Chapter 226: Found Them

The Fold was, Serath had explained during their brief walk from the outer barrier, structured in five concentric layers. Each one was a self-contained dimensional pocket nested inside the last like a set of carved spheres. The outermost layer housed the military garrisons and the great defensive gate that had taken the brunt of the siege. The second and third layers were civilian residential zones, now packed with the wounded and displaced, every hall and chamber converted into makeshift infirmaries. The fourth layer contained the sacred shrines and the administrative heart of Kovrath governance. And the fifth, the deepest and most restricted, was where the Heavenly Leviathan had made her lair for as long as anyone could remember.

I absorbed the information with half an ear, filing it away while the rest of my attention remained fixed on the Kovraths around me. We had relocated to a modest council hall in the fourth layer, which was a circular chamber carved from dark stone, walls lined with tapestries depicting what I assumed were historical battles.

The remaining few elders had been present when we first sat down, expressions ranging from wary to openly terrified. They'd excused themselves one by one as the immediate logistics of the aftermath demanded their attention, until only Serath and I remained. I couldn't blame them. The war hadn't ended just because the enemy was dead. There were wounded to tend, barriers to repair, civilian shelters to reorganize, dead to count.

I recognized one of the elders before he'd left, Skethis, the one who'd tried to mirror my form during that initial disastrous encounter. He'd retreated with his forces immediately afterward, and I hadn't seen him again until now. He hadn't looked me in the eye once during the entire meeting. Neither had any of the others. The acrid scent of fear still permeated the room, hours after the battle had ended. It clung to their scales, the way they addressed me with titles like "benefactor" and "honored guest" while carefully avoiding any direct questions about what they'd witnessed.

I'd expected the interrogation to start immediately. Hell, I'd prepared for it, had a whole made up explanation queued up about it all and my ‘capabilities’. I was ready to offer some context, to reassure them that the terrifying force of nature they'd watched glass a battlefield wasn't going to turn on them next. But the questions never came. They were too afraid to ask, and I was too aware of that fear to push. So instead we'd talked about the attack itself— the siege, the casualties, the Water Leviathan's motives— and left the sadistic elephant err-- dragon in the room politely unacknowledged.

Maybe it was better this way. They were showing me hospitality because they were terrified of what would happen if they didn't. I couldn't tell how different it would have been if they'd only known I was a dragon, versus this— watching "me" turn three demigods into a sadistic art installation. The dragon part would have earned me reverence, maybe. But this was something else entirely. This was the kind of fear that didn't care about my species at all.

Still. I had questions, and Serath seemed willing— eager, even— to answer them. We'd already covered the basics. I'd told him my original motive for visiting the Fold had been to access their sacred shrines, see if the divinity lingering there could help trigger the mutations I'd been chasing. I didn't mention that I'd been crippled from birth, that my body had been fundamentally broken, that I was essentially jury-rigging my own evolution through trial and error. But Serath was a Gold Core divinator. I had a feeling he'd derived most of that already from the fragments I'd given him. Either way, the point was moot now. Dorrusk had served that purpose instead, sealed with me in the obelisk, his sacred energy siphoned out in controlled bursts while my doppelganger guided the mutations. My body was whole-ishh now. I no longer needed the shrines for what I'd originally intended.

Dorrusk though... My doppelganger had cast a barrier around him before launching into the battle, which a dome of hardened light that had survived the solar storm through sheer proximity to the caster. He'd been recovered immediately once the barriers came down, still unconscious and dangerously depleted, but alive. The Kovrath healers had stabilized him within the hour. He was resting now in one of the medical wards in the second layer. The healers assured me he would make a full recovery. I'd check on him myself before I left.

"He will be honoured," Serath said, as if reading my thoughts. Maybe he had. Divinator, after all. "To have served a dragon directly is a distinction few Kovraths have ever achieved. When he wakes, he will be insufferably proud of himself."

I snorted. Sounds about right.

"The Fold will recover. The damage to the outer barrier is extensive, but our architects have repaired worse. The casualties were..." He paused, his claws tightening around his staff. "Acceptable. By the standards of war. We lost fewer than we had any right to expect."

"Because of you," I said. "You held them off for a week with three demigods hammering your gates."

"Because of you," he corrected. "We would have fallen within the next few hours if you hadn't emerged when you did. The Divines have a sense of timing that borders on theatrical."

I didn't argue. Mostly because he was right, and partly because I wanted to steer the conversation toward the thing that had been nagging at me since before I was sealed. "The Water Leviathan. You said she was expanding her army, that taking the Fold was partly about converting your people into soldiers. But you also said that was a secondary objective. What was her primary one?"

