Chapter 595: New Items! [Bonus - ]

Chapter 595: New Items! [Bonus Chapter]

Number Five opened her mouth to scream another protest, but the brick wall of Kara’s arrogance hit her like a physical blow.

The small woman’s shoulders visibly slumped.

Her head dropped forward with her chin practically resting against her collarbone, and her knees buckled slightly before she caught herself, letting out a wheezing groan that sounded like a dying bellows.

She was so tired.

Three hundred years of guarding silent shelves, and she was stuck babysitting a greedy terrifying monster who treated divine relics like clearance items in a flea market.

"Fine," Number Five whispered, her voice completely dead of life. "Take it... Take the whole damned dais while you’re at it and see if I care."

"You mean it?"

The woman ignored her then straightened up, waving a weak limp hand toward the blade.

"It is a Soul Weapon," Number Five explained, her tone flat, mechanical, entirely defeated. "Because the core recognized your... whatever freakish biological anomaly you possess... the weapon is permanently bound to your spirit. You do not need to haul it around on your back like a common mercenary, nor do you need to waste space in your Lord Inventory... Will it into your core and it will dissolve into your soul."

Kara raised an eyebrow. ’A Soul Weapon?’

She focused her intent, visualizing the golden blade sinking into the warm ocean of mana swirling behind her sternum.

SHUUUU!

The massive two-hundred-pound greatsword instantly melted into a shimmering stream of golden particles!

The light flowed like liquid mercury into the palm of Kara’s right hand, sinking effortlessly beneath her skin.

In an instant the weight vanished yet deep within her soul space, resting comfortably beside her core, Silas could distinctly feel the sharp radiant presence of the Dawn Blade, waiting to be summoned at the speed of thought.

Number Five stood frozen in the center of the aisle, watching the light disappear.

Beneath the smooth white porcelain, her mind was spinning into frantic wild calculations.

’She actually stored it,’ Number Five thought, a cold sweat beading beneath her midnight hood. ’It didn’t reject her and it didn’t tear her soul apart. Is she... could she possibly be an illegitimate child of the current World King? Another secret affair, like that girl from Shogya?’

It was the only logical explanation that fit the physical laws of the universe.

The World King was known to have fathered Kiera in secret during his visits to the United Hegemony.

If he’d strayed once, what was to say he hadn’t left another seed in some remote forgotten corner of the world?

Kara White had appeared out of nowhere, possessing an unrecorded Gold Core, physical arrogance, and an instinctive disdain for authority that practically mirrored the Castellian royal line...

’No...’ Number Five corrected herself, shaking her head slightly beneath the dark silk. ’The Castellian bloodline is aggressively dominant. Kiera is proof of that, even born to a common concubine from an eastern sector, she inherited the identical royal-blue hair, the imperial facial structure, and the core affinity... The blood never hides but Kara White has black hair, purple eyes, and a frame that looks disconnected from the Castellian lineage as there isn’t a single trace of the royal features on her face.’

While Number Five was spiraling into an existential crisis, Kara was standing on the platform, grinning like an idiot.

SHING!

Kara flicked her wrist as the Dawn Blade materialized in her grip in a burst of golden sparks.

SHUUU!

She willed it back and it vanished into her soul.

SHING!

She summoned it again, twirling it once around her knuckles.

SHUUU!

She unsummoned it.

"Neat," Kara chuckled aloud to herself, admiring her empty palm. "Very convenient with no scabbard getting caught on doorways... I like it."

Number Five stared at her, her eyeholes dead and empty.

’She’s a child,’ the World Council Head realized with soul-crushing despair. ’A terrifying calamity of a woman... with the attention span and maturity of a twelve-year-old boy playing with a stick in the mud.’

Kara turned around, stepping off the dais with a bright sunny grin.

"Alright, tour guide!" Kara announced, clapping her single hand against her thigh with a loud smack. "That’s one down, four to go! Take me to the good stuff and no more of those rusty kitchen knives from the entrance, or I’ll start using this new sword to carve my initials into your bookshelves!"

Number Five didn’t even have the energy to curse.

She simply rolled her eyes behind her mask, turned her back on the shattered skeleton of the Second King, and dragged her boots forward into the gloom.

