The training session had just ended.
Leah was brushing dust from her mane,
While the five hatchlings curled at her feet, exhausted from the morning’s drills. The erald one had fallen asleep mid-yawn, her small jaws still open. The shadow one had lted into a patch of darkness beneath a stone bench, only his tail visible. The lightning one’s scales still sparked occasionally in her sleep, tiny arcs jumping between her siblings, who had learned to ignore them.
Yuki and Uru sat at the edge of the floating island, watching the sun climb over Drak’thar’s towers. Uru’s eyes were distant, still processing whatever the Tower of Royals had shown her.
Odessa was still fussing over Azure. The newly evolved Greater Dragonkin stood patiently while her mistress adjusted the ceremonial robe they’d found to cover her. The robe was too small in so places and too large in others, but Azure didn’t seem to mind. She kept running her fingers through her own hair, marveling at the sensation.
"The fabric is soft..." she said, her voice still that ethereal ocean-sound. "..I never knew softness could feel this good with fingers."
Odessa’s eyes glistened. "You’ll get used to it."
Then just at that mont, the world shuddered.
Not physically. The stone beneath them didn’t crack. The floating island didn’t tilt. But sothing deeper, sothing woven into the fabric of reality itself trembled. Every awakened being on the planet felt it simultaneously.
In Nexus Pri, hunters paused mid-stride within dungeons, their hands frozen on weapon hilts. In Vashari, beastfolk warriors looked up from their als, ears twitching, tails rigid. In the elven forests, mages stopped chanting mid-word, their spells dissipating into harmless light. In Khazad-Vorn, dwarven engineers dropped their tools, the clang of tal against stone echoing through silent halls.
A ssage appeared in every vision.
[Lesser world #2678 – Ready for Harvest]
The words were cold. Clinical. A notification from a system that didn’t care about the lives it was addressing.
Yuki stared at the panel. Her hand moved to her katana instinctively. "What...is this?"
Odessa’s hands stopped adjusting Azure’s robe. "What the hell?!"
Leah’s transformation flickered, not fully, but enough that her claws extended, her fangs lengthened. "A new threat?"
The hatchlings stirred, sensing the tension. The lightning one’s scales sparked violently, waking the others. The ice one froze a patch of stone beneath him, confused.
Azure looked at the ssage, then at Owen. Her crystalline eyes narrowed. "My King. This feels... wrong."
Before anyone could answer, Owen’s system blazed to life with an urgent red light.
The notifications appeared in rapid succession, each one more alarming than the last.
Ding-!
[External connection detected!]
[Harvest connection – Broken]
[Cosmic Disturbance Detected]
Pzzz- Pzzz-!
[System Unable to Compute Energy Readings!]
[System damaged! System damaged!]
[External force Attempting to bypass Restriction!]
Owen felt it imdiately, sothing pressing against the walls of his consciousness. Not attacking. Not forcing. Simply... probing. Like a gardener checking the ripeness of fruit, pressing a thumb against the skin to see if it yields.
He pushed back, His Sovereignty of the Dragon King flared, gold light bleeding from his scales.
[External force successfully repelled]
[System damaged! System damaged!]
[Attempting to repair...]
[Attempting to repair...]
[Attempting to repair...]
The crimson light flickered, stabilized, then shifted to a deep gold, the color of his bloodline, his legacy, his crown.
[System force Update initiated! In progress...]
The ssage hung there, pulsing, incomplete. A progress bar appeared beneath it, frozen at zero percent.
---
Every eye in the arena turned to Owen.
His scales had darkened to the color of a starless void. His golden eyes were fixed on sothing none of them could see—a point in the distance that might have been the sky, or might have been sothing far beyond it. The pressure radiating from him was imnse, not intentional, just the natural byproduct of a Dragon King preparing for combat.
"Owen..." Yuki stepped forward, her hand reaching for his arm. "...What’s happening?"
He didn’t answer. His jaw was tight. His fists balled up with his feet digging grooves into the ground that stead with residual heat.
"Owen!"
