Chapter 118: Chapter 118: Caelum, The Overpowered Prince

Aegis entered the command center, his presence immediately silencing the room.

He looked at the map with his cold and calculating eyes. He had just come from playing hide-and-seek with Caelum, and the transition back to the role of a Tier 16 Sovereign was jarring.

​”They want a reaction,” Aegis said. “If we fire the Planet-Crackers, we prove we are a threat to the sector, and the Kyros get their permission for a “Correction Crusade.” But If we do nothing, they slowly chip away at our sensors until we are blind.”

​”Exactly. What is the order, My Emperor?” Kaelen asked, his body tense with the urge to fight.

​Aegis looked at the crimson markers.

“We can not fire the main arrays. We woll use the Legion. Kaelen, take five squadrons of Law-Binders. Phase into sub-space and wait for them to cross the third orbital ring. When they do, don’t destroy the ships. Invert their causal engines. Make it look like a technical failure. If the ships simply ’disappear’ due to their own malfunctioning tech, the Kyros have nothing to report to the Sovereigns.”

​Kaelen grinned. “A ghost war. I like it.”

​Aegis nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. He could feel the tension in the air. The Kyros Hegemony was a Tier 15 empire that had existed for eons. They had resources that Eternia, even with its thousand-year jump, still couldn’t match in raw volume. He was playing for time, trying to let Caelum grow, but the universe was shortening the fuse.

​A few hours later, Aegis walked back to the residential wing. He felt a strange ripple in the mana-flow near the nursery. It was subtle, like the shimmer of heat over a summer road, but to a Stage 16 Conqueror, it was a glaring anomaly.

​He pushed the door open quietly. Caelum was lying in his cradle, the picture of peaceful slumber. His breathing was deep and regular. The room was cool, scented with the lavender-ice Bella used to soothe the air.

​Aegis walked to the cradle and looked down at his son. He felt the “Planetary Link.” Everything seemed normal. But as he turned to leave, his foot brushed against a small wooden block on the floor.

​The block didn’t move. It was anchored to the floor with a gravitational force so immense that it felt like it was part of the planet’s core.

Aegis frowned, kneeling to inspect it. He tried to pick it up with his hand, but the block resisted him. He had to exert a fraction of his Emperor power just to lift the toy.

​He looked at Caelum. The boy’s eyelids flickered for a second, then quieted down.

​Aegis stood there in the dark for a long time. He wasn’t a fool. He knew what a thousand-year gestation meant. He knew the child was gifted. But he hadn’t realized Caelum was already training himself.

​A wave of conflicting emotions washed over him. He felt a surge of pride that his son was so disciplined, so ahead of his time. But beneath that was a profound sadness. He had wanted to give Caelum a life free of the burden of the trident. He wanted the boy to be a child, to experience the world without seeing it as a series of laws to be manipulated.

​”You’re just like me, aren’t you?” Aegis whispered into the dark. “You can hear the wolves at the door.”

​He reached out and gently stroked the boy’s forehead. He could feel the hidden heat of the “Temporal Pocket” Caelum had just collapsed. Aegis didn’t dismantle the anchor on the block.

He didn’t scold the child. Instead, he channeled a tiny sliver of his own Abyssal Law into the cradle, a protective shroud that would help stabilize the boy’s mana-veins during his secret training.

​”If you won’t stay a child for me,” Aegis thought, “then I will make sure you are the strongest monster the stars have ever seen.”

​

​The ordinary day ended, but the “Ghost War” on the borders intensified.

Over the next month, Kaelen’s Law-Binders “erased” forty Kyros scout-vessels. Each time, the Hegemony claimed a “navigational error” or “engine instability,” but the frustration in the Interstellar Chatbox was reaching a boiling point.

​[ SECTOR CHAT: KYROS_OFFICIAL: WE ARE EXPERIENCING UNPRECEDENTED TECH-GLITCHES IN THE HELIOS SECTOR. ADVISE ALL TRADERS TO AVOID THE AREA. ]

[ COMMENT: STAR-REAPER: GLITCHES? OR IS THE ANT BITING BACK? ]

​The pressure was mounting. Inside the palace, Caelum continued his double life. During the day, he was the clumsy toddler who laughed when Bella made ice-sculptures of dolphins. He would pretend to struggle with his ABCs, making Flama and Diva giggle as they “taught” him.

​But at night, he became a Tier 15 titan. He was already working on a way to harmonize the Absolute Zero of his mother with the Abyssal Void of his father to create a new, “Third Law”—something that shouldn’t exist in the System’s database.

​One evening, while Aegis was at the border observing the Kyros fleet through a long-range mana-lens, Caelum sat in the garden with Bella.

She was showing him how to bloom a flower using only the moisture in the air.

​”See, Caelum?” Bella said, a gentle smile on her face. “You don’t have to force the world. You just have to ask it nicely.”

​Caelum looked at the flower. He saw the molecular bonds of the water being nudged by his mother’s intent. He saw the beauty in it. But he also saw the shadow of a Kyros cloaking-drone hovering miles above them in the upper atmosphere, a drone that had slipped past the planetary sensors.

​Caelum didn’t say anything. He didn’t point it out. He simply reached up and “accidentally” sneezed.

​A tiny, invisible needle of Absolute Zero mana shot from his breath, travelling at the speed of light. It bypassed the atmosphere, hit the drone’s causal-core, and shattered it into frozen dust before it could transmit a single image of the Empress and the Heir.

​Caelum then looked back at the flower and clapped his hands.

“Pretty! Mommy!” he chirped.

​Bella kissed his cheek, unaware that her son had just neutralized a Tier 15 spy-craft. You’re such a good boy, Caelum. You’re going to have such a peaceful life.

​Caelum smiled, but his eyes were fixed on the stars. He knew the Kyros were losing patience. He knew the “Ghost War” would soon turn into a “Star War.” And he knew that when the time came, he wouldn’t be hiding in a nursery.

​He would be the one showing the Hegemony that the Heir of Eternia didn’t just play with blocks. He played with the fate of empires.

​

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