Chapter 63: 63. Truth I

Meanwhile, at the apartment.

It was silent when Owen moved to the window.

Yuki had left for her lunch with Odessa hours ago, and the space felt different in her absence. Smaller, somehow. More confining. The walls pressed in with the accumulated weight of revelations he hadn’t shared, truths he was still trying to process.

Owen stood at the window in his humanoid form, his golden eyes tracking the city below.

Nexus Prime stretched in all directions—a sprawling metropolis of steel and glass and humanity’s stubborn refusal to let the the warring times define them. Millions of people going about their lives, completely unaware of the forces that shaped their reality.

Completely unaware that the system they relied on, the power that had saved humanity, was itself a leash created by something that viewed them as livestock.

He needed to understand. Needed to verify what Dominus and Chronara had told him, see if the truth held up when examined outside the context of a dragon kingdom floating in temporal uncertainty.

Owen opened the window and stepped out onto the narrow ledge three stories above the street.

Then he jumped.

The fall lasted exactly 1.3 seconds before his wings snapped open and caught air. He angled upward immediately, powerful wing-beats driving him toward the sky with acceleration that would have been invisible to any human eye watching from below.

To a casual observer—if there had been one looking in exactly the right direction at exactly the right moment—it would have appeared as nothing more than a dark blur, a trick of light, perhaps a large bird passing overhead.

Owen climbed higher, each wing-beat taking him farther from the ground, from the city’s noise and light and press of humanity. The air grew thinner, colder. The sounds of traffic and conversation faded to distant murmurs. The people below shrank to dots, then vanished entirely as perspective rendered them invisible.

At 3,000 meters, Owen leveled off and hovered, his four wings maintaining position with minimal effort.

Up here, suspended in the empty sky where no one could watch, where no surveillance could track, he let his Mana Sense expand to its maximum range.

The skill unfurled like an invisible net cast across the world, spreading outward in concentric circles that grew weaker with distance but still perceptible for kilometers. Owen had refined this ability through constant use, , learning to filter the constant background noise of ambient mana and focus on specific signatures, it was unarguably his most used skill.

And now, he was looking for dungeons.

Their gates appeared in his senses as distortions, places where reality bent slightly out of true, where the fabric between dimensions had worn thin enough to create permanent tears. Each dungeon had a distinctive signature based on its rank and type, a magical fingerprint that Research had now made Hunters able to recognise with the necessary devices.

Owen found several immediately. Two C-ranks within five kilometers, both field-type based on their signature patterns. An A-rank approximately twelve kilometers northeast, its mana signature pulsing with the chaotic irregularity of a labyrinth-type. And there—

There.

Seven kilometers almost due east. A D-rank dungeon, small and stable, the kind of low-level gate that barely registered in the Hunter Association’s priority queue. Perfect.

Owen angled toward it, folding his wings and dropping into a controlled dive that accelerated him to speeds that would have torn apart anything less aerodynamic. Wind screamed past his scales, creating a sonic pressure that human ears would have found painful.

The dungeon gate materialized below him—a shimmering oval portal perhaps three meters tall, anchored to the ground in what looked like an abandoned industrial area. No hunter teams preparing for entry. Just one Hunter association agent sleeping at his desk in a small office tent by the side and the gate itself, pulsing with a gentle blue-white light.

Owen pulled up at the last second, bleeding off speed in a maneuver that created a brief gust strong enough to scatter loose debris across the industrial lot. He landed twenty meters from the gate and immediately activated Sovereignty of Space-Time just before the agent could wake up.

The world shifted.

Owen used the first second to transform to his full juvenile dragon form, his body expanding to its true size now as there would be no witnesses to see within the dungeon.

The second and third seconds were spent crossing the distance to the gate in bounds that would have been blurs even to hunter-enhanced vision.

The fourth second saw him dive through the gate’s surface, reality parting around him like water.

The fifth second, time snapped back to normal as Owen deactivated the Sovereignty.

But he was through. Inside the dungeon. Completely undetected by any surveillance or monitoring that might have been watching the gate.

