The Monarch-Chapter 648: Silence
It was funny that the lowest-ranked mage in the group was the first to descend. Not only that, but his aura and titles exploded like a nuclear bomb in front of everyone. A silence fell across the skies as they watched Kayden descend without even looking back.
After a few hundred meters, Kayden felt his body being pulled at high speed toward the ground. He resisted, and the inert mountain became an insane weight upon his mind. It was as if he were staring directly at a god. For the blink of an eye, the pressure on his body equaled that of facing the strongest god he had ever encountered in his life. But...
It wasn't enough. Kayden converted that pressure directly into energy—his path subdued the pressure and transformed it into energy. The mountain's pressure began to be drained by Kayden like a boiling cauldron of energy. The equilibrium of the environment was completely distorted. A hole in the laws of the mountain opened instantly. Chaos began to spread across the billions of kilometers of the mountain. In a blink... the mountain recognized Kayden as worthy.
Kayden felt the pressure vanish. The mountain completely withdrew. Kayden had conquered the hill without any real difficulty. Not only that, but he had managed to cause a rupture in its laws altogether. The gods who had come with Kayden began to fall, one by one.
The pressure on their minds was absolutely insane. They were geniuses, capable of reaching absurd heights, but the pressure of the mountain was something they had never even come close to handling. And these weren't beings with little emotional experience—they were people who had fought entire wars, who had lived billions of years. They had been fathers, sons, kings, and servants. They had gone through nearly everything this world had to offer—and even so, the pressure utterly destroyed them.
Kayden had studied the mountain for a decade. He understood very well that this pressure wasn't just meant to separate the strong from the weak. It was also one of the mountain's tests. Its pressure was a primordial law of a ridiculously high level. The pressure was nothing more than that law manifested into physical form. In summary, it was a challenge.
"Congratulations, Kayden," the god from earlier appeared once more beside them. It was the same mage who had recruited each of the gods following Kayden and the boy. "You've overcome one of the final tests by setting foot on the mountain."
The other gods had not been able to conquer the mountain. The skeletal god had waited for each of them to fail before appearing. Not even the sound of a pin dropping could be heard in the group at that moment. They had lost to a mortal—not only that, but they had been completely outclassed by a mage who wasn't even a god.
"This test comes with a reward. It's unusual to grant this right at this point, but Olympus officially recognizes you as a citizen with full rights. Kayden Heart is hereby named a first-level citizen." The mountain seemed to welcome Kayden's aura.
"I'll keep climbing it normally," Kayden commented, and the god vanished once again without anyone being able to sense it.
The mountain's entrance was more like the border of a country. It was immense—a circular golden wooden gate stretching several dozen billion kilometers. Kayden chose to continue forward simply because he could still learn more. Just a blink of an eye, in his conception of time, had been enough for him to learn how to convert pressure into energy.
Kayden took a colossal step at that moment. Converting the pressure caused by gods and mages into energy was practically a madman's delusion. But the mountain had taught him that merely by showing him a physical law of pressure. By understanding how pressure took shape in reality through laws, Kayden had been able to achieve this feat. Little by little, he was evolving into something strange and unexplainable.
"Hey, kid," Yasmim shouted, making Kayden stop flying toward the portal. He turned and looked at the group. He thought for just a moment to decide what he would do if invited. "Don't you want to climb this mountain with a group? Our learning could be much greater together."
The woman's invitation was exactly what Kayden wanted. He just hadn't expected that a god would lower itself to that level. None of the others would have swallowed their pride to propose such a thing to Kayden. They were arrogant beings, like most mages at their level of power. Only a few there would have been capable of making that kind of offer.
"Sure," Kayden replied. His speed decreased significantly at that moment, as he was flying while the others were merely walking. This difference in movement created a slightly hostile atmosphere between those gods and him.
It felt as if Kayden were superior to them. The egos of those gods were brutally wounded. But unfortunately, there was nothing they could do. While some of them accepted it as a lesson and an opportunity to become better, one of them was Yasmim. She had no shame at all in asking Kayden for help.
"Kayden, would you give me just a second of your time? Pull me up," she said directly and made a pout with her nose slightly raised—a rather cute attitude, honestly. Kayden didn't care about it in the slightest.
The mountain would not stop him from carrying other mages with him through the air, because at this moment, he was a citizen of that mountain. Denying him that right would be a bit strange. But...
"Anyone else want a ride?" Kayden offered to the rest. Of the twelve who were there... only three others accepted. The rest saw it as lowering themselves to a level they were unwilling to reach.
The mountain sent Kayden a warning when he pulled all those people into the sky with him. It was a very clear warning—one that echoed to everyone: the limit of foreigners he could bring had been reached. He did not have permission to carry so many people with him. The issue was that Kayden...
"Silence."
This content is taken from (f)reewe(b)novel.𝗰𝗼𝐦
