Read Novel Full Chapter 785: Return
Chapter 785: Return
One of Pymon’s brood came for them at dawn, a storm-eagle smaller than the true Sovereign but still vast enough to blot out the whole bruised sky of the Bloodroot Wilds, and landed at the edge of the scarred plain with a gentleness that seemed almost comically careful for something that size.
"The true Pymon sends his congratulations," the eagle said, voice carrying the same regal warmth every bird in that domain seemed to share. "Along with his apologies for not coming himself. He’s currently occupied being smug about something else entirely, and honestly, so am I, a little. It’s a family trait."
"That tracks," Julian said, and the laugh that went through the group was the first easy one any of them had managed in weeks.
They climbed onto the great eagle’s back, nine tired, victorious people settling into feathers that felt more like solid ground than any bird’s back had a right to, and the Bloodroot Wilds fell away beneath them in a single long, rising breath.
---
The pocket world under the Virion Iridant Tree looked exactly the same as they’d left it, and somehow entirely different, the way home always did after you came back changed.
Silvester spotted them first, dropping the training blade he’d been sparring with and shouting loud enough that half the gathering ground turned at once.
"They’re back!"
What followed was not quiet. Hiroshi reached them next, then Saffa and Clovelle, then Fraisea, then Gopu landing hard enough to shake dust off the nearest trees, and Big D came last, the way he always did, letting the crowd part for him rather than pushing through it.
He looked at all nine of them for a long moment, reading the changes the way only someone who’d watched them grow from nothing could.
"Five decks," he said finally, gruff and plain. "All of you. I can feel it standing this close."
"All of us," Natalia confirmed, and something in her voice cracked just slightly with how good it felt to say.
Big D pulled her into a rough, one-armed embrace that said more than any speech could have, and let go before it could get sentimental enough to embarrass either of them.
"Rest," he said. "Eat something that isn’t monster meat. Then tell us everything."
---
They ate, and they told most of it, and the gathering ground listened with the particular quiet a family used when it understood it was hearing something that had genuinely cost someone.
Aryan, predictably, broke the reverent mood first. "So you’re all telling me," he said, "that the secret to unlocking real power was just being nicer to a several-mile-wide wound in the ground."
"More or less," Kayla said, and didn’t rise to the bait even a little.
Natalia looked around the crowded ground, counting faces out of old habit, and found four missing that should have been there.
"Where’s Almond?" she asked. "Lily, Rudra, Ainen. I don’t feel any of them close."
Big D’s mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
"Getting stronger," he said. "Somewhere else. John found them a cave that rebuilds a deck instead of just handing out a new one. Tear one down, walk it back through its own truth, build something sharper in its place."
"Sounds familiar," Marcus said dryly.
"They already did their first rounds," Big D said. "Word is they’re back in there now, going for seconds."
Natalia felt something steady and warm settle in her chest at that, the particular satisfaction of knowing the people who’d inspired all of this hadn’t stopped climbing either.
"Then we’d better catch up," she said. "Before they get too far ahead again."
---
The dark took Almond the same quiet way it always did, and when it let him see again, he stood once more in the small grey room, four tiles glowing where five had once hung.
[Choose one deck to rebuild. This process cannot be reversed.]
Ark of Fabricating Oblivion. Vault of the Sovereign Keymaker. Crucible of the Unmaking Flame. Choir of the Severed Sovereigns.
He read them over slowly this time, without the urgency his first rebuild had carried. No fresh loss was pushing him toward an answer. This time the choice was about what deserved to become something the world hadn’t seen yet.
His eyes settled on Ark of Fabricating Oblivion, a deck he’d built early and barely understood even now, built around a question he’d never fully answered. What happened to a thing’s essence once he unmade it completely, rather than simply reading it?
He’d always stopped short of finding out.
"Ark," he said, and touched the tile.
[Ark of Fabricating Oblivion: erased.]
The tile didn’t crumble to dust the way the others had. It simply stopped existing, all at once, and for a moment Almond felt the strange vertigo of a question with no answer left to interrupt it.
"Let’s actually find out this time," he said to the empty space where the tile had been.
---
[Choose a prefix.]
Void— / Null— / Entropy— / Paradox— / Hollow—
He read each one slowly. Nothing here carried an element, a shape, a familiar comfort. That felt correct. This deck had never been about reading what already existed. It had always been about the space left over once something stopped.
He chose Void—.
[Choose a suffix.]
—forge / —weave / —break / —seed / —cipher
Seed, he thought. Not an ending. A beginning that happened to require an ending first.
He chose —seed.
[Enter one word of your own.]
The blank space opened, and Almond thought of every truth he’d ever read out of something, and the one question reading had never once let him ask.
What could he build if the truth itself became raw material?
He wrote: Genesis.
[Deck seed accepted: Voidseed + Genesis]
[Entering first trial.]
---
The grey room dissolved into something that wasn’t quite a place at all, edges fraying where they met, matter flickering between existing and not with no particular pattern to it.
[Stage 1: The Fraying Expanse]
Half-erased horrors drifted through the wreckage of their own uncertain shapes, and Almond fought them with nothing but instinct, since the deck built to answer a question this large no longer existed yet to help him.
[Boss: The Nullwright]
It didn’t attack so much as unravel things near it, walls and ground and the very air losing their certainty the longer it lingered, and Almond understood, fighting it, that this cave intended to teach him the one skill his old deck had never actually possessed.
Not reading. Unmaking, on purpose, and building something new from what was left behind.
He reached for that unmaking for the first time, tore a piece of the Nullwright’s own unraveling power directly out of it, and felt it settle into his open hand as something between a weapon and a question.
He struck with it, and the Nullwright came apart into the same uncertain nothing it had spent the whole fight spreading.
[Stage cleared. Choose one card.]