Chapter 592: The Key To The Vault [Bonus - ]

Chapter 592: The Key To The Vault [Bonus Chapter]

’If I were still just Silas Graves, a commoner even if I was wearing an expensive suit, they wouldn’t have negotiated for three seconds,’ he mused, his jaw setting firmly beneath his skin. ’They would have dragged me into a white room, pinned my limbs to a dissection slab with suppression nails, and picked my brain apart to steal the glove schematics. I’m only alive because they think I’m a divine monster they can’t afford to fight...’

A slow sharp smirk pulled at the corner of Kara’s lips.

’Which means I just have to milk this position for every single scrap of meat on the bone... If they think I’m an unhinged greedy monster, I might as well play the part to perfection.’

As if sensing the sudden shift in the air, Number Five’s posture stiffened.

She turned her featureless mask toward Kara with her small head cocking to the side as a visible shudder rippled through her midnight-silk robes.

"Why..." Number Five muttered, her muffled voice sounding distinctly uneasy, "...did the temperature just drop by four degrees? What horrific extortionist plot are you conjuring behind those eyes now, Lord White?"

"Who, me?" Kara gasped, holding her single right hand to her chest in mock innocence. "I’m just a simple humble slum girl admiring your lovely interior decorating. I wouldn’t dream of plotting anything..."

"You are a plague," Number Five stated with flat certainty.

POP!

A puff of lavender smoke billowed across the dragon-bone counter, accompanied by a bright cheerful humming noise.

Musvi reappeared exactly where he had been standing before, leaning forward with his elbows on the bone, holding a flat rectangular slab of dark stone between his palms.

"I have returned!" Musvi announced joyfully.

He glanced past Kara, his painted wooden eyes locking onto the small woman standing in the aisle.

"Oh, little Five! Did you enjoy the velvet cushion? I had it woven from primeval nightmare-silk! Remarkably soft, isn’t it? Though it seems your posture hasn’t improved... Still as delightfully compact as a garden gnome, I see!"

"I am going to murder you," Number Five hissed, taking two rapid furious strides toward the counter. "I swear on the First Founder’s tomb, Musvi, I will sever your vocal cords and feed them to the sewer drakes!"

She reached the counter and tried to plant her boots on the stone trim to hoist herself up, but her limbs were simply too short.

She hopped twice with her small fingers clawing uselessly at the polished fossilized edge and her robes tangling around her ankles as she failed to gain an inch of height.

"Aiya! Look at those little hops!" Musvi laughed, clapping his hands together like an amused parent at a festival. "Magnificent form! Splendid verticality! Truly the most adorable Council Head in the last three centuries!"

FSSSSSH!

Number Five froze mid-hop and she slowly lowered her arms.

’Ah, what’s she going to do?’

Number Five didn’t yell and she didn’t curse either. The woman simply turned her entire body around, walked stiffly over to the nearest wall of petrified dark-wood, planted her nose three inches from the polished bark, and stood there in dead silence, facing the corner like a pouting child sent to time-out.

Kara couldn’t take it anymore.

"Pfft, hah!"

A loud sharp bark of laughter escaped Kara’s throat, echoing across the quiet rotunda.

She’d spent the entire morning assuming the World Council Heads were ancient soulless automatons carved from ice and cruelty.

To see the legendary Number Five, a woman capable of bending the assembly chamber with pure spiritual pressure, standing in a corner facing the wall because she couldn’t jump onto a desk was nothing short of cinematic gold.

’They really do have distinct personalities,’ Silas thought, shaking his head with genuine amusement. ’Ancient beings, but still hilariously human under those porcelain shells.’

Musvi cleared his throat, tapping the stone slab against the counter with a rhythmic TOC-TOC-TOC.

"Now then, back to serious business!" Musvi declared, pushing the slab across the bone surface toward Kara. "Take a look at this, Lord White."

Kara stepped forward, picking up the object with her right hand.

It was roughly the size and thickness of an architectural floor tile, carved from a dense midnight-black basalt that felt surprisingly warm to the touch.

