Chapter 1396: The Lord & Danton: Private Audience

The Lord remained silent for so long that even Danton, who usually treated silence as an empty space graciously provided for him to fill with his own voice, allowed it to remain untouched.

The Lord’s avatar stood at the far end of the private hall beneath a haze of gold-white radiance, six seraphic wings resting behind him in perfect symmetry while light flowed continuously through every feather.

The manifestation possessed none of the frailty of an ordinary projection.

Even though his true body existed elsewhere, the Essence compressed into this avatar carried enough weight to make the ancient stone beneath his feet hum softly whenever he moved. Engraved formations ran throughout the walls and ceiling, built by generations of Heavenchild ancestors to withstand powers that would have reduced ordinary estates to smoking holes in the earth, yet the entire chamber still seemed to shrink slightly whenever the Lord’s expression hardened.

Danton sat in the middle of all that pressure as though he were waiting for someone to refill his wine.

His body rested lazily against the back of the chair with one ankle laid across the opposite knee, with his now blue hair falling carelessly around a face that had already survived hours of accusations, suspicion and barely concealed hatred from both Legacy Families.

He had spent most of that time talking.

Danton had talked Maxtons out of demanding Marcus’s head for insulting them, talked Heavenchild elders out of immediately accusing him of betrayal and somehow managed to convince an entire hall of furious old monsters that before anyone decided which limb to tear off first, they should perhaps listen to what had actually happened in Anarctica.

The Lord had listened.

He simply had not believed shit coming out of Danton’s crafty mouth.

Persuasion had never impressed the Lord particularly much:

A truth remained true whether delivered beautifully or screamed by an idiot, and a failure remained a failure no matter how expensive the vocabulary wrapped around it became. He had watched Danton turn the larger gathering around slowly, feeding them explanations, half-answers and carefully selected truths until people who wanted blood had settled for another hour of conversation.

The Lord had remained standing above all of them, watching Danton perform verbal surgery upon an entire room while refusing to let the same blade anywhere near his own judgment.

That refusal was precisely why Danton had requested this private audience.

Eventually the Lord rose from his seat and began pacing across the hall, robes of condensed radiance drifting around him while each slow turn sent a faint tremor through the formations beneath the floor. Danton watched him for several moments before finally uncrossing his leg and asking, with an audacity almost impressive enough to deserve preservation in some historical archive:

"Are we really going to let one mishap determine what we’ve planned for centuries?"

The Lord stopped walking.

’Mishap?’

For one strange instant he wondered whether being thrown into the Indian Ocean had damaged Danton’s understanding of language.

A mishap was spilling tea over an ancient scroll. A mishap was miscalculating a teleportation formation and arriving in the wrong province. A mishap was accidentally insulting someone’s ancestor at a banquet and spending the next decade avoiding that family.

What happened in Anarctica was closer to losing the banquet hall, the province, the ancestor, the tea, the scroll and the continent beneath them.

Their centuries of planning had not merely included the Coffer; the entire undertaking had revolved around possessing the Coffer. Everything that came before had been preparation for that one prize:

From capturing the necessary races, preserving ancient rituals, bargaining with allies nobody trusted, slaving World Transcendents into weapons, gathering keys, opening paths their ancestors had spent generations locating and forcing together families whose cooperation usually lasted exactly as long as mutual greed outweighed mutual hatred; all of it had been to getting the Coffer.

And Danton had possessed it—

—then he had lost it.

The Lord’s expression became increasingly difficult to read as he remembered exactly what disappeared with that vault. Forget for a moment the treasures contributed by the other Legacy Families since they came here, because the Heavenchild portion alone was enough to turn the loss into something future descendants could curse Danton over million years after everyone in this room was dead.

The Coffer had carried resources capable of supporting thousands of cultivators from their first steps into the Mortal Realm all the way to become Lesser Gods.

The wealth stored within it was almost obscene. Resources gathered across generations filled the vast interior in quantities that made ordinary Legacy treasuries seem embarrassingly small, with rare materials, weapons, artifacts and sealed stores stretching farther than the eye could comfortably take in. Nothing needed an exaggerated history attached to it. The sheer amount belonging to the Heavenchilds was already enough to make the Coffer everything twenty or more people would ever need to become Immortal stage beings at least!

That was merely the useful wealth.

The heirlooms were a different story:

Some Heavenchild treasures hidden inside that Coffer had been passed down since eras so ancient that even the family records describing their creators had become incomplete; since the eras of Progenitors.

Several could never be recreated because the beings who forged them no longer existed, while others contained powers modern Heavenchild descendants barely understood enough to activate safely.

If someone became vulgar enough to reduce their value into ordinary wealth, the family could have traded several of those heirlooms alone to buy a Realm two or three times larger than Earth and still walked away wondering whether they had been cheated.

Danton had lost all of it.

Then sat there calling the catastrophe a mishap.

The Lord’s lips parted slowly. "Mishap—"

"Immortal God!" Danton cut him off before the word could properly leave his mouth.

The Lord’s six wings became perfectly still.

Danton’s relaxed posture disappeared with frightening speed. His foot dropped onto the floor, his shoulders straightened and the expression he had worn before both families vanished beneath something far more genuine. Anger moved across his face first, followed by a bitterness he had clearly been choking down since returning to the Heavenchild estate.

"An Immortal God," Danton repeated, staring directly at him. "That is the level of the being who intervened in Anarctica, they stole the Coffer and buried me so deep beneath the fucking Indian Ocean that I woke up wondering whether the world above me still existed."

The Lord’s avatar lost color.

Not metaphorically.

The gold-white brilliance flowing through his robes dimmed visibly, the radiance around his six wings fading until each feather looked carved from pale glass rather than condensed divinity.

Even the halo of Essence surrounding his body thinned for several seconds before stabilizing again.

Danton saw it.

He stood slowly from his chair.