Chapter 957: The Drifters’ Whispers [Bonus 21]
After arriving on Gozon, Arthur went straight to the planet’s Interstellar Citadel to inform them he was present and to request a meeting with any Demon Kings who were available.
By now, he was fairly well known, and confirming his identity wasn’t difficult either, since his godslayer Lord Authority still functioned perfectly fine.
Arthur lounged in a waiting room, passing the time while outlining his plan of activity, when McEnda II suddenly burst into the room, calling out in a loud voice.
"Arthur!"
"??"
Arthur looked at the older man with confusion, wondering why he hadn’t simply entered the room normally, but before he could say a word, McEnda began talking.
"You never cease to amaze me, do you? You said you were stepping out for a bit to talk to someone, then you vanished for years, and the next thing I hear is that you were beating up an Elder Vampire right in front of the Progenitor of Vampires."
The instant McEnda finished speaking, Arthur’s expression changed, and he placed the phone he’d been holding down on the table.
"How the hell do you know about that?" he demanded.
"How the hell wouldn’t I know about it?" McEnda shot back. "Pretty much everybody knows about it now."
"What the heck do you mean by ’pretty much everybody’? For one thing, that didn’t even happen in this universe. It took place in one that’s so many light-years away from this one that the number might give me a headache just thinking about it.
So how the hell do you know about it over here?"
Arthur had beaten up the Elder Vampire in front of Vlad in Draco Sirus, so why was McEnda in Valmone talking about him meeting Vlad?
But the instant he posed that question to McEnda, the answer connected in his mind.
’Wait... information spreading across universes in such a short span of time?’
It had only been three Draco Sirus Years and about 9 Valmone Years, but compared to the scale of distance between universes, that was a short time.
Aleksas had recently mentioned one of the existences who specialised in enabling such rapid dissemination of information to Arthur, and as soon as he recalled that, the answer to his own question came to him.
"Drifters!"
"Indeed. They’re the ones responsible for this," another voice said.
Arthur looked up and saw Malorum stepping into the room, his expression weary as he took a seat in the chair across from him.
"You’ve attracted quite a bit of inter-universal attention to our universe, Arthur," Malorum said.
He tossed a small disk onto the table, and it immediately projected holograms of news tabloids, displaying images of Arthur’s encounter in Vlad from different angles, all caught in 4K.
"When the drifters arrived here with the news, they uncovered the existence of the ’Progenitor godslayer’ we know of here and quickly realised that that individual and the ’New Progenitor’ they’d come to spread word about were actually one and the same.
This attracted more drifters from beyond our universe, and before long, the story of the ’NEW PROGENITOR ENCOUNTERING THE PROGENITOR VAMPIRE’ turned into ’THE PROGENITOR OF THE NEW RACE OF GODSLAYERS ENCOUNTERING THE PROGENITOR VAMPIRE’."
Arthur’s expression darkened as he listened to Malorum’s words, his fists clenching without a sound.
’So that’s what Aleksas was referring to!’
He finally understood why Aleksas had said what he had earlier.
Arthur hadn’t declared that he was the Progenitor of godslayers when he spoke to Vlad because he’d considered the possibility that people from other universes might be present and hadn’t wanted it known across universes that he was the Progenitor of godslayers, at least not now, while he was still too weak to matter on the cosmic stage where the other Progenitors stood.
He was fine with being recognised as a ’New Progenitor,’ but the specific detail of being the origin of ’godslayers’ was what he’d intended to keep on the down low for the time being.
Revealing it in Valmone couldn’t be avoided, since he needed it to secure cooperation with the Gozonian Demons and establish a power base in Valmone.
Arthur didn’t particularly mind people in Valmone knowing, since they rarely left their universe. Very few of them were even capable of doing so in the first place, so the risk of the information spreading beyond Valmone was low compared to Draco Sirus.
But Arthur had made one fatal miscalculation.
