Chapter 39: The Conductor

That was all the text gave him. Nothing more, no confirmation whether this was the same Omen Lumina had meant.

Ten massive fingers tore through the gap between the gate’s doors first, clawing into the frame itself, wrenching it wider by force. The rattle of chains dragged out from behind it, loud enough to carry through the memory itself.

Whatever waited behind that gate was fighting its own way out, and every violent shudder of the doors being forced apart carried something close to dread with it.

Lucian couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like standing here in person when this actually happened. Even now, secondhand, filtered through memory, it was already enough to make him afraid to even lift his head toward it.

The tremors sharpened inside the memory itself, growing violent enough that Kai and everyone fighting beside him simply stopped moving entirely, the grim understanding settling over all of them that whatever came next, it was already too late to prepare for it.

The gate tore open wider still. A head emerged first, long black hair spilling loose, a star-shaped mask concealing whatever lay beneath it.

Then the rest of it followed, a body standing twelve meters tall, unfolding out from behind the doors in full. At a glance, it carried something close to a human shape.

Except.

The sheer scale of it, and the density of dark mana coiling around its frame, marked it as something far removed from anything mortal, or any Beast either of them had ever encountered before.

"An Omen born of dark mana. How interesting. I would have thought the gods and goddesses refused to accept a Conductor carrying that kind of power."

Conductor.

The gods accept Conductors born with dark mana? Lucian turned the word over, something about it striking too close to the exact phrasing he’d once seen appear in that strange notification text of his own.

"What do you mean by Conductor, Lumina?"

Even crushed beneath the weight pressing down on him, Lucian forced the question out. Something told him the word Conductor and the Omen standing in front of them were tied together somehow, threads of the same truth.

"It’s fair enough that you don’t know the term yet. Honestly, I’m not fond of it myself. But you’ll hear yourself called that plenty, soon enough, by the Oracle of Lumielle."

"It’s a designation reserved for people like us. So don’t be too surprised when you start hearing it more often, Lucian." Lumina’s attention stayed fixed on the Omen Miyu had summoned even as she spoke.

People like us?

According to her, Conductor was simply the term gods and goddesses used for those they’d personally chosen.

To them, mortals weren’t recognized the way titles like Saintess or Moonmaiden framed them, those were human inventions, human ways of naming what the gods gave. The gods themselves had their own word for it, Conductor, meaning someone bound directly to them.

That thought sent Lucian’s mind spinning harder than before.

I have a bond with a goddess? Since when? Wasn’t I already being called Conductor by that text, before my Awakening ever happened?

"You’d do well to watch what’s standing in front of you, Lucian. However she managed to shape an Omen as her own personal manifestation, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a goddess dare accept a Conductor like this one."

"It seems this Kirana crystal really does carry more secrets than either of us realized."

Genuine surprise crossed Lumina’s face as she took in what was unfolding in front of her. As far as she’d always understood it, an Omen could only be shaped through knowledge granted directly by a god or goddess.

With that knowledge, a Conductor could manifest their purest concentration of mana into a single form, the Omen, standing as a living symbol of their true potential.

But according to Lumina, how strong an Omen turned out to be depended entirely on the strength of its Conductor’s own Mana Core.

It explained everything about Sol Invicta, the Omen Lucian himself had summoned once before, powerful enough to overwhelm opponents several tiers above him, and yet it would have crumbled instantly against someone whose real strength sat far beyond his own.

Miyu’s Omen, appearing here despite the fact that she carried no Sacred Mana of her own, proved something remarkable on its own: that a goddess had accepted her, dark mana and all.

Lumina’s gaze flicked downward suddenly, toward Lucian still pinned against the floor beside her.

"Lucian, how long have you been stuck down there? Why didn’t you say something sooner?"

His body hadn’t moved at all, locked rigid under the pressure still bearing down on him, his face frozen in place against the stone.

Lumina, only now registering how badly he was struggling, reached a hand toward him, meaning to help.

But her eyes cut sideways before she could finish the motion, drawn by a scream tearing out from somewhere inside the memory.

It was Kai.

His finger shook as he pointed, identifying the very creature that had torn through his own energy earlier while he’d been digging through Miyu’s memories, the same monstrous figure now standing directly behind her.

"No. That’s really it. How is it out here? Wasn’t it supposed to be sealed inside that girl the whole time?"

Shock rippled through everyone within earshot. Whatever this thing was, it had managed to strike genuine fear into a Supreme, something even Zoria, already fused with Crimson blood, had never come close to provoking in any of them.

Lucian tried to turn and face the creature directly, but he never got the chance. Miyu had already given her command, and the towering figure answered instantly, unleashed against everyone still standing.

Rhaiven went first, caught by a single sweep of its spear that sent him hurtling dozens of meters through the air.

Then it turned on Zoria. Zoria threw everything he had into a wall of crimson fluid to defend himself, but nothing he built held for even a moment, no matter how thick or how desperate his defense became, none of it could stand against what Miyu’s Omen was throwing at him.

One more strike finished it. The blow tore straight through Zoria’s stomach and up into his chest.

Lumina’s eyes stayed locked on the slaughter unfolding in front of her, something sharp and calculating behind her expression.

"Why does this play out so differently from what Isabella reported?" she murmured, tilting her head slightly.

"Has Isabella actually seen this memory before?"

This wasn’t the first time Lucian had heard that name from her. Isabella, it seemed, was the one who’d fed Lumina the report that had led her to drag Lucian into this domain in the first place.

But something in Lumina’s tone now suggested a mismatch, whatever Isabella had told her didn’t line up cleanly with what this memory was actually showing them.

According to that report, Zoria was supposed to be careful, calculating, someone who never engaged a threat stronger than himself if he could help it.

That same caution was exactly why the Order of Lumielle had spent decades hunting him without ever managing to close the distance.

"We’re running out of time here. I still haven’t found that bastard’s trail. I hate dealing with a creature I haven’t finished bringing to heel myself," Lumina muttered under her breath.

Frustration bled openly into her voice, sharp enough that crimson light flared briefly around her hand, as though some part of her genuinely wanted to tear the entire domain apart just to find what she was looking for.

Zoria, one of the last true-blooded descendants of the Crimson clan still unclaimed by her, mattered too much to let slip. Left unchecked much longer, she worried someone as careless as him could unravel everything she’d been building toward.

She’d been certain she was following Isabella’s lead correctly, but nothing about this journey through the memory had turned up anything genuinely out of place, nothing beyond watching Zoria end up gutted on the floor.

Lumina turned the problem over. Maybe the crystal itself simply didn’t have enough left to give them, not when the Kirana fragment they carried was only half of what it should have been to begin with.

But according to Isabella, this exact fragment, the one Lucian carried now, was where Zoria’s trail had last been detected with any certainty.

Only two possibilities remained, as far as Lumina could see. Either Isabella’s information had been wrong from the start, or something inside this domain itself was actively working against her.