Chapter 41: The Graveyard of Gods
The entrance to the Dungeon of the Ancients was located in the deepest basement of the Divine Sky Academy.
It wasn't a gate. It was a hole.
A massive, circular pit roughly a mile wide, rimmed with ancient runes that glowed with a sickly green light. The air rising from the pit smelled of ozone and old dust—the smell of a tomb that hadn't been opened in a millennium.
We stood at the edge.
Prince Valerian looked down into the darkness and gulped. "This doesn't look like a dungeon. It looks like a mouth."
"It is," I said, adjusting my gloves. "The Academy built the city on top of this pit to seal it. They use the ambient death energy to power their defense arrays. Efficient, but disrespectful."
Old Mo stood beside us, holding a lantern.
"Be careful, Rudra," Mo warned. "The Upper Layers (1-10) are ruins of the 7th Civilization. They are dangerous, but manageable. But below that... the Abyssal Layer... that is where the Arbiters dumped the bodies of the gods who rebelled during the 6th Reset."
"Don't worry, Mo," I patted his shoulder. "I respect the dead. Especially if they have good loot."
I turned to the control panel.
Usually, a student would input their ID, and the teleportation array would lower them safely to Layer 1.
I swiped my ID card.
The panel flashed RED.
[ERROR. TARGET IDENTIFIED: ANOMALY.]
[DESTINATION OVERRIDE: LAYER 99 (ABYSS).]
[INITIATING PURGE PROTOCOL.]
The ground beneath us vanished.
"It's a trap!" Lyra screamed.
The teleportation array didn't lower us slowly. It simply deactivated the floor.
We fell.
We plummeted into the endless dark, falling past the lit levels of the upper ruins, descending straight into the black heart of the planet.
"Rudra!" Seraphina shouted, trying to manifest her wings, but the anti-flight arrays in the pit suppressed her magic.
"Relax," I said calmly, falling headfirst like a diver.
I watched the layers flash by.
Layer 10... Layer 20... Layer 50...
The air grew colder. The pressure grew immense.
We passed Layer 80. The walls of the pit turned from stone to something that looked like calcified bone.
"Impact in 5 seconds," Ria calculated, falling beside me in a perfect aerodynamic posture. "Surivival probability without deceleration: 0%."
"Chronos," I whispered.
Inside the Ring, my clone spun the gears.
'Ability: Local Time Dilation.'
I expanded a bubble around the team.
Inside the bubble, gravity didn't change, but time slowed down by a factor of 100.
We didn't hit the bottom. We drifted to the bottom like feathers.
Touch.
We landed softly on a surface of grey ash.
The time bubble popped.
We were alive.
We were in the Abyssal Layer.
The Grey World.
"Is everyone okay?" Valerian asked, checking his limbs. "I'm not a pancake?"
"You're fine," I said, standing up.
I looked around.
The Abyssal Layer was not dark. It was lit by a pale, grey light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
It was a city.
But not a medieval city.
It was a ruin of jagged metal skyscrapers, twisted monorails, and shattered glass towers. This was the ruin of a Technological Civilization.
"The 6th Era," I realized, touching a rusted metal wall. "They didn't use Qi. They used Science and Ether. And the Arbiters wiped them out because they got too close to the Truth."
"It's creepy," Anya whispered, holding my hand. "It's so quiet."
It was silent. No wind. No insects. Even the sound of our footsteps was swallowed by the thick layer of grey ash covering everything.
"Look," Seraphina pointed.
In the center of a plaza, there was a statue.
Or... we thought it was a statue.
It was a giant, fifty feet tall, wearing power armor. It was kneeling, holding a massive broken sword.
But as we got closer, I saw the truth.
It wasn't stone. It was flesh that had been frozen in time.
"A True God," Seraphina hissed, her demon instincts flaring. "This is the corpse of a True God. He died kneeling."
I walked up to the giant.
I touched his boot.
Eye of Truth: Activate.
Flash.
A vision hit me.
I saw the sky burning. I saw faceless white figures—Arbiters—descending from the clouds. I saw this giant roaring, swinging his sword at the heavens.
I saw an Arbiter raise a hand. "Reset," the Arbiter said.
