CHAPTER 792: WHEN THE CRYSTALS SCREAMED WHITE (1)

The first alarm did not sound in Silvarion.

It flared in a lone tower of crystal and stone on the far edge of the continent, where night still clung to the sky and the scribe on duty had fallen half-asleep over his ink.

The relay crystal above his head went from soft blue to screaming white in one heartbeat.

Light stabbed through his eyelids. He jerked upright, knocking over his inkpot. Black liquid spilled over neat ledgers as the crystal’s inner runes spun at frightening speed, lines of script blooming across its surface like burning vines.

"Report... report..." he muttered, grabbing for his quill, heart hammering.

The characters on the crystal rearranged, locking at last into a single, clear message.

PRINCE-CONSORT MIKHAILIS – SILVARION DEEP-ENTRY ATTEMPT: ASHEN RIVER STATUS: REJECTED / SURVIVED CORE: INACCESSIBLE / RESISTANT

The scribe’s mouth went dry. He might be no one, just a tired clerk on a poor salary, but even he understood the weight of those four lines.

They tried, he thought. They failed. And he lived.

He moved on reflex, hands suddenly steady. The quill scratched across the transmission form as he copied the key points and shoved the parchment into the brass tube beside his desk. A twist, a push, a spark of mana—and somewhere above, in the tall relay mast, gears spun and runes glowed as the message shot into the League’s veins.

On the other side of the world, other towers woke.

A mountain station where frost covered the stone outside but the relay crystal sweated light.

A river barge converted into a floating relay hub, sails furled as the crew stared up at the pulsing gems on the mast.

A tiny listening post hidden in a trading town that was not supposed to be connected to Technomancer networks at all—where a woman with careful eyes and no official name smiled as the forbidden crystal above her table woke and poured the same message, half-encrypted, into the air.

"Thank you, Director Halsen," she murmured to no one. "You left the door just wide enough."

Her fingers danced over the copied glyphs, stripping off one layer of code, then another. The core remained hidden, but the headline was clear enough.

Prince-Consort Mikhailis of Silvarion entered the Ashen River dungeon. The dungeon spat him out and tried to kill him. He did not die.

Around that simple fact, imagination and ambition rushed in like sharks scenting blood.

In a capital of black iron and red banners, a spymaster slid the report across a war table cluttered with maps.

In a crystal-walled council chamber above a stormy sea, a clerk whispered the news in the ear of a woman in silver chains.

In a sun-bright temple, a young priest read the lines twice, then dropped to his knees and began to pray too quickly.

The relay web hummed. Scribbles became copies, copies became summaries, summaries became rumours whispered with a little more colour each time.

"The dungeon rejected him."

"He cracked the first layer and lived."

"The core is still unclaimed."

Whatever the version, the conclusion was the same.

Ashen River was not owned. Not by Silvarion. Not by the Technomancer League.

There was still a seat at the table.

Far above maps and petty borders, if one could look down on the continent as the relay currents did, one would see it clearly: a slow, spreading blaze.

Ashen River burned like a wound of light in the middle of the land. From it, fine lines of mana and messages shot outward toward four, five, six bright clusters—capitals, strongholds, hidden cities—each flaring a little hotter as the news landed.

The world, which had watched Silvarion and the League dance around the dungeon until now, began to lean forward.

In the League capital, the war hall felt colder than usual.

Queen Ryline stood before the main display wall, hands folded behind her back, watching numbers crawl and dip across pane after pane of glass and brass. Sickly blue light from the arrays painted her dark skin a strange, underwater shade. Her reflection in the panels looked like a ghost—tall, rigid, crowned not with gold but with a ring of steel and circuitry.

Behind her, the door seals clicked open.

"Your Majesty."

The voice belonged to Director Halsen, but he did not enter alone. His thin figure was flanked by two others: Magister Voril in his immaculate high-collared robe, white hair tied back so tightly it pulled his brow, and Commander Jaev, broad-shouldered in scarred field armour, her cloak still dusty from a late inspection.

Ryline did not turn immediately.

"The Board comes in person," she said. "We must be celebrating something."

"You call this celebration?" Jaev’s voice was rough, clipped. "We poured resources into this little forest prince of yours."

"He is not little," Ryline replied. "And he is not mine."

Now she turned.

Halsen’s expression was polite, almost gentle. That made him the most dangerous one in the room.

"The first deep-entry attempt, led by the prince-consort of our ’ally,’" he said softly. "A historic day, certainly."

