Chapter 1482: Unburning Progenitor Soul Flame

The Coffer had never held the entirety of the Legacy Families’ wealth.

Its ancient depths contained the yearly contributions each family had pledged to their common cause: treasures, precious resources, materials, rare spiritual herbs, divine and a few immortals fruits and herbs if they please and relics gathered from the World of Powers.

Such offerings had accumulated into a treasury few families even the Greater Realms could rival, but even the Heavenchilds, entrusted with its keeping and standing at the head of the old alliance, could scarcely have expected the others to surrender everything their ancestors had left them.

What ancient family would willingly empty its ancestral treasury into another’s hands?

So long as the appointed offerings were made and the old allegiance upheld, the wealth behind each family’s gates remained its own.

The Heavenchilds, too, guarded their treasures within their estate, as did the Maxtons and the other Legacy Families, each descended from a Progenitor. Their vaults held weapons, elixirs, Beast Cores and inheritances belonging to those lineages.

Deeper within those Legacy Families treasuries, beyond the halls of accumulated riches, lay the Soul Chambers.

Each family possessed one!

The flames burning there were cherished above even the rarest treasures, for each Flame belonged to a descendant of the ancestral bloodline. A family might lose word of its children across distant oceans or within forbidden lands, yet beneath its own roof, their Soul Flames would still bear witness to their lives.

Every child born into the Main Family or its Immediate Families was accompanied by a Soul Flame upon an inextinguishable wick of flame in the ancestral chamber bound to that descendant’s blood and Soul, the fire endured throughout their life and only went dark upon their death.

Before those who had witnessed the death could return, before a messenger could cross the wilderness separating them from home, the family would already know. Those who waited for an absent son or daughter could find comfort beneath the same lights, watching a familiar flame burn steadily among its kin.

Death, however, was not the only thing capable of extinguishing a Soul Flame.

Records reaching back toward the Primordial Times spoke of another cause: the complete severance of the bloodline binding a descendant to their family.

Stripped of their Bloodline, a person could remain alive, their flesh unharmed and their Soul intact, while the fire bearing witness to their existence ceased to burn.

The ancestral chamber however could no longer recognize them with the bloodline lost.

The wick itself would endure so long as the Soul remained, and yet the same person’s Soul Essence could kindle the Soul Flame anew.

Eira had made use of precisely this when Phei Ryujin Tiamat turned Heaven-Stealer upon Marcus Heavenchild. The Primordial Rank treasure had torn the dormant Angel Progenitor Bloodline from his body, taking the Bloodline of the Original Angel Progenitor with it, and deep within the Heavenchild treasury, Marcus’s Soul Flame had gone out.

Had a member of the Main Family entered the chamber then, the extinction of that single fire would have thrown the household into turmoil. The Male Angel Progenitor, whose return had occupied their preparations for generations, would have appeared dead. Eira reached the chamber before anyone discovered the change, carrying Marcus’s own Soul Essence, and touched it to the waiting wick.

Golden fire blossomed again, filling the place his extinguished flame had left among those of his family.

By the time another Heavenchild might have entered, there would have been little to distinguish it from the fire they had always known. Its familiar brilliance concealed the loss Heaven-Stealer had wrought, and its brief extinction passed unwitnessed.

His golden fire now stood at the heart of the Soul Chamber.

Around it stretched the other Flames of the Heavenchild descendants, their innumerable lights reaching across the stone and mingling beneath the chamber’s high ceiling. Beside Marcus’s restored flame rested another inextinguishable wick, dark amid all that radiance.

Eira had seen it when she came to rekindle his fire, untouched by even the faintest spark.

That wick belonged to Shekinah, the Female Angel Progenitor.

Its darkness had endured since the birth of Paige and Brielle!

When the twin girls entered the world, a phenomenon appeared within the Heavenchild Soul Chamber that none of the family had witnessed before, though the Main Family had long awaited it to happen— only a single Soul Flame manifested for the two girls instead of both!

Stranger still, the inextinguishable wick bore no fire.

Where the flames of other descendants burned upon and since birth, this one remained bare!

Thus, two Soul Flames occupied the very centre of the chamber: Marcus’s and Shekinah’s.

The one had been extinguished and restored while the other had never burned at all.

Through all the years since the twins’ birth, the surrounding fires had cast their brilliance across that dark wick without a single tongue of flame ever rising from its tip.

The Heavenchilds understood the significance of its silence. Until the Female Angel Progenitor awakened, Shekinah’s flame would remain unlit— the twins were the ones from which Shekinah would be reborn from— so they understood and her been told for generations.

They had waited beneath that certainty, preserving the wick beside Marcus’s while the ancient existence it belonged to continued to slumber.

Other Legacy Families awaited similar awakenings. Sierra’s Soul Flame remained unlit, for the ancient Soul of the First Devil had yet to awaken through the sacrifice intended for his return. So it was with Clara’s, Gianna Romano’s, Natasha’s, Priya’s and Juliette’s.

Their families depended upon the Maxtons and Heavenchilds to awaken the Male Progenitors, and within their treasuries, the unburning wicks remained as they had been— awaiting the fulfillment of that promise upon the sacrifice of the girls!

Within the Heavenchild Soul Chamber, Eira had departed that day after completing her task.

Marcus’s restored fire continued to burn beside Shekinah’s darkened wick, surrounded by the light of the family’s living descendants. Its gold rose steadily, offering no outward disturbance to draw attention towards the neighboring flame that had never once existed beyond its unlit wick.

Yet... exactly NINE hours after the Lord summoned Paige and Brielle, a golden spark appeared upon that bare tip.