The joy in the room vanished, sucked into the swirling, malevolent darkness in the skull's eyes on the living map. A moment ago, we had been kings in our own hall, masters of an inheritance beyond imagining. Now, we were just people, staring at a warning that felt as old as the mountains around us, a cold, primordial dread seeping into the warm, triumphant air.

"Old gods..." Lucas breathed, his voice a low rumble. He leaned over the table, his hand resting near the hilt of [Oathsworn], as if the simple presence of the blessed steel could ward off the chill. "It can't mean... like Enki, can it? Other refugees from Earth?"

Kasian's great golden eye pulsed softly from his place beside me. His telepathic voice was devoid of its usual academic warmth, replaced by a flat, clinical certainty. <Not certain, Lord Lucas. The term, in this context, does not denote a being of our ancestral line. The connotation is different. More foundational. Less... structured. When the records speak of the 'old gods,' they speak of entities that predate the Prime System's ordered reality. Powers that were not born from Essence, but from whom Essence itself may have been a byproduct. They are... a different kind of truth.>

"A truth that wants to be left alone, by the sounds of it," Silas muttered, his hand constantly testing and practicing with his new, shadowy dagger. "I've seen warnings on tombs, on treasure vaults. They all feel like a challenge. This..." He gestured to the grinning skull. "This feels like a finality."

Just as the weight of the unknown threat began to press down on us, something new appeared on the map. Beneath the skull, a series of glowing amber runes flickered into existence, arranging themselves in a precise, damning line. My mind perceived them as numbers, counting down.

364:23:19:15... 14... 13…

"What is that?" Lena asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Jeeves' analytical mote shimmered beside my ear. "Based on the sequential degradation, it appears to be a temporal marker. A countdown. Three hundred and sixty-four days, twenty-three hours, and change."

"A countdown to what?" Anna demanded, her knuckles white where she gripped her new bow. "To them waking up? An attack? What the hell does it mean?"

The unspoken questions hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. A doomsday clock, set by a power we couldn't even begin to comprehend, ticking down in the heart of our new fortress. The impulse was primal, immediate: find the threat, confront it, eliminate it. Go there. Now.

But I felt something else, a subtle thread of information coming from the map itself, a whisper from the deep magic that powered it. My [Predator's Gaze] wasn't just seeing a threat; it was feeling the nature of the threat. It was immense, yes. Horrifying. But it was also... dormant. The timer didn't feel like a fuse on a bomb about to explode. It felt more like an alarm clock set for a very, very deep sleeper. A long, slow awakening. The urgency was for the destination, not the departure.

"We wait," I said.

Every head in the room snapped towards me. Anna's eyes narrowed. "Wait? Eren, did you not see the skull? Do you not feel the effect it's giving off? The countdown? We have a year to deal with… whatever the hell that is!"

"Exactly," I said, meeting her fiery gaze with a calm I didn't entirely feel. "We have a year. Look at us. We're standing in a god's armory, holding weapons that could make us legends, and we barely know how to turn them on. We have a forge that can rewrite matter, and we don't have the instruction manual. We have a library that holds the secrets of our ancestors, and most of the doors are still locked to us. Right now, our greatest enemy isn't some sleeping god on a lost continent. It's Adjutant Vayne. It's Governor Vorr. It's the Kyorian Empire that could decide to 'audit' our little operation at any moment."

I paced in front of the map, forcing myself to think like Jeeves, like a strategist, not like a brother or a friend. "Going there now would be suicide. We'd be rushing into the deepest darkness we've ever seen with nothing but a brand-new box of matches. A year is a gift. It's time. Time to get stronger. Time to truly understand what we've inherited here. Time to make this fortress and these weapons an extension of ourselves, not just tools we picked up." I looked at each of them in turn. "We consolidate our power. We train until our new gear feels like a second skin. We unlock every secret of this place that we can. We turn ourselves into a force so powerful that when that clock runs out, we're the ones they should be afraid of."

The logic was cold and undeniable. The fire in Anna's eyes banked, replaced by a reluctant, grudging acceptance. Lucas nodded slowly, his hand dropping from his sword. "He's right. A year of preparation, with these resources... We could become a Tier 4 team, maybe even tier 5. Hell, Eren might be Tier 8 at that point."

