To the outside world, the war between Abyssal Bone Forest Academy and the combined might of Sage Gotham's Hut and Whitewoods Castle was a catastrophe.
A bitter conflict that swallowed the lives of neighbors, friends, and loved ones. A grinding event that bled resources dry, and turned the lands into a slaughtering ground for bot magi and civilians.
But to the Farlier's transmigrators who has been planted deep within both sides, it was something far different.
A culling.
A sweeping off of or the efficient removal of everyone standing in their path to gain a foothold within the organizations they have infiltrated.
With the kinetic dampeners and stealth-weave cloaking fed by compact mana generators, they moved like shadows beneath the chaos.
They slipped past sentries, harvesting lives, and thinning the ranks of both dark and light Magi faction with cold, methodical precision.
The Secret Plane that was chosen to hold the final bloodbath in order to decide the allocation of resources became their hunting ground. In the end, the Light Faction suffered devastation. Their formations broke, their officers died or vanished, and their reserves were gutted. Yet those who fought for Abyssal Bone… barely seemed to bleed.
That is simply because Abyssal Bone's advance parties were almost composed entirely of transmigrators who are equipped with a built-in magic genius system via the nano-chip implant and nanite swarm injections they received as children .
Even if the memories they have are just simulated or fake they are basically experts or veteran warriors when compared to these greenhouse flowers of the white magi faction.
Their true strength lay far above the rank they pretended to hold, basically smurf accounts in an online battlefield, or like masters playing against children.
They fought with spells they should not have known, with poise and foresight no apprentice could possibly possess, sweeping through enemy lines like a relentless tide.
When the smoke cleared, Abyssal Bone clearly suffered minimal damage compared to the devastation of the light magi faction.
And among the Light Faction's dead and missing, every vacant post, every empty rank, every position left that suddenly opened… was an invitation. A perfect opening for the transmigrators to step forward, step up, and take the place of those who perished in battle.
*****
Leylin barely skimmed the pages of victory and resource tallies from the Secret Plane, his attention already drifting past the reports.
What truly held his gaze was the figure on a screen before him... it is a live feed of the Queen, who had just crossed a critical threshold in her maturation.
She stood nearly two meters tall, upright and graceful, humanoid. Her exoskeleton gleamed like forged obsidian steel, smooth and polished to a mirror sheen, yet flowing over her form like living armor. It fit close to her limbs, sweeping into elegant, spiked pauldrons and tapering greaves, every line honed for beauty and lethality alike.
From her shoulders and spine rose long, curved chitinous blades that shimmered with iridescent violet at the edges, catching the light like polished gemstone. This goes all the way to her tail end that looked like an outstretched skeletal hand.
Her face was breathtaking, exquisitely, and terrifyingly beautiful. She had a pale skin that stretched taut over fine, sharp bone, framed by cascading strands of living, silken chitin that looked like spun silver.
Her eyes burned with a piercing, luminous amber, ancient and knowing, and when she moved, the heavy steel-like plates shifted with terrifying fluidity, as light and supple as silk.
She held herself with the regal, terrible poise of a queen born of flesh and blood, reforged in agony and power, her humanity not lost but transcended, turned into something perfect, immortal, and utterly her own.
She was no longer the viral strain not the Magus Ashley. She was something in between, something far greater than both.
Leylin watched her stand tall, her presence alone radiating a quiet, absolute authority that made the very air seem to still.
'Beautiful,' he thought with genuine appreciation, watching as a violet light pulsed gently beneath her plates.
'Show us what you can do...'
*****
On the mist-shrouded fringes of Thornmarsh Principality, the Queen stood silent amidst the marsh reeds.
Her towering, graceful form gleamed like dark-forged steel beneath the pale moonlight, violet light pulsing faintly beneath her chitin.
Behind her, a long, sinuous tail coiled and swayed as if it had a life of its own.
In her hands is a young acolyte who had stumbled upon her.
Before he could scream or cast even the simplest spell, the Queen's tail lashed out. It clamped over his face sealing his mouth and nostrils, pressing him back into the mud.
He thrashed wildly, clawing at the living gauntlet smothering him, but his struggles weakened fast. From within the hollow palm, something warm and writhing slipped down his throat, depositing something deep into his chest.
When the tail pulled back, he slumped, gasping, eyes wide and unseeing, already lost to what was now growing inside him.
"Lucius! What is this thing!" A shout went up and more acolytes emerged from the treeline, spells flared to life in their hands. They saw the female figure in dark steel armor and the stricken man at her feet, and charged.
"Seize her! She's alone!" An apprentice of the second rank shouted before sending the fireball spell in his hand out towards the unknown female.
The Queen turned. Her amber eyes burned with calm, ancient hunger. She did not rush. She flowed.
