Chapter 1225: Swallowed Progenitor

Long before the Coffer ever left the ancient world hidden beneath Anarctica, Danton had warned Marcus to prepare for the possibility that Phei already knew what they intended to do:

"Assume the Dragon knows everything."

Marcus had looked at him with immediate annoyance. "Everything?"

"Everything," Danton had repeated, smiling. "The Coffer. The keys. The Chained. Our timing. Assume someone has already crawled into our walls, read our letters, emptied our wine cellar and left our secrets neatly arranged on his bedside table. Then ask yourself whether our plan still works."

Marcus had considered that excessive paranoia but Danton had considered it longevity.

Ancient beings did not survive by assuming the enemy was stupid.

Granting the enemy every advantage that could reasonably exist, imagining several that could not, and then preparing for the day reality developed a sense of humor and provided one anyway. Danton had lived through too many thing, betrayals and wars to dismiss a danger merely because its probability looked small.

That was why eleven Chained had accompanied the Coffer.

The number had never been necessary for transportation just the Coffer alone.

One or three World Transcendents could have carried its reduced size through Anarctica without difficulty while guarding it, and five would have turned the escort into extravagance. Eleven was excessive by every practical measure, which was precisely why Danton had chosen eleven.

’If Phei knew, let him come.’

If some traitor among them had whispered into the Dragon’s ear, let the traitor enjoy the consequences from whatever hiding place they had purchased with their courage. Danton had already placed enough monsters around the Coffer to smother the interruption before it developed teeth.

The Dragon himself was still Master Stage.

’An abnormal Master Stage, certainly.’ Danton was not fool enough to reduce Phei to his cultivation alone anymore.

Worse, Phei possessed that particularly troublesome quality Danton respected most in enemies: he learned while fighting.

Yet absurdities had limits.

A Master could ambush someone stronger. A Master could possess a forbidden technique capable of threatening someone on a higher realm and even overturn several stages if his power was monstrous enough and the circumstances sufficiently favorable.

Against eleven World Transcendents arranged around a single objective, however, talent became much less romantic.

That was not a battle.

It was an execution waiting for its victim to arrive.

And Phei’s stronger allies were supposedly even easier to account for; Danton had even took Consort into account too, and for others Earth itself had shackled them so he didnt need to worry.

The Laws of this little realm were restrictive to the point of cruelty toward beings who had exceeded what Earth could comfortably contain. The moment they crossed the world’s tolerance, the Laws would descend upon them with suppression, punishment or expulsion.

Danton had trusted that.

Perhaps too much.

That was the mistake.

He had not underestimated Phei. Had someone accused him of such stupidity, Danton would have taken genuine offense and he had accounted for the Dragon with enough caution to bring nearly four times the number of World Transcendents actually required for the Coffer.

What he had failed to account for was someone else who stood outside that calculation.

Perhaps that someone was one tthe Laws of the Universe apparently did not frighten.

Someone whose existence had never entered his preparation because Danton, for one rare and expensive moment, had trusted the prison around his enemies more than he trusted his own paranoia.

That single mistake had purchased him an ocean.

When Danton’s vision cleared from the attack that had come out of nowhere, blue swallowed had world.

Water extended above him until darkness devoured the distance, and below him stretched a deeper water abyss where even the faintest remnants of light were gradually losing courage and there was no visible seabed or surface he could orient himself against and no familiar spiritual landmark capable of telling him where he had been taken.

Immense currents travelled through the surrounding depths with enough pressure to deform mountains, yet whatever had been enclosed around him drifted through them untouched.

Danton remained upright inside a perfectly transparent sphere.

At first glance it resembled glass, though the comparison failed the moment he examined it properly. The substance carried neither the brittleness of crystal nor the spiritual texture of any barrier he recognized; it was clear enough that the black-blue ocean remained visible in every direction, yet something within the sphere moved whenever he reached for his essence, minute inscriptions or perhaps veins of an unknown substance surfacing for an instant before dissolving again.

The sphere continued descending lower in a gentle movement.

That almost annoying as there was no violent drag into the abyss or chaotic plunge or roaring current.

It simply sank with a calm inevitability, taking Danton deeper meter by meter while the ocean outside grew darker and the pressure climbed toward levels that would have crushed mortal machinery into scraps of metal no larger than coins.

Danton looked upward for several breaths before realizing he could no longer see any indication of the surface.

He smiled.

"Interesting." Golden radiance stirred beneath his skin.

The Flames of Beginning answered the call as naturally as breath but only a spark appeared near his fingers and even that, the sphere drank it.

Danton’s smile thinned; he drew a little more essence through his meridians and attempted to feed the flame properly. Before he could shape it, the transparent surface darkened faintly and a pull spread across his body and the essence flowed out of him siphoning exactly what he gathered before the gathered power could cross the threshold required to manifest his flames.

Danton stopped and the sphere’s hunger ceased.

His eyes narrowed: "Clever."

That single word carried more respect than most people ever received from him.

He tested the sphere physically next.

His palm settled against the transparent surface and power moved into his arm, muscle and bone reinforcing themselves beneath the monstrous density of his Jörmungandr bloodline and cultivation base. Outside, an ocean deep enough to crush cities pressed against the prison...

...Inside, Danton punched with all his mighty but the sphere did not even tremble.

He increased the force and his essence instinctively gathered to support his physique, and the instant it did, the transparent substance awakened again and drank.

Danton withdrew his hand and the pressure vanished.

His gaze finally lowered toward his throat whereelegant necklace rested there.

For several seconds, he simply stared at it.

Chains he would have accepted, seals would have been understandable or monstrous collar carved with suppression arrays and hammered shut against his neck would at least have possessed the decency to look like imprisonment.

This thing looked like jewelry; a slender band of pale metal encircled his throat, beautiful enough to belong around the neck of an imperial princess rather than an Original Progenitor. Tiny blue stones had been set throughout its design, each one carrying a watery brilliance that deepened whenever Danton attempted to circulate power.

There was almost something insulting about its elegance.

He raised one hand toward it.

His fingers stopped before making contact.

The essence, his cultivation and Jörmungandr bloodline inside him recoiled so violently that Danton’s expression changed for the first time since arriving.

It was not terror.

The World Serpent did not understand fear in anything resembling a mortal fashion.

It recognized something.

The necklace pressed upon his cultivation, his bloodline and the deeper structures of his soul with an authority Danton could feel but could not immediately identify.

The stolen powers grafted into his existence were suppressed with equal ruthlessness. The Dragon Heart Scale resting within him had gone unnaturally quiet, while the Core responded only with a faint pulse before whatever restrained him forced even that resonance back into silence.

Danton’s face lost its amusement.

The Flames of Beginning could destroy this prison; that much he knew.

An ocean meant little before the primordial flame. If he could release enough of the Flames of Beginning, the surrounding water would cease being an ocean and become a continent-sized cloud of steam and whatever depths had swallowed him could be boiled until the sea itself fled upward.

Unfortunately, such confidence assumed he could actually summon the flames.

That distinction mattered.

The Flames of Beginning lived within Danton, answered his commands and had wrapped around him enough times that almost everyone witnessing them assumed they were his powers.

Even Marcus had eventually begun speaking of the fire as though Danton had fully inherited it.

Danton had never made that mistake; he was still conquering the flames.

Still taming them, stealing, refining and forcing an ancient power that had not originally belonged to him to accept his soul as its throne.

The Dragon Heart Scale and the Core had allowed that process to advance far beyond what should have been possible for his current vessel. Both strengthened his compatibility with the flames and helped his soul endure something that might otherwise have incinerated it from the inside out.

But while they were bridges, they were not ownership.