Read Novel Full Chapter 770: Reaching Heaven
Chapter 770: Reaching Heaven
John found Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen on the gathering ground three days after the homecoming, and he didn’t waste time working up to what he’d come to say.
"They asked me not to tell you where," he said. "Not out of secrecy. Out of pride. They wanted to prove they could survive it before anyone came looking."
"How do you know they’re surviving it?" Lily asked.
"Because I check," John said simply. "Quietly. From a distance they can’t feel. Nine people, alive, and getting stronger faster than most anyone I’ve ever pointed at that place." He met Almond’s eyes squarely. "You could go pull them out today. You have the power for it."
Almond was quiet for a long moment.
"No," he said finally. "They didn’t destroy their decks because they wanted rescuing. They did it because they wanted the same chance we had." He looked at Lily, then Rudra, then Ainen, and found the same understanding waiting in all three. "We let them earn it. The same way we did."
John’s smile came slowly, and genuinely pleased. "I hoped you’d say that."
"Doesn’t mean I have to like it," Rudra added.
"No," John agreed. "It doesn’t."
---
The subject changed before the worry could settle in properly, because John had come for two reasons, and he’d only led with the gentler one.
"There’s a summons," he said. "For every kingdom leader in the upper layer. The Top Six have called a gathering at the Reaching Heaven Realm, and Ananta Regalon’s name is on the list now. Yours to answer, if you want it."
"We want it," Almond said, without needing to check with the others first.
The Realm did not so much appear as arrive, folding open around all four of them in the space between one breath and the next, and the pocket world fell away behind them into gold-edged light.
They stood a moment later in a garden that made the Gilded Horizon look modest by comparison, terraces of white stone rising in slow spirals toward a sky with no visible ceiling, flowers blooming in colors none of them had names for, fountains running with water that glowed faint silver even in daylight.
Hundreds of figures moved through it already, kingdom leaders and their retinues gathered in loose clusters across every terrace, the low hum of a thousand quiet conversations filling air that smelled, impossibly, of rain that hadn’t fallen yet.
"Big turnout," Ainen said, taking it in.
"Every kingdom that’s climbed this far answers a Top Six summons," John said. "Nobody skips this one."
---
John walked them through the crowd with the easy familiarity of a man who had outlived most of the politics currently playing out around him, and along the way he pointed out faces the way another man might point out landmarks.
"That one," he said, nodding toward a tall figure in pale armor holding court near the central fountain, "is Kael Vantress. Heir to Skytheum, first-ranked of the Six. Undefeated in every tournament he’s entered since he manifested his third deck. People who’ve fought him don’t talk about it much afterward."
"Encouraging," Lily said dryly.
"That one," John continued, nodding toward a woman standing alone near the garden’s edge, watching everything and speaking to no one, "doesn’t belong to any kingdom at all. Wandering cultivator. No name anyone’s confirmed, no banner, no allegiance. She’s climbed higher solo than most kingdoms manage with an army behind them."
"How high?" Rudra asked.
"High enough that the Six invite her personally, every time," John said. "Make of that what you will."
He nodded toward a cluster near the Aurelian banners, familiar gold and white among the crowd. "And there’s at least one face in that group who remembers exactly which kingdom sent them a very good recommendation for a floating garden resort."
Ainen grinned despite himself. "We should say hello."
"Later," Almond said. "The Six are arriving."
---
The garden’s low hum died all at once as six figures descended together from the open sky, each one settling onto a raised dais at the terrace’s highest point, and even from a distance the weight of them pressed against every mind in the crowd like a held breath.
The Skytheum Empress came first, pale armor catching light that seemed to bend toward her rather than simply fall. The Voidmere Sovereign followed, a presence more absence than shape, edges blurring wherever he stood too still. The Aurelian Emperor, golden and unhurried, the same easy authority John’s earlier recommendation had borrowed weight from. The Emberfall Warlord, restless heat shimmering off him even at rest. The Duskspire Matriarch, quiet and watchful. The Frosthold King, still and pale as the ice his empire was named for.
The Skytheum Empress spoke first, and her voice carried without effort to every terrace at once.
"You already know why you’re here," she said. "You climbed this layer because something past it is worth reaching. Tier-100. The ceiling of this whole plane, and the door to whatever waits above it."
"None of us have touched it yet," the Aurelian Emperor added. "Not the Six, not anyone standing in this garden. We sit at the edge of Tier-60, and the road from there has broken stronger kingdoms than most of yours have ever fielded."
