Chapter 1400: Awakening of the World Essence!

The Lord stared at him.

"We know where replacements exist." That was all the answer necessary. Danton continued, "And since we are abandoning the original timetable anyway, there is no reason to wake them as weak souls of themselves and wait day they fully awaken their powers! The original rituals were built around preservation, timing and the Destined Day. They were meant to awaken the Souls safely first and allow the larger conditions of the Destined Day later to complete the whole process of fully awakening."

His smile sharpened.

"We improve them."

The Lord’s attention hardened.

"With the correct treasures feeding the awakening, the Progenitors will not merely return but they will awaken with power already inside them."

"How much?"

"That depends entirely on them. Their Souls, their original souls, whatever remnants of our former power survived, how much we can reclaim during awakening and how perfectly the out bodies accept the power surge. I cannot promise every Progenitor will awaken at the same level."

Danton’s eyes burned.

"But they will not awaken as just helpless mortal with just powerful Soul and their memories."

That alone changed everything.

"And the remaining heirs are easier," Danton continued. "Marcus and the others whose do not require the same Soul awakening ritual or sacrifice can begin drawing upon their power before the Destined Day as well. Instead of sitting here waiting for our enemies to decide when the next disaster arrives— we reshape the board before they realize the game has already changed."

The Lord studied him carefully.

Danton let him.

Then he delivered the final piece.

"We begin today!"

The Lord’s eyes lifted.

Danton’s expression lost some of its controlled arrogance then, and for once what appeared beneath it was not another calculated performance. Something rawer entered his voice, frustration mixed with need and the deeply hated realization that for all his schemes, bloodline and confidence, he had spent too long carrying too much alone.

"And we begin with the person I need most in all of this," he said quietly. "I can’t do this alone anymore."

The admission clearly tasted like poison.

Danton hated weakness with an almost religious commitment, and saying those words seemed to offend something in his bones. Yet the Lord recognized that they were genuine.

He also knew exactly who Danton meant.

"I think that we should—" The Lord never finished before his avatar convulsed!

Danton’s head snapped toward the eastern side of the estate at exactly the same moment because something powerful had just touched the world.

The first tremor passed beneath ordinary senses, so deep that Danton felt it inside his very soul before his senses understood anything had happened. The Mana saturating the private hall quivered all at once, each invisible particle of Mana vibrated so violently that thin rings appeared across the air itself.

A heartbeat later, every other Essence buried throughout the Heavenchild estate answered—

—the floor boomed.

Not because something struck it but because the energy running beneath it shuddered!

Danton’s eyes widened.

The phenomenon did not stop at the estate.

It spread across the entire island.

Mana sleeping inside mountains trembled awake. Elemental Essences hidden inside forests, lakes, caves, buried mineral veins and ancient formations of each legacy mansion erupted into motion. Spiritual energy woven through every fabric of reality began vibrating until the sky itself seemed to acquire a faint hum.

Something changed throughout the Heavenchild estate.

It began so quietly that no one could have said where the first warning came from. A strange stillness crept through the ancient halls, sinking into stone and shadow until even the air seemed unwilling to move. Then, far beneath the estate, the old formations stirred by themselves and the runes awakened one after another in the darkness below, faint at first, then brighter, spreading through buried passages and sealed foundations like some ancient instinct had opened its eyes.

Nothing had struck the estate barriers yet every protection woven into it had reacted at once!

Threads of power embedded inside stone since the island’s formation tore free from the earth. Elemental essences that normally took centuries to shift moved together in a single breath. Mana surged from underground channels in pillars visible even to ordinary eyes, while Essence poured down from the sky in luminous torrents and met it above the island.

The heavens and earth seemed to inhale together. ℯ𝓵.

Danton staggered! 𝐟𝒓ℯⅇ

His Saint Stage cultivation exploded from his body on instinct, golden power hammering outward hard enough to crack the floor beneath his boots, while the Lord’s six wings spread to their full span and every feather burst into blinding radiance.

Neither mattered.

Their powers suddenly felt tiny.

Because the entire fucking island was vibrating with something bigger.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!"

Danton’s voice disappeared beneath the sound.

It was not thunder.

This was deeper.