The bolt of fire streaked toward her and she chose not to step aside, she grabbed the flames with her bare hands and snuffed it like a candle flame leaving not a single trace or mark.
She closed the distance in a heartbeat, sweeping one arm outward. Her armored hands streaked through the air unhindered and two acolytes went down instantly, gasping for breath before they could speak a single word.
The remaining two struck her, but her steel-like exoskeleton just rang like a bell, unyielding. She caught a wrist in one hand, crushing it with a gentle squeeze, and while he screamed, her tail lashed forward again. The skeletal hand clamped over his face, and in seconds, he too fell still, carrying the seed within him.
Panic broke the remaining three. They tried to run but she moved faster than their eyes could follow. She struck them down one by one, not with slaughter, but with overwhelming, paralyzing force.
And then, one by one, the skeletal hand descended.
Silence returned to the marsh.
Five acolytes lay scattered in the reeds, unconscious but breathing, each one carrying a faint, unnatural warmth spreading through their chests.
The Queen stood over them, violet light rippling across her armor, and slowly, deliberately, turned toward the horizon.
The first generation had been sown. The swarm would soon begin to spread throughout the South Coast and soon enough, towards the vast lands of the Central Continent.
*****
The world of the Magus possessed a silent, unyielding law, a limit woven into the very fabric of existence. In a bid to maintain balance, the world itself resisted the birth of beings too far above the common order.
This is one of the reasons why beings with great bloodlines were rare; ancient potentials were suppressed; and any soul born with power beyond a certain threshold would find their potential capped, their growth slowed, as if the heavens themselves pressed down upon them to keep them in their place.
Sion should have been no exception.
His essence was woven from the finest serpent traits and the vigor of lesser draconic beasts, material that, by all conventional standards, ought to yield a being of Rank 2 or at most Rank 3 potential.
Comparable, perhaps, to the Black Horall Snake that used to guard the gates of Dylan Gardens.
But Leylin did not deal in convention. He would never settle for a bloodline shackled at Rank 4 or lower.
When a captured Magus' memories revealed a Venom Wyvern nest hidden deep within the Silverveil Principality, north of Poolfield, Leylin did not hesitate. His agents were dispatched at once, and what they uncovered would have made every bloodline Warlock in the Central Continent turn green with envy.
Leylin had traced and refined the Wyvern lineage all the way back to its primordial ancestors, the Thousand Venom Dragons, lofty Rank 5 existences whose bloodline far surpassed even that of the revered Kemoyin Serpent the Ouroboros Clan chased so desperately.
Leylin did not stop there. He refused to let his children merely be pale copies of those ancient relics.
He studied every serpentine bloodline he had gathered, every draconic trait he could unravel, seeking not to inherit power but to understand it.
To grasp the very essence of what made those creatures great, and then to weave that essence into something entirely new.
To adapt the source of their power, not to copy it. That, Leylin believed, was the true path toward transcendence. And that was the gift he gave his children who he believed to be beings that could no longer simply be classified as humans, but something far greater, 'Neo‑Humans'.
Within the Genesis Chamber, Sion no longer floated within glass and fluid.
Instead, he rested within a living iridescent shell that had formed naturally around him as he matured, pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
Slowly, the shell began to crack.
Fine fissures spread outward, glowing with soft, golden light from within. The air filled with the scent of ozone and sweet, ancient venom.
The mana density within the Dylan Gardens suddenly plummeted down to the lowest levels. If not for safety measures installed as precaution for such incidents, some of the ongoing projects would have been ruined.
With a resonant crack, the shell parted open.
There lay Sion.
He appeared to be a human child in form, yet from the very first breath, he was anything but human.
Smooth, iridescent scales the color of polished obsidian sheathed his limbs and traced elegant patterns across his chest and face, shifting subtly with every beat of his heart.
His eyes were vertical slits of molten gold, bright and piercing, holding a clarity and weight that no infant should ever possess.
A slender, sinuous tail coiled gently beside him, tipped with a faint, glowing stinger. Two small, curved horns spiraled upward from his forehead, dark and gleaming like polished onyx.
Fine, silken hair cascaded down his back, woven through with strands that shimmered like diamond dust.
He lifted his head and looked directly at Leylin without crying nor fear. He stretched out one tiny, scaled hand, and a drop of shimmering violet venom glistened on his fingertip, potent enough to eat through stone.
Leylin stepped forward, gazing down at his firstborn. The oppressive weight of the world's limit lingered looking to press him down, seeking to cap, to bind, to suppress.
Yet around Sion, that invisible ceiling simply shattered finally accepting his arrival in this world. The golden eyes blinked, and the infant cooed softly.
"I welcome you to the world."