The chamber devoured sound. When the huge doors sealed behind us, the only thing that lived was light — the slow, breathing pulse of the obsidian pedestal and the orb that had spoken our father's voice. We had expected relics, runes, maybe another map. We had not expected an entire life waiting to be poured into us.
Beneath a carved arch, half-buried in runes older than any language I'd ever known, lay a sarcophagus. Its lid was sealed with a lattice of cold metal and braided mana-veins. I felt it before I saw it — a depth of power that made my teeth ache. The sigil above the stone read: Phantom Emperor — Dual Path, Sealed.
Alex and I moved forward as if pulled. I found the seam and traced it with trembling fingers. The moment the seal broke, a shock crawled up my arm — subtle at first, then like thunder uncoiling. The sarcophagus lid slid aside with a sound like distant waves. Inside lay a figure in ceremonial armor, bones long dust but hair braided with crystal threads. At his heart, nested like a furnace, glowed a pair of cores: one coiling with pure qi, the other a well of raw mana braided with spatial ink.
They said the Phantom Emperor walked both paths. He had sealed his legacies — not to hoard power but to test those who would come after. The instant Alex touched the mana core, it sang through him like a living tide.
I saw it first on his face: a swell, like heat and ice combined. His palms puffed with light and then compressed; the air around him thinned and curved. The mana surged into him like an ocean pouring into a newly opened basin — vast, hungry, and impossibly ancient.
"Alaric…" Alex's voice bent, deeper than mine, resonant with something foreign. "It's… everywhere."
It happened so fast I could not stop it. His back arched; veins of gold light threaded beneath his skin. The magnitude of the inflow made him huge, then still, like a balloon suddenly held. I shouted, lunged for him, but the Phantom Emperor's mana had already recognized a suitable vessel — and Alex was full to the brim before my hands closed.
He passed out with a sound like a sigh. The cave tilting seemed to be the only thing that steadied me. I sank to my knees beside him, feeling my own mana coil with hunger and apprehension. Alex's chest rose and fell with a thunderous, slow rhythm as the mana reorganized inside him.
When he finally opened his eyes hours later, the world bent around him. The space between pillar and ceiling tilted, light folding like paper. He blinked up at me, and for a long stunned beat I realized his presence changed the walls themselves — a faint warping, a prickle along my skin where reality thinned.
"Space…" he whispered, voice half-lost. "I can… unmake a step and place it somewhere else."
He stood; the air around his hands shimmered as if each finger carried a small private sky. He was gone in the old sense of himself. The Phantom Emperor's mana had not only elevated him — it compressed his mana paths, expanded them sideways and up, carved channels for volumes of energy no one at his previous level should have held. When his aura rolled past me, I felt the difference like a punch: his mana equaled the beginning of the Sage Realm in raw volume, but it was shaped by spatial law — a new axis of power.
"Spatial magic," he breathed, smiling like a boy who'd found a star. "Phantom techniques. The orb said I'd find the corpus… and the books."
Around the sarcophagus, stacked on pedestals of obsidian, were scrolls and iron-bound tomes — inks that shifted like oil on water. Titles in the old script folded into modern words in my mind: Codex of Distortion, Passages of Voidstep, Manual of Spatial Synthesis. Alex grabbed one with trembling hands and, already, his fingers began to trace glyphs that hummed when he read. He did not understand everything yet. No one would, not at first. But the tools were here: training regimens, diagrams of anchors and nexuses, exercises to seed nodes of distance inside your own mana.
He practiced that night until dawn, small hops where space folded and he stepped through his own footprint. The first attempts left him dizzy; a good thing, I thought, because dizziness meant his body was learning to tolerate the strange architecture of space.
When I looked at him, steadier now, his aura a web of green-gold and folded distance, I felt a sharp surge of gratitude and fear. The Phantom Emperor had not merely given power — he had given a new kind of war. The world outside had not been ready for men who could rework space itself. We would be.
But first: I had to be sure he was whole. I checked his pulse, traced the new lines of his mana, and watched the way the room bent when he moved. Then I turned toward the sarcophagus again. The emperor's gifts were many. There were still books for me too — but they would demand a different price.