"Which brings us to our next problem," I said, gesturing around at the glittering hoard. "We can't exactly walk into Bastion with Eliza wearing a crown of solidified starlight and Marcus carrying a shield forged in a nebula. Vayne has eyes everywhere. We need to manage our resources, and our appearances."

"A graduated deployment of assets," Jeeves supplied. "We categorize the treasury. Category One: Personal gear and consumables for our use only, never to be seen outside our Sanctums or dungeons. Category Two: 'Plausible' finds. High-quality crafting materials, quintessence crystals that are a grade higher than what's common, things we can claim we 'found' on a deep delve. We can use those to upgrade Bastion's infrastructure and trade for intelligence or other resources. It will raise eyebrows, but not alarms. Category Three: God-tier. The Mythic and Legendary items, the cosmic-level artifacts. Those stay locked down until the day we're ready to burn the whole masquerade to the ground."

"So we start small," Lucas mused. "Strengthen our foundation first. Upgrade Bastion's outer defenses with some of these higher-grade runic alloys. Equip our own personal teams, but keep the new gear under wraps unless we're on a private run. It's a good plan."

"And we need to specialize," I added. "We're an army now, not just dungeon delvers. Everyone needs a focus."

The next hour was a flurry of planning, the cold dread replaced by a focused, determined energy. We laid out the blueprint for our next year.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Lucas, as always, would be the Commander. He and I would handle the overarching strategy, managing the delicate political dance with Vayne and overseeing the controlled flow of Category Two resources into Bastion's economy.

Anna, Silas, and Lena formed our core Strike Team. Their job was simple: dive the most dangerous dungeons we could find, push their combat skills to the absolute limit, and master their new Epic gear until it was as natural as breathing. They would be our razor's edge.

Marcus became our new Head of Defense and Training. With his [Aegis], he was a walking fortress. He would work with the Bastion guard, slowly and subtly improving their techniques and drilling them with a rigor they'd never known. He was to turn our home from a frontier town into a fortified hardpoint.

And Eliza... she was practically vibrating with excitement. She, alongside Leoric, became the joint Heads of Research and Development. Their mission was to unlock the secrets of the Cradle, to spend every waking moment in the Chamber of Weaving and the Crystal Library, reverse-engineering the technology of the ancient gods and creating new wonders for us all.

My role was to be the power source. My primary focus would be on deepening my bond with the Cradle's nexus, strengthening my soul, and pushing for Tier 6. The stronger my connection, the more of this place would open up to us. And, with Kasian's help, I would be the one to delve into the deepest, most forbidden lore.

With the plan set, a new routine began, and a month passed in a blur of furious, focused activity.

The first week, we all felt like children wearing our parents' clothes. The power of the Epic gear was intoxicating but unwieldy. Anna's first shot with [Silent Song] missed its target by ten feet because she couldn't compensate for the arrow's unnatural, frictionless flight. Silas nearly gave himself a heart attack when [Umbral Thorn]'s creeping shadow curse leached the life from a training dummy so fast it crumbled to dust. But they adapted. By the end of the month, Anna's strike team was a thing of terrifying beauty. They moved through the high-tier dungeons like ghosts, a symphony of silent arrows, shadowy blades, and crippling venom, clearing monster dens that would have taken them a full day in mere hours. Their coordination was flawless, their power growing exponentially with every Gatekeeper and Floor Boss they felled. The sheer volume of essence cores they brought back fueled all our other efforts.

Eliza and Leoric's corner of the Cradle became a beautiful, chaotic disaster area of half-finished schematics, sparking power conduits, and muttered curses of joy. They were a perfect match. Eliza, with her frenetic, outside-the-box genius, would propose an impossible theory — like a localized stasis field that could freeze a single incoming projectile — and Leoric, with his echoed experiences of being a Master Craftsman, would meticulously figure out how to actually build the damn thing. They were re-inventing the very principles of artifice.

With their combined efforts, they managed to build a 'Runic Harmonizer' that allowed Kasian to more safely interface with the crystal library. He began to piece together fragments of our lost history, his occasional revelations sending ripples through our quiet evenings.