Serath's expression grew troubled. "I learned about this secondary objective at the last possible moment, just before you emerged from the obelisk. The Heavenly Leviathan confirmed it, in her own... manner. The primary objected was something to with the Heavenly Leviathan herself. Whatever she is planning— whatever requires an army and the subjugation of every tribe in the Sacred Lands— the Heavenly Leviathan is the key to it. Or held the key to it. I do not know precisely what she intends. My divinations have been... inconclusive. But the threads I can see all converge on her."

"Hmm. Another Leviathan, huh."

The last one I'd encountered had been the Water bitch herself. Before that, the Ice Leviathan. That made three. Information on another Leviathan, especially one the Water Leviathan was actively hunting, seemed valuable. Though I wasn't exactly optimistic.

Everything I'd heard so far pointed to someone impossibly elusive, and elusiveness was one of the most dangerous traits a person could have.

Besides...

Serath looked far more afraid of her than he was of me. After everything he'd witnessed me do, that alone was enough to make me curious.

He seemed to notice my hesitation.

"The Heavenly Leviathan is... not the sort of being you should fear in the conventional sense," he said carefully. "People call her the leader of all Leviathans, but she dismissed that title herself. Said it was nothing more than ceremony. She doesn't command the others. Never has. She believes everyone should have the freedom to choose their own path, so she keeps her involvement in the world to an absolute minimum. If someone manages to find her, she'll answer a single question... or grant a single request. Then she'll simply leave. No one has ever seen her fight and no one has ever seen her lose her temper. She simply... exists. Perhaps that's for the best."

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Yeah... this wasn't exactly inspiring confidence.

I filed the information away. At least I probably wouldn't be attacked the moment I ran into her. That was... something.

Serath hesitated again. His face did something complicated, like he wanted to mention something more but was physically restraining himself. After a moment, he shook his head. "The point is, the Water Leviathan wants her or something from her. For what purpose, I cannot say. But whatever it is, it cannot be good.”

He didn't finish.

"Is she still here?" I asked. I knew from prior conversation that she well, usually, resided in the fifth layer.

"There is no way for someone like me to tell. She comes and goes as she pleases. She vanished once you emerged from the obelisk, might have left for somewhere or she may be waiting in the fifth layer as if nothing has happened. With her, either is equally possible." He paused, then added, "I could take you to her. Or to where she should be, at least. The deepermost layer is restricted to the leader of the Kovraths, but I am permitted to bring witnesses. It is... sometimes required. Asking the Leviathan questions always demands a witness, so they can attest to whatever embarrassing task or question she flings at the asker. Sometimes more than one." His expression twitched again.

I thought about it. My first instinct was caution. I'd just barely survived an encounter with one Leviathan, the same one that had sealed me in a golden obelisk and would probably be very interested in finishing the job. Walking directly into the lair of another one, even one that was supposedly benevolent, felt like pushing my luck. But Serath seemed genuine. And if the Heavenly Leviathan really was different from the others, then maybe meeting her wasn't a trap. Maybe it was an opportunity.

Besides. I had more than a few tricks up my sleeve now.

After unlocking my divinity, I'd been running advanced Core Stabilization constantly, recovering mana and immediately converting it. The output was slower without my doppelganger actively assisting, she seemed content to lounge in whatever mental corner she'd claimed, but it was steady. I was already back up to twenty-seven points of divinity. Twenty-seven thousand mana equivalent. Enough to fuel a fight, or an escape, or whatever else the situation demanded.

I'd also been experimenting. Before entering the Fold, I'd summoned Curious and Terrorist using a new approach, ten points of divinity each, mingled with the regular Quantum mana in my nexus. The result had been immediate. Their existences had stabilized in a way I'd never felt before. The usual timer, that nagging prompt to dissipate that always kicked in after a few minutes, was gone. It had been hours now. Curious was off investigating the sacred shrines, running her own analysis on whether they could enhance passive divinity regeneration somehow. Terrorist was stationed somewhere outside the Fold's outer perimeter, watching for any sign of a Water Leviathan counterattack. Neither had shown any sign of destabilizing.

Hours. From seven or eight minutes to this. The implications were staggering.

And the range. Divinity had stretched the tether between us to a ridiculous degree. Earlier, I'd been limited to a few hundred meters before I lost the ability to swap places with my clones. Now Terrorist was multiple miles away, and I could still feel her presence as clearly as if she were standing next to me. If something went wrong in the fifth layer, I could be outside the Fold in an instant.

