I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1324: The Princess’s Soul World

Bairan stood at the shore, watching the Tower of Trammel prepare to sail. The sky had darkened to a bruised gray, and the wind was picking up—gusts strong enough to pull at his clothes, to carry salt and the distant promise of something worse. The ship’s crew moved with the urgency of people who understood that delays on this continent could become permanent.

Someone stormed toward him, white hair whipping behind her like a battle standard.

”What is going on?!” The young lady’s voice cut through the wind like a blade. ”I demand to be filled in on why that ship is leaving without taking anyone!”

Bairan kept his expression neutral. The longing in his chest—the pull toward that ship, toward escape from this damned continent—he buried it before she could close the distance.

He’d spent too long mastering control to let a princess catch him wanting. His arms remained folded behind his back, his posture deliberately relaxed, betraying nothing. When she reached him, he offered a handsome smile and pointed toward the sky.

”Someone needs to take care of those... you and I will, and the people will be safe.”

Princess Rehema frowned. The expression did nothing to diminish her presence—if anything, it sharpened it.

”What are you saying...?” The words carried less question than accusation. As if she were informing him of a mental defect he ought to have the decency to acknowledge.

But Bairan merely shrugged.

”It’s alright to be dismayed. I am too. But except you want to leave these people here... thousands of survivors, good stars, you can’t possibly abandon them.”

Princess Rehema was silent for a long moment. Her gaze locked onto his with an intensity that would have made lesser men flinch, searching for something—weakness, deception, the truth behind his easy manner. Her two subordinates lingered a hundred meters back, close enough to respond if needed, far enough to give the illusion of privacy between powers.

Since setting foot on this dark continent, the princess had been trying to separate the truly powerful from those who merely seemed so. Not the obviously strong ones—the ones who announced their strength through posture and presence.

Those were easy to categorize and ultimately not what concerned her. It was the ones who passed for common. Too common, unremarkable until suddenly they weren’t.

Those were the ones she had learned to watch with extra care, because those were the ones who could destroy you before you realized the danger.

Bairan was exactly that kind. His composure, his laid-back manner—it confused her every time they interacted. He looked ordinary, the sort of man you might pass in a market without a second glance.

Yet power hung around him like heat off sun-baked stone. She couldn’t determine if he was simply skilled at presentation—packaging himself just right—or if something genuinely dangerous lurked beneath that easy smile, coiled and waiting.

One thing was unquestionable: Bairan was strong. She simply didn’t know how strong. And that uncertainty bothered her more than she would ever admit.

He wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. His gaze had drifted upward, a small smile playing at the corner of his lips, as if the crisis overhead amused him rather than alarmed him.

The damned rift had trapped him here—couldn’t just abandon his post, not with that thing tearing open above them, not with thousands of survivors depending on those who could fight.

But if he had to stay, at least the rift had given him the perfect excuse to keep the princess in place as well. She couldn’t flee without abandoning the same people he was stuck protecting.

’Silver linings,’ he thought, though the phrase felt borrowed from somewhere he couldn’t quite place.

”Goodness... why the anomaly?”

Even as the words left his mouth, the sky answered. The clouds tore apart with a sound like reality cracking, and luminescent shapes began filling the gaps—bright, formless, wrong. They pulsed with a light that felt less like illumination and more like violence made visible.

Their presence poured down as rain.

Not water. Light. Pure, consuming light that swallowed the port in an instant. The world went white—so utterly, blindingly white that the brilliance became its own kind of darkness. Bairan felt his eyes burn even through closed lids, heat searing across his face.

Around him, people froze mid-motion, paralyzed, unable to see, unable to move, unable to do anything but exist in that annihilating brightness.

The light stripped everything away. Worse than darkness, perhaps. Darkness you could adapt to, could navigate with other senses. This offered no adaptation, no mercy, no escape. It pressed against the eyes like fingers, forcing itself in.

While Bairan was calculating options when a wave of essence slammed into him.

Just a wave. But the power behind it would have crushed anyone below a Master, scattered their soul like ash in a gale. The pressure hit him with the weight of a thunderstorm compressed into a single instant. Bairan weathered it without moving, and in that same moment, recognized the signature woven through the essence.

The princess.

The moment her power washed over him, the white light began to fracture.

Cracks spread through the brilliance, dark lines splitting the blinding white. Reality itself seemed to shatter, the annihilating brightness breaking apart like glass under tremendous pressure.

Bairan stood in the heart of that whiteness and watched the world come undone around him.

And as the glass fell away, a different reality stood revealed.

The sky here was crimson—deep, violent red, split by veins of darker light like the heavens themselves were bleeding out across eternity. Massive black clouds churned overhead, pregnant with violence, heavy with the promise of destruction.

A colossal lightning strike hung frozen mid-descent, a pillar of godlike force connecting sky to earth, illuminating everything in hellish red glow. The bolt itself was thick as a tower, jagged and terrible, its light casting everything in stark relief.

The air pressed down, heavy and suffocating, charged with ancient wrath. It tasted like copper and ash.

Below, the land stretched out as a slaughtered plain.

Thousands of warriors—tens of thousands, perhaps—surged across scorched ground, frozen mid-motion.

Armies clashed in chaotic waves, silhouettes locked in combat amid fire and smoke. Spears, banners, and broken weapons jutted from the earth like gravestones marking a massacre no one survived. Flaming embers hung suspended in the air, caught mid-drift, carried by wind and ash that no longer moved.

Everything frozen. A single moment of apocalyptic war, crystallized and preserved.

Bairan absorbed the sight with the quiet appreciation of someone who understood exactly what he was looking at. This was no illusion. This was the princess’s soul world—her inner domain made manifest, powerful enough to overlay reality itself.

’She’s strong alright.’

The thought carried amusement more than concern. Not only had Princess Rehema managed to counter a tier-nine rift’s environmental effect—she’d done it by allowing her soul world to spill outward, enveloping everyone within range, saving them all from blindness in a single decisive action.

He found himself nodding slightly. A worthy move.

Still, he was lowkey tempted to cut this world down with a single strike. Just because he hated having something affect him without his consent. The urge was petty, he knew. Almost childish.

But acting on it would plunge everyone back into the blinding light. Counterproductive.

’What in the stars is low... key anyways?’ The phrase had slipped into his thoughts unbidden, foreign, as if borrowed from a language he’d never spoken. ’Why do I keep finding myself using strange words?’

Bairan shook his head at his own strangeness and started to look away—

Then stopped.

His expression shifted. Genuine surprise, the first real crack in his composure since the crisis began.

A small smile curled his lips.

’Amazing...’

The frozen soldiers. They weren’t just scenery, weren’t merely the backdrop of the princess’s soul world. She hadn’t simply saved everyone from the blinding light—she’d invited the rift’s monsters into her domain. Let them cross into her territory, her rules, her battlefield. Reckless, yes. Potentially catastrophic if she’d miscalculated the scope of what was coming through.

’But...’

Bairan looked around the soul world with fresh appreciation. He wasn’t alone here. People who had been standing or lying about the port now found themselves displaced into this frozen battlefield, shock written across their faces, confusion in their eyes. They didn’t understand what had happened or where they were.

But there was a vast distinction between these living people and the frozen soldiers of the princess’s soul world. The survivors were real—bewildered, frightened, but present.

The frozen soldiers were something else entirely.

And they were beginning to move.