After the destruction of the Steelhearts in Norwinter, Sayuri decided to step down as Matron, under the excuse of focusing on her cultivation.
Instead of the Head of the organization, she assud the role of Grand Ancestor.
The new Matron, her oldest disciple, would have so autonomy while still answering to her.
So basically, she decided to dump the workload on her oldest disciple and enjoy so nice vacation in Eversnow, but not before making Lucille the Great Elder responsible for Norwinter.
This way, there would still be ten Great Elders, a Matron, and now a Grand Ancestor forming the ranks of power in the Purple Pavilion.
As for who would assu the position of Mistress in Eversnow, it was obviously Aya.
Once Sayuri returned to the city, her first priority was to visit Sokram.
Once she saw him in a coma, like Lucy, she was unable to leave.
Thanks to the daily sun and moonlight baths, Hannah’s and Moira’s consistent treatnt, and every elixir they fed him, his body was fully recovered.
But he remained in a deep coma as Fate predicted.
Life, as always, waits for no one.
Two weeks later, Sokram's team had to return to work, even without their Captain.
The won in Sokram’s family continued, if not more avidly now, working in their cultivation, steadily increasing their power.
Leona and Hannah took it upon themselves to offer guidance to the families present in the eting.
But those with cultivation of Flawless and above would have to wait for Sokram to wake up from his coma to aid in converting their cores or bargain with the Armfrosts.
Not that Hannah couldn’t help them, she rely didn’t want to.
The only ones she decided to aid in converting their cores were Kamus and Kasine.
Still, she was extra careful, as she had only learned it from watching Sokram work and the reading materials he shared.
But it was a slow process.
By the ti Sokram was in a coma for a month, they had only reached fifty percent of the conversion, while Lymus had completed it.
As ti passed, Sokram’s vital signs reached top condition, and his body was also completely recovered from the burnt marks, with not a single scar left on it.
Moira was optimistic that he could wake up at any given mont.
As for Sokram, he didn’t get bored either.
A month had been enough for him to rediscover a lot of knowledge within his soul realm.
After finally finishing the fifth book in his vast, inner library, he closed the to. The saying, a warm whisper in his mind, resurfaced: ‘The mind can fail, but the soul never forgets.’
Sothing one of his main wives would repeat often.
‘Five soul books in close to fourteen years. It’s too much ti for so little progress, isn't it? But what can I do if I still have most of my ntal potential locked, and with no improvents to my bloodline?’
Sokram had decided that, in one or two years, he would have enough resources and capital to start working toward Ascension and improving his bloodline.
Satisfied with what he relearned, he reached out to his body to see if he could force it to wake up.
Yet he saw that he still needed at least another month, so he decided to start the sixth soul book instead.
That month passed like a breeze.
The mood in the city returned to normalcy despite so people still struggling with grief, and the rumors about Sokram and his family also died down.
But many remained worried about their young hero.
Even so family heads ca to visit the Dracnakrid estate to check on his condition; among those, the most frequent visitors were Kanami and Liaranna.
Kamus and Kasine beca daily visitors as Hannah was helping them with converting their Cores.
Having reached an eighth of the process, it beca even slower as Hannah insisted on proceeding carefully.
Among the other founding and influential families, many youths had already started cultivating either Spirit Magic, Titan Force, or Vital Magic.
Hilda and the others also progressed steadily, with Hilda and Moira having entered the Flawless level.
Astrid, too, reached the first tiers of the Reformation.
Leona, Brunhild, and Margiory reached Tier 10 of the Flawless level as well. They began preparing to enter the Exalted level, but insisted on waiting for Sokram to wake up first.
Savannah, Lucy, and Amber surprised the others the most, having jumped to Tier 10.
They also wanted to wait for Sokram, especially Lucy and Amber, who wanted to know how to change their classes during their Level of Existence Advancent.
The girls continued to take turns cleaning Sokram’s body, helping him exercise so his muscles would not atrophy.
But it was right on the day they were the busiest that he finally woke up.
