Chapter 1398: Jörmungandr Prince’s Gambit!

For several breaths, the Lord could not form a single word, and Danton was clever enough to leave the silence untouched.

The crystalline pendant remained caught between Danton’s fingers beneath the warm radiance filling the private hall, beautiful enough to have passed for an expensive ornament if not for the faint residue clinging to it.

That residue itself was pitifully small compared to the power that must once have touched the object, little more than a spiritual stain left behind after something incomparably greater had already departed, yet even that fragment had forced the Lord’s six wings to spread instinctively.

The golden-white light had drained from the avatar’s several feathers, the Essence composing his avatar recoiling as though it remembered some ancient lesson his mind had not yet finished understanding.

Thin golden lines crawled through the stone, ancient protections responding to a threat that was not even truly present.

Danton observed every reaction with calm patience. ℯ

He could have spoken immediately and piled explanations upon the Lord while fear was still fresh, but that would have been wasteful.

Danton understood persuasion far too well for that.

There were moments when words mattered, moments when pressure mattered and moments when the smartest thing a man could do was shut the fuck up and allow another person’s imagination to torture him properly.

This was one of those moments.

The Lord’s eyes remained fixated upon the pendant while increasingly unpleasant thoughts gathered behind them; Danton could lie. Of course he could lie.

The bastard could twist a truth until it begged forgiveness and redirect suspicion toward someone standing three rooms away and walk a man carefully toward a conclusion while somehow convincing him the destination had been his own idea all along.

Being an Original Progenitor apparently came with many talents, and Danton had cultivated manipulation almost as lovingly as he cultivated power.

Yet even Danton could not manufacture and mimic what the Lord was sensing now.

That Essence had belonged to a divine existence.

At minimum, a God.

If Danton’s claim about the being behind it was true, then something vastly worse.

’An Immortal God!’

The Lord’s thoughts resisted the conclusion because accepting it meant swallowing an excuse so convenient it almost sounded insulting. Danton had returned having lost the Coffer, the World Transcendents and practically every advantage placed into his hands, then suddenly revealed that an Immortal God had been responsible.

Under any normal circumstance, the Lord would have laughed in his face and asked whether the ocean had washed away his dignity along with the Coffer.

Except the proof was sitting between Danton’s fingers.

The Lord could feel it.

His avatar could feel it and even the ancestral formations beneath their feet could feel it.

The truth had become annoyingly physical.

That realization also explained why Danton had refused to announce any of this before the entire gathering of Maxtons and Heavenchilds. Some knowledge belonged in the hands of elders simply because younger or weaker minded tended to turn terror into noise, and telling that hall an Immortal God had descended upon Anarctica would have created enough noise to shake the estate harder than Danton’s Saint Stage aura ever could.

Half of them would have accused him of inventing an impossible enemy to protect himself, while the other half would already be calculating whether the family possessed enough emergency treasures to relocate their children, wealth, servants and preferably favorite furniture before sunset.

Neither reaction would help anyone.

The Lord slowly lifted his gaze toward Danton, and Danton recognized the exact moment the next thought arrived.

Phei!

The Lord’s expression barely moved, but Danton had spent too much time studying faces to miss such a delicious little fracture.

Anahita had already told them Phei had never stepped foot in Anactica. According to the World Essence-born Fallen Angel, she had sensed the Void, Danton, the eleven World Transcendents and the remnants left behind by the catastrophe, but she had found no trace whatsoever belonging Phei.

The possibility remained that he had participated indirectly, yet her testimony had supposedly removed the most possibility that the Young Dragon himself had physically entered the frozen small realm.

Now an entirely new possibility stood before the Lord.

An Immortal God had apparently entered Anactica, removed Danton before he could even react, stolen the Coffer, killed several World Transcendents and freed others.

If Phei had still been involved despite never physically appearing there, then the explanation became horrifyingly simple.

The Young Dragon had help; an Immortal God-level’s help precisely!

Danton nearly smiled.

The expression almost reached his lips before he crushed it beneath the rage already boiling inside him, because unlike the careful story he was feeding the Lord, that anger required almost no acting at all.

Danton knew more.

He had been there!

He had fucking heard Phei’s voice before being removed from the battlefield, unmistakably ordering Consort to attack. He had also seen Consort descend, felt the sequence of events beginning to turn and heard that damned Young Dragon through it all and Danton had been getting ready to counter the Consort before reality abruptly became ocean.

Yes, powerful beings could mimic voices, some creatures could imitate faces, auras, signatures and even memories if their abilities were twisted enough.

Danton still did not believe that shit for one second.

He knew Phei.

They’d grown up together fro ten years and he had watched the boy too carefully and for too long! After Damon awakened he’d tracked too many of Phei’s impossible surges of power and spent far too many nights trying to understand how one seventeen-year-old Dragon kept turning every reasonable expectation into something embarrassingly obsolete.

Danton would sooner believe the moon had become sentient and developed gambling debts than believe the voice in Anarctica had belonged to some random imitator than Phei himself!

Which meant Anahita had lied.

Or something powerful enough had erased every trace Phei left behind so completely that even a being born from World Essence itself could not find his presence.

Danton preferred assuming both possibilities were true.

One of the earliest lessons power had ever taught him was that preparing for one enemy because two seemed unlikely was a wonderful way to become someone’s cautionary tale. He had already underestimated the number of hands once and awakened beneath enough Indian Ocean to make drowning feel like an ambitious hobby.

He had no intention of repeating the experience.

If Anahita had betrayed Marcus and the Heavenchilds, Danton would plan for it. If an Immortal God stood behind Phei and could erase his traces from reality, Danton would plan for that too. If both assumptions turned out correct, then at least he would not spend another afternoon discovering the ocean from the bottom upward.

None of this would reach the Lord’s ear much less his mind.

The more frightened the Lord became of the Immortal God, the more useful that fear became for Danton to exploit!

Fear was often treated as something that made people irrational, but Danton had discovered long ago that fear properly aimed could make intelligent people beautifully cooperative:

A frightened foolpanicked but a frightened elder calculated.

And once every calculation led toward the same terrifying conclusion, obedience usually arrived wearing the respectable disguise of strategy.

The Lord was no fool but a calculative elder!

Perfect.

Danton finally lowered the necklace and slipped it back beneath his collar, allowing the oppressive proof to disappear while leaving its memory sitting heavily inside the chamber. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. The anger remained beneath it, hot and deep, but he wrapped it in measured restraint instead of shouting. ℯ

"We lost," he admitted. "The Coffer disappeared while it was under my command, and I will take responsibility for that. If you want someone whose name gets attached to Anarctica whenever our descendants curse the day everything went to hell, fine. Put mine there."

The Lord studied him in silence while Danton continued before responsibility could become the beginning of a sentence involving punishment.

"But responsibility and surrender are not the same thing. We lost one battle, even if it happened to be a catastrophic one, and if we allow that loss to divide the Maxtons and Heavenchilds now, whoever took the Coffer will not even need to finish destroying us; they’ll just save the effort and just watch us tear ourselves apart."

The Lord’s eyes hardened. "You call losing everything just one battle?!!!"

Danton’s jaw tightened.

There was that blame again; it made him so angry!

The rage he had been carrying since was now returning.