The night of the Grand Gala arrived in a blur of silk, perfume, and the overwhelming scent of wealth. The Academy was transformed into a shimmering palace of light, with floating mana-lanterns casting a warm, golden glow over the thousand noble guests.
But beneath the music of the violins, a heartbeat was missing.
Part I: The Hero's Shadow
In the center of the ballroom, Lucian stood stiffly in his formal white-and-gold uniform. He was the star of the evening—the "Child of Destiny"—yet he felt a mounting sense of unease. His golden eyes, sharpened by years of Church conditioning, kept drifting toward the dark corners of the hall.
"You look like you're expecting an assassin behind every curtain, Lucian," Julian van Astra remarked, leaning against a marble pillar with a glass of champagne.
"Something is wrong, Julian," Lucian whispered, his hand resting instinctively on the hilt of his training sword. "Since I arrived at the Academy, the air has felt... thin. Like there's a vacuum moving through the halls."
Julian's smile faltered. He, too, had felt the cold drafts and the sudden drops in mana. "It's just nerves. The Emperor is here tonight. The security is at its peak. Not even a fly could enter the Vault without being vaporized."
"It's not an outsider," Lucian muttered, his gaze locking onto a group of commoner servants moving through the crowd. "It's a ghost. Someone who is here, but isn't."
Lucian walked away, driven by a nagging intuition. He began to move toward the administrative wing, his S-rank senses expanding. He wasn't looking for a person; he was looking for the absence of a soul.
Part II: The Surgery of the Void
While the Hero hunted shadows, the Ghost was already beneath the floorboards.
Cian and Evelina stood before the Vault of Aethelgard. The air here was viscous, heavy with the psychic weight of the Soul-Eater. It was an amorphous mass of dark, swirling mana that clung to the ceiling, its many lidless eyes blinking in the dark.
"Now," Evelina whispered. Her [Chronos-Tear] flared, a violet dome of "Static Time" expanding to encompass them.
To the Soul-Eater, they simply ceased to exist.
Cian didn't waste a second. He phased through the reinforced dragon-iron door of the Vault. Inside, resting on a pedestal of pure quartz, was the Heart of the Ancient Dragon. It didn't look like a heart; it was a pulsating, crystalline engine of raw, primordial mana, glowing with a fierce, golden internal light.
Cian grabbed it.
The moment his fingers touched the crystal, his E-rank body began to fracture. His skin turned translucent, his veins glowing with a dangerous, violet-black light.
He collapsed onto the floor, but he didn't cry out—he couldn't. He pulled his surgical kit from his void-pocket. He didn't have anesthesia. He didn't have a sterile room. He had a scalpel made of condensed void-matter and a mind that had memorized the blueprint of his own death.
He looked at his own chest. With a trembling hand, he phased the scalpel into his thoracic cavity.
Slicing the pericardium. Bypassing the pulmonary mana-vein.
His internal thoughts were clinical, cold, and utterly detached from the agony screaming through his nerves. He was performing a double-valve mana-bypass on himself while his soul was trying to leave his body.
The Dragon Heart began to hum. It was rejecting him.
"Evelina!" he rasped in his mind, the mental link between them straining.
Outside the Vault, Evelina's nose began to bleed. "Hold on, Cian! The time-loop is thinning! Lucian is outside the door!"
Cian ignored the warning. He gripped the Dragon Heart and shoved it into the center of his mana-circulatory system. He began the "grafting"—knitting his own fragile mana-vessels to the crystalline arteries of the relic.
The fusion was violent. A shockwave of golden and black energy erupted from his chest, throwing him against the Vault wall.
Part III: The Collision
The Vault door groaned. From the outside, Lucian slammed his fist against the dragon-iron, his golden aura flaring.
"I know you're in there!" Lucian roared. "Show yourself!"
Inside, Cian lay in a pool of his own blood. But he wasn't dying.
He stood up slowly. His hair, once white, now had streaks of molten gold. His eyes were no longer just voids; they were supernova-stars encased in glass. The Dragon Heart was beating inside him—a steady, thunderous rhythm that anchored his Ex-rank soul to the physical world.
He was no longer a ghost that would fade away. He was a permanent scar on reality.
The Vault door burst open. Lucian stepped in, his sword drawn, only to find the room empty. There was nothing but a single, bloody handprint on the quartz pedestal and the faint, lingering scent of a frozen rose.
High above, on the Academy roof, Cian stood in the wind. He looked down at his solid, glowing hands. He reached for his throat and felt the tissue knitting together, forced into a new shape by the Dragon's vitality.
He opened his mouth. It was a raspy, terrifying sound, but it was a voice.
"First... the Duke," Cian whispered, the words carried away by the night. "Then... the world."