The dungeon interior was unremarkable—a forest environment, D-rank difficulty, populated by goblins and wolves and other low-level monsters that wouldn’t pose a threat to anyone above F-rank. Owen could feel them in his Mana Sense, scattered throughout the dungeon in patterns that suggested they were going about whatever passed for daily activities among dungeon monsters.

He ignored them all and moved deeper into the forest, looking for somewhere secluded. Somewhere he could think without interruption.

A cave presented itself after perhaps a kilometer of flight—small, dark, unoccupied except for some basic fungi growing along the walls. Owen landed at the entrance, checked with his Mana Sense to ensure nothing was lurking in the depths, and then settled into the cave’s center.

Only then did he open his system interface.

The familiar translucent panels materialized in his vision, displaying information that had once felt like a gift but now felt like chains.

[Name: Owen]

[Species: Dragon (King Bloodline)]

[Status: Juvenile Dragon]

[Rank: SS]

[Level: 25/50]

[HP: 75,000]

And there, at the bottom of the main panel, a new section that hadn’t existed before the Shadowgrave:

[Drak’thar – Personal Pocket Dimension]

[Status: Uninhabited]

[Structures: 2 (Offline)]

[Dragon Population: 1]

[Authority: Tier 1]

Owen stared at the Drak’thar section with a feeling approaching disgust. Not because he didn’t want the dragon kingdom—he did, desperately, felt the weight of responsibility and purpose that came with Dominus’s gift—but because this interface, this system panel, represented everything Dominus had warned him about.

The Will of the World’s surveillance system, built into the fundamental structure of reality itself, monitoring every awakened being’s growth and progress.

He closed the panel with a thought, the interface disappearing as quickly as it had appeared.

Then Owen settled into a more comfortable position, his tail coiling around his body, his wings folded against his sides. And he let himself remember.

Let himself replay everything Dominus and Chronara had told him in those final moments suspended in the sky above the Shadowgrave, when the Dragon King had chosen to share truths that Yuki—that anyone—should probably never know.

—

The memory was sharp, crystalline, Every word Dominus had spoken. Every vision Chronara had shared. All of it recorded in perfect detail.

They had been floating high above the Shadowgrave, so far up that the curvature of the earth was visible on the horizon. Dominus in his full dragon form, scales catching sunlight. Chronara beside him, her body refracting light into rainbow patterns. And Owen, small between them, his juvenile form dwarfed by their ancient presence.

“You deserve the truth,” Dominus had said, his voice carrying the weight of millennia. “Not the sanitized version the Greater Dragons learned. Not the myths mortals tell themselves. Or what the royal tower has probably shared. The actual truth about what this world is and why the dragons fell.”

Owen had just nodded, his throat tight with anticipation and dread.

“It begins,” Chronara said, her voice somehow both ancient and young, “with a story you were told in the Tower of Royals. The prophecy shown on the 99th floor. Do you remember it?”

“The Desecrator,” Owen replied. “A dragon who turned against his own kind, who allied with demons and Outer-Divinities, who brought catastrophe to the world.”

“Vorthraxx,” Dominus confirmed. “My son…to be.”

Dominus’s golden eyes showed something that might have been grief or guilt or simply exhaustion. “Born in an age when dragons and mortals coexisted peacefully. When we believed our purpose was clear and our duty sacred. He was brilliant, powerful, destined to be one of the greatest Dragon Kings in our history.”

“What happened?” Owen asked, though he suspected he already knew the shape of the answer.

“What always happens when beings of immense power experience loss,” Chronara said softly. “He loved a human woman. Elara. A mage of considerable talent and beauty, though mortal and short-lived compared to dragon spans. They built a life together in defiance of convention, and for a time, it worked.”

Dominus continued the story, his voice growing distant with memory.

“She was murdered. By humans who feared her association with dragons, who believed her magic came from demonic sources, who simply couldn’t tolerate what they couldn’t control. They burned her alive in a town square while Vorthraxx was away. Made it a spectacle. A warning.”

Owen felt sick.

“When he returned and found her…” Dominus paused.

“…Something broke in him. The part that believed in protecting mortals, that saw value in their brief lives, that considered them worth saving. It shattered.”

“And he decided to erase humanity entirely”

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