Etched into its face was an intricate circular array of silver and violet lines, spatial coordinates woven into a microscopic interlocking geometric mandala that hummed with a deep ringing sound.

"A Space Anchor," Musvi explained. "Crafted during the zenith of the Second Era... If you take this tile, carry it back to your territory in Blessed Land, and embed it into the foundational bedrock of your central keep, it will forge a permanent stable dimensional corridor directly between your personal grounds and the Grand Plaza of Central City in the Sovereign Realm."

Kara raised an eyebrow, turning the heavy tile over in her palm.

The underside was smooth, marked only by a single stylized crest depicting a soaring hawk clutching a compass.

"How old is this thing?" Kara asked skeptically. "When was it last calibrated? I don’t feel like stepping onto a teleporter in my living room and having my torso materialize inside a solid granite mountain three hundred miles off-target..."

"Completely fresh! Practically straight out of the forge!" Musvi waved a hand dismissively. "It was crafted barely four hundred years ago! In sovereign terms, the ink is still wet! Why, several active lords utilize this exact model for their territory... Take Lord Sky, for instance!"

Kara paused, her fingers tightening around the edge of the basalt tile.

"Lord Sky?" she echoed, keeping her voice completely neutral, though Silas’s internal focus sharpened like a needle.

"Indeed!" Musvi nodded brightly. "The reclusive Lord Sky maintains an identical anchor stone embedded within his primary redoubt... It allows him to transport himself, his high-tier retainers, and cargo crates between his territory and Central City at a moment’s notice as well as his whole territory. Furthermore, he possesses a secondary mobile one, a special stone that allows him to execute randomized spatial leaps across uncharted territorial jurisdictions within a three-thousand-league radius."

Musvi leaned forward, his painted grin gleaming in the crystal light.

"That is precisely how Lord Sky manages to locate so many isolated territories, you see! That adventurous fellow spends half his time tumbling through dimensional blind spots and Unknown Zones far outside Central City’s jurisdiction! That is how he stumbled upon Blessed Land in the first place, if I recall the scouting logs correctly!"

’Huh...’ Silas mused internally, a sudden wave of understanding washing over him.

For a while he’d privately wondered how Evelyn had managed to stumble across his territory in the Umbral Basin.

The basin was an inhospitable mana-corroded wasteland surrounded by territorial anomalies.

It had seemed almost absurdly coincidental that another lord had simply wandered into his backyard.

Now the pieces fit together seamlessly.

Evelyn wasn’t just wandering... she was utilizing high-tier space anchors to skip across the dimensional fabric like a flat stone skipping over a lake.

’Being Lord Sky is definitely not an easy job,’ Silas thought with a faint sympathetic wince.

Skipping through uncharted territories meant constantly dropping head-first into hostile beast dens, unstable spatial rifts, and territories with Lords.

’I can see why she was taking her vacation so seriously back in my place. The poor girl is probably running on pure caffeine and adrenaline half the time... The second she resumes her duties, she’s going to be worked to the bone again.’

He made a quiet mental note.

’When I get back, I’ll order what she likes... She’s definitely earned them.’

Kara slipped the heavy basalt anchor tile into her inner coat pocket, letting it rest beside her pink mobile phone.

"Thanks for the tip, Musvi," Kara said, offering him a casual nod. "I’ll make good use of it."

"Always a pleasure to assist a rising star!" Musvi chirped.

In the corner of the room, Number Five slowly turned around.

She pushed herself away from the petrified wood with her hands vanishing back into her midnight-silk sleeves as she strode back toward the counter with stiff dignified grace.

"The preliminaries are settled," Number Five said, her voice completely lacking of its earlier rage, masked once more beneath thick imperial frost. "Produce the master key, Musvi... The assembly is waiting for our return, and I have zero desire to spend another minute in this dusty hole."

"Ah, the key! Of course, of course!"

Musvi reached into the deep voluminous pocket of his embroidered robe, rummaging through an assortment of rattling objects... loose brass cogs, dried paper scraps, a half-eaten candied plum, and a tiny silver magnifying glass... before finally withdrawing an ornate heavy key.

