Chapter 590: World Vault [Bonus - ]

Chapter 590: World Vault [Bonus Chapter]

"Fascinating how quickly paternal affection blooms when there’s a Gold Core standing in the room," Kara muttered, loud enough for the entire northern arc to hear.

The King ignored the barb, though the subtle destructive vibration around his fingers threatened to unravel the silk of his trousers.

"And finally," the King said, steering the conversation with rigid haste, "there is the matter of your access to the World Vault."

The entire chamber stiffened instantly.

’Did we forget about my other request for the teleportation stuff so I can actually visit Central City...?’

No matter, Kara would ask once she actually got into the world count then a nervous tremor rippled through the ranks of the Nine Major Powers.

The World Vault was not merely a treasury.

It was a mythical sanctum established during the First Apocalypse, a vault constructed beneath the ancient foundations of the Citadel to preserve the relics of a dying world.

It held items salvaged from the Fall of the World... primordial grimoires, soul-forged artifacts, classified weapons whose power could tilt the balance of continental wars.

In centuries, not a single living monarch sitting at this table, not even the ancient Tsar Volkov or Sir Arthur Pendelton, had ever been granted permission to step through its threshold.

The King took a slow heavy breath.

An unmistakable nervous hesitation crept into his regal posture as his oceanic eyes flickered and his fingers clenched into tight tense fists.

"The World Vault contains the foundational heritage of our civilization," the King stated, his voice tight. "Its contents are classified under Omega-level security seals. However... in accordance with our agreement, the Council will permit you entry. You will be escorted to the primary chamber, where you may select three treasures—"

"Five."

The King’s left eyelid twitched violently.

"Three," the King repeated with his voice grinding through clenched teeth.

"Five would do nicely," Kara interrupted smoothly, flashing another brilliant infuriating smile. "I have a growing territory, Your Majesty... Lots of mouths to feed, lots of walls to build... Three is an odd unlucky number and five feels much more harmonious, don’t you think?"

Up on the dais, the King stared down at her with a look of pure murder.

Every single royal instinct in his soul was screaming at him to unleash Destruction, he just wanted to point his finger, unravel her molecular bonds, and turn Kara White into an unrecognizable smear of subatomic ash.

Yet... even if he uncoiled that absolute power, would it even work?

She was a Gold Core.

’She already said it wouldn’t...’

If his Destruction failed to obliterate her in the first second and even bounced off her body a bit, the resulting cataclysm would crack the Citadel in half, drown the summit in the black ocean, and trigger a global civil war humanity could not survive.

The King let out a long agonizing exhale.

"Five," the King ground out, his voice hollow with forced defeat. "You may take five items... No more..."

Kara gave him a cheerful enthusiastic thumbs-up with her right hand.

"Look at that! You’re goated, Your Majesty," Kara grinned shamelessly. "Truly. Some of the times, at least."

The King closed his eyes for a full three seconds, visibly wrestling his temper into submission.

When he opened them, he turned his head toward the northern arc where the five masked World Council Heads sat.

"Number Five," the King commanded, his voice sounding very cold. "Escort the Lord of Blessed Land to the lower sanctuary and supervise the transaction as well."

From the council bench, the smallest of the masked figures rose to her feet.

She was noticeably short, her slender frame enveloped in heavy hooded robes of midnight-silk woven with anti-divination wards.

Her face was completely concealed behind a smooth featureless mask of polished white porcelain, bearing no crest, no runes, and no human expression either.

Even when the King spoke to her, she didn’t speak back.

She simply offered a curt mechanical nod of her head, stepped off the council dais, and began walking toward the heavy titanium blast doors on the western wall.

As she reached the corridor archway, she paused and motioned with a single silk-draped sleeve for Kara to follow.

"Woah~ Finally some action."

Kara pushed herself up from the executive armchair, gave her shoulders a long lazy roll, and casually strolled toward the doors.

WHOOOSH!

The second Kara stepped within three paces of the short, masked woman, the fabric of space violently sheared as the air in the chamber twisted into a sickening vertigo-inducing spiral of translucent gravitational force.

Kara felt a sudden sharp tug behind her navel as an instantaneous high-velocity spatial displacement that bent her eyesight out of alignment!

POP!

In the blink of a mortal eye, both Kara and the masked woman vanished from the Great Assembly Chamber as not a speck of dust, not a whisper of mana, and not a single residual spark was left behind.

The suffocating pressure that had choked the chamber for the timeshe had been there collapsed instantly, replaced by a hollow quiet.

Across the Grand Table, President Julian Vanderbilt Senior let out a massive shuddering gasp, practically deflating into his executive chair like a punctured tire.

