Chapter 699: Return & Reward
The silence after the Doom Monarch fell did not last.
It broke with an announcement, the last one the warfare event would ever send, and it reached every soul still standing on the broken mainland at once.
[The Doom Monarch has been destroyed. The Warfare Event is complete.]
[Victor: Ananta Regalon Kingdom.]
The words settled over the combined force, and for a moment no one moved, and then the mainland erupted. The soldiers of five kingdoms, who had spent a year fighting toward exactly this and had stopped quite believing it would come, let the year out of them all at once. Across the broken land, beneath a sky that had stopped being red, the cheering rose and did not stop for a long time.
Almond stood at the center of it, Lily on one side and Rudra on the other, Ainen behind them, the whole named leadership spread across the field, and he let himself, for the first time in months, simply breathe.
They had done it.
The reward came a moment later, and it came in pieces.
---
The first piece was the one the Hell-Mode Quest had promised at the very beginning, on the day they entered the event.
[Hell-Mode Quest: Warfare Domination. Complete.]
[All people of the Ananta Regalon Kingdom ascend to Tier-20 lifeform.]
It happened all at once, across the entire kingdom, on the mainland and back on the islands and in the pocket realm. Every soul that belonged to Ananta Regalon felt their existence lift, the foundation of what they were rising to a new floor. The 100,000 troops. The Asura Executives. Vorth’s rescued researchers. The whole of the kingdom, raised together to Tier-20, a baseline that most of them had never imagined reaching.
For the leadership, already at or near that line, the ascension settled them firmly into it, stable and clean. For the army, it was a transformation. An entire kingdom of Tier-20 lifeforms, layered over the spring-water elevation and a year of hard-won growth, was a force unlike anything the third layer had produced.
The second piece was the event’s grand reward, the one only the victor received.
[Victor’s Reward: Tier-50 Blueprint.]
The blueprint resolved in front of Almond, and Vorth, who had spent her whole life around technology blueprints, leaned in to read it and went very still.
"That is a body armor system," she said. "Tier-50. But it is not a fixed design." She traced the schematic in the air, her eyes moving fast. "It attunes. Whoever wears it, the armor reads their power and shapes itself to match. A Grimblade user’s armor would carry Grimblade properties. A flame user’s armor would carry flame. It does not give you a new power. It amplifies the one you already have, and it does it for anyone, scaled to whatever they are."
Rudra crossed his arms. "Super body armor that becomes whatever the wearer is."
"For the entire kingdom," Vorth said. "Tier-50, attuned, for every soldier we have. Layered over Tier-20 lifeforms." She shook her head slowly. "We lost the Tier-100 systems the moment we left the event. They never could leave. But this can, and this is ours to keep. It changes our entire army again."
And that was the part that mattered most. The five Tier-100 weapon systems had been the foundation of everything the kingdom did inside the event, but they had stayed behind. They had always been going to stay behind. The energy they ran on existed only in the warfare event world, and the moment Ananta Regalon left, every Tier-100 system and every piece of gear built from one went dark and useless, just as Maya and Clovelle had warned months ago. The kingdom walked out of the event without a single Tier-100 weapon to its name.
But the Tier-50 armor blueprint was different. It did not carry the dimension-lock. Tier-50 could leave the event, and this design would work anywhere, attuned to each wearer, for the entire army. It was the one piece of true military technology the kingdom got to keep, and Almond intended to build the whole army around it.
The third and fourth pieces were the ones that mattered most for what came after.
---
The Virion Iridant Tree Embryo, the Tier-70 resource they had won at the Star Mayhem Mountain, the first thing in the entire event they had been able to carry out. And the dew, the second exportable reward, collected across the event and held in reserve.
These went home with them.
When the celebrations on the mainland had run their course, when the warfare event released them and the kingdom returned to the pocket realm continent that was its true foundation, the leadership turned to the two resources they had carried out of a world that kept almost everything.
The tree went into the ground first.
They chose a secure area deep within the pocket realm, sheltered and central, the kind of place a kingdom plants something it intends to protect for a very long time. Kayla, whose affinity ran closest to growing things, handled the planting herself, settling the embryo into prepared earth while the leadership watched. It was small. It did not look like much. A Tier-70 resource in its earliest form, a seed of something that would take a long time to become what it could be.
Unless they helped it.
"The dew," Almond said.
The dew was a reward in its own right, and a significant one. Drunk, it raised the lifeform tier of whoever took it, increasing their base stats permanently, the same kind of foundational gift the spring water had been but stronger. The kingdom could have distributed all of it through the army and grown stronger for it.