In the spur-of-the-moment decision to introduce himself to Vlad, he’d failed to factor in the cosmic information mongers known as Drifters.
Those drifters had taken the news all the way from Draco Sirus and reached Valmone, and it was likely that the ones already somewhere within Valmone had informed their foreign universal counterparts about Arthur’s actions here, and naturally, they included the part about him being the Progenitor of godslayers.
Now, they had attached a ’Race’ to the title of Progenitor.
That drew the interest of more drifters who came to learn more about Arthur, which led to the inter-universal attention Malorum had just mentioned.
Now the news was likely continuing to spread further across the multiverse, and it included the details of Arthur’s race, along with clear images of what he looked like.
"Fucking hell..."
Arthur had completely miscalculated, failing to account for the variable of drifters being present in Draco Sirus, so the outcome he’d projected turned out to be far lower than it should’ve been.
He didn’t hesitate as he poured cosmic energy into the Cosmic Teleporter, initiating the creation of an Inter-Universal gate that led directly to Draco Sirus.
Aleksas had likely already left, and none of the Levites was present, so there was no one available to transport him quickly, which left him with no option but to rely on the limited cosmic energy stored within the artifact.
His abrupt act of generating a cosmic gate naturally caught Malorum and McEnda off guard, but before either of them could speak, Arthur rose to his feet and began talking.
"There’s a planet at these coordinates in your galaxy," he said while generating a hologram of the Orithyia Galaxy with the location blinking.
"One of the scout ships you sent out long ago crashed there, and some of the godslayers with Nienope interbred with the dragons on that world, and the end result is a hybrid race of dragon-godslayers."
Slamming both hands down onto the desk before him, Arthur leaned forward and continued, "Please, protect that planet! The Progenitor of Dragons has arrived to inspect, and he intends to nurture them.
I need your help with protecting that place, at least until the people he’s sending arrive. Please! I’ve got to return to Draco Sirus now."
Without waiting for any reply, Arthur leapt into the gate and vanished from the planet in an instant.
◇ ◇ ◇
Valmone and Draco Sirus existed within the same multiverse, however, they were separated by an immense distance.
Even though the speed at which he could be propelled through the fabric of space had increased due to his higher Existence Realm and Spatial Authority compared to the last time he’d made a solo Valmont-Draco Sirus trip, it still took Arthur a considerable amount of time to reach Draco Sirus.
By the time his 650-hour journey came to an end and he arrived in Draco Sirus, a new headline was already spreading across the multiverse.
He reached Chazat around the same time the dwarf, Mofil, was informing the Levites present about that very headline.
When Arthur stepped out of the cosmic gate and noticed the tabloid in Mofil’s hands, his eyes went straight to the image displayed on it, and he couldn’t stop himself from cursing.
All the Levites were present, having just concluded a short meeting with Aleksas to determine the fate of a once vital universe cluster somewhere in the Second Multiverse.
As for why Arthur had immediately cursed the moment he saw what Mofil had come to show the Levites, it was because of the headline.
[NEW PROGENITOR ALREADY MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH HIS SENIORS IN THE BUSINESS.]
Directly beneath that headline was an image of Arthur speaking with Aleksas while they were in Valmone, with both of them positioned exactly as they had been a few seconds before Aleksas had turned his head and mentioned that there was a ’drifter’ in the direction he’d glanced toward.
Arthur immediately realised that the ’drifter’ Aleksas had sensed was most likely the one capturing the images being used for this headline at that moment.
"Your name’s really spreading far and wide, huh?" Barda said while going through the details in the article. "Good for you."
"Good for me!?" Arthur shot back instantly. "No! It’s nowhere near good! It’s bad! Terrible! Worst case scenario!"
His enraged outburst and the loss of control behind it left the Levites faintly surprised, as they’d never sensed this degree of immense displeasure from Arthur before.
Even when he’d been irritated about the issue with Valkalonex back in Valmone, it hadn’t been to this extent.
