NOVGO.NET Chapter 346: Demon King ?
Capítulo 346: Demon King ?
Damien blinked. “What do you mean by ‘those words were true’?”
Dominic didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, he took a breath—slow, deliberate—as if unsealing something long kept in shadow. His eyes, when they met Damien’s again, held not just calculation, but memory. And underneath it, the kind of weight that came only from stories soaked in blood and history.
“The Demon King,” Dominic said.
The words landed like a falling blade.
“Demon king?”
“Yes, Demon King….”
Kael stepped back to the side, arms folded again. His silence wasn’t passive—it was permission. He would let Dominic tell it.
“He wasn’t a king in the political sense,” Dominic continued, his voice lower now. “Not a ruler of territory. He never sat on a throne. But the title stuck because no one could call him anything else. He didn’t take land. He claimed reality. And people followed—out of fear, awe, or madness.”
Damien’s eyes narrowed slightly. “When?”
“Three-thousand years ago,” Dominic said. “At least that was what we estimate.”
Dominic’s gaze hardened, voice flattening just enough to carry the weight of history.
“Three thousand years ago… that’s the current estimate. Back then, the world wasn’t what it is now. No centralized governance, no Dominion. And certainly no calibrated Awakening systems. The technology, the cultivation models, the infrastructure—all of it was fragmented. Primitive, by today’s standards.”
He paused, eyes distant now, speaking more like a historian than a soldier.
“That era is what we now call the Lost Era. A time without full records. Without structure. Just shattered timelines and myth woven into stone.”
Kael nodded slowly, folding his arms across his chest. “We only started uncovering it two hundred years ago. Bit by bit. Ruins surfacing in what used to be dead zones. Fragments of languages etched into collapsed towers. Paintings burned into the walls of underground tombs that shouldn’t have lasted a decade, let alone millennia.”
Dominic turned back to Damien. “At first, none of it made sense. The depictions were too abstract. People thought they were religious hallucinations—visions of gods or monsters. Until we started comparing them.”
He stepped forward, almost pacing now.
“Different regions. Different continents. Civilizations that, by all our current understanding, should’ve never had contact with each other. But the same phrases kept appearing. Translated into the tongues of their time, but always pointing to the same name.”
He met Damien’s eyes.
“Demon King.”
Kael added quietly, “Not a title they gave him out of fear. A name carved into the ruins like a warning.”
Damien’s brow furrowed. “So he was real.”
Dominic nodded. “Real enough to leave scars on stone. Real enough for his presence to be recorded even after the structures around him collapsed. Whatever he was, he made an impression too deep to erase.”
“But there are no complete records,” Kael said. “Just fragments. Stories half-told through ruins. A sketch here, a sentence there. Engravings in dead alphabets that took generations to decode.”
Damien crossed his arms, gaze sharpening. “What do they say?”
“Most of them don’t say much at all,” Kael said. “They hint. They gesture. They warn.”
Dominic’s expression shifted—his eyes darker now, more intent. When he spoke next, it wasn’t just with the weight of memory. It was the cadence of someone passing on something sacred. Something dangerous.
“There were three major nations recorded during that time,” he said. “Three continental powers. Not unified like the Dominion today—but each strong enough to shape the world in their own way.”
He held up a hand, counting them off.
“Voltrenne. An empire based on martial might and elemental conditioning. Every citizen, awakened by sixteen. They were a weaponized culture.”
“Thren,” Kael added, “focused on arcana. They studied ley lines, deep resonance theory, developed early binding glyphs—half the runes we still use today were pulled from cracked Threnic tablets.”
“And then,” Dominic said, “there was Caelys.”
Damien frowned slightly. “Caelys?”
“Not a kingdom. A coalition of scholars, mystics, and cultivators. Records describe them as keepers of balance. Guardians of something deeper than simple mana theory. Their cities were built around leyway nexuses. The old texts called them the Pulseborn.”
Kael nodded. “All three powers. All deeply rooted in cultivation. And strangely… a lot of our modern cultivation techniques align with methods pulled from their ruins.”
“They weren’t primitive,” Dominic continued. “They had knowledge. Some of it more advanced than what we have today. And yet…”
He looked back at Damien, his voice sharpening.
“…none of them survived.”
A quiet beat passed.
Damien tilted his head. “Because of the Demon King?”
“Yes,” Dominic said. “Or rather, because of what he became.”
Kael shifted, his posture just a little more alert now. “You need to understand something, Damien. The Demon King wasn’t feared because he was strong. Strong cultivators were common in that age. He was feared because he became something no one else could understand.”
Dominic’s tone dropped low, almost reverent.
“He Ascended.”
Damien’s brows lifted. Just slightly. But it was enough.
“…He was the first Ascended?”
The words weren’t disbelieving—just sharp. Measured. Filing the idea away like a blade he might need later.
Dominic gave a slow nod.
“Yes. That’s what the consensus leans toward. The oldest surviving records call him that, or something like it. The first to step beyond. The one who crossed the line. And the consequences of that step…”
He let the silence finish the sentence.
Kael spoke next, voice more grounded. “Most people today know about Ascension as a theory. A hope. A destination the strongest might reach. But even then, they think of it like a myth—like something symbolic. A way to say someone transcended this world.”
Dominic stepped forward again. “But Ascension is real. We know that. Not just from the Demon King. There have been others. Rare, scattered, centuries apart—but it’s happened. Individuals disappearing from this plane entirely, leaving behind cores that burned clean to nothing. No body. No residue. Just… absence.”
“And most of them,” Kael said, looking directly at Damien, “survived the Cradle.”
That landed.
Dominic watched Damien closely. “You asked to enter the Cradle. No prodding. No pressure. You insisted on it. Even when you knew it nearly killed the last generation of elites. And now I understand why.”
Damien’s voice was calm. “Because I knew what waited on the other side.”
Kael nodded once. “And now you’ve come back changed.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed slightly, as though working through something that had only just begun to make sense.
“There’s more,” he said. “In the ruins. In the deeper engravings beneath Caelys. There were texts—worn so thin we had to reconstruct them from shadow patterns. And in them, a passage…”
He closed his eyes briefly, recalling.
| When the sky cracks and the Colossus stirs, the trial will begin.”
| Not of blood. Not of war. But of will.”
| Only when the thread is seen… when the blink is felt… shall the mighty be called.”
He opened his eyes.
“Those were the words.”
Damien didn’t speak immediately. His jaw had gone still. That tension beneath the surface again—quiet, cold, controlled.
Kael tilted his head slightly. “A thread… and a blink. Sound familiar?”
Damien’s voice was quiet. “The thread was the first thing I felt. It brushed past me just before the colossus looked my way. I thought it was mana at first. Ambient flow.”
“But it wasn’t,” Dominic said.
Damien shook his head. “It felt alive. Not like something to draw from—but like something watching. And then… it vanished. Only to snap back into place the moment that eye turned toward me.”
Dominic exhaled slowly. “Then it’s true. You were marked.”
Kael added, “And the Cradle responded.”
Another pause.
Dominic’s gaze lingered on Damien for a long moment before he finally spoke, voice measured.
“If that’s the case… then the Demon King also walked the Cradle.”
Kael didn’t disagree. His arms unfolded, hands clasping loosely behind his back. “More than that—if the stories are even half true—his trial might have been exactly like yours. Same markers. Same thread. Same blink.
You have walked his steps.”
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