Emerson pushed her awareness against the uterine wall. She focused her newly gathered Aether into her developing auditory nerves. The muffled sounds outside sharpened into brutal clarity.

A low, frantic chanting vibrated through the floorboards. The stench of sulfur and rotting blood hit Kamala, causing a violent wave of nausea. The sudden spike of intense, suffocating terror flooded her bloodstream with stress hormones, chilling the amniotic fluid.

"Josue, what are you doing?" Kamala's voice trembled. "What is this circle?"

The chanting stopped.

"Sacrifices must be made, Kamala," Josue said. His voice was dead, devoid of any human warmth. "If I am to reach Ascension, I need fuel."

Kamala's heartbeat skyrocketed. The frantic thumping echoed like war drums in Emerson's ears.

"I am your wife!" Kamala screamed. "I am carrying our children!"

"The bloodline of a high-born heiress," Josue mocked, his boots stepping closer. "Combined with the pure, unborn souls of twins. It is the perfect catalyst."

A wave of pure terror crashed through Kamala's bloodstream. The temperature of the womb plummeted.

A sickening, freezing mass of Shadow Aether locked onto Kamala's stomach.

Emerson reacted instantly. She drained her tiny Mana Core, throwing up a razor-thin shield of magic around herself and her brother.

Shhhk.

The wet, heavy sound of a blade tearing through flesh and muscle echoed in the dark.

Kamala let out a blood-curdling shriek. Her entire body convulsed. The violent spasm crushed Emerson against the uterine wall.

Life force began pouring out of Kamala, draining away like water down a cracked sink. The sacrificial circle on the floor below them pulled like a magnet, trying to rip Emerson's soul straight out of her chest.

Beside her, Jaden's chaotic energy flared again, provoked by the dark magic. He was about to explode.

Emerson slammed her soul pressure down on him. Do not move. You will tear her apart.

Outside, Kamala's maternal instinct overrode her agony. Her bloody hands clamped down on Josue's wrist, her fingernails digging into his skin.

"You will not touch them!" Kamala roared. The love in her voice was gone. Only raw, bleeding hatred remained.

Kamala shoved her free hand into her pocket. Her fingers crushed a silver Rune Stone.

A blinding, explosive light detonated in the basement.

A massive spatial shockwave slammed into Josue, throwing him backward. His spine cracked against the stone wall. The sacrificial pull snapped.

Kamala clamped both hands over the gaping wound in her abdomen. She stumbled forward, her boots slipping on her own blood, and kicked the iron door open.

Freezing rain and howling wind slapped against her face. She threw herself into the pitch-black pine forest.

Her boots sank into the thick mud. She fell hard to her knees, the impact jarring the babies inside her. She forced herself back up, gasping for air, her lungs wheezing.

Inside, Emerson pushed tiny pulses of Aether toward the wound, trying to clot the severed blood vessels. But Josue's Shadow Aether coated the blade's entry point. It ate through Emerson's healing magic like acid.

"You cannot run, Kamala!" Josue's furious roar echoed through the trees behind them. "The perimeter is sealed!"

Kamala ground her teeth together. She leaned her shoulder against a rough pine trunk and dragged her feet forward.

Emerson felt the mother's heart rate slowing. The blood loss was too severe. Kamala had less than ten minutes before her organs failed.

If Kamala died, they all died.

Emerson made her choice. She sank her consciousness to the absolute bottom of her Noetic Space. She reached for the heavy, forbidden iron doors of her past life's power.

Emerson's mind ripped the first seal off the Noetic doors.

A tsunami of ancient memories and raw power violently crashed into her fragile consciousness. Her soul felt like it was being torn into shreds. She gritted her nonexistent teeth and extracted a single, microscopic drop of the Architect's Essence.

Outside, Kamala's knees buckled. She collapsed face-first into the freezing mud.

A violent contraction seized the womb. Kamala let out a suffocated whimper. The pressure inside shifted dangerously. The amniotic sac was close to rupturing.

"I can't die here..." Kamala's fingers clawed at the dirt, her nails breaking and bleeding.

Before Kamala could pass out, a terrifying, blistering heat erupted from deep inside her stomach.

Emerson injected the Architect's Essence directly into her fragile Mana Core. She forced it to compress.

Novice. Adept. Expert.

The fetus's magic level skyrocketed in a matter of seconds. The sheer gravitational pull of her core instantly sucked the surrounding forest dry of all ambient magic. A visible vacuum of Aether formed around Kamala's body.

The falling raindrops froze in mid-air. A split second later, the intense magical pressure vaporized the water into thick white steam.

Emerson's core stabilized with a silent, internal boom. She was at the Master-tier.

The universe noticed.

