Chapter 66
When Head Merchant Rume Ironbark finally came down to see Nille, he immediately felt it, a subtle but undeniable tremor running through the structure of the building. It wasn't an earthquake, nor was it external damage. It was something internal, something pressurizing the very air itself. He stopped mid-step, narrowing his eyes as he looked toward the secured corridor.
"…What did that lad do this time?" he muttered under his breath, already sensing this was far beyond a normal post-hunt report.
Without hesitation, he turned to Nhulla Loresong and issued a sharp command to secure the entire area where Nille was being held. He ordered the security unit to halt all recording systems and disable external monitoring immediately, as a precaution against whatever was happening inside. Nhulla moved quickly, her expression tense, already aware that this situation was not ordinary.
Even before anyone reached the room, the answer became clear.
Nille's leaking spiritual energy had already begun affecting the environment. It wasn't chaotic or violently destructive, nor did it feel like an uncontrolled surge, but the pressure behind it was immense, like something vast pressing gently against reality itself. The reinforced VIP room, designed to withstand high-tier awakened beings, responded poorly under the influence. The thick metal shutter door, meant to seal and contain extreme energy fluctuations, had begun to bend outward slightly, as if an invisible force was steadily pushing it from the inside with patient but overwhelming weight.
There was no explosion, no collapse, just silent deformation, the kind that suggested raw power far beyond what the facility was built to contain.
Head Merchant Rume Ironbark did not move immediately toward the sealed VIP room. Instead, his first action was silent and controlled, he raised a hand and issued a private signal through his communication band. Within seconds, the Rune Forge Merchant Group's internal security network activated without alarm, spreading subtle instructions across the floor levels.
To the public eye, nothing unusual was happening.
The Rune Forge Building was designed not like a fortress or office tower, but like a massive commercial mall, wide open walkways, layered balconies, and transparent glass walls that showcased the inner merchant districts like exhibitions. Buyers, sellers, adventurers, and traveling traders all moved freely through its halls, unaware that beneath the polished commerce atmosphere, security protocols were already tightening.
Rume Ironbark stepped into the central atrium and, with practiced ease, raised his voice just enough to carry authority without panic.
"Attention all units," he announced calmly. "A controlled containment inspection is being conducted on Level VIP Sector. Please evacuate the surrounding area for a standard structural audit."
The excuse was simple. Familiar. Believable.
Staff began moving without resistance. Security personnel guided merchants and customers away with rehearsed professionalism. A few curious eyes lingered, but no one questioned the Head Merchant directly, his presence alone carried enough authority to suppress doubt.
Yet as people were redirected toward exits and side corridors, the truth became harder to ignore.
The VIP merchant room, where Nille had been placed, was visible through the towering glass architecture of the building. The Rune Forge was intentionally designed this way: transparency symbolizing trust, commerce, and openness between factions. But now, that design worked against them.
From multiple levels of balconies and walkways, people began to notice it.
The sealed VIP door.
The reinforced chamber.
And the faint but growing distortion around it.
At first, it looked like heat haze.
Then the metal began to warp.
A slow, unsettling bend outward pressed against the thick shutter door, as if something inside was quietly testing the limits of reality itself. No sound. No explosion. Just pressure—constant, patient, and absolute.
Whispers started spreading through the crowd as merchants paused mid-step, sensing something wrong even without understanding what they were seeing.
"Is that… damage?"
"No, that's reinforced alloy…"
"Something is pushing it from inside?"
High above, Rume Ironbark stood still, his eyes locked on the deforming structure. His expression did not change, but his grip tightened slightly.
"…So it's already leaking that much," he muttered.
Nhulla, standing nearby, swallowed hard. "Head Merchant… should we proceed with emergency containment protocols?"
Rume didn't answer immediately.
Because by then, even he could feel it.
Not fear.
Not panic.
Pressure.
A presence so dense it made the air feel heavier the closer one looked at the VIP chamber.
Finally, he exhaled slowly.
"…Clear the remaining floor. Now."
His voice dropped lower, sharper.
"And nobody is allowed to approach that room under any circumstance."
As the last of the civilians were ushered away, the glass walls of the Rune Forge Building reflected something increasingly disturbing, the subtle bending of reinforced metal, the faint shimmer of spiritual leakage, and the silent realization among those who still saw it that whatever was inside that room…
Was not contained.
It was waiting.
Nille's spiritual energy was no longer behaving like a typical awakened force. It was breathing.
