Twelve days after Integration.
Su Ming was Level 29 and people had stopped laughing at Undead Summoner.
They hadn't started respecting it yet — that would come later, with the first S-rank summon, with the moment the undead army stopped being his undead army and started being a force of nature attached to a person. But the laughing had stopped, because the numbers were there on the public board and numbers spoke in a language that mockery struggled to compete with.
Level 29. In twelve days. With the joke class.
People were doing math. The math was not adding up. Which meant there was something about Undead Summoner that they were missing, and the gap between not laughing and wanting to know what they were missing was shrinking by the hour.
Su Xuan monitored this from his usual corner of the Player Hub and thought about the next phase.
[ BINDING SYNC ]
Su Ming: Level 29 | Summon Count: 7 | Highest Rank: B+
Su Xuan: Level 61 | Death Sovereign: Level 48 | Demon God: Level 43
Subjugated: Kael (C-rank) + 4 others (D-rank, acquired in dungeons)
Sovereign's Dominion: +5% all stats (5 subjugated)
Level 61.
He had a private opinion about the speed of his own development that he kept very private, which was that the Binding System was not balanced and whoever had assigned it to him had either made a catastrophic error or had very specific plans for the outcome.
Either way, he was not complaining.
He was, however, thinking about the Iron Vanguard. Fourteen days had passed since the refusal at the E-rank gate. Zhao Wei had not approached them again. This meant one of two things: he had accepted the refusal, or he was planning something.
Nobody with Zhao Wei's personality profile accepted that kind of refusal.
Su Xuan set his tea down and sent a message: Where are you?
Su Ming's reply came back immediately: C-rank gate, south district. You were right, by the way. Iron Vanguard has been scouting my dungeon runs for the last three days.
Su Xuan typed: Don't go in alone today.
A pause. Then: I can handle a C-rank.
I know you can. Wait for me anyway.
Another pause. Longer. He could feel his brother deciding whether to argue, and then the moment he decided not to.
Fine. I'm at the café near gate 7. Come find me.
Su Xuan was already standing.
They went into the C-rank dungeon together, and the Iron Vanguard's scouts went with them — not openly, but at a distance of two chambers, which Su Xuan tracked through Kael's peripheral awareness without acknowledging.
The dungeon was a burial ground — vast, cold, layered with the accumulated death-energy of whatever this world had been before the System arrived and claimed it. C-rank monsters moved in the corridors: Wight Knights, Spectral Archers, a Bone Colossus in the fourth chamber that stood twelve meters tall and had been killing Player parties at a steady rate since the gate opened.
Su Ming disposed of the Wight Knights with four summons and a gesture that took approximately three seconds. The Spectral Archers took slightly longer because their projectiles had a homing component that required calculated counter-positioning. The Bone Colossus — Su Ming stood in front of it, raised a new summon, and summoned an undead ogre that was larger.
It was starting to be less funny and more alarming, Su Xuan observed. He could see it in the feed data — the way Su Ming's face was perfectly calm while a twelve-meter construct tried to destroy him and his counter-summon dismantled it methodically.
He, meanwhile, was in the side corridor with Kael.
The C-rank dungeon had a secret floor.
Not in the novel — this was a dungeon Su Ming had never fully cleared in the original story. But Su Xuan could feel it, in the specific way that Demon God perception operated, as a vibration in the floor beneath his feet that said: something older and more powerful is below this level and it is aware of you.
He found the staircase behind a collapsed pillar.
He went down.
The dungeon's secret floor was a throne room.
It had been a throne room when it was a real place, before the System folded it into a dungeon, and it had retained that identity the way places do when something important enough happened in them. The ceiling was sixty feet up. The throne at the far end was black stone and larger than it needed to be. On the throne sat an undead knight in full black plate armor, with a sword across its knees and two flames burning in the visor of its helm.
It was an A-rank undead.
A Death Knight.
Its name, visible through Su Xuan's Sovereign perception, was: Serrath, the Last Oathkeeper.
It had been sitting on that throne for one hundred and forty years, waiting, with the patience of dead things that don't need anything except something worth serving.
It looked at Su Xuan.
Su Xuan walked to the center of the room, stopped, and looked back.
"Sovereign," Serrath said. Its voice was the sound of a sword being drawn in an empty hall.
"Oathkeeper," Su Xuan said.
A pause. The flames in the helm's visor flickered.
Then Serrath rose from the throne, planted its sword point-down on the floor, and bowed.
[ SOVEREIGN'S EDICT — APPLIED ]
New Undead Bound: Serrath, the Last Oathkeeper
Rank: A | Power Level: 2,847
Class: Death Knight — Oath of the Eternal Guard
Ability: [Unbreakable Oath] — Cannot be killed while Sovereign lives. Will revive 60 seconds after destruction.
Status: Fully Subjugated. Loyalty: Absolute.
Sovereign's Dominion: Subjugated count: 6 | Bonus: +6% all stats
"Rise," Su Xuan said.
Serrath rose. Sheathed its sword. Stood at Su Xuan's left shoulder.
Su Xuan looked at the throne for a moment. Then he turned and walked back toward the staircase, and Serrath followed him, black plate silent on the stone floor, oath already burning in the dead knight's chest like a coal that would outlast the world.
He emerged back into the main dungeon to find Su Ming standing over the remains of the Bone Colossus with a new summon and an expression that shifted, when he saw what was behind his brother, from satisfaction to something much more complicated.
"That," Su Ming said carefully, "is an A-rank Death Knight."
"Yes."
"We're in a C-rank dungeon."
"Secret floor. Below the main level."
Su Ming looked at Serrath for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, with the tone of a man revising his understanding of a situation: "Xuan. I don't know what your class is. But I need you to understand that whatever it is, it is—"
"Ming."
"—completely—"
"The Iron Vanguard scouts are in chamber three," Su Xuan said. "They've been following us since the first corridor. They've seen the Death Knight."
Su Ming stopped. Processed this. His expression closed up — not in anger, but in the specific focused sharpness of someone shifting from one mode to another. "How many?"
"Four. Two combat class, two information class. The information class will have recording ability."
"They've already sent footage."
"Probably."
Su Ming was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed, not in distress but in the specific resignation of someone who has accepted that the next two weeks are going to be annoying. "All right. So they know about the Death Knight."
"They know about your summons too, from the earlier chambers. But they don't know about mine."
"What do you want to do?"
Su Xuan thought about it for exactly one second. "Nothing yet," he said. "Let them send the footage. Let Zhao Wei look at it. Let him decide whether to escalate."
"And if he escalates?"
"Then I'll handle it," Su Xuan said simply. "Come. Let's finish the dungeon."