It was roughly nine inches long, forged from an iridescent dark-violet metal that seemed to absorb the ambient light around it.

The shaft was twisted like the horn of an ancient ram, and the teeth were not simple notches, but miniature interlocking clockwork gears that continuously rotated on their own with a small rhythmic ticking sound.

TICK-TICK-TICK!

Musvi held the key up, letting the violet metal catch the crystal glare, before lowering it toward Number Five.

"Here you are, my tiny terrifying Council member," Musvi teased, his painted eyebrows arching playfully. "Do try not to drop it... If it falls into a crack in the floor, you might need a step-ladder to fish it out."

Number Five snatched the key from his wooden fingers with a violent snapping motion of her wrist, quickly tucking it into her sleeve before she could be tempted to plunge it into his throat.

"May your teeth fall out one by one," Number Five muttered under her breath.

Musvi only laughed, offering them both a deep bow from behind the counter, sweeping his silk sleeves so wide they brushed the floor tiles.

"Safe travels into the deep dark, ladies!" Musvi called out, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. "And Lord White... a word of professional advice from an old tired curator who has watched generations turn to dust."

Kara paused, glancing back at the painted wooden mask.

"If you should venture into the deepest forgotten alcoves of the vault..." Musvi said, his voice suddenly dropping its clownish lilt, carrying a strange hollow weight that sent a genuine shiver through the rotunda, "...do not listen to the voices in the stone. Do not answer them and above all else, do not agree to whatever bargains they whisper through the dark."

Kara blinked, her brow furrowing slightly.

"Voices? What kind of voic—"

PING!

Before she could finish the syllable, the world violently fractured and this time, it wasn’t just the gentle sliding transition of standard teleportation.

It was a brutal vertical spatial drop!

The library, the petrified bookshelves, the bone counter, and Musvi’s painted theater grin were violently ripped away in an instantaneous blur of black and violet light.

The crushing gravitational acceleration hammered down onto Kara’s skull like an iron weight, forcing a sharp breath from her lungs as her vision warped into rings of static.

WHAM!

Her boots hit cold unforgiving stone and the air here was completely different.

It was freezing, so cold that Kara’s breath plumed into thick white clouds the moment it left her lips but far worse than the cold was the pressure.

It was an immense crushing weight that pressed against the eardrums, made the teeth ache, and settled across the shoulders like a lead blanket.

Kara reflexively nudged her internal mana, preparing to unfurl her perception to map the perimeter once more.

"Do not."

Number Five’s voice cut through the dark, cold and sharp as chipped obsidian.

Kara looked down.

The short woman was standing beside her, holding the iridescent violet key in her right hand, her heavy midnight-silk robes pulled tight against the biting chill.

"We are miles beneath the continental shelf," Number Five explained, her muffled voice sounding very flat. "The volume of oceanic water pressing down upon the bedrock above our heads is calculated in billions of metric tons... This entire chamber is suspended within a stabilized pressure-bubble but if you push your Gold Core mana into the surrounding stone, the power will disrupt the external equilibrium arrays... The water will not merely flood this corridor, it will hammer through these walls with the kinetic force of a falling moon, vaporizing both of us into biological pulp before you can even form an incantation."

Kara let out a low whistle, pulling her senses back into the core behind her sternum.

"A simple ’keep your hands to yourself’ would have sufficed," Kara drawled dryly.

"With you, Lord White, nothing simple ever suffices," Number Five replied, turning away and marching forward into the gloom.

Kara followed half a step behind, her single right hand tucked into her coat pocket with her boots clicking softly against the dark flagstones.

The corridor was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, carved directly out of solid seamless black basalt that bore no tool marks.

Glowing pale runes, ancient, fading, and written in a dialect that predated the modern Nine Powers by centuries, flickered along the baseboards, casting long eerie shadows across their path.

After thirty paces, the corridor terminated at an enormous terrifying barrier.