Not fluctuating in bursts, not surging in waves, not leaking in unstable pressure—but inhaling and exhaling with a slow, organic rhythm, as if it had developed a life pattern of its own. The phenomenon was unprecedented in recorded cultivation studies. There was no detectable hostility, no overwhelming density spike, no explosive output that normally signaled danger. Instead, it was calm, steady, and strangely alive, like an unseen organism learning how to exist inside containment without resisting it.
Inside the Rune Forge Building, the pressure spreading from the VIP room remained subtle but deeply unsettling, and it was this anomaly that forced Nhulla to call for immediate specialist assistance. What she did not expect was how quickly Professor Caelum Verdanis arrived—or how he arrived at all.
The moment he entered the building, Nhulla paused in visible confusion. The elven-born professor, known for his strict academic discipline and Spiritual Level 40 certification, was standing in the merchant atrium wearing pajamas, clearly having rushed out without preparation. Yet there was no hesitation in his expression, no concern for appearance or protocol. He had come the moment he was called, treating the situation as far more important than formal presentation.
He barely acknowledged the startled stares from staff and merchants as he moved directly toward the restricted zone, already analyzing the situation through spiritual perception alone.
Despite his disheveled appearance, his presence immediately changed the atmosphere. Unlike ordinary observers, Professor Caelum could perceive the structure of spiritual flow with precision—and what he felt from Nille's room made even his expression tighten slightly.
A living rhythm.
Breathing energy.
Not chaos, not control, but evolution.
Nhulla quickly explained the situation as they moved, noting that she had not expected him to respond so personally, especially given his status and reputation. She also mentioned the unusual development of Nille now being under dual sponsorship, a condition rare enough to be nearly theoretical in merchant–awakening systems.
Professor Caelum listened without interrupting, his focus already elsewhere.
Because dual sponsorship was not just rare, it was unstable. Most sponsors attempted to dominate or overly influence the individual they supported, creating conflict in growth patterns and forcing unnatural dependency. Two equal sponsors, however, created a far more complex problem: competing frameworks of guidance that could either accelerate evolution or fracture it entirely if misaligned.
And yet,
What Nille was doing inside that room did not match any known sponsorship model.
It was something else.
Something self-regulating.
As they approached the VIP sector, Professor Caelum finally spoke, his voice low and serious.
"…That is not normal spiritual development," he said.
Nhulla glanced at him. "Then what is it?"
The professor stopped just short of the sealed chamber, eyes narrowing as he sensed the rhythm behind the door.
A pause.
"…It's learning how to sustain itself."
When the energy finally settled, the pressure inside the VIP chamber dropped all at once—like a held breath finally released. The warped metal stopped bending, the humming distortion in the air faded, and the sealed shutter door slowly unlocked under emergency override.
Head Merchant Rume Ironbark, Professor Caelum Verdanis, and Nhulla Loresong stood at the entrance for a brief moment, each of them silently preparing for what they expected to see.
A collapsed body.
A severely injured awakened.
Or at worst, a containment failure scenario that would require immediate suppression.
Instead,
They found Nille standing.
Perfectly upright.
Still.
Calm.
But the room around him was no longer recognizable.
The reinforced VIP chamber had been scorched and reshaped by residual spiritual pressure. The floor bore layered burn-like imprints that were not fire damage, but compressed energy discharge patterns. The walls had faint cracks of luminous residue embedded into the metal, as if reality itself had been pressed and rewritten for a brief moment inside that space.
Rume Ironbark stepped forward first, his expression tightening.
"…Kid?"
Professor Caelum followed closely, eyes scanning immediately for signs of unconsciousness or neurological strain. "He should not be standing after that level of fluctuation…"
Nhulla remained silent, her gaze locked on Nille's posture.
He looked stable, but not normal.
Then Nille moved.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
For a fraction of a second, his irises shifted—changing into a sharp, glowing yellow, layered with faint inner patterns like a system briefly syncing across an unknown layer. The shift was instantaneous, almost reflexive.
And just as quickly, it reverted back to his normal eye color.
Like nothing had happened.
A faint smile formed on Nille's face.
"…Did something happen?" he asked calmly, as if the room around him hadn't just been nearly destroyed by his presence.
The three adults froze for a moment—not in fear, but in restrained calculation. None of them answered immediately.
Instead, Nille casually raised his hand and accessed his storage core.
A distortion opened beside him.
Then,
Items began to fall.
Not small objects.