I was, to put it mildly, exceptionally slippery these days.

I still hadn't tested everything I wanted to. The combat applications of divinity-infused abilities, the limits of the clones' new stability, whether I could push the tether even further. Part of me wanted to let Curious handle the testing, she was better at systematic analysis than I was, but there was something deeply satisfying about doing it myself. Blowing things up with my own claws. I'd hold onto that privilege for now.

"Alright," I said, pushing myself up from the stone bench. "Take me to her."

Serath led me through a series of passages that folded space in ways my spatial sense struggled to track. We'd step through an archway and emerge in a corridor that shouldn't have been connected to where we started. We'd climb a staircase that spiraled upward and somehow deposit us deeper underground. The walls were lined with embedded runes that pulsed faintly with sacred energy. I kept asking questions— how the layers were anchored, what stabilized the spatial compression, whether the whole structure was a single working or multiple interlocking ones— and Serath answered each one with an enthusiasm that suggested he didn't often get to talk about this with outsiders. Or maybe he was just relieved to be discussing architecture instead of apocalypses.

"The Fold was… grown, in a sense," he said as we descended a ramp of what appeared to be solid shadow. "The original seed was a fragment of the Divine Dragon's own dimensional magic, planted here millennia ago by the first Kovrath settlers. Each subsequent layer was cultivated from that seed, nourished by sacred energy and guided by our architects. What you see now is the result of over three thousand years of continuous refinement. Every stone, every corridor, every spatial fold is intentional. There is no wasted space in the Fold. No random geometry. Every angle serves a purpose, whether defensive, structural, or spiritual."

"It's beautiful," I said, and meant it. "And completely insane.” The dimensional compression alone would take a team of Varkaigrad’s best mages decades to reproduce, and they'd probably blow themselves up in the process.

Serath's chest puffed slightly. "We have had practice."

We reached the final threshold, which a simple archway carved from obsidian, unadorned except for a single rune. Serath paused before it, his staff tapping twice against the stone. The shadows around us thickened, swirled, and then swallowed us whole.

When my vision cleared, we were standing what I assumed was the fifth layer.

My mind went blank for a moment from sheer scale.

The chamber was vast beyond reason. The ceiling, if there was one, was lost in darkness far above, and the walls were so distant that my spatial sense could barely brush against them. The floor beneath my feet was polished obsidian, so perfectly smooth it reflected the ambient light like a mirror. But the light itself, that was what stole my attention. It came from a tree. A tree that stood at the far end of the chamber, its trunk wider than a city block, its white branches spreading outward and upward until they seemed to merge with the darkness itself. It had to be thousands of meters tall, its canopy lost in the void above, its roots coiling across the chamber floor like rivers of pale wood. Every inch of it was bathed in light that my newly awakened senses identified immediately.

Pure, undiluted divinity, radiating from the tree in rhythmic pulses like a heartbeat.

I reached out through the mental link immediately. Curious.

Yes, main body. Her response was instant.

I think I found the source of the shrines' divinity. It's a tree. A massive white tree in the deepest layer. Radiating pure divinity.

A pause. Then, with an intensity that bordered on hunger: Requesting permission to—

Denied. I cut her off before she could finish. I need you outside. If something goes wrong here, you're my exit strategy. And Terrorist needs backup on the perimeter.

I could feel her disappointment bleeding through the link, Curious did not like being excluded from fascinating new phenomena, but she didn't argue.

Understood. I’ll just continue with the shrine analysis and await further instructions.

I refocused on the chamber. Serath had taken a few steps forward, his head turning as he scanned the vast space.

"Weird," he murmured. "I thought she'd be back here by now." But I wasn't listening anymore. My eyes narrowed, pupils contracting to pinpricks. I was already channeling divinity into my Air Sense, the enhanced perception was flooding the chamber. The range was staggering compared to what I was used to. Every detail of the space snapped into focus— the texture of the obsidian, the pulse of the tree's energy, the faint stir of air currents that seemed undisturbed. And the presences.

Beneath the gigantic Tree, tucked between its colossal roots, several mana signatures clung to the shadows. Suppressed almost to the point of disappearing.

Familiar ones.

How could I have forgotten about Moru the fluffy wolf? He was curled against his master, both of them hiding beneath the roots, their presence concealed so thoroughly that I would've missed them without my enhanced senses.

And they weren't alone.

So that's where the rest of the trial participants had been hiding all this time.