Millions upon millions of particles of Mana and Essence had begun resonating together, and their combined vibration became a single enormous note rolling through land, sea and sky. Windows throughout the estate shattered.

Clouds above the island twisted inward.

Trees bent without wind while leaves tore free and began circling upward in vast spirals of green. The ocean surrounding the island rippled outward from its shores as though the land itself possessed a heartbeat powerful enough to disturb the sea.

Power became visible everywhere. Blue Mana rose like mist through stone. Golden Essence bled from formations. Green life-energy streamed from forests. Pale spiritual radiance poured from the atmosphere. Crimson fire Essence, silver wind Essence, violet currents neither Danton nor the Lord could immediately identify and countless subtler powers joined them until the island became buried beneath a storm of living light.

And then everything began moving toward one place they could not even perceive.

Across the whole island, every current slowly changed direction as though creation itself had noticed something and turned to look.

They accelerated making the sky explode with color.

Rivers of Mana ripped across the heavens. Essence thundered through forests and mountains in luminous currents and everything else screamed as power surged through them, and the enormous island shook beneath enough converging energy that cliffs along its coastline began shedding stone into the sea.

The Lord’s avatar stared through the walls as though they no longer existed.

Danton’s face had lost every trace of calculation.

For several horrifying seconds, the gathering energies seemed to form the outline of something unimaginably vast. It was not a body exactly, yet the way Mana curved suggested shoulders somewhere beyond sight, the way Essence folded hinted at something towering over the island, and every current flowing through Heaven and Earth appeared to acknowledge a presence neither man could actually perceive.

Danton felt his blood go cold.

Something was being born!

Or awakening.

Or returning?

Then, at the exact moment the pressure became almost unbearable, everything collapsed inward.

The island went silent.

Not gradually.

One instant the heavens were screaming with enough power to make mountains tremble, and the next every sound vanished so completely that Danton heard his own breathing.

The rivers of light disappeared, the sea fell calm, the Mana returned to the air Essence returned to the earth; the island looked exactly as it had before.

Except nothing was the same.

The Lord’s hand lifted slowly.

Mana gathered above his palm.

Both men’s expressions changed.

The energy was cleaner.

’Incomparably cleaner!’

What had previously been crude and dirty ambient Mana unlike other realms possessed now carried a purity neither had ever felt naturally occurring anywhere on Earth. The impurities that had always contaminated it had somehow vanished. Every particle felt polished until nothing useless remained inside it.

Danton sensed the potency; his pupils contracted.

"Oh, fuck..."

The Lord absorbed a single thread and his avatar shook.

Danton reached for the Mana around him and attempted the same thing, only for the energy to resist him for one impossible heartbeat. His cultivation pulled, yet the Mana hovered beyond his meridians as though it no longer recognized the old relationship between cultivator and energy.

Then something loosened and the Mana finally entered his body!

Danton inhaled sharply.

Power rushed through his meridians; a quantity that should have been almost meaningless to him carried far more strength than before, flowing through his body without the usual impurities cultivation needed to refine away.

The Lord absorbed another current, and his six wings shuddered visibly.

They looked at each other.

Neither needed to ask whether they had imagined it.

Every type of energy across the island had just been cleansed, refined, strengthened and made more potent.

The entire fucking environment had advanced.

"What just happened?" the Lord whispered.

Danton did not answer immediately because his mind had already begun racing through every phenomenon he knew capable of affecting Mana on this scale.

There were almost none.

Certainly none he wanted occurring inside the Heavenchild estate without warning.

Only one possibility struck both men at once.

The Lord’s face drained of color, Danton’s followed.

Their heads turned toward the same distant section of the estate.

""Something has happened to him!""

They spoke together, and the words had barely left their mouths before both disappeared.

The Lord’s avatar erupted into a pillar of golden-white light and tore through the estate, while Danton ripped across space after him so violently that several protective formations awakened and screamed behind the wake of his speed.

Danton’s heart hammered harder with every instant.

Because if the thought forming inside his mind was correct, then something had happened far sooner than he planned.

Something enormous!

Something powerful enough to make every Essence across an entire island and beyond had bowed, trembled, purified itself and return stronger.

The Progenitor plan had been supposed to begin today.

Danton suddenly found himself praying that someone else had not begun against his plans!