He blinked. Looked at her. For a mont, his eyes held uncertainty.
"I don’t know," he said. "But I’m going to find out."
He raised his hand and space folded. A rift tore open in front of him, a controlled doorway to lead outside Drak’thar.
Then he stepped through and was gone.
---
The sky above Nexus Pri was clear.
Owen erged from the rift a thousand ters above the capital, his adult dragon form catching the morning light. Below, the city stretched across the plains, its sky scrappers and buildings gleaming, its streets busy with the rhythms of daily life, cars swishing past the road, trains etc.
No one looked up. No one knew.
He spread his mana sense.
It expanded outward like ripples in a pond—across the city first, brushing against the signatures of thousands of hunters, civilians. Then across the region, touching the farms and villages that surrounded Nexus Pri. Then across the continents.
And beneath it all, beneath the familiar rhythms of his world, he felt sothing else.
A presence.
It was vast. Ancient. Alien in a way that had nothing to do with demons or celestials or anything he had ever encountered. Its signature didn’t seem to belong to this world, didn’t belong to any world that Owen knew. It felt older than the mountains, older than the seas, older than the dragons themselves.
And it watched him.
Observed him.
Owen pushed his mana sense further—reaching for the edges of the atmosphere, for the darkness beyond the land, for the source of that ancient gaze.
Then the presence withdrew.
The pressure that had been building behind Owen’s consciousness eased, and the warning ssage vanished from every system across the world.
Hunters blinked, confused. Beastfolk shook their heads. Elves resud their chanting, dwarves picked up their tools.
But sothing remained.
A fragnt of residue energy floated in the air a hundred ters from Owen. It was faint, but it pulsed with a light that seed older than the stars. Foreign energy, the sa foreign elent that had attempted to penetrate his system and strangely familiar to the new pulse of energy within his Sovereignties.
Owen approached this carefully. His Magic Affinity activated, reaching out to read the residue energy’s structure, its origin, its purpose.
Then an image invaded his mind, the vision ca without warning.
He stood in a garden. Not a garden of flowers or trees, no. This was a garden of worlds. Planets floated like fruit on invisible vines, their surfaces teeming with life. So were lush, covered in oceans and forests. Others were barren, their continents cracked and dry. A few were burning, their atmospheres on fire.
A figure moved among them.
Tall. Robed. Featureless. It walked between the planets as if stepping across stones in a stream. In one hand, it carried seeds—small, glowing, alive. In the other, a scythe that glead with a threatening light.
It planted seeds in empty orbits. Watered them with starlight. Watched them grow. Then devoured them whole when they ripened.
Owen gasped. His lungs burned. He hadn’t realized he had stopped breathing.
His system flickered. A new line appeared beneath the forced update notification, which now hung at 51%.
[Cosmic Rank: ???]
The question marks pulsed, undefined, incomplete. The system didn’t know what to put there. It seed to be trying to categorise sothing beyond it’s scope of programming.
Then the air in front of him rippled.
And a figure materialized, the residue energy all coalesced together with the space around it, as if it had always been there and was only now choosing to be seen. A Tall, robed, featureless figure.
The sa figure from the vision but without the scythe. The sa presence that had been watching him since the warning appeared.
The Will.
Its presence was not hostile. Not even threatening. It was... curious. Like a scientist observing an unexpected variable, a gardener discovering a flower growing where no seed had been planted.
Its voice entered Owen’s mind. Direct. Unfiltered. And impossible to ignore.
"I thought I had Deleted all fo your kind from this plane of existence. You... are an anomaly."
Owen’s claws tightened. His fire built in his chest. His Sovereignties humd beneath his scales, ready to activate, ready to defend.
But he didn’t attack. Sothing told him that attacking would be pointless. That this figure could no more be hard by dragon fire than the ocean could be boiled by a candle.
"We... must speak." The figure said.
The wind blew across the sky above Nexus Pri. Below, the city continued its oblivious rhythms.
And the Dragon King, for the first ti in his existence, did not know what to do next.
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