That day, neither Amber, Lucy, nor Savannah was by his side as Sokram’s team was sent out on a mission.
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Hilda, Miralyn, and Astrid each had gone out to hunt along their employed hunting teams.
Hannah, this ti, had gone to the palace for a eting with Brunhild and Margiory.
Moira, after her morning check on Sokram, left right after.
Sayuri had gone to visit Lucille and Aya in the Pavilion.
Alain went back to training Amber’s parents.
Sokram wasn’t left entirely alone, as many guards were surrounding their estate.
But no one from his family was around when he woke up.
The first thing Sokram saw when he opened his eyes was a screen with a short and simple ssage:
[Second Mind Lock lifted, extra caution advised.]
With a thought, Sokram closed the screen and looked around the room, a little disappointed that he didn’t see anyone there.
‘I guess they are getting tired of being knocked unconscious, haha.’ Sokram chuckled to himself as he looked around his room and didn’t see anyone there.
Extending his sensory field, he was surprised to see that it increased from a five-ter radius to twenty.
But he also noticed that, besides the distracted guards on the roof, there was no one else ho.
Nodding approvingly, he first checked the condition of his Chaos Energy Core. He realized his Tier had regressed to 9, but it was sothing he could recover quite quickly.
What bothered him the most was his appearance.
He was much skinnier.
Hannah had obviously been feeding him only restorative and nutritive pills with hydration serums.
But there weren’t enough calories in those for his body to maintain its weight.
Getting up, he stretched his body, feeling the strain of his coma leaving as his bloodline's gifts worked in his favor, before moving to the mirror on the wall.
Standing before the mirror, Sokram was surprised by his reflection.
He was leaner, yes, but also taller.
His fra now stretched to nearly 1.8 ters, the added height making the mirror feel almost unfamiliar.
The boyish roundness of his face was gone, replaced by sharper angles and a length he hadn’t possessed before.
Despite the weight loss, his appearance brought a smile to his face, but also reminded him of the importance of a good night's sleep from ti to ti.
"Nice..." he murmured, a smile spreading across his face as he tested his voice.
It was deeper, rougher, with a resonant quality that vibrated in his chest.
It was the sound of a man, not a boy; the mory of that voice had been slumbering, yet he instantly recognized it as his own.
‘I truly need to find another Golden Ancient before entering the Realm of the kings…’ Sokram thought to himself while grinning happily.
He caressed his face, feeling the thin stubble that had grown.
‘Puberty is going to be quite troubleso, especially with so many beautiful won around, sigh…’
Then he clapped his belly and muscles, grinning and trying to get used to his voice that varied between high and low as it was still stabilizing.
Sokram spoke to himself in a hushed tone, “Yep, got to eat to bulk from now on, Figos better have so boars in stock, haha.”
After checking himself for long enough, Sokram went to the bathroom.
He needed to cut his hair and shave, which Magi helped a lot.
This ti, he wasn’t happy with just shaving the sides of his head and shaved his head all around, leaving a subtle fade on the sides and back.
Sokram braided the long hair on top into various thin locks and tied those locks together in a low tail.
After that long, hot bath, Sokram pulled on so loose robes.
The clean, fresh fabric had a luxurious feeling against his skin.
The scent of soap and clean linen replaced the faint, stale sll of a sickbed, and he let out a sigh of pure contentnt.
‘After two months in bed, slling nice, and feeling neat and clean, it is so good.’
The first thing he did was check the magic food storage to see what was there, and he sensed the boars' ribs that Hilda had left there roasted and ready to heat.
The savory, smoke-laced scent of roasted boar ribs clawed at his empty stomach until it rumbled violently in protest with pure unadulterated hunger.
A tear of gratitude almost escaped his eyes.
After stuffing himself with ribs and buns, Sokram, wrapped in the muffling hush of a sound isolation spell and the invisible veil of a light isolation spell, slipped away without a sound, each step brushing snow that crunched faintly before his spell swallowed the noise.