Not tools.
But harvested cores.
Heavy, dense, and violently unstable even in a sealed state.
One after another, they dropped onto the scorched floor with dull, resonant impacts.
Level 150 cores.
Mutated malignant remains.
Refined combat drops from high-tier entities.
And then,
A massive object appeared last.
It struck the ground with a deep, oppressive thud that made even the reinforced chamber tremble slightly.
A Level 600 core.
The pressure it emitted was so dense that the air around it visibly distorted for a moment before stabilizing.
Rume Ironbark's expression tightened instantly.
Professor Caelum's pupils narrowed.
Nhulla instinctively took a half-step back.
But all three of them forced their reactions down, keeping their composure intact.
Because Nille was still smiling.
Still calm.
As if casually unloading resources after a normal hunt.
Rume finally spoke, voice controlled but sharp.
"…You're going to explain where you got all of that."
And for the first time, the weight in the room wasn't from the cores anymore,
It was from Nille's quiet presence standing in the center of it all.
The rest of the night unfolded in a blur of negotiations, explanations, and controlled disbelief.
After the initial shock inside the ruined VIP chamber, the Rune Forge Merchant Group immediately moved into private containment protocol. The entire incident was quietly sealed from public record under Head Merchant Rume Ironbark's authority, while Professor Caelum Verdanis personally supervised the analysis of the harvested materials Nille brought back from Sector 12.
And the deeper they inspected the haul,
The quieter the room became.
The Level 150 cores alone were already considered valuable enough to fund a veteran hunter team for months. But the true centerpiece was the enormous Level 600 Drake-class core resting inside the reinforced containment vault.
Even dormant, the thing radiated terrifying biological pressure.
No one could understand how Nille survived long enough to even retrieve it.
When questioned, Nille calmly explained what he encountered within the deeper zones of Sector 12, the Chimera territories, the Basilisk convergence areas, and finally the existence of the massive draconic entity he discovered beyond the unstable region.
He did not reveal everything.
Only enough.
Enough to make Rume Ironbark's expression gradually darken in concern.
Enough to make Professor Caelum realize Sector 12 was hiding threats far beyond official danger rankings.
And enough for both men to understand one thing clearly:
Nille was no longer operating at the level of a normal awakened youth.
The sponsorship discussion happened shortly afterward.
Normally, dual sponsorships were political nightmares. Merchant factions and academic sponsors rarely tolerated shared influence over a rising awakened, especially one with abnormal growth potential. But after what happened tonight, neither Rume nor Caelum attempted to dominate the arrangement.
Instead,
They adapted.
Rume Ironbark would provide financial support, resources, and access to restricted merchant channels.
Professor Caelum would oversee academic guidance, spiritual theory, and awakened development research.
And Nille…
Accepted both calmly.
No arrogance.
No excitement.
Just quiet acknowledgment.
As if he had already expected life to continue moving forward regardless of how abnormal things became.
By the time the final evaluations ended, the transaction results were finalized privately through Rune Forge's highest internal clearance.
The total value of the cores and malignant materials reached a number large enough to make even veteran hunters envious.
From that payout, two hundred thousand was immediately deducted toward Nille's debt.
A debt that once looked completely impossible to repay.
And even after the deduction,
Nille still walked away with nearly thirty thousand remaining under his personal account.
Nhulla herself looked slightly speechless while processing the transfer confirmation.
Only days ago, he had entered the merchant building as a desperate young man drowning under impossible financial pressure.
Now he was walking out as someone who had just sold materials powerful enough to shake high-level awakened organizations.
Yet strangely,
Nille himself remained unchanged.
No pride.
No greed.
No visible triumph.
Just exhaustion.
Deep, silent exhaustion hidden beneath his usual calm expression.
When everything finally ended, Nille quietly left the Rune Forge headquarters and returned to his rented room near the outer district.
The city lights outside had already dimmed into late-night silence by then.
The moment he entered the room, the tension he had been suppressing throughout the entire night finally eased slightly from his shoulders. He removed the Celestial Cloth carefully and sat at the edge of the bed in silence.
The room was simple, enough for one person.
But after everything that happened tonight, it felt strangely peaceful.
Inside his Enclave, the Dragon Heart inside the embrace of the Balete tree continued breathing softly within the spinning halo.
And somewhere within that living spiritual world.
Nyx quietly watched over the system stabilizing itself further.
While Nille, for the first time since re entering Sector 12,
Allowed himself to full rest.