Lukas dusted himself off and slowly straightened, taking in his surroundings for the first ti since crashing into the ground.
The place made his skin crawl.....
It reminded him of the vitality-draining cave where he had inherited the Death God’s legacy.
The resemblance wasn’t visual. The trees were different. The terrain was different. Yet the feeling was unmistakable.
The sa oppressive stillness hung over everything like a suffocating veil. The sa unnatural pressure lingered in the air, subtle enough to escape notice at first glance but impossible to ignore once felt. Even breathing seed wrong here. Every inhale carried a faint resistance, as though the atmosphere itself objected to the presence of living things.
Lukas quietly filed the observation away.
Then he noticed sothing else.
A sensation was spreading through his body so subtly that he almost overlooked it. Warm. Gentle. Comforting.
Like sunlight filtering through layers of cloth.
Almost pleasant.
Which imdiately made it suspicious.
His focus turned inward.
His eyes narrowed.
The fusion of his two stars was moving.
That alone should have been impossible.
After everything he had forced himself through, the process should have been unstable. At best, it should have slowed to a crawl. At worst, it should have stalled entirely.
Instead, it flowed.
The massive celestial structures within him rotated with unusual harmony, their convergence advancing steadily without the familiar resistance that had plagued him from the beginning. Sothing in this place was influencing it. Guiding it.
Encouraging it.
The sensation felt disturbingly similar to a hidden hand pressing against his back, pushing him forward along a path he hadn’t chosen and didn’t understand.
The progress wasn’t dramatic.
It was worse.
It was deliberate.
Lukas stared for several seconds before forcibly tearing his attention away.
The last thing he needed was to stand in the middle of an unknown realm and beco fascinated by sothing that was probably trying to kill him.
Because sothing was undeniably wrong with this forest.
Now that he was paying attention, he could feel it.
The silence.
Not the ordinary silence of an untouched woodland.
This silence felt intentional.
Absolute.
They were standing in one of the most dangerous regions of the Mysterious Forest. The area should have been alive with sound. Distant roars from monsters fighting over territory. The occasional shockwave from awakeners battling for survival. The countless subtle noises that existed in any wilderness where predators and prey constantly struggled against one another.
Instead—
Nothing.
Not a single cry.
Not a single rustle.
Even the wind seed reluctant to move.
The forest stood frozen beneath a blanket of impossible stillness.
It felt less like silence and more like anticipation.
Like the held breath before sothing enormous opened its eyes.
"I can’t circulate my star energy."
The voice ca from behind him.
Low.
Controlled.
Yet edged with tension.
Lukas turned.
The White Knight Guild Master’s hawk-sharp eyes were fixed on him.
The killing intent lurking within her gaze hadn’t disappeared completely. She still hadn’t decided whether he was a threat, and uncertainty in a woman like her tended to resolve itself through violence.
But sothing more imdiate had forced its way to the forefront.
Concern.
No.
Alarm.
"Sothing is wrong," she said. "I can’t connect to the constellations either."
Her gaze sharpened further.
"Answer ."
The pressure behind those words was almost physical.
"Can you feel the star energy in the surrounding area?"
Lukas opened his mouth.
Then stopped.
For the first ti since arriving, he realized he genuinely didn’t know how to answer.
He reached outward with his senses.
And found it imdiately.
The star energy was still there.
It hadn’t vanished.
It simply wasn’t moving.
The energy perating the forest hung suspended around him like a river frozen in the middle of its flow. Countless currents that should have been circulating through the environnt sat perfectly still, every strand locked in place by an invisible force. Not weakened. Not dispersed.
Stopped.
Lukas focused harder.
Nothing.
No fluctuations.
No drift.
No movent whatsoever.
It was as though soone had reached into reality itself and pressed pause.
So kind of force is suppressing its movent.
Under normal circumstances, he would have filed the observation away as another problem and moved on.
These were not normal circumstances.
Since awakening his ice affinity, his perception had changed. Certain phenona resonated with him differently now. He could recognize the subtle signatures of freezing and stillness in ways he never could before.
And whatever was holding the star energy in place carried that sa feeling.
Cold.
Absolute.
Patient.
Not the cold of winter.
Not the cold of ice.
