Investing In My Demon Empress: Every Seal I Break Makes Me Stronger

Fen looked back at the array. "The people who are also looking," he said. "And who would do considerably more damage when they arrive than I would." He stood up from the wall. "The array will take a week to build. Your Void pathway development will accelerate significantly once it’s active." He moved toward the door. "That’s what matters right now."

He stopped in the doorway.

"The Ring Seeker Sect," he said without turning. "They’re not the only ones who know the ring exists. They’re just the loudest." He glanced back once. "Get stronger fast, Kael. The people coming after them are not going to send foot soldiers."

He left.

Kael sat in the center of the array for a long time after the door closed.

"He is an ally," Seradhiel said finally. "I hope to believe in my goddess instincts . But he has not told you everything."

"No," Kael said. "He hasn’t."

The array hummed beneath him. Warm and even. His shoulder felt almost normal.

"He knows more than he has said," Seradhiel said quietly. "About what the orb would show. About what you are."

He got up and went back to the inn.

"Twenty-three silver," he said. "I’ll have it by the end of the week."

He had forty-five silver and some copper when he counted it in the room that night.

Thirty-seven from the client. Eight remaining from before. The cultivation resource budget for week two still intact.

He sat on the edge of the bed and counted it twice. Then put it away and lay back.

His shoulder was significantly better. The array had done in two hours what rest would have taken three days to do.

He stared at the ceiling.

"The woman," Seradhiel said. "With the journal."

"What about her," Kael said.

"Twelve years," she said. "That is how long he spent writing it. She said so." She was quiet for a moment. "Three thousand years is a long time to have no record of oneself. No journal. No account. Just silence."

Kael looked at the ring.

He understood what she wasn’t saying.

He sat up. Crossed to the small desk under the window. Opened the drawer empty, as inn room drawers always were. He went back to his pack and found the small notebook he’d bought in Valdris two weeks ago for logging cultivation progress. Opened it to a clean page.

Sat back down at the desk.

"Tell me something," he said. "About before the seal. Something you remember."

The ring went very still against his finger.

"Why," she said. Her voice careful in a way that had nothing practiced in it.

"Because nobody else is going to ask," he said. "And you said three thousand years with no record. So tell me something. I’ll write it down."

Silence.

Long enough that he thought she wasn’t going to answer.

Then:

"There was a mountain," she said. "In the eastern reaches of what is now called the Valdris borderlands. Before the war it had a name that this era has forgotten. I climbed it once, alone, before any of it began. I was young by Sovereign standards. The summit took three days and the view from the top showed every kingdom that would later burn." A pause. "I did not know that then. I just thought it was beautiful."

Kael wrote it down. Word for word.

He wrote until she stopped talking.

She talked for a long time.

DING.

The notification came quietly just before midnight.

『 Hidden Investment Quest — COMPLETE. Bearer has created the first written record of sealed entity’s personal history in 3,000 years. Investment category: Memory. Preservation of identity. Reward: Status Orb — Tier 1. Item manifested. Note — this item is normally restricted to major guild halls. Guard it. 』

Then:

『 Host — you gave her back something that costs nothing to give and means everything to receive. This is what investment looks like when it has nothing to do with resources. 』

Something cool and perfectly clear materialized on the desk beside the notebook.

A sphere. Roughly the size of his fist. A faint pulse running through its center that matched the ring’s rhythm almost exactly.

Kael picked it up.

Looked at it for a moment.

Then he looked at the notebook beside it ; three pages of small careful writing, a mountain with a forgotten name, a woman who had been young once before the world burned.

"What is that," Seradhiel said. Her voice was different from any version he’d heard. Quieter. Something in it that had no armor on it.

"Status Orb," he said. "A gift."

She went quiet.

"Use it," she said finally.

He held it in his right hand and pushed a thread of Void Essence into it.

The orb lit up.

Warm pulse expanding from the center outward, the clear surface filling with soft light that organized itself into text only he could read.

KAEL MORROW

Age: 22

Realm: Iron — Late Stage

Essence Composition: Void — Primary

Pathway Development: 73% (above realm average by 340%)

Passive Supplementary Draw: Active — Sealed Sovereign Source

Technique Proficiency:

— Void Compression Point: Intermediate

— Azura Burst Flame: Beginner — High

— Void Compression Strike: Beginner — High

Hidden Attribute: Sovereign Vessel Compatibility — MAXIMUM

Cultivation Ceiling: UNREGISTERED

He read it.

Read it again.

"Unregistered," he said quietly.

’Twenty-two,’ he thought. ’I was twenty-seven when I fell asleep at that desk.’

He looked at his hand. Turned it over. Back again. The same hand he’d always had but now that he was looking for it he could feel it — the difference. The body running slightly lighter than it should. Recovery that had seemed fast but he’d attributed to cultivation. The way his joints hadn’t complained once since arriving in Valdenmoor despite two weeks of sleeping on inn mattresses and fighting things that outweighed him considerably.

’Five years,’ he thought. ’The transmigration took five years off me and I didn’t even notice.’

"Transmigration frequently causes age regression from my profound knowledge ," Seradhiel said. "The body is rebuilt at the point of crossing. Apparently yours was rebuilt younger."

"You could have mentioned that," Kael said.

"I did not know your original age," she said. "I still do not. You have never told me."

Kael looked at the number on the orb.

"Twenty-seven," he said. "I was twenty-seven."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Then the crossing gave you five years," she said. "In a cultivation world, five additional years of potential growth is not an insignificant gift."

Kael set the orb down beside the notebook.

"I don’t know whether to be grateful or unsettled," he said.

"Both are acceptable," she said. "Now read the rest of it."

"Yes," Seradhiel said. The voice that had no performance in it. "An unregistered cultivation ceiling means the orb cannot calculate your upper limit. It occurs in less than one in ten million cultivators."

"What does it mean practically," he said.

She didn’t answer immediately.

The orb pulsed once. Warm and steady.

"It means," she said finally, "that I had either been underestimating or overestimating you."

He looked at the orb for a long moment.

Then he set it beside the notebook on the desk. Beside the three pages of her mountain and her forgotten name and the view from the summit before the world she knew burned.

"Get some rest," he said quietly.

She didn’t respond.

But the warmth didn’t fade.

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