Chapter 348 - 348: The Void God’s Playpen

The air inside the secure chamber of the Gildreath Palace was cool and thick with the scent of sterile alchemical herbs and burning incense. From the corner of the stone mattress, a fragile, trembling voice broke the silence of the room, singing a soft, desperate nursery rhyme.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are..."

Julia Vance cradled her child, her fingers desperately tracing the fine, silver-furred ridges beginning to form along the baby's head. To her, he was 'Julio,' a human child who belonged to Earth, to shopping malls, and to the comfortable, lost life of Miami. She desperately tried to anchor him to those memories.

But the baby ignored her completely. He didn't want to look at her, and he certainly didn't care about her earthly songs. Solid pools of shifting, dark cosmos swirled inside his pupilless eyes—eyes that mirrored the absolute, empty void of the Sovereign's sanctuary.

The infant was currently preoccupied, his surprisingly strong hands clutching a pair of jagged bone-handled daggers General Gulag had carelessly tossed onto the floor as 'toys'.

When he grew tired of the cold steel, he shoved his customized tungsten-alloy teething ring into his mouth, his gums grinding against the built-in kinetic stabilizers with a series of sharp, muffled clanks.

A year passed inside the server.

Under the aggressive time dilation of Project Civilization, where months on Earth translated to decades inside the game engine, the infant grew at an unnatural, alarming rate. Eon was now a toddler, taking his first waddling steps through the wide corridors of the palace.

Because of his passive [Absolute Density] trait, his tiny body carried the highly compressed physical mass of a subterranean leviathan. His small, bare feet did not simply patter against the stone. Every heavy step he took sent spiderweb cracks splintering across the polished limestone floorboards.

The palace guards kept a wide, terrified berth from the walking anomaly, fully aware that the child's curiosity was a localized natural disaster waiting to happen.

One quiet afternoon, Eon was crawling through the grand corridor of the residential wing. He was pushing his favorite tungsten teething ring across the tiles.

The heavy metal ring, forged with a high-density core that would have crushed a normal human's foot, rolled smoothly away from his grip. It slid down the hallway, picking up speed, until it slipped perfectly beneath the narrow gap of a heavy, sealed star-iron blast door leading to the inner chambers.

Eon waddled to the door. He dropped flat onto his stomach and reached his stubby, silver-furred arms beneath the metal frame. His tiny fingers brushed against the cold edge of the tungsten, but he couldn't grasp it.

He pulled his arm back. He tried again. The ring was just out of reach.

The frustration hit him instantly.

The swirling galaxies inside his dark eyes violently contorted, shifting into a deep, angry purple. He threw his head back and unleashed a piercing, high-pitched toddler shriek.

It was his first major tantrum.

His raw void-magic flared uncontrollably. The ambient air pressure in the corridor violently inverted, plunging the hallway into a sudden, suffocating vacuum. Miniature spatial rifts tore open along the ceiling and walls, snapping shut like shards of broken glass.

The spatial distortion reached a critical threshold. The game engine's coordinate system violently glitched. With a wet, popping sound of folding reality, the spatial assets of the palace were instantly scrambled.

In a fraction of a second, the Gildreath Royal Treasury which housed hundreds of iron chests filled with refined star-iron bullion, priceless Aether-Crystals, and piles of looted gold, was completely teleported and swapped with the royal kitchen's massive, overflowing piles of grease-stained laundry and dirty aprons.

A mile away, in the strategic war room, Warlord Gorak and Apostle Krug were reviewing defensive layouts when the palace foundation violently groaned.

The warning bells didn't just ring; their clappers melted. A frantic royal page burst into the chamber, his face pale and his hands shaking.

"The... the treasury!" the page gasped, pointing a trembling finger toward the lower levels. "It's gone! There is nothing inside the vault but moldy undergarments and wet dishcloths! And the kitchen... the cooks are currently trapped beneath three million tons of refined star-iron ingots!"

Gorak let out a low, rumbling growl, his ten-foot-tall, bone-plated frame tensing as blue arcs of Abyssal Thunder violently sparked along his crystallized right arm.

"The boy," Gorak grated, his unhinged jaw grinding in sheer frustration. "He is screaming again."

Krug stood up, his eight-foot-tall obsidian armor plates radiating an oppressive, superheated haze. Violet flames flared fiercely from his eyes. "The local gravity is destabilizing. If we do not anchor the corridor, he will pull the roof down onto our heads."

They sprinted down the hallway, their heavy footsteps shaking the palace masonry. When they rounded the corner into the residential wing, they found the hallway in absolute, gravity-free chaos.

Floating lanterns, broken marble pillars, and loose cobblestones drifted through the air in a slow-motion orbit. Eon sat in the center of the vertical debris field, his face red as he shrieked, actively tearing the walls of the palace apart with his mind.

"Grab the child, Warlord!" Krug commanded, stepping into the center of the spatial storm.

Krug raised his hands and channeled The Violet Eclipse. Pushing his mana core to its limit, he slammed his palms downward to manipulate the local gravity.

The invisible weight of his authority crashed down like a hammer, compressing the expanding spatial rifts and forcing the floating stones and lanterns to plummet harmlessly back to the floor.

Gorak lunged through the falling debris. His crystalline arm arced with electrical currents as he reached into the distortion. He grabbed Eon by his tiny waist and pulled him away from the star-iron door.

The spatial rifts snapped shut with a series of sharp pops. Eon stopped screaming, blinking his cosmic eyes in surprise as he looked up at the towering Warlord.

Gorak let out a heavy, smoking breath. He reached down, picked up a dented, bronze soldier's helmet from a nearby pile of rubble, and shoved it directly into the toddler's hands. Eon sniffed the metal, giggled, and immediately bit down on the bronze with a loud, satisfying crunch.

The tantrum was over. The silence that returned to the corridor was heavy and exhausting.

Krug deactivated his gravity core and surveyed the ruined hallway. "We cannot continue like this. A standard stone nursery is entirely useless. He will eventually teleport the entire capital into the ocean."

"Contact the mechanical deity," Gorak growled, wiping a smudge of glowing saliva from his crystallized forearm. "The Brass Construct must build something to contain this anomaly."

By the following evening, the construction was complete.

The Vanguard utilized the newly acquired blueprints from the Virtual Pantheon to engineer an absolute baby-proofing solution.

Installed in the center of the grand courtyard was a colossal, twelve-foot-tall playpen. The bars were not crafted from steel or iron, which Eon could easily dissolve. Instead, the Vanguard had utilized the massive, pulverized ribs of the Fossilized Leviathan they had excavated from the eastern quarries.

The ancient, magic-resistant calcium was reinforced with thick bands of star-iron and lined with advanced kinetic dampeners designed by the Brass Construct.

Eon was placed inside the bone enclosure.

He sat comfortably on a thick pile of sulfur-cured leather blankets, happily banging his tungsten teething ring against the indestructible Leviathan bone. Every time his frustration flared and a tiny spatial spark escaped his knuckles, the kinetic dampeners instantly hummed, absorbing the void energy and dispersing the gravitational shockwaves harmlessly into the earth.

Krug and Gorak stood on the palace balcony overlooking the courtyard, watching the toddler play in his secure, heavily engineered cage.

"The anchors are holding," Krug noted, resting his hands on his greataxe. "The foundries can finally return to manufacturing weapons instead of replacing our palace walls."

Gorak let out a rumbling chuckle, his serrated teeth showing in a smug grin. "He breaks things flawlessly, Krug. The boy will make a magnificent general for our Sovereign's Vanguard."