. Something else. Something that carried a faint chemical smell — acrid, organic.
The signal cut to static. Then silence.
Sirens.
They erupted from every direction — deep, throbbing wails that echoed off the buildings and rolled through the streets like a living thing. Lucian’s enhanced hearing caught the automated announcement repeating on every frequency.
"RED ALERT. RED ALERT. NEW GENEVA IS UNDER ATTACK. ALL CITIZENS PROCEED TO NEAREST SAFEHOUSE IMMEDIATELY. ALL AWAKENED INDIVIDUALS REPORT TO NEAREST DEFENSE POINT. BEAST HORDE DETECTED — ORIGIN: BLACK FOREST. ADDITIONAL HOSTILES DETECTED — ORIGIN: FRENCH BORDER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. RED ALERT."
Lucian’s expression hardened.
The Black Forest — the massive mutated wilderness south of New Geneva, one of the most dangerous beast territories in Europe. And the French border. The beasts on the French border had been quiet for years. Decades, even. For them to be active now was not natural at all.
Red alert meant a horde. Not a raid — a horde. Thousands of beasts. Hundreds of C-Rank. Some B-Rank. The combined threat equivalent of multiple Grand Core Realm masters attacking simultaneously.
Lucian moved.
He leaped onto the nearest building — thump — and started running. Rooftop to rooftop. The green rain was falling harder now, streaking the air, soaking his clothes. His enhanced senses swept the city.
Officers and Task Force members flooded the streets below, directing civilians toward safehouses. Hunter Guild teams in ranked squads ran toward the outer walls. Vehicles with mounted mana-turrets sped through the main avenues. The city’s defense grid was activating — he could see barrier emplacements powering up along the northern wall.
Then he felt it.
A pressure from above. So massive and overwhelming. Like a mountain had decided to hover directly overhead.
Lucian’s knees buckled. The weight pressed down on his shoulders, his spine, his skull — a dominating aura that screamed prey at every instinct in his body.
No.
Fear Aura.
Lucian pushed back. His own aura erupted outward — primal, vampiric, the inherited dread of an apex predator that predated humanity itself. The crushing pressure shattered against it like a wave breaking on rocks. His knees straightened. His vision cleared.
He looked up.
An eagle.
Not a normal eagle. A massive eagle — wingspan easily forty meters, feathers the color of storm clouds shot through with veins of crackling lightning. Its eyes were golden and ancient and regarded the city below with the casual indifference of a god surveying an anthill.
Lucian’s Primordial Sight activated instinctively.
Zephyr Eagle
Peak B-Rank.
Equivalent to a Peak Grand Core Realm master, Lucian thought.
One of the dominant beasts of the Black Forest. The Ruler of the Skies.
The eagle opened its beak and lightning erupted — not a single bolt but a cascade, dozens of strikes raining down toward the city like divine punishment.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK. The air burned white. The sound was deafening.
Below, four figures moved simultaneously — Guild Masters, Lucian realized, each one radiating the pressure of Grand Core Realm cultivation. They formed hand seals in perfect synchronization and slammed their palms into the earth.
BOOM.
A massive earthen barrier erupted from the ground — a curved wall of reinforced stone and compressed earth that spread across the sky above the defense point, covering the entire range of the lightning strikes. The bolts slammed into it — crack-crack-crack — cracks spiderwebbed across the surface, but it held.
The eagle looked down at the Guild Masters.
Its expression — if a bird could have an expression — was contempt.