But the dew did something else, too. It fed the tree.
"It can do both," Kayla said, kneeling beside the planted embryo. "We can drink it ourselves, or we can give it to the tree to grow it from the embryo. Not both with the same dew. We have to choose how to split it."
The leadership discussed it, and the discussion did not take long, because the math was clear once they looked at it. The dew, drunk, made them stronger once. The tree, grown, was a resource that would keep giving for as long as the kingdom stood. A one-time gain against a permanent one.
"Feed the tree," Almond said, and no one argued. "Enough to grow it fully. We keep the rest for ourselves."
So they gave the dew to the tree.
It drank half of everything they had collected before it had grown enough to stop needing more. Half the dew, poured into the embryo over days, and the tree took all of it and put it to use.
It grew.
---
What rose out of the secure ground was not what any of them had expected.
The Virion Iridant Tree grew gigantic, far larger than its Tier-70 designation had suggested, rising in the pocket realm until its canopy spread across the secure area like a second sky. Its bark caught the light of the realm and held it, faint iridescent colors shifting across its surface, and its leaves moved in a wind that did not blow. It was beautiful in a way that the kingdom’s weapons and fortresses were not. It was alive, and it was theirs, and it had cost them half their dew, and it turned out to be worth far more than that.
Because the tree gave gifts.
The first they discovered when Kayla sat beneath it to rest after the growing was done, and found herself somewhere else.
The tree granted a mental space to anyone who sat beneath it to meditate or train. Not a physical place. A space inside the mind, clear and quiet and entirely focused, where distraction did not exist and the mind could work at its full depth. Sitting beneath the tree, a person’s focus sharpened to a degree they could not reach anywhere else. And the mental stamina that training and cultivation drained, the exhaustion that limited how long anyone could push their mind before they had to stop, recovered beneath the tree at a rate that changed what training even meant. People could train longer, deeper, and harder beneath the Virion Iridant Tree than anywhere else in the kingdom.
That alone would have justified every drop of dew it drank.
But the tree did more.
As people began to use the mental space, sitting beneath the canopy to meditate and train, the tree responded. It grew fruit. Small, unripe fruit at first, scattered through the canopy, and the leadership did not understand what they were until they watched how they formed.
The fruits shaped themselves according to the people who trained beneath the tree.
Each fruit grew in answer to a specific person’s training, taking its form from the nature of what that person worked on in the mental space. A fruit that grew above a Grimblade user shaped itself one way. A fruit that grew above a flame user shaped itself another. The tree read the training happening beneath it and grew a fruit that matched, and the fruit ripened only as that person’s training deepened, drawing toward readiness in step with the work they put in.
And when a fruit ripened, it gave enlightenment.
Not power, exactly. Not a new ability handed over. Enlightenment, the sudden clear understanding of one’s own power that took most cultivators years of struggle to reach, the insight that turned a technique you could perform into a technique you understood. A ripened fruit, eaten by the person whose training had grown it, granted them a breakthrough in comprehension of their own decks, their own flames, their own domains, their own strength.
The leadership stood beneath the gigantic tree and understood, slowly, what they had grown.
The army was Tier-20 now, and would soon be wrapped in Tier-50 attuning armor that, unlike everything else, was theirs to keep. The Tier-100 systems were gone, left behind in a world that would not let them leave, but the kingdom that remained was still far beyond what it had been. And raw power was only part of it. Raw power had a ceiling that understanding did not, and the tree was a machine for understanding, a place where the kingdom’s people could train deeper than anywhere else and, in time, ripen fruits that would deepen their grasp of their own power in ways no resource could simply hand them.
Almond stood beneath the canopy, looking up through the shifting iridescent leaves, and thought about the long road that had brought them here. A bottom-tier plane of slaves and losers. A middle plane and a kingdom built from nine castles. A warfare event they had entered as the weakest force on the ocean and walked out of as its master, having killed a Doom Monarch and reshaped a world.
And now this. A tree that would let his people grow not just stronger, but wiser, for as long as the kingdom stood.
"We earned this," Lily said quietly, beside him, looking up at the same leaves.
"We did," Almond agreed.
Around them, the first of the leadership were already settling beneath the tree, sinking into the mental space, beginning the deep work that the canopy made possible, while above them the unripe fruits hung waiting, each one shaped by the person it belonged to, each one ripening toward an enlightenment that had been earned the long way.
The warfare event was over.
The kingdom had won.
And beneath the Virion Iridant Tree, in a pocket realm that was theirs and no one else’s, the next Chapter of Ananta Regalon’s rise had already quietly begun.
