Chapter 701: Survival Is Everything

But Veylara was obviously not satisfied with just these petty offerings.

“You sat behind your palisades when the enemies were constantly attacking our borders,” Veylara murmured, her sapphire eyes tracking the trembling silhouettes below.

“You closed their trading posts. Your elders prayed for the Veynar to be butchered so you could pick over the bones of our storehouses. You sent scouts to watch the slaughter from the ridges.”

Her lips curved into that cold, razor-thin smile. Even though it wasn’t her but Sol who noticed and killed those scouts, it didn’t stop her from threatening them using that information, after all their relationship had reached a depth that couldn’t be deeper.

“Did you truly think I would not notice your little rats sniffing around my perimeter?” She continued.

The words fell like mountains weighing onto their bowed necks. A wave of burning, suffocating embarrassment washed over the entire delegation, swiftly swallowed by cold, unadulterated terror.

Every envoy’s spine locked solid.

The horror of that realization struck them with sickening force.

The scouts that had vanished… the animal-spirit trackers, the wind-whisperers, the stealth specialists who had slipped into the mist and never returned… they hadn’t just died in the crossfire.

They had been deliberately killed.

The Warchief knew. She had known every breath, every glance, and every greedy thought they had harbored from the very beginning.

Elder Sarn threw his forehead back into the stone with a sickening THWACK!

“We were blind! We were foolish, Great Mother!” Sarn wept, completely abandoning whatever shreds of dignity seventy winters of life had granted him.

“Our chieftains were cowards, paralyzed by fear of the Coalition! We did not dare to stand beside you, and for that… for that our blood is forfeit! But show mercy! We do not ask for alliance… we know we are unworthy to hold your spear! Make us your thralls! Take our harvest! Take our young men to haul your timber! Just… do not bring the sky down upon our hearths!”

The great hall descended once more into the muffled, weeping pleas of the emissaries. The sound of their foreheads thudding against the rock echoed rhythmically, like a bizarre, macabre drumbeat of absolute capitulation.

Thinking about when they had hastily assembled these meager bundles three days ago, their councils had still been blind.

They knew the Veynar had somehow broken the Coalition and conquered the central northern basin, but because their own territories lay tucked along the outer ridges and river plains, they hadn’t felt the immediate bite of it.

They had stubbornly comforted themselves with distance, treating this visit as little more than a customary, face-saving gesture.

How laughably, catastrophically blind they had been.

First had come the nightmare outside: that dark-haired reaper lounging against the lumber stack like death incarnate, whose mere glance had summoned the phantom stench of a butcher’s yard and sent their beasts clawing the dirt in madness.

And then, stepping through these doors, they had been physically flattened by the suffocating, ungodly truth… Veylara had shattered the ancient ceiling of the world and ascended to Layer 5.

Standing in the presence of a living god, their pitiful baskets of offerings weren’t just inadequate; they were an insult worthy of annihilation.

Without a single shred of doubt left in their minds, they knew the truth: this entire expanse, from the highest snow peaks to their own humble riverbanks, was going to be ruled by her. There was no negotiation. There were no border treaties.

Yet right alongside that terror, a strange, desperate thread of relief coiled in Sarn’s chest.

Thank the ancestors, Sarn thought, his trembling hands clutching the cold flagstones. Thank the ancestors we swallowed our pride and came.

There were other tribes out beyond their borders… arrogant, stubborn fools who had sneered at the news, declaring that visiting the backwater Veynar and offering tribute was beneath them.

Those fools were sitting in their huts right now, blind to the storm gathering above their heads. Sarn’s delegation had brought garbage, yes, and they had thoroughly disgraced themselves on the floor, but at least they were here.

At least they had groveled early. In the eyes of a newly crowned sovereign, the worm that crawls to feet on day one always fares better than the worm that has to be hunted down.

As for tribal sovereignty? Independence? Preserving their ancestral autonomy?

Sarn didn’t even dare to let those thoughts cross his mind. To dream of sovereignty in front of a Layer 5 sovereign was sheer, unadulterated suicide.

In this savage world, absolute strength was the only law that mattered. The weak served the strong; it had been the way of the wild since the first man picked up a flint spear.

And deep down, it wasn’t even a bad fate. In fact, it was a salvation.

Living as a small, neutral clan in the Great Orrath was a miserable, waking nightmare.

You spent every winter starving behind rotting barricades, praying that stronger neighbors wouldn’t wake up hungry, and praying even harder that the roaming beast tides wouldn’t roll down your valley.

But under the banner of the Fifth Layer? Under the absolute protection of a sovereign who held the sky in her hand?

No enemy would ever dare cross their rivers again. No rogue clan would dare raid their caches. Even when the great beast tides surged from the deep wilderness, a Layer 5 titan could flatten apex horrors with a wave of her wrist. Their chances of survival had just multiplied.

It wasn’t just him, the realization swept through the other delegates too.

Dignity meant nothing.

Survival was everything.

Elder Sarn threw his forehead against the stone floor once more, his voice cracking with total, shameless fervency.

“We have failed, Sovereign! Our offerings are trash! We are blind, destitute vermin who did not understand the glory of the high seat!” Sarn bellowed into the dust, completely giving up on pretense.

“We do not offer gifts… we offer ourselves! The Stone-River abandons its independence! We swear our blood, our hunters, and our lands to the Veynar! Take our spears! Take our harvests! Place your brand upon our gates!”