Voril made a soft, disdainful sound.

"Historic for failure," he said. "He pushed too far, too soon. The dungeon rejected him, violently. Our sensors almost melted from the backlash. And now..." His long fingers flicked toward the display wall. "Now look at it."

Ryline’s gaze followed the gesture.

The graph that represented Ashen River’s ambient mana was no longer a calm wave with predictable peaks. It jittered and spiked, new oscillations appearing like extra heartbeats.

"The structure is unstable," Voril continued. "If there was a pattern we could map, he scrambled it. The so-called ’organic anomaly’ you insisted on backing has shaken the reef."

"Yet the reef did not consume him," Ryline said. "Tell me, Magister, which of your trained, disciplined, completely non-organic specialists could have touched that core and still been breathing after?"

Voril’s jaw tightened. Jaev spoke before he could.

"Breathing, yes," the commander said. "But lying on the edge of death. Your reports say he bled out on the floor and only lived because Silvarion’s queen burned half her reserves to keep his heart pumping." She crossed her arms. "If he dies, we lose a unique brain. If he lives and decides he prefers the forest throne to our labs, we lose control anyway."

Halsen’s smile did not reach his eyes.

"We are not here to argue his sentimental value," he said. "We are here because the Board would like clarity, Your Majesty."

Ryline arched one eyebrow.

"Clarity?"

"Yes," Halsen said. "On three points. One: what exactly did this prince’s ’failure’ teach us? Two: how do we move forward without tying our fortunes to one man’s whims? And three..." His gaze flicked toward a side panel, where a list of intercepted messages glowed softly. "...how will we handle the fact that other nations have now heard the rumours?"

Ryline’s fingers curled against her palm, nails biting into skin. On another day, in another mood, she might have laughed.

We leaked half of those rumours ourselves, she thought. You just did it through more hands.

Out loud, she said, "We learned the dungeon has a reflex. We confirmed that the outer layers behave like a shielded skin. Push too hard in the wrong way, and it throws all its weight back at you."

"Which we already suspected," Voril said.

"Suspected," Ryline repeated. "Now we have readings. Pulse timing, mana density, what kind of backlash it uses. We know it focused on a physical ejection and external flooding of hostile mana. It screamed at the doorway and strengthened the front."

She tapped a panel. A rough three-dimensional model of the dungeon shell rotated slowly, pulsing from pale blue to red where the energy spikes had hit.

"What it did not look for," she added, mostly to herself, "was internal seepage."

There was something there. Some pattern in the noise. Extra threads of interference inside the reef that were not dungeon-native. But every time she tried to isolate them, they slipped away, disguised under Silvarion’s forest-tinged energy.

Halsen pretended not to notice her brief distraction.

"Fine," he said. "Point one. Granted. Point two?"

Voril answered before she could.

"We cut him loose," the Magister said. "We retrieve whatever data we can coax—or... persuade—from him. Then we send our own people. Technomancer-trained, properly augmented, properly loyal."

"Loyal until they snap under something like that backlash," Jaev said. "You saw the numbers. If we had sent a standard deep-entry unit, we would be counting bodies, not graphs."

Her dark eyes met Ryline’s.

"I will not throw my soldiers into a hole like that without more assurance. But I also will not wait while Silvarion plays dungeon games with our equipment."

Halsen spread his hands.

"There is a middle path," he said. "We stop pretending we can monopolise the core. We accept that others will try to get in. So we sell them picks and maps."

Jaev frowned.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning," Halsen said calmly, "we offer carefully limited access. Contracts. ’Advisory services’ on dungeon approach for interested powers. We control the routes, the tools, the information flow. If we cannot own the centre, we can at least rent the door."

Voril’s lip curled.

"You want to open our research to merchants and warlords?"

"I want to turn their greed into our funding," Halsen replied. "And their mistakes into our data."

Ryline listened, weighing each argument against the hollow thudding of the Ashen River graphs in the background.

Outside this room, the League thought in straight lines: deep-entry failed, try again with bigger machines. Inside, she saw the grid shifting.

If Mikhailis dies, she thought, we lose a tool no one else on this continent understands. If he lives and grows closer to that queen, we lose leverage.

The displays flickered again. For a fraction of a second, her sensors caught a pattern—tiny spikes moving through the mana like a swarm.

She zoomed in, but the image stabilised into normal dungeon turbulence. Gone.

Something is inside, she thought. Something that is not ours.

Aloud, she said, "We do all of it."