The gateway.
It was a siren's call to every ambitious soul on the continent. A permanent, stable path to the Higher Realms, the dream of every cultivator since the Sundering. For me, it was not a dream; it was the next logical step. The throne of the Ravencrest Empire was a gilded cage. The true game, the path to absolute, unbound power, lay beyond that shimmering portal.
My time in this mortal realm was over.
I looked at Lyra, who was still slumped on the floor, spiritually drained and emotionally broken. She was a loose end. A beautiful, tragic loose end that I could not afford to leave. Killing her would be the cleanest solution.
But my mind, ever the cold strategist, saw a better use for her.
The world above was a chaotic mess, but it would eventually stabilize. The factions would consolidate, and their combined might would eventually be directed towards the gateway. I couldn't have them following me. I needed to leave behind a fire so large, so all-consuming, that they would be too busy trying to put it out to even think about ascension.
Lyra was not a loose end. She was my parting gift to the world. She was the fuse.
"Get up," I said, my voice leaving no room for argument.
She looked at me, her eyes hollow. "What now? Are you going to throw me to the leviathans in the sea?"
"I have something far more interesting in mind for you," I replied, a cruel smile touching my lips. I opened the System interface, the blue light illuminating my face. "I am leaving this world, Lyra. I am ascending. But before I go, I'm going to ensure the empire I leave behind is a viper's nest of paranoia and betrayal, incapable of ever threatening me again."
I activated the Creation Engine.
[CREATION ENGINE]
[Objective: Forge a new item by fusing concepts, materials, and SP.]
I had no rare materials here. But my new, upgraded engine didn't always need them. For this, I only needed a concept.
[Select Concept: 'Fabricated Betrayal'.]
[Select Materials: 1x Memory Fragment (from Lin Feng's interrogation), 1x Drop of Royal Blood (my own), 2,000 SP.]
[Select Form: 'Correspondence Crystal'.]
[Forge?]
"Forge," I commanded.
A ball of shimmering light appeared before me. I fed it the concepts, the memories, the drop of blood. It was a lie-smithing of the highest order. I crafted a series of "recorded" conversations, of secret meetings between Prince Valerius and the "impostor princess" Lyra. In my fabricated reality, Valerius had known her secret all along. He had helped her infiltrate the palace, planned to use her as a puppet, and then "exposed" her to seize the moral high ground for himself. It was a masterpiece of political assassination.
A small, intricately-cut crystal, warm to the touch, materialized in my hand. It was my parting gift.
I tossed it to Lyra. She fumbled to catch it. "What is this?"
"That," I said, "is your story. And your shield." I explained its contents, watching as her hollow eyes widened with a dawning, horrified understanding of my plan. "I am going to 'rescue' you. I will leave you, along with this crystal, near a major trade outpost. When you are found, this evidence will be found with you. It will tear Valerius's 'righteous' faction apart from the inside. It will shatter his legitimacy and plunge the entire succession into a bloody, chaotic civil war."
"You… you are a monster," she breathed.
"I am a pragmatist," I corrected her. "I am giving you a new role to play. No longer the hated impostor. Now, you are the tragic, manipulated pawn. The key witness. Your life will be spared, because every faction will want to use you as a weapon against the others. You will be the most valuable, and the most miserable, woman on the continent."
I was not just saving her life. I was condemning her to a life of being a political chess piece, a fate I knew her proud, ambitious soul would find far worse than death. It was the perfect, final act of my twisted obsession.
She was silent, staring at the crystal, the terrible genius of my plan sinking in.
"Come," I said. "It's time to leave."
I took her arm, and with a lurch of [Imp's Shadow-Step], we left the Sunken City forever, reappearing in a dark, windswept cave on the southern coast.
I left her there, unconscious, with the crystal clutched in her hand. My final move in the mortal realm was complete. The fires I had lit would burn for a generation.
I turned my gaze north, towards the Scar of the Sundering. Towards the gateway. Towards my future. I was finally, truly free. My path to power was clear.
But as I took my first step towards my new destiny, my data-siphon, that quiet, forgotten link to Seraphina, flared to life with an intensity that stunned me. She was still in the void-palace, but the gateway's appearance had changed her plans. She wasn't preparing to ascend. She was preparing for a meeting.
My system struggled to process the data, the sheer cosmic weight of it causing the interface to flicker and glitch.
[!!! CRITICAL ALERT - SERAPHINA VANE !!!]
[User has initiated a 'Cosmic Beacon' protocol using her authority as an agent of 'The Architect'.]
[She is not going TO the gateway. She is SUMMONING her master TO the gateway.]
[REASON: The gateway's manifestation has created a unique, temporary 'Confluence' of cosmic energies. The veil between the Higher Realms, the Mortal Realm, and the Overvoid is at its thinnest point in millennia.]
I stared, my mind reeling. She wasn't going to the next level. She was calling the final boss to the starting zone.
[ANALYZING SERAPHINA'S INTENT...]
[OBJECTIVE: THE MERGER.]
[She believes the Confluence will allow her to merge her soul with the 'Architect' entity, to become its perfect, corporeal avatar. She is not trying to ascend. She is trying to become a god, here and now.]
The gateway wasn't just my escape route. It was now a ticking time bomb, the site of a cosmic event that could unmake reality itself.
And then, the final, horrifying twist landed, a piece of information from a different source—the Sages of the Serene Cloud. Their scroll, the one they had given me, flared with a single, desperate, telepathic message, a warning that overrode even the system's alerts.
[Traveler. The Architect's arrival at the Confluence will unmake this world. It is a reality-ending paradox. The one who created the System cannot physically exist in the same reality as its broken, unbound fragments.]
[There is only one way to stop it. A failsafe. The original sin of the System's creation. The ultimate Glitch Protocol.]
[You must take all the System fragments you possess—your Core, your Gacha, your Engine—to the gateway before The Architect arrives.]
[You must perform a 'Factory Reset'.]
[The protocol will not fix the System. It will force all fragments in this universe to REUNITE, violently and catastrophically. It will merge your Core, Seraphina's fragment, and Lyra's fragment back into a single, unstable, but COMPLETE Nexus Core.]
[WARNING: The resulting entity will be a new, singular System. But the one who initiates the reset, the one whose Core is the foundation... their personality, their soul, will become the System's new, base OPERATING SYSTEM. You will not be a god. You will BECOME the System itself.]