"Which is why we watch," the Duskspire Matriarch said. "Who climbs. Who falls. Who’s worth lending a hand to, and who’s worth learning from instead."
The Skytheum Empress’s gaze swept the crowd, and settled, for a moment, on four familiar faces near the garden’s center.
"Ananta Regalon," she said. "New to this layer. Already climbed from three hundred and forty-first to one hundred and eighty-third in a single war event, and cleared a permanent-death Hell-Mode Quest outright the week after. That’s not luck. The Six have taken notice."
A ripple of attention moved through the crowd, curious and assessing, and Almond felt every bit of it without flinching under it.
"Noted," he said quietly, to no one but his own family. "Let’s make sure it stays earned."
---
The meeting proper lasted the better part of an hour, names and numbers and quiet politics moving through the garden like weather, and it ended the way the Frosthold King finally made plain.
"Words are cheap this high up," he said. "We want to see combat power, not hear about it. So we’re hosting a tournament. Every kingdom leader in attendance, one bracket, one winner per group."
"Six groups," the Emberfall Warlord said. "One overseen by each of us. Seven hundred and fifty-eight names on today’s roster, split as close to even as six groups allow."
"One on one," the Voidmere Sovereign said, voice like something spoken from underwater. "Win, and you climb a bracket. Lose, and you’re done. Simple rules for a question that isn’t simple at all."
"And the reward," the Aurelian Emperor said, "isn’t just pride. Whoever proves the strongest in this tournament earns real authority on this layer. A hand in running its monthly events. A say in how kingdoms like yours are tested going forward." His eyes found the Regalon banner again, briefly. "Worth fighting for, I’d think."
"Brackets open in one hour," the Skytheum Empress said, and the Six rose together, and the garden’s held breath finally let go into a thousand separate conversations at once.
---
The arena that unfolded an hour later had no visible edges, six enormous floating rings hanging in open sky, each one bearing the sigil of the Empire that oversaw it, and Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen found their names scattered across three different rings when the brackets finally lit.
The first fights began without ceremony.
On the Skytheum ring, Kael Vantress ended his opening match in a single unhurried strike, his opponent’s blade shattering before it ever completed its swing, and the crowd’s murmur afterward carried more relief than surprise. Nobody had expected otherwise.
On the Voidmere ring, the wandering cultivator John had pointed out fought without a single visible weapon, her opponent simply losing, piece by piece, whatever advantage he’d walked in with, until he had nothing left to fight with at all.
Almond’s own match came on the Aurelian ring, and his opponent arrived with a deck built around summoned constructs, a small army of stone-limbed guardians rising at his call.
"Interesting deck," Almond said, reading the constructs the way he read everything. "Wrong opponent to test it on."
He didn’t bother fighting the guardians one at a time. He read the essence binding them together, found the single command-thread running through every construct at once, and cut it with one clean strike before the fight had properly started. The guardians dropped where they stood, and his opponent, staring at a deck gone suddenly silent, didn’t need to be told the match was over.
"Round one," Almond said, and moved to find the others.
Lily’s match, on the same ring an hour later, ended almost as quickly. Her opponent leaned hard into overwhelming sound, a deck built to disorient through sheer noise, and Lily let him build toward a crescendo she had no intention of letting land.
"Wrong tool," she said, whip catching the sound at its peak and unmaking it whole, silence swallowing his whole deck’s foundation in a single strike. He hadn’t built a backup plan for an opponent who simply erased his advantage outright.
Rudra fought on the Emberfall ring, matched against a fellow tactician whose deck read the battlefield the way his own once had, and the two of them traded careful, patient advances for longer than either expected before Rudra finally read one hesitation too many and closed the gap for good, the Unmoved Current locking his opponent’s next move a half second before it could matter.
"Good instincts," Rudra told him afterward, offering a hand up. "Not quite good enough today."
Ainen’s match, back on the Aurelian ring, drew the loudest laugh from the surrounding crowd, an opponent who opened with open scorn for a deck built around food.
"You cook," the man said, sneering. "I fight."
"You’ll learn the difference is smaller than you think," Ainen said, and proved it within three exchanges, the Grand Table finding the one true weakness in every weapon the man carried and quietly, thoroughly dissolving his confidence along with his blade’s edge.
Four names climbed their brackets before the day’s first round had even finished, and across six floating rings, seven hundred and fifty-eight fighters found out, one match at a time, exactly how far this layer still had to climb before anyone touched Tier-100 at all.