1 Prologue: Lorentz's Catharsis

"This goddamned thing better work now," said Lorentz as he looked at the massive 10m tall crystal pulsate with power. "I can't have this fail on me; the stakes are too high."

Lorentz had never felt his emotions spike so much ever since he entered the path of cultivation. His current desperation outclassed only when he had been exiled from the Empire, left with nowhere to go and no one to turn to, lest they also be punished for harboring an exile. Although pragmatic and, relatively fair and just, the Empire wasn't known for its mercy.

He had been hailed as a genius in his youth, a damn prodigy even! His talent, combined with his ambition and hard work, quickly made him rise through the ranks and even got himself employed at the prestigious Imperial Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs, accessing their inexhaustible resources and, more importantly, information.

But one day, his cultivation just stopped. It ceased to progress no matter what he did. Nothing worked, no technique, spell, potion, pill, elixer- you name it. He could still use his current mana just like usual, but his body refused to accumulate more mana. It's as if his body suddenly became satisfied and didn't want to grow anymore.

At first, he didn't panic. Cultivating took time and patience; roadblocks were to be expected. His conjecture - which his peers and elders supported - was that he rose too quickly; his body failed to keep up and needed some time to adjust.

Not only did it stroke his ego and solidify his image as a genius, but this also wasn't an unprecedented issue. Some geniuses tended to need to consolidate their core and let their bodies acclimate before being able to cultivate further.

It truly made so much sense at the time. It was only a matter of waiting.

Alas, how naive he had been.

His inexplicable 'roadblock' wouldn't go away, his cultivation not progressing.

Time passed, his desperation mounting daily.

He couldn't accept it. He had dreams! Ambition! His road couldn't end here. The feeling of ascending through the ranks of life, the levels of existence itself, was something so intoxicating that he couldn't just abandon it.

But all this wouldn't make him genuinely despair to the brink of madness. No, he lived for many years; his achievements have mounted enough to guarantee that the remainder of his life would be full of comfort. Perhaps even be employed to a Marquisate. No, the beginning of his madness started when—

Lorentz's increasingly maddening gaze suddenly shifted to the entrance of his laboratory. Compared to Lorentz's simple but high-quality robe, two individuals dressed in tattered robes clearly in dire need of repair hastily approached him.

He glanced at them and quickly looked back at the crystal. His expression slowly twisted with madness seeming almost demonic.

"My fiercest 'servants'," said Lorentz. "Is everything ready?"

"Yes, master," both individuals answered simultaneously, in a dull, machine-like tone.

Under their hoods, their grotesque visage was slightly visible. Their expression was numbed, and the looks in their eyes distant. They were addled with scars and even some burn marks. One can imagine the misery they had to endure before reaching such a state.

Since his exile, no one but the genuinely desperate power-hungry wanted to employ themselves to him. If no one wanted to offer themselves to him voluntarily, he would be forced to become... creative.

"Then come, let's start."

Both robed individuals moved and stood next to him—one to his left and one to his right.

Lorentz stood before the massive crystal and closed his eyes to focus. He could hear the voices become excited, their intelligible whispers almost imperceptively increasing in tempo, as if telling him that the key to his destiny lay in that crystal in front of him.

Those voices started shortly after his cultivation stopped progressing.

They started mild. Only coming to him when occasionally when slept. Sleeping was a relatively rare activity anyway because of his sizable cultivation, and it allowed him to forego sleep to a certain extent. However, he still had to do it every once in a while.

However, soon, every time he slept, he would be assaulted by nightmares the likes of which he couldn't comprehend.

Whispers would come from every direction, his surrounding practically non-existent. He couldn't see anything, as if light wasn't allowed to be present, which made him highly disoriented. To make things worse, those damned whispers would come closer and closer; their intelligible mutterings become louder and louder in his head.

As that was happening, he'd start sweating, his emotions becoming unstable. He tried so many things. He tried attacking, but his mana wasn't present, as if he had never cultivated. He tried running, but he could never escape the voices. Not to mention, he couldn't see a thing—it was pitch black.

Every single time, he'd wake up screaming and sweating. And sometimes, he'd notice the whispers persisting for a few seconds even after waking up,

And thus, he did his best to avoid sleep as much as possible. It wasn't impossible with his sizable cultivation. Furthermore, he used potions and techniques to prolong his waking hours as much as possible, sometimes going weeks without sleep, which only thinned his sanity even further.

Unfortunately, his relief was short-lived. The whispers spilled into his wakefulness.

Whenever there wasn't any noise, he'd be able to hear them faintly, which scared the sh*t out of him. He knew that everything he was doing up until that point was just a temporary solution, a bandaid to a fatal wound.

He suspected that he might be poisoned, cursed, or afflicted with some sort of extraordinary disease.

He went to libraries, exhausted every possible resource, visited every so-called expert in the Bureau and beyond, and, using his position at the Bureau, even requested help from the high nobles to get powerful existences to take a look, but it all yielded no result.

