Chapter 84: A Brand-New Building: The Starborn Altar

"Notification: Territory upgrade complete. [Ebonreach] has reached Level 5. New structures unlocked: Starborn Altar, Starborn Totem, Waygate."

Every scrap of interest in tonight’s grind evaporated the moment the notification finished resolving.

Kael was already summoning Thunder Roc before the chime had fully faded, excitement lighting behind his eyes.

The leveling ground he’d picked sat close enough to Ebonreach that the flight back took only minutes.

Tonight’s resources had gone entirely into the upgrade itself, with nothing spared for walls or outer defenses, so from the outside the city looked essentially unchanged. The real transformation had happened at its heart.

Where the open plaza had once stood bare around the floating Starstone, a towering pyramid now rose in its place: pure white stone, veined through with poured metal and dense, glowing rune-work, studded with scattered gemstones that caught and scattered the Starstone’s own light.

The stone itself still hovered at the structure’s peak, slowly rotating, pouring a steady cascade of radiant energy down through the pyramid’s carved channels and feeding power through every corner of the city.

Kael pulled up the territory management panel the instant he landed, and there it was, a new option waiting at the top of the list.

The Veil Array.

Activating it would render the entire city invisible.

The catch sat in the fine print. Everything about Ebonreach’s daily function, including the rate at which new Starborn soldiers could be trained and recruited, ran entirely off a single resource.

Source Energy, drawn continuously from the Starstone itself.A level 5 territory produced ten thousand points of it a day.

The Veil Array alone would burn through two thousand of that just to stay active around the clock, a full fifth of the city’s daily output gone before anything else got a share.

Run it constantly, and recruitment would slow noticeably. The city’s military growth would trail what it could otherwise be for as long as the veil stayed up.

Kael weighed that cost for exactly as long as it took to dismiss it.The whole reason he’d bled for this stronghold in the first place wasn’t troop numbers.

It was survival: a place in reality nobody could find, nobody could threaten, nobody could use against him the way Sterling had already tried once tonight.

With that guaranteed, his own strength would keep compounding regardless of how large a garrison backed it up. Given enough time, raw personal power would outpace anything a standing army could add anyway.

He activated the Veil Array without a second thought.The air around Ebonreach rippled, light bending strangely across the city’s outline, and slowly, steadily, the whole structure faded from view. It wasn’t gone, simply no longer visible to anything watching from outside.

That left three new buildings available to construct.The Waygate explained itself. Once built, it would offer fast, long-range travel between claimed territories, more convenience than necessity.

The Starborn Totem provided a standing buff, boosting every Starborn soldier within a hundred-mile radius of any territory it stood in.

It was useful, but passive, the kind of advantage that compounded slowly over time.

The third option was the one Kael actually wanted.

The Starborn Altar would, once finished, let him spend Source Energy to summon full Starborn heroes directly into his service: combatants that dwarfed even an elite soldier in raw power, closer in strength to a proper boss than a rank-and-file unit, with growth potential to match.

Resources remained tight this soon after the upgrade. Only one of the three could realistically be built right now. After weighing it briefly, Kael committed to the Altar without much hesitation.

He watched Starborn craftsmen haul timber and stone into the plaza, hammers ringing through the night as construction began in earnest, and logged off satisfied, ready to let the build run its course.

Back in his own body, he pulled up the withdrawal interface out of habit, and the number waiting there made him grimace outright.

The level 5 upgrade had dragged the extraction cost up with it. What used to run thirty million gold now sat at a full hundred million.

Fortunately, he didn’t need the whole city. One functional building, enough to actually live inside, was all this plan had ever required.

After a moment’s hesitation, he committed to the expense: five million gold, spent extracting Ebonreach’s main hall whole into the physical world.

The result was, functionally, a floating, invisible fortress he could retreat into at will.

Abandon every electronic device that might carry a signal, step inside, and the single most resource-intensive tracking effort a government could mount wouldn’t find so much as a trace of him.

For the first time since this second life had started, his physical safety stopped being a variable he had to track every waking hour.

Everything left over could go straight into getting stronger, without that particular weight hanging over every decision.

He made his way into the Lord’s Hall, logged back into the game just long enough to furnish himself a proper bed somewhere in Frostwatch, extracted it, and finally let himself rest.

The sleep that followed was the first genuinely restful night he’d had since this whole second life began.

Late morning sun was already well up by the time he stirred, stretching the stiffness out of his shoulders before working through the routine motions of a normal morning: teeth, breakfast, and then, finally, back into the game.

Light resolved around him, and the open stretch of plaza that had sat empty the night before now held something new.

A circular altar, cut from deep blue stone, its surface worked edge to edge with intricate, glowing inscriptions, radiating a quiet, mysterious weight.

The Starborn Altar, fully complete after a full night of uninterrupted labor.

Kael pulled up the building’s details immediately, eager to see exactly what it could do.

[STARBORN ALTAR]

Building Level: 5

Consume Source Energy to summon a Starborn hero to stand guard over Ebonreach. Hero rarity fluctuates randomly between Silver and Legendary.

Summoning Cost: 100,000 Source Energy

Available Source Energy: 127,124

Territory Heroes: 0/2

A hundred thousand out of a hundred and twenty-seven. Enough for exactly one pull, with nothing to spare for a second.

Kael rested his palm against the altar’s rim, and the inscriptions brightened beneath his hand.

"Summon."