Chapter 410 - 65: Aetheria and the Sovereign’s Blind Spot

Chapter 410: Chapter 65: Aetheria and the Sovereign’s Blind Spot

Ash began to explore the villa, and he noticed that it was too quiet.

Well that was to be expected, since he was the only one here. Automated formations constantly cleaned the house and also cooked.

He walked down a hallway of pale stone and dark wood.

Ash noticed his footsteps made no sound, a result of constantly levitating a few nanometers above the floor.

His true weight was immense, as boundless energy and immeasurable conceptual laws coursed through every single atom of his being. Though he felt as light as a feather, he knew that if even a fraction of that mass leaked out during a single step, his brand-new villa would instantly cave in on itself.

Furthermore, having achieved complete harmony with nature and laws, the surrounding air and earth naturally yielded to his presence without friction or resistance. It was for these exact reasons that the footsteps of high-level cultivators were always silent.

[AN: What do you guys think of my reason why cultivators footsteps are always quiet. Let me know down in the comments.]

The estate was ridiculous. Three floors above ground, two below, a library with actual physical books shelved beside data-crystal racks, a kitchen he could have parked 10 trucks in, and a training hall with a ceiling forty meters high. Beneath the foundation, three natural spiritual veins braided together like roots, feeding arrays so efficient that the ambient cosmic energy sat thick enough to taste.

Whoever built this place had built it for someone who intended to live here for a few centuries.

He found the media room on the second floor. Curved wall screen eleven meters wide, seating for twenty, sound system that could probably reproduce a supernova.

Ash stopped in the doorway and grinned for the first time since he’d landed on Mars.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, now we’re talking."

He spent the next forty minutes doing something that had absolutely nothing to do with cultivation, planetary engineering, or the survival of the human species. He linked his old terminal to his current terminal and then linked it to the account of the villa’s system, migrated his entire library of anime, manga, novels—every season, every OVA, every fan-subtitled special he’d hoarded over four years—and set the whole thing to index. He queued Eternal Sovereign’s Return from Season 2 Episode 1, turned the volume to a reasonable level, and let the opening theme play for about ninety seconds while he stood in the middle of the room with his arms crossed.

The animation was better than he remembered. Or maybe he was just seeing it with eyes that could track individual frames now.

Both, he decided.

He paused it at episode one, twelve minutes in.

Not yet. Later. With Rylan.

He’d promised. That whole season had been marinating for months, and he wasn’t going to burn it alone in an empty house like some tragic cultivator on a mountaintop. That was exactly the kind of thing the those lonely cultivators did, and look how that turned out for them. Empty chairs and cold tea. No life or friends.

Well i am not going to be like that. I have a friend at least.

Sigh, whatever.

Ash closed the media room and then he suddenly realized that he was given a Spatial ring.

He quickly searched his pockets, but couldnt find it.

"Did I lose it when I was touring the Villa?"

He quickly set off to look for it.

If the Martial Sovereigns knew that he had lost the ring, they would have pulled his hair out.

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He stood in the center of the villa’s private training courtyard—a wide, flat expanse of packed white stone under open sky—and turned the spatial ring on his finger. He found it.

It was a plain band of dark metal, no thicker than a coin’s edge, with a hairline seam of silver running around its circumference. Lyra had handed it over like it was a set of house keys. A small world inside with the volume of a moon. Living things can even survive inside. It’s very precious.

Very precious. She’d said it the same way someone would describe a decent kettle.

Ash pushed a thread of awareness into the ring to activate it, faint spatial fluctuation appeared and soon he disappeared from where he was standing.

The transition was gentler than a portal. No tearing, no pressure change—just a soft sense of elsewhere, and then grass under his boots.

He opened his eyes.

He was standing on the slope of a low green hill. The grass came up to his shins, thick and slightly coarse, waving in a breeze that carried the smell of soil and cut stems. Below the hill a shallow river ran between banks of gray stone, and beyond that, forest—real forest, kilometers of it, broad-leafed and dark green, the canopy shifting in slow waves as the wind moved across it.

And above, hanging in a pale blue sky at a fixed point about forty degrees off the horizon, was a sun.

It was small. Not distant-small—actually small, maybe two hundred meters across, a compact sphere of steady golden-white light suspended in the air like a lamp on a wire. He could feel the warmth of it on his face. It didn’t burn. It just sat there, patient, doing its job.

Ash tilted his head back and looked at it for a long moment.