The giant froze. His soul was ripped out. His civilization turned to ash in a microsecond.
The vision ended.
I stepped back.
"They didn't just kill him," I whispered. "They erased his concept of 'Victory'."
Suddenly, the ash on the ground began to swirl.
The shadows stretched.
From the ruins of the skyscrapers, figures emerged.
They were translucent. Ghosts.
But they wore the uniforms of the 6th Era—lab coats, military fatigues, pilot suits.
Their eyes were hollow pits of black void.
Remnants.
The hatred of billions of people who were erased unjustly, coalesced into spirits.
"Intruders..." the ghosts whispered. Their voices sounded like radio static. "Are you... Arbiters?"
"Formation!" Valerian shouted, drawing his sword.
Hundreds of ghosts floated toward us. The temperature dropped to absolute zero.
"Wait," I stepped forward.
I raised my hand.
I didn't use Qi. I used Chronos.
I projected a holographic image above my hand.
It was the image of the Arbiter I had seen in the vision. The faceless white figure.
"We are not Arbiters," I announced, my voice amplified by the ruins. "We are the ones who are going to kill them."
The ghosts paused.
The static in the air intensified.
"Kill... Arbiters?" a large ghost—a General—drifted forward. "Impossible. They control... Fate."
"I have no Fate," I said.
I activated my Void Eyes. I let the Clockwork Gears spin.
I showed them my Acausality.
To the ghosts, who were trapped in the trauma of the past, seeing someone who didn't exist in time was like seeing a messiah.
"An... Anomaly," the General ghost whispered. "A glitch in the system."
He knelt.
The hundreds of ghosts knelt.
"Free us," the General begged. "Our souls are trapped in the Reset. We cannot move on. The Arbiters locked the cycle."
"I will break the lock," I promised. "But I need power. Where is the Core of this layer?"
The General pointed a ghostly finger toward a massive, shattered spire in the distance.
"The Tower of Babel. The Arbiters sealed the World Heart of our era there. But beware... the Watchdog is still there."
"Watchdog?"
"The one who betrayed us," the ghost spat static. "Agent Zero."
The Assassin.
I looked at the Tower of Babel.
My Chronos clone sent a warning pulse.
'Threat Detected. Future Probability: Death.'
"Someone followed us down," I said to the team.
I turned around.
Standing on top of a ruined skyscraper, watching us, was a figure.
He wore pure white robes that were unstained by the ash. He wore a white mask with a single vertical eye painted on it.
Agent Zero. An Assassin of the Order of Providence.
"You speak to the trash," Agent Zero's voice was smooth, synthetic. "It is fitting. You will die with them."
He stepped off the building.
He didn't fall. He walked on the air.
"Rudra Ye," Zero said. "You have been designated a Type-1 Anomaly. The King of this world is too scared to act. So the Order has intervened."
He raised his hand.
A black cube appeared in his palm.
The Box of Erasure.
"This dimension is sealed," Zero stated. "No one can see us. No one can hear you scream. I am going to erase your existence from the timeline."
"Erase me?" I laughed.
I drew Antakala.
"Pinky sends a Prince. The King sends a Ghost. The Order sends a Janitor."
I looked at Seraphina.
"Honey. Do you want the left leg or the right leg?"
Seraphina smiled. Her dress turned into crimson armor. Wings of black fire erupted from her back.
"I want the head."
"Valerian, Lyra, Kael, protect the rear," I ordered. "Ria, calculate his attack patterns. Anya... blow up that tower."
"Okay!" Anya cheered.
"Agent Zero," I pointed my sword at the white figure. "You call yourself a Watchdog?"
My silver eyes flashed.
Time Skip.
I vanished.
I appeared directly behind him in the air.
"Let's see if dogs can fly."
I swung Antakala.
The blade didn't just cut space. It cut the Silence of the graveyard.
CLANG.
Agent Zero blocked with a dagger made of solidified light.
The impact created a shockwave that flattened the surrounding ruins.
"You are fast," Zero admitted, his mask cracking slightly. "But you are still mortal."
"And you," I grinned, pressing the blade down, "are just a glitch that I haven't fixed yet."
The battle for the Graveyard had begun.