’Gone...’ Vanderbilt thought, his trembling fingers pressing against his inner coat pocket, feeling the reassuring rigidity of the midnight-blue gloves pressed against his ribs. ’That demonic extortionist bitch is finally gone.’

TOC! TOC! TOC!

The rhythmic tapping of a manicured finger against polished star-iron echoed from the northern dais.

Vanderbilt froze, slowly lifting his head.

The King was looking down at him from his throne with his oceanic blue eyes piercing straight through Vanderbilt’s skull.

"President Vanderbilt," the King spoke quietly.

Vanderbilt scrambled to sit upright, adjusting his spectacles with shaking hands. "Y-Yes, Your Majesty?"

"The Republic has acquired the prototype," the King stated flatly. "You will not waste this opportunity on internal delays... Before the sun sets, the Crown will assign Grand Master Varun, the most accomplished Runemaster on the terrestrial plane, directly to your primary research facility in New Columbia."

Vanderbilt’s eyes widened in sudden feverish ecstasy.

Grand Master Varun was a living national treasure, a sage whose understanding of runes was quite legendary... He was quite younger than some of the other Masked members but old enough to be one himself.

"You will dismantle those gloves," the King ordered, his voice dropping into a dark razor-sharp whisper that chilled the room. "You will map every artificial pathway, decipher every containment rune, and replicate the conductive weave... The Crown expects a functioning, mass-producible schematic within thirty days."

Vanderbilt rose to his feet, bowing low from the waist with venomous resolve.

"The Republic hears and obeys, Your Majesty!" Vanderbilt declared, his heart thumping with fierce triumphant malice.

’Just you wait, Kara White,’ Vanderbilt vowed in the dark twisted corners of his mind, his fingers tightening around his lapel. ’Enjoy your fifty billion while you can... The second our artificers crack this weave and mass-produce your secret, Columbia will flood the global market. I will personally make it my life’s mission to see the look on your arrogant face when your precious monopoly is reduced to worthless street scrap.’

...

SWOOSH!

The disorienting pull of spell snapped off with the clean finality of a closing ledger as Kara blinked with her vision stabilizing in an instant.

The suffocating titanium walls of the Citadel and the bitter salt-air of the ocean were completely gone.

Instead she stood in the center of a colossal underground library that seemed to stretch outward into infinity.

The air was cool and dry, carrying the scent of old books which made Kara’s nose twitch.

Towering bookshelves carved from seamless petrified dark-wood rose fifty feet into the air, arranged in concentric curving rings that formed a massive labyrinth.

Thousands upon thousands of leather-bound grimoires, illuminated scrolls, and glowing crystalline data-slates rested neatly on the shelves as their spines hummed with dormant mana-currents.

There were no windows and no sounds of the outside world.

’We’re deep,’ Silas analyzed instantly, looking up at the vaulted ceiling carved directly from ancient glowing bedrock. ’Miles beneath the crust of the Island... We might even be situated directly beneath the ocean floor itself.’

Curious, Silas let his senses unfurl, nudging a thread of high-frequency vibrational mana outward to probe the perimeter and map the exits—

"I would strongly advise against expanding your spiritual perception in this facility."

The voice was muffled and came from the short hooded woman standing beside her.

Kara paused, looking down at the porcelain mask.

"The foundation of this sanctuary is woven with ninety-six layers of soul-dampening arrays," Number Five explained tiredly. "If your Gold Core mana touches the peripheral wards, the feedback will rebound directly into your nervous system... You will experience an instantaneous high-tier psychic backlash followed by a migraine that will make you wish your skull had been cracked open by a siege hammer."

Kara raised an eyebrow, but surprisingly, she pulled her mana back, letting it settle quietly into her core.

"Good to know," Kara said casually. "I like my brain right where it is."

Number Five turned on her heel and began walking down the wide central aisle of petrified wood with her midnight-silk robes sweeping silently over the polished slate tiles.

Kara strolled beside her with her hands tucked loosely into her coat pockets and her half-lidded eyes casually scanning the titles on the massive shelves.

’[Foundational Core Compaction: Third Era]... [The Seven Calamities of the Rift]... [Theoretical Principles of Void-Conductive Metals]...’

’Rowenna would literally sell her left kidney to spend an hour in this room,’ Silas thought, thoroughly amused. ’She’d probably chain herself to a bookshelf and refuse to leave until they dragged her out with a winch.’

Rowenna really did want to study a lot, according to what Reina was telling him, Rowenna was reading the most books in the Library. ℴℴ𝘮

After navigating through three rings of towering shelves, they arrived at a massive circular reception rotunda.

At the center of the rotunda sat an enormous high-backed service counter carved from a single polished slab of fossilized dragon-bone.

