Re-Awakened :I Ascend as an SSS-Ranked Dragon Summoner Chapter 763: A Void Stone

"So where is this nest," Marcus said.

"There are several," Priya said. "But the one I want to walk you through is the one I’m most confident about."

She pulled up a canopy composite, dense unbroken green stretching across the display in every direction, the kind of unbroken terrain that made the word jungle feel inadequate for what was actually being shown. She let the room sit with it a moment before she kept going.

"This region used to have a name people actually used," she said. "Before the old maps stopped mattering the way they used to, before the cardinal system replaced national borders and most of human geography got folded into administrative zones instead. This basin sat at the heart of what was once one of the largest rainforest systems the planet ever produced. Dense enough that even pre-Harbinger satellite mapping struggled to get reliable canopy-to-floor readings across most of its interior. Civilizations rose and fell along its edges for thousands of years, traded with it, feared it, told stories about it, and almost none of them ever truly penetrated past the outer fringe. Every culture that bordered it treated it the same way. Sacred. Untouchable. Something you respected rather than conquered."

"And now it’s sitting there generating a void signature nobody’s been watching closely enough to flag," Kelvin said.

"Exactly that," Priya said. "Canopy density alone kills most aerial surveying past a certain depth. You get readings, sure, but they’re inconsistent, scattered, the kind of thing that’s easy to write off as instrument drift if you’re not specifically hunting for the pattern underneath the noise. I wasn’t looking for it there originally either, if I’m being honest. I found it because the bleed was strong enough to register across three separate monitoring stations positioned hundreds of kilometers apart, all picking up faint but consistent elevated readings pointing back toward the exact same interior coordinate."

"Triangulated off interference alone," Kelvin said, nodding slowly, clearly running the methodology through his own head as she spoke. "That’s clean work. Genuinely clean. Most people wouldn’t have thought to cross-reference three separate stations against each other without already suspecting a centralized source."

"Thank you," Priya said, flat, no false modesty in it, just the calm acknowledgment of someone who knew exactly how good her own work was and didn’t feel the need to perform humility about it for anyone’s comfort.

"The terrain," Zahir said, gesturing at the unbroken green. "Walk us through what we’re actually looking at, assuming anyone ever gets boots down there."

"Hostile in every conventional sense," Priya said. "Humidity high enough to degrade standard equipment within days if it’s not properly sealed against moisture intrusion. Canopy three layers deep in places, which already means sunlight barely reaches the forest floor at all, producing flora adapted to low light conditions even without our specific problem layered on top of it. Now factor in months, possibly considerably longer, of sustained void energy bleed into that same closed ecosystem, and you’re not looking at simple environmental adaptation anymore. You’re looking at active, ongoing mutation pressure with no natural ceiling on it."

"The beasts down there wouldn’t just be drawn to the concentration," Kelvin said. "They’d be shaped by it. Continuously, generation after generation, the pressure never letting up long enough for anything to stabilize into a normal evolutionary baseline."

"Continuously," Priya agreed. "Which is exactly why our confirmed sightings near the basin’s outer edge have climbed in classification faster than any of the other three sites we’ve mapped across the past eight months. The other regions have void concentrations too, measurable, real, worth tracking. But they’re diffuse, spread across open terrain where the energy disperses naturally into the atmosphere and dilutes over distance. This basin traps it. The canopy itself functions almost like a lid on a container, holding everything in rather than letting it escape and thin out."

"A pressure cooker," Sam said.

"A pressure cooker," Priya confirmed, nodding at him. "With centuries’ worth of biological material inside it being slow-cooked by something none of those organisms ever evolved any natural defense mechanism against, because nothing on this planet had ever needed one before the void energy problem started compounding."

The room held the image a moment longer, the unbroken canopy somehow more unsettling now that everyone in the room understood exactly what was happening beneath it, hidden from satellites, hidden from surveys, hidden from every faction’s attention for who knew how long before Priya’s triangulation finally caught the signal hiding in plain sight.

"There’s something else," Kelvin said slowly, the particular cadence in his voice shifting into the register Sophie had learned to recognize over years of working alongside him, the one that meant a thought had just connected to another thought he hadn’t fully said out loud yet, the gears still visibly turning behind his eyes. "If the concentration is sustained and centralized the way you’re describing, contained by terrain rather than dispersing, there’s a real possibility we’re not looking at ambient bleed coming from nothing in particular. We could be looking at an actual source object. Something physical, discrete, generating that output continuously rather than the energy just existing diffusely in the environment."

"A void stone," Priya said, fast, immediate, the two of them arriving at the exact same word in what felt like the same breath, the same half-second of recognition hitting both of them simultaneously.

"Exactly that," Kelvin said, and for a moment the entire room watched two genuinely brilliant people discover someone else fluent in their specific, narrow dialect of obsession, the energy between them shifting into something almost giddy despite the seriousness of the subject. "A void stone isn’t just a concentrated beast core scaled up. It’s an entire order of magnitude past that classification. Several stacked category five cores combined wouldn’t approach the sustained output a stable, sizable void stone produces on its own, continuously, without any external power source feeding it."

