The Darkness System: Rise of the Broken Sovereign

Chapter 180: Chapter 180: Inter Galatic Federation Library

The transport hummed through the void between galaxies, and Kael closed his eyes as the System notification pulsed behind his vision.

QUEST COMPLETED: THE GLORY OF HEAVEN’S GATE

Objective: Lead Heaven’s Gate Academy to 1st place in the inter-academy tournament

Sub-objectives:

• Defeat at least 3 opponents personally — Completed

• Discover and counter at least 1 opponent’s hidden ability — Completed

Rewards:

50,000 Shadow Points

Shadow Manipulation has evolved to Darkness Manipulation

King Grade Technique: Devouring Darkness

Mystic Grade Technique: Shadow Army: Legion of the Void

Kael opened his eyes and pulled up the full details.

Devouring Darkness — King Grade

Releases a wave of corrosive darkness that consumes energy and matter it touches. Consumed energy partially replenishes the user’s mana reserves. Effective against energy-based fighters and defensive constructs. Cannot consume living flesh without direct contact.

Useful, Kael noted. But not for him right now. He already had more darkness-based techniques than he could master in a decade. The mana replenishment aspect was valuable, but it was a tool for a different kind of fighter.

Shadow Army: Legion of the Void — Mystic Grade

Creates up to five shadow clones or more based on mana output that can fight independently. Each clone possesses 30% of the user’s physical stats and can use darkness-based techniques up to Heaven Grade. Clones dissipate after three minutes or upon destruction.

Now that was interesting. Shadow clones that could fight independently and use techniques. The tactical applications were immediately obvious. Distraction. Flanking. Overwhelming numbers in a concentrated engagement. The three-minute duration was limiting, but for hit-and-run tactics or creating chaos in a larger battle, it was exceptional.

He closed the notifications and let the transport carry him through the stars.

Planet Bibliotheca was small by galactic standards, barely a quarter the size of a normal inhabited world. What it lacked in size, it compensated for with security. The moment their transport entered orbit, Kael felt the detection arrays sweep over them like invisible fingers prodding every centimeter of the ship. A tiny insect couldn’t enter the atmosphere without permission.

The city below was clean, ordered, and built entirely around the library. No residential districts. No commercial zones. Just support infrastructure for the thousands of scholars, researchers, and authorized visitors who came to access the accumulated knowledge of the IGF’s thousand-year history.

An IGF officer met them at the landing pad. His uniform bore insignia Kael didn’t recognize, marking a rank higher than any he had encountered among the IGF officers he had seen.

"Welcome to the IGF Library," the officer said, his voice carrying the flat efficiency of someone who had given this speech thousands of times. "Follow me. Stay within the marked areas. Touch nothing without librarian authorization."

The 48 students from four academies followed him through streets of white stone and crystalline buildings. Nobody spoke. The gravity of the place demanded silence.

Then they entered the library.

The gasps were audible.

The interior of the library was impossible. The outside building was the size of a modest city block. The inside was larger than the outside. Kael’s spatial awareness registered the discrepancy immediately. Spatial compression. The architecture folded reality in ways that made the building feel like it had been carved from a pocket dimension.

Floors stretched upward into a vaulted ceiling that vanished into golden light. Balconies lined every level, connected by floating staircases and suspended walkways. Thousands of people in IGF uniforms moved between shelves that held scrolls, books, tablets, and crystalline data cores. The smell of old paper and concentrated mana was intoxicating.

The officer then said, gesturing toward the ascending levels. "Iron Nexus, second floor. Astral Zenith, third lower floor. Empyrean Celestial, third upper floor. Heaven’s Gate, fourth lower and upper floors based on individual ranking. Follow your assigned guides."

The Iron Nexus students split off first, led by a stern-faced librarian who handed each of them a small token inscribed with their name and access parameters. Heaven Grade techniques. The shelves on the second floor held hundreds of them, neatly organized by category.

Valerius Kaine, the Iron Nexus vice captain ranked fifth individually, received a second token. King Grade. Third upper floor access. His expression was carefully neutral as he accepted it, but the satisfaction in his eyes was unmistakable. Afterall, king grade techniques were quite powerful.

The Astral Zenith students followed to the third lower floor, where their tokens granted Heaven Grade techniques from a selection noticeably superior to the second floor offerings. Dean Hawthorne, ranked fourth individually, received his own King Grade token for the third upper floor. He nodded silently and walked past the Astral Zenith students without a word.

Empyrean Celestial ascended to the third upper floor, where their tokens granted quasi-King Grade techniques. One step below true King Grade, but superior to standard Heaven Grade by a significant margin. Michael Weston received his special token for the fourth upper floor for 1st place in the individual ranking. Mystic Grade. The Empyrean students watched him go with expressions that mixed pride and awe.