Most left him unanswered. The few Nobles that did grant him an audience found no anomaly present in his body, cultivation, or spirit. People started looking weirdly at him, rumors stating that he was losing his sanity. And he was.

'The prodigy's fall from grace,' they said. These fucking people knew nothing. Nothing!

He felt abandoned.

These demonic whispers nearly made him go mad, assaulting his mind relentlessly. They influenced his thought processes, his work, his projects, everything!

Soon he slowly transitioned to using more radical methods of not only getting his cultivation to progress again but also to satisfy the voices. That's right, he noticed that he could do certain things to stop- no, satisfy these voices, even for a moment.

He started researching taboo knowledge, deepening himself in how to use death, sacrifices, and misery as a source of power. The voices certainly approved. And whatever abated those voices was something he'd be willing to do, even if it meant betraying his morals.

Following the instruction of those voices eventually culminated in what was happening right now. He finally found the key. This mystical crystal. Nigh indestructible, impervious to mana or any other form of energy, its composition unknown to him. Meaning it was either scarce and obscure, or he had just discovered a new type of ore. It radiated a kind of energy he had never encountered before. Extremely dense in its power, yet he could not extract or make use of it whatsoever.

What's even more curious is that there seemed to be 'something' inside of it, at its center: the voices'— no, his ultimate goal. It was his key to salvation. His key to power.

He put each hand on the heads of his slaves while chanting a spell. A spell granted to him during one of his recent nightmares by the voices. He somehow knew this indicated that the voices thought he was ready.

As he kept chanting, the voices became louder, and they became more apparent for the first time since its inception.

As he focused on the voices to hear what they were saying, he could finally make out one of their words.

'—Dawn is nigh.'

'—the Cycle shall continue unabated.'

As Lorentz heard those words, he suddenly felt his consciousness being pulled away, but strangely enough, his body remained firm, his hands on his slaves' heads.

He felt his mana... burning!

"No! Don't!"

Before he could protest, however, he lost his consciousness, his body continuing the chant as if possessed.

His mana is being burned, permanently consumed, to accelerate the spell and amplify its effects.

The robed individuals howled with pain, their bodies quickly aging but remained rooted on the spot due to Lorentz's powerful mana binding them.

As the chanting reached its crescendo and the spell started to activate, Lorentz's body slowly started levitating higher and higher, his hands no longer touching the robed individuals, or rather, what's left of them.

His body shone with light, resonating with the previously passive and unchanging energy the massive crystal was emitting, synchronizing and shining even brighter as if starting a chain reaction.

RUMBLE!

A low rumble started emitting and could be felt miles away.

The rumble intensified, and although Lorentz chose his hideout to be as far from civilization as possible, the neighboring villages could still feel the rumble.

When the brightness reached its peak, the light quickly spread through the entire laboratory and hideout. It spread extremely fast, engulfing the surrounding area before constricting again in the blink of an eye.

When it constricted to only a tiny light point, everything fell silent for a split second. The rumble was gone, everything was eerily quiet, and time seemed to halt.

In that fraction of a second, Lorentz's crumbling consciousness had a final moment of clarity and realized the truth.

His entire existence has led to this moment.

The moment he was conceived, his fate was already sealed.

The reason his cultivation stopped wasn't because of some inherent problem in his body or some curse or anything like that. It was simply because he reached the necessary amount of mana to barely be able to chant this spell.

That's right. His entire existence served only to activate whatever this crystal was. The voices slowly corrupted and guided his mind and spirit, not allowing him to comprehend what was happening until this final moment of clarity.

Who could've been responsible for this? What kind of power was necessary to be able even to do such a thing? What was the end goal?

He would never know, for it was never the right of a pawn such as him to grasp such knowledge.

'...a joke,' he thought. 'What a fucking jo—

BOOM!

Suddenly, the light exploded into a vast shockwave, the power of which was extremely devastating.

Lorentz's hideout got obliterated in the blink of an eye. The walls and roof exploded outward as the shockwave increased in radius, blowing trees over and devastating the surrounding forest and fauna.

As the shockwave covered more land, it began to lose its power. But before it could do so, it completely ruined the territory in the surrounding miles. When it reached the villages, miles away from Lorentz's hideout, most powerless villagers didn't even have the chance to comprehend what happened to them before their organs collapsed and blood vessels erupted. Their disfigured bodies fell to the ground in a pool of their blood.

As the shockwave kept spreading, it gradually lost its power before it slowly dissipated, leaving an untold amount of damage in its wake.

At the epicenter, amid a barely recognizable hideout, was Lorentz and the two enslaved people's bodies, which, surprisingly, were relatively intact. However, beyond a shadow of a doubt, they were dead.

However, there was one oddity.

The crystal was gone. Not even a trace of it left.

And occupying its space was a naked male body that looked relatively unharmed besides being covered in debris and a few cuts and bruises. It was as if the blast had nearly no effect on it.

Right at that moment, the body twitched, and its eyes shot open.

Leon has awoken.