Eventually, silence gave way to memory.
"You know," Wendy said, her voice trembling, so soft it brushed the air. She hugged her arms around herself and stared at the floor. "I remember the first time I saw him."
Everyone turned to look at her. They didn't interrupt.
"He was so small," she said.
"A premature baby, thin as a sparrow. He couldn't have weighed more than a couple of apples. I was five, just brought to East Wing Manor after… after my family was gone."
She hesitated, jaw tightening, and a shadow passed over her face. Pain flickered in her eyes, but she forced her lips not to quiver. "Massacred," she said flatly, her voice sharp as a blade.
She shifted her gaze toward the bed again, her eyes softening as she focused on the silent figure resting there.
"Then I saw her. Duchess Evelyne. Holding this tiny, fragile thing wrapped in a deep blue swaddle. Whispering his name like it was a prayer, she was scared the gods would forget."
Her lips curled into a faint smile that hid the ache.
"He looked fragile, paler than moonlight, fingers like bird bones. But she held him as if he were made of stars."
Wendy paused, blinking rapidly. Her hands were clasped so tightly her knuckles whitened. Eyes glistening now, but no tears fell. Not yet.
"She died smiling," she said, almost too quietly to hear. "Clutching him. She made us promise—me, Elmer, the handmaids—to take care of her Charles."
The promise burned in her eyes. Not as memory, but as a fire that hadn't gone out.
They didn't interrupt.
Because every word she spoke felt like part of the reason they were still here. Still holding on. Still believing he'd wake up.
Still waiting.
Her eyes misted again as they clouded and shimmered. Her lips twitched into the ghost of a smile that defied the grief pressing against her composure.
"She smiled when she died," Wendy said, "clutching him. She made us promise—me, Elmer, Evelyne's handmaids—to take care of her Charles."
The promise burned now.
"After she passed, the estate forgot him," she continued, quieter.
"The East Wing fell into disrepair. No maids. No tutors. No food some days. I watched him grow up…sickly, weak, so desperate to prove himself."
She looked down at him—the boy who once sobbed in private.
"I saw him cry at five years old when he failed to awaken any elemental affinity. The Duke left the hall without a word. They called him the disgrace of Ziglar. The cursed one."
Geo winced. "That's brutal."
"Yeah, traumatic for a child." Wendy nodded. "Still, he never gave up. He trained until his palms bled, always smiling and hoping."
"He finally opened his dantian a year ago," she said, smiling. "We celebrated with grilled trout and stolen peach wine."
"Let me guess." Diana chuckled. "He pretended he didn't like the wine?"
"Nah! He chugged the whole bottle and passed out with peach juice on his cheek."
Laughter filled the room, brief and soft—a flash of light between storm clouds. Still, the sound of Charles's ragged breathing lingered.
It was a subtle reminder, a faint whisper beneath their mirth, that though they sought relief in humor, the gravity of his condition hung over them, like a shadow that refused to disperse.
"But three months later, we found him in the woods… barely alive. His dantian shattered. Skull fractured. Just like now."
She looked at Charles again. "He was unconscious for three days back then, too."
"And when he woke up…"
"Everything changed," Borris finished.
He leaned back, tossing the Epoch Sphere from hand to hand like a relic that meant nothing and everything.
"What kind of lunatic attempts a ten-stage tower trial five whole cultivation levels above their current realm?"
Rob raised his hand with a grin. "I mean, I would…if I wanted to die horribly."
"He trained straight through," Borris muttered, reading the numbers on the side of the trialmind core. "Seventeen hours. Twenty-one minutes. Thirty-nine seconds. Non-stop. Hardcore mode. Full sensory sync."
Luther let out a low whistle. "Every wound, every burn, every illusion… felt in real-time?"
"Yeah," Rob nodded slowly. "At that setting, you can feel every second. You don't scream for show."
Borris spoke in a softer voice. "What do you think he'll be like when he wakes up?"
Rob smiled and showed his teeth. "Oh, that's easy. A total menace. Like a dragon hopped up on caffeine and spite"
Luther shook his head and laughed softly. "Or maybe he becomes a full-fledged philosopher. Begins to write poems about cutting people in half with perfect rhythm and rhyme."
Geo raised an eyebrow and shrugged. "To be honest? I really want him to just... take a break. Get a fishing rod. Make a cookbook."
Diana said from the corner, with her arms crossed, "That's the dream. That day when Charles rests willingly is the day I start to believe in miracles."
But none of them truly expected rest. Not from him.
Because Charles didn't sleep to relax.
He slept to reload.
So, they waited.
And in that candlelit room of heartbeats and stories, laughter and weightless grief, they kept their vigil—not just to pass time, but to remember why they followed him in the first place.
Not because he was the strongest. But because he refused to stay broken.
Even now, unconscious and quiet… he was still leading them.
Micah listened.
Micah listened. She tuned out their spoken words and the laughter that poorly masked exhaustion or grief; all those sounds seemed to pass through her as if she were transparent, barely present among them.
Because she had seen what they hadn't.
What they never would.
She said nothing. She couldn't. Her lips pressed in a thin line, her shoulders rigid. Inside her chest, something violent and wordless raged like a storm. The faint hum of the Epoch Sphere, unnoticed before, now echoed through her—its melody winding around her thoughts, tightening her throat, refusing release.
The Epoch Sphere was small, humming, innocent. It showed her everything, then took it away. Only she remembered the truth.