<It is fascinating,> his thought-voice echoed through the command center one night as we reviewed the day's progress. <The myths of your old world… they are not mere stories. They are degraded data, corrupted memories of real events and real people. The Greek god Hephaestus, the master smith thrown from a mountain? Likely a garbled account of a Dweorg Artificer Lord whose citadel-forge fell from orbit during the Long War. The Norse tales of Yggdrasil, the World-Tree connecting nine realms? A primitive understanding of a living bio-Sanctum that once held stable portals to nine different worlds.> Every new piece of lore was a reminder of what we'd lost, and a fierce, burning testament to what we could reclaim.

My own training in the Ashen Gauntlet became a brutal, relentless crucible. With my deeper understanding of causality and my overflowing reserves, I wasn't just fighting the Gatekeeper anymore; I was bending the rules of the Gauntlet itself, using Ashen Edicts to rewrite the very terms of our engagement. My control over my Soulfire became so fine I could manifest a dozen different weapons at once, each moving with its own independent, lethal intent. The gap between Tier 5 and Tier 6, once a chasm, now felt like a distance I could actually cross, my evolved dungeon floors, replicas of old but now higher Tiered and containing much more Primal Essence — with each Sentinel now providing more Essence than the Sky-Reaver of the unevolved dungeon. The improved cores looted also provided excellent upgrades for the evolved (Mark IV) Golem — now a lightning crackling behemoth.

It was near the end of the fifth week, during one of our evening debriefings. The mood was comfortable, productive. We were getting stronger, relishing in our new found resources. And then a priority alert chimed on my command console, a frantic, desperate signal patched through from Lyraeth's enclave in Sylvandell. I accepted the connection, and the haggard face of an elven scout I recognized — Faelan's younger brother, Orias — appeared on the main screen.

His face was streaked with grime and tears, the formal serenity of his people completely shattered. Behind him, the serene green glow of their settlement was marred by the angry, flickering orange of fires.

"Lord Eren!" he gasped, his voice cracking with panic and grief. "You have to help us! Please, you have to help!"

"Orias, calm down," I said, my own body going rigid. "What happened? What's wrong?"

"They came... a few hours ago," he sobbed, the words tumbling out in a frantic, broken rush. "The Featherleaf Crown… another faction. They... they had scanners, devices we've never seen. They detected the materials you gave us — the sun-forged arrowheads, the ingots of star-metal... They said our little refugee enclave had no right to such treasures. They said we were thieves... that we stole them from a 'superior' clan."

My blood ran cold. The Category Two resources. Plausible, but still good enough to attract attention. Perhaps too much attention.

"They demanded we tell them where we got them," Orias' voice broke completely. "We refused. We said nothing. So they started... killing people. Lyraeth's uncle… they made us watch as they... they murdered him with their blood-magic, just to get us to talk. They're torturing our people in the streets, Lord Eren! We've sealed the portal chamber, they can't get in, they don't have the key — but they have the entire enclave surrounded! They're burning everything! They say if we don't open the portal and give them its secrets immediately, they're going to kill everyone... slowly."

He was openly weeping now, his terror a raw, open wound broadcast across the screen. "Please, Lord Eren! They are evil monsters! We held to our promise! We told them nothing! Please... you are our only hope!"

The connection cut out.

The command center was utterly silent. The productive warmth of moments before was gone, replaced by a deadly, sub-zero cold that originated from me. My friends were staring at me, their own faces a mixture of horror and fury.

I looked at the empty screen where the terrified face of the scout had been. I felt the echo of his agony, the memory of his plea. They were torturing and murdering innocent people. Allies. People I considered friends. All because of our own damned carelessness. We'd been so focused on the Kyorians, on the grand, cosmic threats, we'd forgotten about the simple, brutal evil of greed and envy.

A low, dangerous sound, like the grating of stone on stone, echoed in the quiet room. It took me a second to realize it was coming from my own gritted teeth. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees as tendrils of black, condensed Soulfire, the color of pure, annihilating rage, began to leak from my clenched fists.

They wanted our secrets? They wanted to know where the treasure came from?

Fine. I'd deliver it to them personally.

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