The expanse of the World Vault was an exercise in sensory numbness.

Minutes bled into hours without the sun or stars to mark their passing. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

The rhythmic clack-clack-clack of their boots against the damp basalt floor was the only sound cutting through the endless corridors of petrified wood and humming stasis-cases.

Every twenty paces, another glass pedestal glowed under a pale blue preservation spell.

Every fifty paces, an ornate iron archway displayed the crest of an imperial legion long since ground to dust by the turning of the centuries.

To a scholar or an antiquarian, this place was an infinite paradise of forgotten lore but to Kara, who was actively looking for weapons that could rip a titan apart or fortify a territory against apocalyptic sieges, it was rapidly becoming an agonizing exercise in patience...

Three hours had dragged by... Three grueling dust-choked hours of walking, cataloging, rejecting, and arguing as well...

CREAK!

Kara finally gave up on walking.

She spotted a heavy carved archivist’s chair resting beside a towering filing array in Aisle 100, walked over, and practically dropped her entire weight into it.

"Trash," Kara announced loudly, throwing her head back until her dark hair spilled over the mahogany headrest.

Her voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling of blue-lit quartz, carrying down the corridor like a stone skipping over a frozen pond. "All of it is ornamental trash... I have seen better inventory at a roadside vegetable stand in Valoria City..."

Ten paces away, Number Five didn’t even bother to respond.

The short woman had walked over to a low marble storage chest, climbed onto the surface, and laid down completely flat on her back.

Her arms were folded neatly across her chest, her midnight-silk robes draped over her legs like a burial shroud and her porcelain mask staring blankly straight up at the quartz ceiling.

She didn’t move.

At this point Number Five had completely divested herself of dignity so even if Kara decided to pull a sledgehammer from her coat and start smashing the third-century porcelain urns, Number Five was reasonably confident she’d just lie on this marble slab and listen to the shattering clay with a peaceful smile.

’Well,’ Silas mused internally, rolling his shoulder against the chair’s upholstery, ’it hasn’t been a complete waste of time.’

Resting securely inside his hand, alongside the Dawn Blade sleeping quietly in his soul space, were three additional artifacts.

The second item had been uncovered in the boundary between the final archives of the Second King and the relatively modest austere sector dedicated to the Third King.

Tucked away inside a velvet-lined lead casket was an ancient leather-bound grimoire titled simply... [Treatise on the Compression of the Primary Core: The Creation of a Mana Heart].

Under normal circumstances, Kara wouldn’t have looked twice at a cultivation manual.

Silas already possessed his own training regimens, and his gold-core foundation was an anomaly that standard manuals couldn’t touch.

However, the moment Number Five had begrudgingly explained the book’s contents, Silas’s thoughts had immediately snapped to his subordinates back in Blessed Land.

’Tasmin,’ Silas remembered, his mind drifting to the fierce dark-haired woman who had pledged her life to his banner.

Tasmin had been hitting an agonizing painful bottleneck in her shadow cultivation.

She’d been attempting to forge an artificial Shadow Heart, a secondary condensed mana-organ that would allow her to draw directly from the Umbral Basin’s darkness without poisoning her channels.

She’d spent a lot of time coughing blood in the quiet corners of the barracks, stubbornly refusing to ask for aid.

This book was not an ordinary manual.

It was a comprehensive universal architectural guide on how an Awakened could manually compress their primary core into an autonomous Mana Heart, regardless of their native elemental affinity.

According to Number Five, if a Hero or Troop succeeded in forming a true Mana Heart, their latent affinity for their primary element didn’t just increase, it skyrocketed by several orders of magnitude.

The heart acted as an internal perpetual-motion engine, cleansing mana impurities, drastically cutting casting intervals, and granting the user an instinctual, almost spiritual command over their element.

’If I hand this to Tasmin, she’ll break through that shadow bottleneck within a month...’ Silas realized, his fingers twitching with excitement. ’And not just her. What about the rest of the mages in Blessed Land?... If I establish an elite circle of casters who all possess secondary Mana Hearts, our defensive output will multiply ten times over.’

And then his thoughts wandered further.

’What about Vala?’

Vala was a freak of nature.