Not just pain, or death, or war. Something deeper.
Reality folded. Life stitched into another, memory an open wound.
A secret no one was ever meant to know.
The real Charlemagne Ziglar had died.
Not with heroism. Not in glory. He died in the dirt—alone, broken, forgotten by his own bloodline.
And the one who now bore his name… didn't belong to this world at all.
Charles Alden Vale.
A man from another life. Another time. Another reality.
Yet somehow, impossibly, both men lived within the same flesh.
In her vision, two faces overlapped. The first, a handsome man with the poise of a ruler, dark hair slick with rain, eyes cold, calculating, and sharp enough to dissect a lie before it left your lips. The second, the boy he had replaced—a young noble with sapphire eyes, full of naive courage and the kind of hope that only existed before life took its first swing.
Charles and Charlemagne.
Two souls intertwined by catastrophe, each distinct yet bound within the same form. One, a calculated brilliance, cold as winter steel, executing precision with every heartbeat. The other, an open, innocent spirit, warm and hopeful as the dawn breaking over unfamiliar horizons.
Together, they didn't simply coexist.
They pushed against each other, collided, then fused—until there was no longer a clean line between warmth and logic, mercy and resolve. What emerged wasn't just survival. It was something more dangerous. Something whole.
A will forged from two broken lives.
Vengeance reborn through genius.
Genius refined through pain.
She had seen his other world, too—cold boardrooms, cities made of glass, betrayal traded like currency, a coffin lowered without a proper ceremonial burial for the man inside. And then the screams, the steel, the fire. The battlefield that followed.
His death. His rebirth. His second war.
It was all there. And she had barely survived seeing it.
Micah stood frozen, not from fear but from awe. Her hands barely steadied her on the doorframe. Her breath shuddered, the magnitude of what she'd witnessed pressing down, as if the room itself closed in.
How could anyone endure that and still remain human?
Her hands trembled violently. She clenched them into fists, hating how weak she suddenly felt. Next to his fire, she felt like little more than a flicker—a candle struggling beside a burning star.
He had endured what would have destroyed gods. And somehow, he was still here.
He had died once, lived twice, and carried the weight of both worlds in one heart that refused to stop beating.
Every loss. Every betrayal. Every scream.
All of it was still inside him, buried deep where no one could reach.
He had carried it alone. Every wound. Every ghost.
Now he lay there—silent, unmoving. Not like someone resting, but like a weapon left to cool after a war. A prince forged in pain, a blade that still faintly glowed from the heat of battle.
Micah's throat tightened as she tried to swallow. The air tasted like ash, her chest heavy with everything she couldn't say. Her eyes burned, but no tears came. She wouldn't let them.
The man they followed—the one they trusted, laughed with, fought beside—was more than brilliant.
More than mortal. He wasn't even just human anymore.
He was impossible.
Even if he never woke again… even if this was the end…He had already done what legends never could.
He had rewritten the meaning of one.
And only she knew the cost.
Micah looked at Charles with a gaze both hollow and soft. Quietly, she turned away from him and slipped out of the suite, unseen by the others as she left.
She was back at Tre Sorelle Velmora, composed, radiant, unstoppable.
As if nothing tragic had ever happened.
No one saw the sleepless nights. No one heard the quiet screams buried in her chest.
Micah moved through operations like a force in heels—signing contracts, negotiating terms, reviewing reports, charming dignitaries…all with robotic precision and a woman's smile who hadn't stood beside death days ago.
She never faltered. Never blinked. Never mentioned Charles.
To the world, she was every inch the merchant princess reborn.
When the fifth day closed, the last guest gone and ledgers shut, Micah drifted into her office.
And then… once the door was shut, she slumped into her executive chair like a marionette with its strings freshly severed, shoulders collapsing and eyes glazing as exhaustion finally broke through her mask.
The mask cracked just a little. Not enough for tears.
Just enough for the silence to catch up to her.
Something had changed.
She was no longer the pampered, silver-tongued daughter of a Merchant King—no longer the radiant jewel of the Sorelle dynasty, protected, praised, and preened.
That moment within the Epoch Sphere had shattered her. And then, it had rebuilt her.
In the days that followed, Micah found herself signing documents with firmer strokes, the paper bearing the weight of her newfound resolve. She no longer wore her favorite perfume, as if its sweetness was an unnecessary layer she had shed along with her old self.
These subtle shifts were small indicators of a profound transformation, marking her journey from the wreckage of what she once was to the strength of who she had become.
Micah had stepped into a memory not hers… and emerged with a scar on her soul.
She could never unsee what she saw—his pain, his fury, his unbearable isolation. It stripped away her vanity, her illusions, her carefully curated confidence like a storm ripping the paint from a palace.
And then—the light.
When her qi awakened again, it was not gentle.
It roared through her veins like a divine reckoning, blasting apart her former bottlenecks, purging weakness and comfort in a single radiant pulse.
The Divine Light felt like molten sunlight on her skin, warm and searing, as if every pore was glowing from within. This transcendent force vibrated through her, anchoring her breakthrough deep into bone and breath, transforming ephemeral power into something almost tangible.
Her affinity had reawakened. Not just light—but Divine Light.
And just like that—she broke through.
Core Realm Rank 1.
Not through pills or training or any elder's guidance. But through grief. Through fire. Through truth.
She wasn't the same woman who walked into that chamber.
And she would never be again.