Chapter 35: Void Era?

Lucian pressed a hand to his forehead, still struggling to accept any of it, gods and demons alike, working together just to tear a single crystal apart.

And if that crystal really could build a New Heaven, what was it even for? If it was real, how had something like that ended up here at all, when everything in this world was supposed to trace back to the gods themselves in the first place?

But as Lumina had already told him, everything she’d just laid out came from the Codex of Lumielle alone.

Most records like that only reached as far back as the first year of the current Eclipse era, serving mainly as a guide through the great war humanity had once fought against the demons overrunning the land. What Lumina was describing now, though, wasn’t that kind of Codex at all.

"Wait. Are you telling me this Codex predates the Void era itself? Not something written after it, starting from year one of the Eclipse calendar?"

Lumina nodded, confirming it plainly. The Codex, she said, ran back well over a thousand years, and at nineteen, Lucian himself stood in the current year, Eclipse 995.

Whatever came before the Eclipse calendar even began was the era Lucian meant, the Void. Even the earliest recorded history of the war between humanity and the demons stayed locked away, restricted to the highest circles of the Order and the empire alike.

"Is this really something that came from Lumielle’s own Codex, Lumina?"

Curiosity sharpened his voice as he asked it. How could a record over a thousand years old even exist, when the Void era itself was a period whose true origins had been lost, treated as something almost forbidden to speak of at all.

Everything to do with the Void stayed buried, and not only among humans. Plenty of other races across the world guarded it just as fiercely, including whatever remained of the demon races themselves.

"Why does that question even matter? If it’s sitting inside the Order of Lumielle, it belongs to Lumielle, no matter whose hand originally wrote it. And of course, the original Codices, the ones written by our earliest Oracles themselves, are still kept there as well."

The way she said it made it sound like this particular Codex wasn’t common knowledge even within the Order itself, something known only to a handful of its highest-ranking members.

I always assumed Lumina alone carried strange secrets and reckless ambition. Turns out the Order of Lumielle plays the same game, somehow keeping a record like that in their own hands.

Lucian turned the thought over, the growing sense that he’d stepped into something far bigger than he could handle with his usual composure.

"That’s exactly why so many power-hungry fools are drawn to this crystal. Whether what it can actually do turns out to be true or not, they need to see it for themselves, even if it means facing down the gods themselves."

His hand trembled faintly where it rested against the sword at his side. If this thing ever fell into the wrong hands, there was no telling what might follow, and worse, the Sarnel family itself seemed to have no idea what this crystal really was.

Something Lumina had said earlier still didn’t add up, though. Hadn’t she claimed the Genesis crystal’s information existed only inside the Order of Lumielle’s own Codex?

"Lumina. Then how do these Green Land nobles know anything about this crystal’s power at all?"

"We don’t have access to the whole Codex, obviously. At first I assumed that fool told them himself. Turns out, from what this memory’s shown us, that’s not what happened at all."

Piecing together what Lumina had gathered so far, her real target here had never been just Zoria. She’d also come to confirm exactly how these Green Land nobles had learned about the crystal in the first place.

But based on what this memory revealed, they’d already known about it beforehand, which meant either another Codex existed somewhere holding the same information Lumielle had, or the Green Lands were working from an entirely different account of the crystal altogether.

Either way, Lumina said, this was exactly the kind of finding worth reporting back.

"Because of this, Lucian, I’ve got something important to bring home now." Lumina smiled at him, though Lucian barely registered it, caught up instead in the nagging sense that something in her explanation still didn’t quite fit together.

"You’re not messing with me, right? Isn’t a Codex usually a whole book? Did you two only get your hands on a few loose pages?"

Lumina explained that the Codices written by the Order’s own Oracles did take that form, bound and kept as books.

But the one tracing back to the Void era, the one the Order of Lumielle had actually recovered, existed as something else entirely, carved directly into the surface of a massive stone.

So what she’s calling a Codex is really more like an inscription, a monument carved with the same kind of record? All of this information, coming to me this freely, feels too easy. Is there really nothing being held back from what she’s telling me?

Lucian’s attention drifted back toward the fight still raging in front of them.

Yunxi’s guards had thrown themselves into the battle alongside Kai and Rhaiven now, all of them working together against the swarm and against Zoria himself. Zoria, for his part, showed no sign of struggling against any of it.

Something about the way he moved struck Lucian as wrong, too fluid, too alive, nothing like the fighting style he’d seen from Boien or even Isabella before.

Zoria fought with a controlled, deliberate precision, nothing brutal or reckless about it at all, the movements of someone who’d carried this Crimson power for a long, long time.

Is he actually born into the Crimson bloodline, not someone who’s simply been infected by it? Something about Zoria still felt off to Lucian, beyond even that question, the man seemed to be acting entirely on his own will, answering to no one else’s command at all.

And there was something else nagging at him. Based on what he remembered of this same memory from when he was twelve, the events playing out in front of him now might not be a hundred years old at all.

If this memory only stretched back a few decades, that meant someone like Zoria could still be alive today, which would explain why the Order of Lumielle was hunting him again. But if that was true, why was Lumina the one hunting him? Weren’t they supposed to be on the same side?

"Lumina. You said your main target here was Zoria, right? If he’s still alive somewhere out there, are you actually planning to capture him? Isn’t he still one of your own people?"

Lumina reached up and brushed her hand through Lucian’s hair instead of answering right away.

"He was never one of ours, not from the start. If he were simply weak, maybe I could have made something stronger out of him. But if he’s dumber than a soybean, what use would he be to me?"

"So you’re saying he doesn’t even meet your standards?"

Lucian hadn’t expected her to say something like that about him, not when Zoria’s raw power alone, whatever else could be said about his character, already put him well above what most would consider exceptional even among the Green Lands’ strongest, more than enough to make him a natural fit for the Crimson clan by any measure.

It left Lucian wondering just how many people stronger than that Lumina actually commanded, if someone like Zoria didn’t even clear the bar for what she considered worth claiming as her own.