Back in the crumpled lost realm, the three chieftains traded one last wary look, then knelt.
It did not matter who their new god was. It did not matter what they thought of the strange, plainspoken commandments etched into their souls. They had been pulled back from the edge of dissolution. They owed respect, at the very least. They bowed their heads, and they prayed.
It was a rough, quiet, earnest prayer—the kind forged by years of abandonment and bitter survival. For centuries they had begged a god who never listened. Now, held together by a stranger's power, they poured every scrap of genuine gratitude they had left into the words.
High above, standing in the ash-gray dust of the Forsaken Wastes, Laia froze.
A warm, steady trickle of faith welled up out of nowhere, soft and bright and shockingly sincere. A heartbeat later, a hundred glimmering divinity crystals materialized in her open palm, warm to the touch.
She stared.
A hundred crystals. Just like that. From thirty thousand worn-out, half-starved survivors.
Her face lit up. Well now. These new ones had manners. They knew how to say thank you.
Then she thought of her own hundred and fifty thousand subjects, and her smile dropped straight off her face.
Her clans had thrived for two hundred years. They had built villages, forged holds, fought off void tides side by side. And the most she had ever gotten out of them was a handful of grain left on a broken stone altar, and even that had mostly been to get her to stop nagging.
She stuffed the crystals into her pouch with a huff. Those lazy heathens would probably corrupt the new arrivals within a month. She would have to rely on formal sacrifices for the big payouts, same as always. Whatever. She had bigger problems right now. She needed to get back.
She had taken barely three steps toward what she hoped was the border when a shadow fell over the mist.
Laia froze and craned her neck upward.
A vast war-ship drifted overhead, its hull carved from pale white marble and reinforced with gilded void-warding bands. Holy light spilled from every porthole, pushing the black mist back for miles in every direction. Not a single wisp of void could touch it.
Her jaw tightened. A void-palace ship. Those things cost hundreds of millions of crystals. Some great house's private patrol, no doubt. She did not wait to find out who. She pressed herself flat against a jagged rock outcropping, pulled her divine aura in tight, and stayed perfectly still until the great vessel had vanished into the haze.
Aboard the flagship, a guard knelt low outside the innermost chamber, his voice steady.
"My lord. We picked up a stray signature in the mist below."
A deep, low voice answered from behind the carved door, calm as forged steel.
"Fallen god? Void beast? Some feral war-god?"
"Neither, my lord. It appeared to be a young deity. Newly awakened. I could not make out its rank."
The door swung silently open. The man who stepped out wore a plain officer's cloak, his face sharp and weathered, his eyes like chips of glacial ice. He was one of the most powerful men on the entire northern border command. A God King, by rank.
"A new god," he said, slow and thoughtful. "Wandering the Forsaken Wastes alone? Either they have a very powerful guardian, or a very well-hidden relic."
The guard hesitated. "I… detected neither, my lord. No ward. No relic aura. It felt like a trait. Natural resistance."
The God King went silent.
That was not supposed to be possible. Not truly. No god could ignore the void entirely. Even Void Resistance only slowed the erosion. Even he, with all his power, could only wander the wastes for a few months at a time before the toll grew too heavy. Leave his kingdom exposed to the mist for a hundred years of internal time, and it would shatter.
And yet the guard was certain.
"Did you see their face? Feel their resonance signature?"
"The mist was too thick, my lord. I am sorry."
Another long silence.
"Continue the patrol," he said at last, turning back toward his chamber.
When the door clicked shut, his lips tugged into a thin, cold smile.
Someone was moving in the wastes. Someone with natural void tolerance. The Abyss had been stirring lately, slipping agents across the border in Fallen God shells. It seemed word had gotten out.
He had been quiet too long. The world had forgotten what it meant to rouse his wrath. Soon, he would have to pay the Abyss a visit. Cut off a few grasping claws. Remind them why the border had held for three hundred years.
Far below, Laia flew on through the mist, and her heart slowly stopped hammering.
She flew for what felt like an hour. Then two.
Slowly, a creeping dread settled over her.
Nothing looked familiar. The rock formations were wrong. The mist felt thicker, colder, heavier. She had never had a good sense of direction, and the endless, featureless fog was impossible to navigate.
She had flown the wrong way.
The realization hit her at the exact same moment she felt it: a vast, cold, ancient presence, coiled in the mist ahead. A Seventh Rank Fallen Deity. Old. Powerful. Far beyond anything she could fight.
Her blood turned to ice. She fumbled in her pouch, closed her fingers around a jagged void crystal, and crushed it hard.
Thick, roiling black mist exploded outward, wrapping around her like a cloak. Her signature vanished. The great twisted shape in the mist drifted past, slow and searching, and never noticed her.
Only once it was long gone did she let out a shaky breath.
That was too close. Way too close. She had to get out of here. Now. The tournament was in three days. She could not afford to get herself killed out here.
But which way was out? Every direction looked the same. She could try asking one of the feral void beasts, but that seemed like a great way to get eaten.
A faint glimmer caught her eye, far off to her left.
Not the cold silver of the border wards. A warm, golden glow, like sunlight on stone. Like proper divine realm earth, sitting right in the middle of the void.
Laia blinked. Curiosity won out over caution. She drifted closer, slow and careful.
It was a small island of land, barely a few square kilometers, floating adrift in the mist. Grass grew there, soft and green. A single broken white spire jutted from its center. The void mist curled around its edges but never crossed the line. It was like a tiny piece of the divine realms had broken off and drifted out here.
She stepped onto the grass.
The effect hit her at once. Warmth seeped into her bones, soft and steady, like sinking into a hot bath after a long day in the cold. The constant, faint drain on her divine essence—the slow, steady leak that every god lived with, that cost her ten crystals a day just to counteract—vanished.
Laia's eyes flew open. She stared at her hands, stunned.
It was gone. The drain was gone.
She had grown so used to it she barely noticed it anymore, but now that it was gone, she felt light. Full. Like she could stand here forever and never burn through a single crystal.
This changed everything.
She dropped to her knees and dug her fingers into the soil. Beneath the grass, veins of pale glowing ore ran through the rock. Divine ore. The rare, heavily monopolized kind that the great houses hoarded like dragons on gold. One particular variant hummed with a soft, steadying frequency—exactly the frequency that canceled out divine essence leakage.
She pulled a small shard free and pressed it into the cracked, cobbled-together divine relic she wore around her neck—her only real artifact, pieced together from scrap and academy salvage. The hum stabilized. The faint, constant drain she carried with her faded to nothing.
Laia laughed, quiet and giddy. Her biggest problem, solved. Just like that.
The ore was too hot to sell, of course. Unrefined divine ore was strictly controlled. No merchant would touch uncertified stock, not with the Voss clan holding the monopoly. She could never move it. She would just have to keep it for herself.
She ran a hand over the grass, gazing out across the little floating island.
Then a thought struck her.
This land repelled the void. It stabilized divine essence. It was a tiny, perfect piece of stable divine realm.
What if she absorbed the whole thing? What if she merged it straight into her own kingdom?
What would that do to her paper-thin barriers? To her constant void erosion? To her endless crystal hunger?
She knelt there for a long minute, her heart beating fast, staring at the broken spire at the island's center.
Only one way to find out.