Like Silas himself, she commanded a staggering multi-elemental palette, shifting between wind and blistering fire with fluid ease.

’If a mono-elemental mage forms a red or blue Mana Heart... what happens if someone like Vala creates one?’ Silas mused with a slow grin spreading behind Kara’s lips. ’Does the heart manifest as a shifting multi-colored prism? Would it allow her to fuse opposing elements without suffering backlash? The potential is terrifying...’

That single manual alone was worth more to the long-term military survival of Blessed Land than ten wagons of gold.

The third and fourth items, however, were of of a different nature.

They came from an era Silas found himself privately admiring, the reign of the Fourth World King, King Tor Castellian.

...Tor had been an unapologetic monster.

He was a ruthless usurper who had drowned three ducal courts in their own blood to take the throne, personally executing eleven of his brothers on the steps of the palace.

He was notoriously despised by modern court historians, largely because he’d publicly mocked the divine traditions of the throne, flatly refusing to adopt the sacred royal seal of "Zel" simply because he loudly proclaimed that "it sounded like a wet cough from an asthmatic sheep."

He ruled through terror, iron discipline, and an obscene terrifying mastery of close-quarters violence... and from Tor’s private, bloody war-chest, Kara had plundered two pieces.

The third item was the Ash Gauntlet.

It was a single heavy left gauntlet forged from a dull volcanic gray alloy that constantly bled faint cold ash from its seams.

The right gauntlet had been shattered and lost during Tor’s final cataclysmic siege against the western demon-lords, leaving only this solitary piece.

Its function, however, was absurd.

Once per day, the Ash Gauntlet allowed the wearer to physically catch and completely reverse the magical trajectory of an incoming attack, redirecting it straight back at the source with zero degradation of force.

According to the military journals kept in Tor’s display case, the tyrant had once stood atop a breached fortress wall, caught a direct solar-beam fired by a high-tier entity with his bare hand, and hurled it back into the creature’s face, blowing its skull clean off its neck.

And the fourth item... was the Death Mask.

It was a terrifying unsettling artifact.

The mask had been cast in dark unpolished bronze directly over Tor’s severed face mere seconds after his execution on the imperial scaffold.

It captured the tyrant’s final hideous sneering grimace down to the microscopic wrinkles around his lips.

According to Number Five, the mask was saturated with the lingering post-mortem soul-shards of the tyrant’s consciousness.

When strapped to the face during active combat, it allowed the wearer to temporarily bypass their own calculation speed, directly accessing fragments of Tor’s ancient battle instincts, his ruthless spatial awareness, and his terrifying cold-blooded muscle memory.

Nobody in four hundred years had dared touch it...

The Council viewed it as a cursed psychologically hazardous relic that slowly drove its wielders into paranoid homicidal madness.

’Madness is for people with weak mental discipline,’ Silas thought, thoroughly pleased with the acquisition.

He didn’t care about Tor’s psychological baggage.

Silas was a practitioner of the Tide-Blade Arts, a discipline that relied heavily on reading the fluid micro-second shifts in an opponent’s balance and exploiting openings before they fully formed.

If he could slip on the Death Mask during an extreme life-or-death engagement, stacking Tor’s ancient brutal battlefield instincts directly on top of his Tide-Blade mastery, his efficiency would reach a threshold that could challenge even monsters at this level.

Yet, sitting here in this creaking chair in Aisle 100, Kara dragged her single right hand down her face, letting out a groan of pure misery.

"It’s just too much stuff," Kara muttered, her voice muffled against her palm. "Four hundred and ninety-eight aisles... and we’ve barely cleared a hundred. My legs are falling off, my eyes are dry from reading plaques, and ninety-nine percent of these shelves are filled with useless garbage."

On the marble chest, Number Five slowly rolled her head to the side, her porcelain mask staring at Kara with deep silent contempt.

"You have claimed a divine greatsword, an ancient core-condensation treatise, and two classified relics of an executed tyrant," Number Five said, her voice dripping with dry exhausted venom. "Most monarchs would consider any single one of those items the crowning glory of their family dynasty... You have gathered four in three hours, and you sit there whining like a spoiled child who received the wrong flavor of candied plum."