The march back to the capital was not a retreat; it was a slow, crushing transformation of the landscape. Indra did not leave the conquered lands in ruins. Instead, he practiced the ancient principle of Dharmavijaya (Righteous Conquest), though his version was stripped of mercy and built on absolute fear.
As he descended from the Theta Mountains, thousands of defeated Gamma and Theta soldiers—left leaderless by the deaths of Moon Gyu, Mo Fan, and the betrayal of Veda—lay prostrate in the dirt. They had seen him survive the impossible. They had seen the heads of the "Invincibles" hanging from his belt.
"I do not care for your past oaths," Indra told the kneeling legions. "Loyalty to a dead man is a ghost's errand. Pledge your lives to the Spear, and you shall eat. Defy me, and you shall join your masters in the dust."
By the thousands, the professional soldiers of two empires discarded their old insignias and took up the black banners of Ohm. Indra stationed them strategically in the captured provinces, turning the enemy's own defenders into his border guards. He created a new meritocracy where the only law was his word, and the only reward was survival.
The Return of the God-King
When Indra finally reached the gates of the Ohm capital, the city was silent. The rumors of his "Revenant" nature had reached a fever pitch. The commoner army marched behind him, twenty thousand strong, followed by the broken remnants of the world's greatest empires.
Indra rode through the main thoroughfare, the heads of the three generals—Veda, Moon Gyu, and Mo Fan—bumping against his saddle. He did not go to the palace to mourn his father or to sit on a dusty throne. He marched directly to the Great Temple where the Priest had once predicted his death at fifteen.
The remaining high priests and the trembling nobility met him at the steps. They saw the boy who had left at sixteen return as a force of nature. He was no longer just a King of a province; he was something much more terrifying.
The High Priest, shaking with a primal terror, stepped forward with a crown of gold and obsidian. "The stars were wrong," the priest whispered, loud enough for the gathered thousands to hear. "You are not a king of men. You are the instrument of the skies."
They did not crown him "King of Ohm." They proclaimed him the "Head Serving Heaven Emperor"—a title that suggested he was the bridge between the mortal world and the divine realm he had threatened to conquer. To the people, he was the Chakravartin, the ruler whose wheels roll over all, the one who had survived death to bring the world under a single, iron shadow.
Indra stood atop the temple stairs, looking out over his vast, silent empire. He felt no joy, only the cold satisfaction of a prophecy dismantled. He looked at the sky, his eyes piercing the clouds.
"The earth is mine," he thought. "Now, the heavens should start to worry."