Looking back at the guards, whose attention had drifted, a naughty grin ford on his lips, knowing that this little escape would serve as a good lesson for them.
Sokram went straight back to his lab, which, surprisingly, was just as he had left it when the attack started.
The lab still carried the faint sll of herbs and acrid minerals, undercut by the sharp tang of blood ink he had used to cast that runic spell on his body.
Sokram sat on a chair and scratched his chin thoughtfully before digging into work.
After reading through the sixth soul book, he decided to modify his plans slightly.
Instead of creating a pill for decompressing the Core to speed up one’s cultivation, so it would work alongside the pill he had concocted to help Kamus and Kasine.
He decided to go further by creating sothing that could both speed up cultivation and help with Core compression for Level of Existence Advancent.
He knew of the perfect recipe, sothing he had discovered eons ago, when still struggling with the bottlenecks caused by Chaos Energy Cultivation once soone reached Transcendence.
Only after reading through the end of the sixth soul book did he rember it.
It was sothing he called the Nexus Core Pill.
The reason he nad the pill as such was because of what it did to soone’s Core when consud.
First, it would cause the Core to break apart, completely liquefying the energy within it, making it possible for the arterial veins to carry that liquid energy mixed in the user’s blood, with no risks of soone dying or losing their Tiers of cultivation.
Second, it would open every channel of energy absorption in the user’s body, increasing the energy absorption several tis. Soone who would take ten years to advance from one Level of Existence to the next would only need a few days using this pill.
Third, the pill would also aid the bodies of its users to achieve a higher level of energy purification.
And fourth, once the user reaches the point of advancent to a new Level of Existence, the pill will have a greater effect than the one he used on Kasine and Kamus, offering an even greater compression of the Energy Core for the next level.
These four effects converge into a single pill; thus, the na Sokram gave to it is Nexus Core Pill.
Sokram created the pill for himself in his past tiline, with the hopes that it would free him from the Chaotic Stagnation that haunted him for nearly five thousand years in the Transcendental Zone.
The effects worked perfectly all the way to Paragon level, and Sokram was sure it could even push soone to the Mythical level.
But before he could test it, he discovered Soul Force, which rendered that pill useless because of how different Soul Force cultivation was.
So, what he was about to discover was a Transcendental-level pill.
One that he could easily sell for thousands of gold.
But not before fortifying his family, his city, and maybe even his country.
While Sokram put himself to work, the guards of the Androny family were in disarray.
The young Patriarch had disappeared from right under their noses.
Their first reaction was to organize search parties among their companions on duty.
But when that failed, they called all the available guards in Eversnow.
The growing panic within the Androny family estate was palpable.
The sound of shouting guards and the urgent echoes of communication crystals in the wind drew the attention of the city guards.
The guards moved in frantic bursts.
Armor plates clinking, the sounds of heavy leather boots, and the sharp bark of orders echoed the frantic search for the missing Patriarch.
Soon, every guard in the city heard that Sokram had disappeared, and they couldn’t avoid informing the Matriarch, who was still in a closed-door eting with the other family heads.
When they heard of Sokram’s going missing, their first reaction was to activate the tracking spell on his life stone, which Sokram purposefully left on his bed headboard.
Of course, Sokram never intended for things to go so far, but things only stopped escalating when Kamus and Kasine tracked his scent back to his lab.
Sokram was just about to mix the first trial vial for his new pill, the faint sll of herbs and alchemical reagents filling the air, when the lab door burst wide open.
Kamus, followed by four stunning, youthful, and worried grandmothers, saw Sokram looking at them like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Hi, haha, I’m... awake? Haha.” Sokram’s voice sounded all over the place as he embarrassedly scratched the back of his head and avoided their gazes.
Sokram braced himself for a lecture, but the scolding never ca. Instead, the worried frowns on the faces of his grandmothers softened, their eyes welling up with tears of relief.
A silent gasp escaped one of them as they saw him, and then the tears started to flow freely.
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