It stood nearly six feet high, looming like an ancient fortress wall and mounted on the center of the bone counter was a small ornate brass service bell.

Number Five stopped in front of the counter.

Standing barely five feet tall in her heavy robes, the counter came up past her shoulders.

She stood on the tips of her soft leather boots, stretching her slender neck and extending her silk-draped right arm, straining with all her might to reach the tiny brass button on top of the bell.

Her fingertips grazed the cold metal...

SWOOSH!

With a mocking hiss, the brass bell slid backward across the dragon-bone counter by exactly one meter, stopping just out of her reach!

Number Five froze as her arm remained outstretched in mid-air with her porcelain-masked face stared at the retreating bell for two long agonizing seconds.

Kara let out a low amused snicker, leaning against the edge of the desk.

"Need a hand, short stuff?" Kara offered, smirking. "I can pick you up by the scruff of your robe if you want."

Number Five slowly lowered her arm with her shoulders dropping into a posture of pure exasperation.

"I do not require your assistance," Number Five muttered, her muffled voice dripping with cold murderous venom.

She took a sharp breath, glaring at the empty space behind the counter.

"Musvi, you ancient festering parasite," Number Five cursed, her voice rising into an irritated rasp. "Get out here before I dismantle your precious card catalog and burn your petrified shelves for firewood..."

"Aiya! Such hostility from little Number Five!"

POP!

With a soft swirl of pale violet smoke, a man materialized behind the dragon-bone counter.

He leaned forward, resting both elbows on the polished bone, offering them an energetic flamboyant wave.

He was dressed in immaculate midnight-silk robes that mirrored the World Council Heads, but instead of the featureless white porcelain mask worn by the others, his mask was painted with an enormous comical smiling theater grin, accented by exaggerated red cheeks and spiraling golden eyebrows.

"You wound me, little sister!" the man exclaimed, his voice carrying the lively melodic voice of a wandering bard. "A gentleman spends four hundred years dusting ancient tomes in the dark, and this is the reception he receives?... No ’Good morning, Musvi’? No ’How are your aching joints, Musvi’?... Truly, the youth of the modern council have zero appreciation for classical hospitality!"

’Modern council, what the hell is he talking about?’

He turned his theatrical mask toward Kara, leaning his head to the side.

"And who is this delightful young lady standing in my humble reading room?" Musvi asked, his masked smile practically beaming. "My, my... look at that posture. Look at that glorious untamed power humming beneath the skin. You must be the famous Kara White! The wild girl from Blessed Land who made the mighty King swallow his own teeth in the assembly!"

Kara narrowed her eyes, studying the man before her.

’He’s strong,’ Silas analyzed instantly with a sharp quiet warning bell chiming behind his ribs.

On the surface, Musvi acted like an eccentric retired librarian, but beneath that painted wooden theater mask, Silas could feel the deep unfathomable ocean of a High-Tier Lord.

Yet there was something deeply strange about his core circulation.

It felt sluggish... it was not weak, but dormant instead, like an engine that had been deliberately geared down to run on low power for centuries.

Musvi caught her intense stare and let out a dramatic high-pitched gasp, clutching his chest with both hands.

"Oh my!" Musvi squeaked, taking a step backward. "Please, Lord White, do not look at an old man with such intensity! I am a fragile delicate scholar! My heart cannot handle the fiery gaze of a youthful Gold Core! If you fall in love with me, little Number Five will become terribly jealous, and we simply do not have the budget for domestic disputes in the archive!"

Kara blinked with an incredulous smirk pulling at her lips.

"Are you always this annoying, or is today a special occasion?"

"Every day is a special occasion when you live under miles of granite, my dear!" Musvi winked from behind his wooden eyeholes.

Number Five let out a heavy suffering sigh that sounded like it had been building up for three centuries.

"Enough garbage, Musvi," Number Five said, her voice dry as dust. "By imperial decree of the King and the High Council, the Lord of Blessed Land has been granted authorization to enter the World Vault and claim five ancestral artifacts so produce the master key."

"Oho!" Musvi’s painted eyebrows seemed to gleam with genuine excitement. "The World Vault?! A customer for the deep sanctum?! Splendid! Marvelous! It has been three hundred and eighty years since someone walked through those iron gates... Oh, the dust down there is magnificent and the cobwebs are practically historical monuments—"

"Hold on," Kara interrupted, leaning her hip against the dragon-bone counter.

Musvi paused mid-gesture. "Yes, my fierce warrior maiden?"

"Before we go wandering into the spooky basement," Kara said, holding out her right hand with an open palm, "I want my other assets delivered... The King signed off on the full package so where are my Hero Summoning Tickets and my Troop Summoning Tickets?"