A fetus reaching the Master-tier violated the fundamental laws of existence. The Reality Correction mechanism engaged instantly.

High above the forest, the ordinary storm clouds violently twisted into a massive, dark purple vortex. The sky roared. The thunder sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates. The ground beneath Kamala shook.

Josue stopped running. He pushed through a thicket of thorns and stared up at the swirling purple sky, his chest heaving.

"A high-tier beast advancing?" Josue muttered, his eyes widening with greed. "Or an artifact?"

He looked down and saw Kamala bleeding out in the mud.

Josue laughed. It was a wet, ugly sound. "The heavens are blessing my Ascension."

He raised his blood-soaked dagger. Thick, black Shadow Aether dripped from the blade.

Kamala saw him. She curled into a tight ball, wrapping her arms and legs around her stomach to take the blade in her back.

Inside the womb, Emerson felt the vibration of Josue's footsteps.

You know nothing of power, insect.

Emerson carefully extracted a single thread of dark, abyssal magic from her brother's dormant core. She pushed it out through Kamala's skin, mixing the dark essence directly into the localized Reality Correction storm she had just triggered. The thread acted as an invisible, magnetic beacon, guiding the heavens' wrath to lock onto the nearest, most concentrated source of matching dark energy-Josue.

The Reality Correction storm above was blindly searching for the source of the anomaly. It instantly locked onto the massive spike of Shadow Aether radiating from Josue's dagger and the thread on his leg.

The targeting shifted.

A pillar of blinding purple lightning, thick as a redwood tree, tore through the sky.

The static electricity made Josue's hair stand on end. The air around him tasted like copper. He looked up. The purple light consumed his pupils.

"No-!"

Josue screamed. He shoved all his magic into his defensive shields.

The lightning struck him dead center. The world vanished into a blinding white flash.

The deafening crack of thunder faded, leaving a ringing silence in the forest. The only sound was the hiss of rain hitting scorched earth.

The shockwave had thrown Kamala three feet backward. She lay in the mud, her ears bleeding, her vision swimming with black spots.

She forced her heavy head up and looked at where her husband had just been standing.

There was only a crater. It was thirty feet wide. The dirt had been superheated into glowing, jagged glass.

Josue was gone. Not a bone, not a drop of blood remained. He had been completely obliterated into ash.

Near the edge of the glassed earth, his obsidian ring-the one he wore to channel shadow magic-lay half-melted in the mud.

Kamala stared at the smoking crater. Her brain refused to process the image.

"Divine retribution..." she whispered, a broken laugh tearing from her throat. "The heavens actually saw."

The adrenaline holding her together snapped. The massive blood loss caught up to her. Her eyes rolled back, and her head hit the mud. She blacked out.

Inside the womb, Emerson exhaled a long, silent breath. She severed her connection to the outside world.

The backlash of forcing a Master-tier core into a fetal body hit her. Her soul felt hollowed out, scraping against her ribs. If she kept this power active, the sheer radiation of her magic would cook her mother from the inside out.

Emerson grabbed her glowing Master-tier core and crushed it down. She sealed the power behind mental walls, shrinking it until it barely registered as a Novice-tier pulse.

She checked on Jaden. The thunder had terrified him. He was curled into a tight, trembling ball in the corner of the sac.

Emerson pushed a tiny wave of soothing Aether into Kamala's bloodstream to keep her heart beating, then let the exhaustion take her.

Hours passed. The rain stopped. Sunlight pierced the pine branches.

Heavy boots sloshed through the mud. A patrol of mercenaries, drawn by the unnatural lightning strike, stood at the edge of the glass crater.

"Boss, we got a bleeder here," a rough voice called out.

The squad leader, a massive man with a scarred jaw, walked over to Kamala's unconscious body. He reached down to check her pockets. His fingers brushed against her wrist.

He paused. He wiped the mud off her skin, revealing a delicate, silver defensive bracelet.

The leader's eyes widened. He knew quality. That metal was worth more than his entire squad's yearly pay.

"Pack her up!" the leader barked. "She's highborn. If she lives, we get a massive payout. Move!"

Rough hands lifted Kamala onto a canvas stretcher. Someone forced a bitter, chalky blood-clotting paste down her throat.

Emerson felt the movement. She sensed no killing intent from the men, only greed. She stayed dormant.

The cart bounced over deep ruts in the road. The jolting woke Kamala for a fraction of a second.

She gasped, her hands immediately flying to her stomach. "My babies..."

"Relax, lady," the gruff leader said from the front of the cart. "You're lucky. The kids are still kicking."

Kamala's tense muscles went entirely slack. She slipped back into a deep, healing coma. Emerson let the darkness pull her under, falling into the longest sleep of her new life.