"What the hell, that’s not a star," he said. "That’s just a normal bright and hot light source."

He extended his divine sense.

It rolled out across the world in every direction without strain. His awareness washed over the forests, sank into the soil, mapped the crust, and found the boundaries. The whole thing was a sphere roughly the size of Earth’s moon, wrapped in a stable, self-contained spatial shell. Gravity sat at a comfortable, slightly light 0.9g. The atmosphere was breathable and clean. The miniature sun cycled on a twenty-six-hour loop. There was a water cycle. There were seasons, of a sort, driven by slow shifts in the shell’s energy distribution.

There were plants. There were insects—small, ordinary ones with no spiritual signature at all. There were fish in the river.

There was nothing else. No beasts. No spirit herbs. No ore veins worth the name. No ruins, no arrays, no roads.

A completely ordinary, completely empty little world, running quietly in the palm of his hand.

Ash sat down in the grass.

He’d been half-expecting a barren rock. Lyra had said small world, and his brain had filled in dead moon. Instead someone had gone to the trouble of building an entire functioning biosphere and then just... leaving it fallow.

Probably a rich cultivator’s private garden, he thought. Or a seed vault. Or someone’s retirement plan.

He picked a blade of grass, turned it over in his fingers, and let his mind run the numbers.

He could terraform this. Right now, today. He had the perfected Unique Origin Law of Planetary Genesis sitting complete in his mind—the same law he’d used to rewrite Mars. He knew the syntax. He knew the exact structure of the core-integration sequence, the ley-line layout, the atmospheric retention parameters, the consciousness fetus code. He could carve a cultivation chamber into the mantle of this little moon, ignite a spiritual vein network, and turn this quiet green world into a high-tier cultivation planet.

He ran the energy calculation.

Then he ran it again, because he wanted to be sure he hadn’t misplaced a zero.

He hadn’t.

Ash let the blade of grass fall.

"Yeah," he said to the empty hillside. "No."

The problem was exactly the same as it had been with Earth. The blueprint was free. The fuel was not. To bring a world of this volume up to proper cultivation-grade energy density, he’d need to inject an amount of Origin-level cosmic energy that made the word astronomical feel understated. Mars had worked because the alien Seed came pre-charged—millions of years of accumulated energy sitting in a compressed package, built by a civilization that had centuries to spare and a star to draw from.

He didn’t have a second Seed. He had himself, a very large battery of a body, and no way to convert quantity into that particular quality fast enough to matter.

And even if he did have the energy—

Ash leaned back on his hands and looked up at the little sun.

Even if I did, what would I use it for?

That was the part he kept circling back to. A private cultivation world sounded incredible on paper. Infinite energy, total privacy, no Sovereigns watching, no academy arrays to accidentally drain. The dream.

Except his actual plan didn’t need it.

The Zero-Point integration was the real path. If Orrin developed and stabilized the reactor and Ash wove the vacuum-extraction principle into the Boundless Omni Art, his own body would generate cosmic energy continuously from empty space. He wouldn’t need a planetary battery. He’d be the battery—and unlike a planet, he could take himself anywhere.

Building a private cultivation world now would be like buying a second house to store the gasoline he was about to stop needing.

Doesn’t mean it’s useless, though.

He sat up and looked out over the forest again, thinking about it differently this time.

Spirit herbs. The really rare ones—the kind that needed three thousand years of undisturbed growth in a specific energy climate, the kind that showed up in the catalogue with a price tag and a nine-month waiting list. He could grow them here. He could adjust the shell’s parameters to whatever climate a specific plant wanted, run accelerated growth cycles with Life Law, and harvest on his own schedule.

Rare materials, too. If he seeded the crust with the right mineral base and let the shell’s pressure do the work over a few decades, he could grow his own ore veins. Artifact refining, formation work, rune-carving—Lyra had mentioned those paths, and the villa came equipped for all of them.

And no one would ever know. No requisition forms. No questions about why a Grandmaster needed four tons of star-iron and a greenhouse full of six-thousand-year-old ginseng.

"Aetheria," he said.

The name arrived whole, the way names sometimes did. He turned it over once and found he liked it.

"Aetheria," he repeated, more firmly. "Private. Mine. Agricultural and mineral expansion priority. Energy density secondary."

Nothing happened, because the world had no spirit and no arrays and nothing to hear him with. But saying it out loud made it feel decided.

He stood, brushed grass off his robes, and stepped back out through the seam.

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