"And beasts are drawn to void energy concentration the way moths are drawn to light," Priya said, picking the thread up without missing a single beat, the two of them now talking almost in tandem. "Except moths don’t mutate from prolonged exposure to the light source. A stable void stone sitting in one fixed location for months, generating sustained output directly into a sealed ecosystem with nowhere for that energy to disperse—"

"Explains every single data point we’re currently seeing," Kelvin finished. "The frequency increase, the classification climb across multiple consecutive quarters, the fact that it’s localized specifically to this region instead of distributed evenly across the planet’s general beast population the way you’d expect from a more diffuse phenomenon."

"Hold on," Marcus said from his seat near the back, raising a hand slightly. "Void stone. Kelvin, you’ve found one of these before. The one you used on Diana, durinh the coma."

The room’s collective attention shifted toward him, and something flickered across Kelvin’s face that wasn’t quite discomfort but lived close enough to it to be noticeable.

"I did," he said.

"Where," Marcus said.

"That’s," Kelvin started, then stopped himself, visibly choosing his next words with unusual care for someone who normally talked considerably faster than he actually thought things through. "I’d rather not go into the specific details of what I may or may not have done to acquire that particular item. There were regulations involved. Possibly several regulations, layered, spanning more than one jurisdiction simultaneously, some of which may have had overlapping enforcement priorities that complicated things further."

"Crimes," Reyna said flatly, not even looking up from her dossier.

"I wouldn’t use that specific word on the record," Kelvin said. "Off the record, sure, fine, there may have been some structural damage sustained by a facility that wasn’t technically mine to damage in the process, and certain data that left a server through channels nobody officially sanctioned or was even aware existed. But on the record, for any future inquiry that might ask, I found it through diligent independent research and a healthy disregard for jurisdictional red tape that was, in my professional opinion at the time and still now, slowing down something that genuinely needed doing for a person I cared about deeply."

"That’s a crime," Angel said, grinning openly now.

"It’s a love story," Kelvin said, completely unbothered. "With logistics."

Sophie almost laughed despite the gravity of everything else on the table, the tension in the room loosening noticeably at the familiar rhythm of Kelvin talking his way around a direct question instead of ever actually answering it.

"The point," Priya said, steering the conversation firmly back on track, "is that if a void stone genuinely sits at the center of this basin, retrieving it accomplishes two separate things simultaneously. It removes the source actively driving the local beast surge, which would likely allow the regional population to gradually regress back toward normal classification over time once the pressure feeding their accelerated mutation finally disappears. And it places something with capabilities we don’t currently have a complete catalogue for into responsible hands instead of leaving it sitting unmonitored, generating ongoing chaos in a forest nobody’s properly surveyed in decades."

"Worth the expedition on either count alone," Zahir said. "Worth considerably more pursued together than either faction chasing it independently and potentially walking into something neither of us is fully equipped to handle solo."

"Assuming we can actually get in at all," Sophie said.

Priya’s confident delivery slowed for the first time since she’d started speaking.

"That’s the complication," she said. "Canopy density aside, the basin sits inside EDF-designated restricted airspace. Has for decades now, since well before any of this started developing. Officially it’s classified as an environmental preservation zone, one of the last genuinely unmanaged ecosystems left on the planet that the EDF apparently decided, at some point in the institution’s history, was worth simply leaving alone rather than developing, surveying, or exploiting the way they’ve handled most other resource-rich regions."

"Officially," Kelvin repeated, the way he repeated anything that smelled like an interesting story buried underneath an official designation.

"Officially," Priya said. "Unofficially, actually getting any faction’s transport into that airspace without triggering an automatic EDF response requires either formal clearance we don’t currently have access to, or finding a specific window where the monitoring coverage has a genuine gap in it."

"Which means this isn’t a today problem," Sam said. "This is a planning problem. A real one, with real bureaucratic friction attached to it."

"This is absolutely not a today problem," Priya agreed firmly. "I wanted this information on the table because the underlying data is solid and the implications genuinely matter for both our factions long term. But nobody is deploying into that basin without proper clearance secured first, equipment specifically built to survive the actual terrain conditions down there, and a considerably better understanding of exactly what classification of beasts we’d be walking into before we ever send a single person across that border."

"Agreed completely," Sophie said. "We don’t move on incomplete information. Not after everything that’s happened recently with Voss, with Mercer, with Albright. We’ve all had enough of incomplete pictures turning into disasters."

The room settled into that shared understanding, the energy in it shifting gradually from the excitement of discovery into the slower, more deliberate work of actually planning something properly instead of chasing it recklessly the moment it appeared interesting.

---

Lila hadn’t said a single word through the entire briefing.

She’d sat at the far end of the long table with her arms crossed, watching the Dreamers the way she watched anything genuinely new to her, total physical stillness, eyes moving slowly and deliberately across each face in turn, cataloguing every micro-expression with the patient attention of someone who’d learned a long time ago that people revealed more in their unguarded moments than in anything they actually said out loud. Boran had noticed it within the first ten minutes of the meeting and had visibly adjusted his seating twice, the massive man somehow managing to look genuinely uncomfortable despite physically outweighing everyone else currently in the room combined, Lucas and Seraleth included.