Sothing deeper.
The cold of a glacier burying a mountain.
The cold of a star that had long since died.
The cold of ti itself standing still.
Lukas was still turning the realization over when the change inside him beca impossible to ignore.
His eyes widened slightly.
It’s accelerating.
This ti he saw the connection imdiately.
The frozen star energy wasn’t rely restricting awakeners.
It had created a perfect environnt for fusion.
Normally, ambient star energy constantly interacted with the stars inside his body. The interference was minor, but it never fully stopped. Tiny disturbances accumulated over ti, slowing the process.
Here, there was none of that.
The surrounding energy had beco completely inert.
Silent.
Still.
Undisturbed.
And within that unnatural calm, his two stars were rging faster than they ever had before.
Much faster.
At this rate...
His heart skipped a beat.
It wouldn’t take a year.
It might not even take close to that.
Lukas maintained a perfectly neutral expression through an act of will that deserved recognition.
The alternative involved making a noise he would never recover from.
Then the excitent faded.
Sothing colder replaced it.
Fear.
He couldn’t circulate star energy.
Couldn’t access most of his abilities.
Couldn’t summon Tommy.
If sothing attacked them now, a monster, an awakener, anything powerful enough to survive in this place, he had very few options available.
His greatest opportunity and his greatest vulnerability had arrived simultaneously.
The only thing standing between him and a catastrophically bad day was the hope that the fusion would finish before sothing found them.
Not exactly reassuring.
Still.
Hope was the only resource available.
So he held onto it and kept his face expressionless.
Across the clearing, the White Knight Guild Master had reached her own conclusions.
Her inability to circulate star energy was deeply concerning.
Not crippling.
Concerning.
There was a difference.
She was a full-fledged bloodline awakener.
That title wasn’t earned through cultivated power alone.
Her body remained monstrously strong.
Her instincts remained razor sharp.
Even stripped of half her arsenal, she was still dangerous enough to make most awakeners reconsider their life choices.
She turned toward the surrounding forest.
Her eyes swept across the treeline.
Searching.
Calculating.
Cataloguing every potential threat.
Which was why she completely failed to notice the golden chest that casually stepped out of Lukas’s shadow.
It erged without fanfare.
One mont there was only a shadow.
The next, there was a chest.
A small golden chest waddled into the clearing on stubby little legs with the relaxed confidence of sothing that had visited before and approved of the local accommodations.
At so point, a pair of eyes and a mouth had appeared on its surface.
The eyes blinked slowly.
The mouth hung slightly open.
Its expression settled sowhere between mild curiosity and soone discovering an unexpected furniture arrangent.
The chest looked at Lukas.
Then at the frozen forest.
Then back at Lukas.
It seed genuinely confused.
The Guild Master finally glanced over.
Her eyes landed on the chest.
For perhaps half a second, her brain refused to process what it was seeing.
Then it succeeded.
Her composure detonated.
She was on her feet before the thought fully ford, moving so abruptly that even Lukas would have been impressed.
"What-"
She pointed.
"What is that?!"
The sharp, controlled voice she used on battlefields had vanished entirely.
"What do you an what is that?" Lukas said instinctively.
The Guild Master rounded on him.
"It ca out of your shadow!"
"That’s not the important part!"
"How is that not the important part?!"
The chest watched the exchange with growing interest.
"Monster! Where did it co from?! How did it just appear?!"
Lukas turned toward the source of the disturbance.
And found himself staring directly into two blinking eyes.
The golden chest stared back.
Half puzzled.
Half completely unconcerned.
As though appearing from shadows in impossible locations was perfectly normal behavior.
The two of them regarded one another in silence.
Neither seed particularly eager to explain themselves.
For several long seconds, nothing happened.
Then the chest blinked again.
Lukas blinked back.
The chest appeared satisfied by this exchange.
Then suddenly rembered sothing, he pointed his finger at the chest and yelled, "Its you!! What are you doing here..?"
This ti Lukas was genuinely horrified, how did this creepy chest suddenly walk out, more so in this situation.
Although the chest looked completely harmless, but he had known long ago it was anything but harmless, every ti he would forget about the chest existence, to be honest even this ti, he had completely forgotten about it.
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