SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!-Chapter 31: The Magic Tower

The faint wave of energy that had left Evan spread outward in silence, in every direction at once.

Thinner than smoke, quieter than a whisper, it expanded from a single point in the heart of Lirath and dissolved into the world like ink dropped into an ocean. By the time it crossed the barony’s borders, it was barely an echo. By the time it reached the edges of the kingdom, it was less than that.

For the vast majority of beings in the world, it passed through them and was gone without leaving so much as a memory.

But the world was not made up only of ordinary beings.

[Northern district of the capital of the Kingdom of Solren]

Here stood one of the kingdom’s largest and one of the most important institutions,

the Awakened Academy.

The Academy had existed for as long as the kingdom itself. A place of instruction and training for future generations of awakened individuals, its halls drew all kind of people, those with deep pockets, those with exceptional talent, and those with connections to the powerful.

Every year, raw potential poured through its gates, carefully processed through an initial entrance examination and a subsequent filtering that took place during the first year, when every new student began finding their footing with their abilities. It was during that period that it became clearer who had potential worth investing in, and who did not.

Within the Academy’s vast campus there were many important places, but one stood apart from all the rest.

The Magic Tower.

Generations of scholars had walked its corridors, filled its archives, argued in its halls. It was a place of learning, or at least, that was what the vast majority of its current inhabitants believed. They came for the libraries, the training facilities, the centuries of accumulated knowledge on mana, bloodlines, techniques, and the mechanics of awakening. To them, the Magic Tower was a temple of progress.

They were not entirely wrong.

But that was not why it had been built.

Deep within the Magic Tower, older than the Academy itself, older than most things still standing in the kingdom, there was a room that most of the staff had never entered, and that the few who knew of its existence had long since stopped thinking about.

It had been silent for so long that its existence had become more legend than fact.

The library on the floor below was a warm, well-lit place, heavy with the particular smell of old paper and lamp oil. Scholars sat at long tables with their books and their notes, and the only sounds were the soft turning of pages and the occasional scratch of a quill.

Then something changed.

It began as a vibration, low and resonant, felt more in the chest than heard with the ears. The scholars looked up from their work, exchanging glances caught somewhere between confusion and unease. The librarian, a man who had worked in that building for eighty years and prided himself on having seen everything worth seeing, set down his quill and rose slowly from his chair.

In eighty years, he had never heard that sound.

He didn’t know what it was. None of them did.

But someone nearby did.

***

The Dean of the Academy moved like a man who had stopped being surprised by most things a very long time ago. He had felt the disturbance the moment it reached the tower, not through any instrument or device, but through the particular sensitivity that came from decades spent in proximity to the room above the library.

He was through the tower door and inside the control room before the vibration had finished fading.

The room was unlike anything else in the Academy. Not modern, not in any sense that word usually implied, but advanced in its own way, a precision instrument built from mana rather than metal, every surface etched with formations that had been calibrated and recalibrated over centuries. Screens of condensed light hovered in the air, displaying readings that most of the Academy’s current staff wouldn’t have known how to interpret. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

A supervisor was already at his station, hands moving quickly over the controls.

"Was that what I think it was?" the Dean asked, his voice flat and even.

The supervisor didn’t look up. "We’re trying to determine that now, sir. The fluctuation was- "

"Void energy."

A pause.

"We believe so, yes. But it was extremely faint, and it’s already gone. There’s no residual trace we can lock onto. We can’t determine the source, and we can’t determine the point of origin." The supervisor finally looked up, and there was something careful in his expression. "Whatever it was, it lasted only a moment. It’s possible it was a natural fluctuation, residual particles disturbed by something. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all."

"Perhaps. But it costs nothing to be thorough." The Dean’s eyes remained on the readings. "Stay on alert. If it appears again, I want the source pinpointed this time."

He paused for a moment, then added:

"And don’t discuss this with anyone."

He left the room the way he had entered it, quickly, quietly, and without explaining himself to anyone.

***

On the other side of the continent, high above a mountain whose peak disappeared into a curtain of dark clouds, black as ash, thick as a storm that never broke, a figure hung suspended in the air, motionless against the pale afternoon sky.

The air at that altitude should have been impossible to breathe. The cold should have been lethal. For anyone else, it would have been.

She was tall, elegant, and still in the way that very old things tend to be still, not motionless, but settled, as if movement itself required her permission before it could occur near her. Her robes were white shading into pale grey, threaded with silver at the edges. Her hair, long and white, moved faintly in a wind that seemed to exist only for her.

Her face was striking, refined and ageless, the kind of beauty that had nothing warm in it. And her eyes, violet, unnaturally luminous, cold, were cut through by pupils thin as needles, and within them something vast seemed to swirl, like galaxies trapped behind glass.

Those eyes were glowing now with greater intensity than usual, fixed on the horizon in a direction that meant nothing to anyone who hadn’t felt what she had just felt.

She had tracked the wave the moment it left its source. Not the wave itself, that had been nothing, barely a tremor. But the point of origin. The specific, unmistakable nature of what had produced it.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then, softly, to no one, or perhaps to something very far away, she spoke.

"Someone has opened a gate of the Abyss."

The words dissolved into the wind.

A moment later, she was gone, vanished from the mountaintop as if she had never been there at all, leaving only the drifting clouds below and a silence that quickly swallowed all trace of her presence.