Then it was Heaven’s Gate’s turn.

The fourth lower floor was King Grade territory. Each of the twelve students received a token and spread out among the shelves. Kael accepted his without looking at it. King Grade didn’t interest him right now.

Karacus received his Mystic Grade token for the fourth lower floor, nodded once in Kael’s direction, and followed the group toward the lower level without complaint.

Kael took the elevator to the fourth upper floor alone.

The Mystic Grade section was smaller than the floors below but denser in terms of power. Each technique was sealed in its own containment field, protected by arrays that hummed with enough energy to deter theft. The air itself felt different here. Heavier. More dangerous.

Kael walked past gravity techniques, shadow techniques, spatial techniques, and temporal techniques without slowing. He had what he needed from those categories. His gravity came from the Vorn family library. His shadow and darkness were already overflowing.

He was looking for lightning.

He scanned scrolls for over an hour. Lightning manipulation techniques in the King Grade section below had been numerous but uninspiring. Nothing he couldn’t replicate or improve upon with his existing abilities. The Mystic Grade section was smaller, more selective, and the techniques here operated on fundamentally different principles.

Then he found it.

An ancient leather-bound book, pages yellowed with age, spine cracked from centuries of handling. The title on the cover was written in a script so old that even Kael’s enhanced comprehension struggled to parse the individual characters.

Thunder God Technique. Mystic Grade.

He opened it carefully, turning pages with the reverence due to something that had survived longer than most civilizations.

THUNDER GOD TECHNIQUE — MYSTIC GRADE

FIRST FORM: THUNDER GOD FLASH

This form does not make the user faster in the traditional sense. Instead, it synchronizes the user’s nervous system with the speed of lightning itself. The user’s perception accelerates to match the speed of electrical signal transmission through nerves, effectively allowing the user to perceive and react at the speed of thought. Physical movement follows perception. The body doesn’t move faster than the user’s maximum speed. The user simply processes information and acts on it faster than should be physically possible.

Kael read the description twice, then a third time. His mind was already racing through applications.

This wasn’t a speed boost. It was a perception boost that made everything else faster by eliminating the gap between seeing and acting. Combined with his lightning speed, the effect would be multiplicative. His body would move at its normal maximum, but he would perceive, decide, and execute in a fraction of the time it normally took.

Maximum safe duration is fifteen seconds, he thought, committing the number to memory. Beyond that, neural damage begins. Maximum absolute duration before permanent damage: thirty seconds, after which the nervous system may never fully recover.

Fifteen seconds of perfect combat awareness. Thirty seconds before the damage became potentially irreversible. The parameters were tight, but for someone who fought at the speed Kael fought, fifteen seconds was an eternity.

He turned the page to the second form. The description began.

SECOND FORM: WRATH OF THE THUNDER GOD

The user condenses all ambient electrical energy in a two-hundred-meter radius into a single bolt and fires it from point-blank range. The bolt manifests directly above or beside the target and strikes with the cumulative electrical force of every lightning strike that would have naturally occurred in that two-hundred-meter radius over the next thirty seconds, compressed into a single instant.

Kael’s eyebrows rose. Unlike Lightning Fang or SILENCE, this technique didn’t channel lightning through the user’s body. It gathered ambient energy from the environment itself and weaponized it. The destructive potential was staggering.

Using this technique twice in quick succession would drain most cultivators’ reserves, the text noted in a marginal annotation.

The third form’s description filled the remaining pages.

THIRD FORM: REALM OF THE THUNDER GOD

Requirement: Create a Lightning Reality Annex.

This form helps the user understand the mechanics of a Reality Annex to create a Lightning Domain. Lightning strikes manifest without casting time, targeting anything the user perceives as a threat. The domain generates its own lightning from the ambient environment, reducing the mana cost of all lightning techniques used within it by sixty percent. The domain provides spatial awareness through electrical field distortion, allowing the user to perceive every movement within the boundary through the way the electrical field shifts around moving bodies.

Kael closed the book slowly.

A Reality Annex for lightning. He hadn’t even refined his gravity domain yet, despite having formed the seed. His gravity domain existed as a raw concept, untested and unrefined. And now he had a blueprint for a lightning domain that would reduce the cost of all his electrical techniques by sixty percent while providing spatial awareness. It might even help him understand his gravity domain more.

The remaining pages were torn out. Only the three forms existed in this copy. But Kael didn’t care. If he could learn just these three forms, he could take his lightning ability to a level that would make him genuinely terrifying even to someone like Michael Weston.