The Duchess's horror was a beautiful, fleeting thing. It was the expression of a god who had just watched its perfectly crafted universe crumble into dust.
"Seraphina!" she commanded, her voice laced with an authority that had controlled her daughter for lifetimes. "Cease this madness! Obey!"
"Obey?" Seraphina's voice was a discordant symphony, a hundred lifetimes of suppressed rage and newfound chaos blending into one. A shimmering, fractured wheel of light—the Gacha of Destiny—materialized behind her, spinning with a manic, uncontrollable energy. "The game has changed, Mother. I am no longer your piece. I am the board."
She lunged. The ensuing battle was not a clash of swords and Qi. It was a war of concepts.
The Duchess Vane, agent of The Architect, wielded order. The very laws of physics became her weapons. She pointed a finger, and the gravity around Seraphina multiplied a hundredfold. She gestured, and the light from the Dragon Veins bent, forming into razor-sharp spears of solid law.
Seraphina, the agent of chaos, simply laughed. The Gacha spun, and reality broke. Gravity reversed, sending the Duchess stumbling. The spears of light dissolved into a flock of harmless, giggling butterflies. For every law her mother tried to impose, Seraphina's corrupted system provided a random, insane, and utterly effective counter.
While this cosmic duel raged, the Emperor, a king in a land of gods, finally acted. Seeing me as the source of this madness, he let out a furious roar and charged, his ancestral sword blazing with the golden fire of the Ravencrest line. "For the Empire, demon!"
It was a valiant, heroic, and utterly pathetic gesture.
I didn't even turn to face him. I was focused on the true prize. The pulsating, golden heart of the empire. I raised my Void-Eater's Hand, not to defend, but to begin my feast.
As the Emperor's blade descended, a single, elegant tendril of pure shadow manifested from my gauntlet. It met his legendary sword not with force, but with an endless, consuming void. The golden flames were snuffed out. The ancient steel dissolved into rust and dust. The tendril gently tapped him on the chest.
The Emperor froze, his eyes wide with disbelief. Then, he simply crumbled, his life force, his Qi, his very soul devoured in a single, silent instant. He was a king, and then he was nothing. A minor appetizer before the main course.
With the distractions dealt with, I placed my hand upon the golden orb of the Dragon Veins.
"[Devour]."
The universe screamed.
The collective energy, the accumulated luck, the very essence of the Ravencrest dynasty poured into me. It was a torrent of power so immense it made the Spirit Carp and the Crimsonwood Ancestor feel like trickling streams. My cultivation base, already at its absolute limit, did not just break. It shattered, vaporized, and was instantly reforged into something new. Something greater.
My Nascent Soul grew, maturing in an instant, and began to radiate an aura of absolute authority.
Soul Ascension Realm!
The chamber shook, the very foundations of the palace groaning under the strain of my breakthrough.
The battle between mother and daughter faltered. They both turned to look at me, their cosmic struggle dwarfed by the sheer, raw power I was now emanating.
The Duchess's face was a mask of cold fury and calculation. She knew the battle was lost. Her mission to "delete" me had failed catastrophically.
"This is not over, anomaly," she hissed, her voice a promise. A portal of pure, ordered light opened behind her. "The Architect does not tolerate flaws. We will meet again, beyond the veil."
And with that, she vanished. A tactical retreat. She had abandoned her daughter, the empire, this entire world, to report her failure.
Seraphina, her opponent gone, let out a wild, triumphant laugh. She looked at me, her eyes swirling with a mixture of madness, admiration, and a new, dangerous desire.
I ignored her. I was still consuming, still ascending. The power was intoxicating, but it came with something I hadn't expected.
The Dragon Veins were not just energy. They were the lifeblood of a dynasty. And they contained memories.
A flood of someone else's life washed over me. The life of the true Kaelen Ravencrest. I saw his childhood, his rivalries with his brothers, his lonely, pampered existence.
And I saw his secrets.
I saw him in the royal library, late at night, discovering a hidden, sealed decree from his grandfather's reign. A decree detailing the truth of the Fifth Princess's birth. The Carp's dying words were true. She was the sole, orphaned survivor of the rival Silvermoon Dynasty, a line the Ravencrests had exterminated in a bloody war decades ago. She had been adopted in secret, a political hostage raised as a princess, her true identity a poison pill at the heart of the empire.
I saw the original Kaelen's reaction. Not jealousy. Not lust. But a profound, soul-crushing guilt and a desperate, protective pity. His dandy persona, his frivolous ways, were a mask to hide the terror of what he knew. His "love" for her was not the dark, possessive thing my soul had twisted it into. It was the desperate, clumsy attempt of a boy trying to protect the one person in the world who was as much a prisoner of the throne as he was.
The final memory was the most chilling. I saw him, weeks before his sixteenth birthday, growing weaker. A subtle, creeping illness that no royal physician could diagnose. A spiritual decay. It wasn't natural.
The last thing the true Kaelen saw before his consciousness faded and my own took its place was the face of a visiting physician, an old, kindly man sent as a "gift" from a vassal state. A man who had just administered a "tonic."
And as the memory clarified, I recognized the symbol on the physician's robes.
It was the twin-serpent crest of the Vane family.
The twist wasn't just that the original Kaelen knew Lyra's secret. It was that my entire second chance, my very presence in this world, was the result of a political assassination. The Duchess Vane had murdered the true prince to create a weak link in the royal family, paving the way for her own daughter's influence.
She hadn't just been playing the long game for lifetimes. She had been playing it since the day I arrived.
But as this earth-shattering revelation settled, a new, even more urgent crisis erupted. It wasn't a memory. It was my System, screaming a warning.
[!!! CRITICAL ALERT: BLOODLINE INCOMPATIBILITY DETECTED !!!]
[You have devoured the conceptual core of the Ravencrest Dragon Veins.]
[Your soul, the soul of a 'Traveler from Beyond the Veil', is not of the Ravencrest bloodline.]
[The dynastic energy is rejecting your soul's authority. It is attempting to create a new, 'true' vessel.]
[A 'Karmic Abscess' is forming. The power you have consumed is coalescing into a separate, hostile entity within your own soul.]
I looked down in horror. The golden energy of the Dragon Veins, which had been flowing into me, was now pooling in the center of the chamber, ripping itself free from my control. It swirled, it condensed, it took on a form.
It was creating a person. A perfect, golden copy of the man I had just seen in the memories.
The true Kaelen Ravencrest, a golem of pure, dynastic power and vengeful memory, was being born from the ashes of my feast, right here, right now. And its first and only instinct would be to reclaim the body that had been stolen from it.