When the meeting finally broke and people started filtering out toward the door in loose clusters, Lila stayed exactly where she was, still watching, until only she and Wren remained on opposite ends of the emptying table.

Wren looked at her for a long, measuring moment.

"You’re going to stare at me the entire time we’re here, aren’t you," she said.

"Probably," Lila said.

"Because of Lyra."

"Because I don’t know you yet," Lila said. "Lyra’s a separate problem entirely, one my team has already dealt with. You’re a new one. I prefer to understand new problems thoroughly before they have any chance of becoming old ones I didn’t see coming."

Wren almost laughed, the sound clearly surprised out of her despite herself. "Fair enough, honestly. I respect that."

Lila stood, unhurried, and walked toward the door, pausing at the threshold just long enough to look back over her shoulder one final time.

"For what it’s worth," she said, "I don’t actually think you’re her. I just think trust gets earned properly, not assumed by default because someone seems friendly enough on the surface. Ask anyone sometime how long it actually took me to earn real trust from Lucas, even after everything today."

She left without waiting around for any kind of response.

---

Lucas found the training bay empty that evening, the overhead lights running at the dimmer half power they always defaulted to after standard hours, and he stood in front of the heavy reinforced post for a long while before he ever threw his first real strike.

He thought about Zahir. About the years that had passed since the arena, about the boy he’d put through a barrier wall and then through the arena floor itself, who had somehow turned into a man who’d built an entire functioning faction in the deliberate shadow of what Eclipse had originally demonstrated was even possible for people outside the traditional EDF structure. He thought about the easy, genuine warmth in Zahir’s handshake earlier, the complete absence of any lingering resentment over a loss that had happened years ago in front of hundreds of watching students, and found himself oddly, unexpectedly moved by all of it.

He threw the first strike.

The post took it cleanly, the VPT technique concentrating to the precise point he’d spent months now refining past anything he’d known back in his academy days, and he followed it immediately with another, then another, the rhythm of it settling gradually into something closer to meditation than aggression.

’He built something real,’ Lucas thought, striking again, the impact echoing through the empty bay. ’Out of an actual loss. Most people don’t manage that. Most people carry a defeat like that and let it curdle slowly into something smaller and bitterer over time. He turned his into a faction that’s genuinely helping people in an entirely different cardinal, building something good out of getting beaten in front of everyone he respected.’

He thought about the basin next. About what it would actually take logistically to get past EDF restricted airspace without triggering every alarm in the system. About the specific kind of beasts that grew, unchecked, inside a sealed pressure cooker fed continuously by raw void energy for months on end without any natural predator pressure to balance them. About whether the void stone theory would actually hold up once anyone got real eyes on the place instead of theorizing from secondhand sensor data.

He thought, unbidden, about Sophie. About the briefing room days earlier. About the things he’d told her before walking out without waiting for any response at all, the same deliberate way Wren had just walked away from Lila’s questions without feeling any particular need to hand back an answer.

He hit the post again, harder this time, and didn’t stop for a long while after that.

---

Later, well after most of the facility had gone quiet for the night, Zahir found Mira standing alone on the upper observation deck, looking out through the reinforced glass at the dark water pressing endlessly against it from every direction.

He came up beside her, leaning his forearms against the railing.

"Today went well," he said.

"It did," Mira said. "Better than I genuinely expected, if I’m being honest with you. Lucas didn’t hold the old win over you for even a single second the whole time we were here. And Kelvin and Priya are probably already drafting an entire joint research paper together inside their own heads as we speak."

"They’ve found a kindred spirit in each other," Zahir said, a faint smile pulling at his mouth. "Genuinely terrifying, honestly, having the two of them in the same room together. I give it a week before they’re co-authoring something neither faction officially sanctioned."

Mira allowed herself a small smile in response, brief, the kind she rarely gave away fully even in quiet private moments like this one.

"Do you think we should tell them the rest," Zahir said, his voice dropping slightly now, the easy warmth that had carried him through the entire briefing room replaced by something more careful, more deliberate. "About what we actually found near the basin’s edge before we ever brought Priya’s clean version of the data to them today."

Mira was quiet for a long moment, watching the dark water shift and press against the glass in slow, patient waves.

"Not yet," she said finally.

"Not yet," Zahir repeated. "Or not at all, ever."

"Not yet," Mira said again, firmer this time, something underneath the words closing the conversation down before it could fully open back up. "We’ve waited this long already. A little while longer costs us absolutely nothing. Telling them too early, before we genuinely understand what we’re actually dealing with ourselves, costs us everything if we turn out to be wrong about how they’d react to it."

Zahir looked at her for a long moment, then back out at the dark water, and chose not to push any further. He’d learned, across the years they’d spent married to each other, exactly which of her silences were worth pressing gently