I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 763: Why so early?

​The three dragons fell silent.

The moment Ren’s blade had made contact with Jack’s chest, the transformation had been instantaneous.

A sudden, violent collapse of whatever had been building inside him.

The black lightning had died, the patterns in his eyes had shattered, and the absolute hunger that had been radiating from him in palpable waves had evaporated.

​”Something is wrong with him,” Nexia said, her voice carrying the weight of absolute certainty. “He can’t tell friend from foe.”

​Malacia’s copper scales rippled, sending small waves of heat across the stone. “We should have intervened. We should have…”

​”We have no wings,” Skatha cut in, her bluntness cutting through sentiment like a wedge through wood. “We have no escape or flight. We are creatures of the ground now, and the Soul Warden fights the Sovereign above us while something we cannot perceive whispers into the darkness inside his skull.”

​Nexia’s silver eyes tracked Ren as he stood over Jack’s unconscious form.

The Sovereign-rank entity was breathing heavily, his posture still rigid with the readiness to act. From the dragons’ perspective, watching from the ground with a limited range of motion and no capacity to intervene, the scene was one of terrible stasis.

A moment where power had been proven, dominance had been asserted, and where something fundamental had shifted in ways they couldn’t fully comprehend.

​”What happens when he wakes up?” Malacia asked, her voice carrying layers of concern that she would normally never permit herself to express. “What happens when he wakes up? What is your fate?”

​Nexia didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The calculation was impossible.

​Skatha’s massive head turned to face the direction where Ren was preparing to move. “The Sovereign felt it. Through their connection. Whatever that presence was, it burned through the soul-bond like fire through cloth.” Her earth-affinity perception had tracked the moment Ren had recoiled from Jack’s strike.

Not from the physical impact, but from something metaphysical that had traveled along the threads binding them together.

“If something is waking inside the Soul Warden’s bloodline, then the tower’s hierarchy just became unstable. History is going to repeat itself again.”

​Malacia’s copper scales flared with a heat as her agitation grew by the second. “The Herald assumed a position of authority over us. We acquiesced, relinquishing our autonomy. We acknowledged the established hierarchy, recognizing the undeniable and absolute nature of its power.”

She paused, her golden eyes tracking the distant figures as Ren began his careful walk. “But if Jack can lose himself to something he doesn’t understand, something that can override his consciousness without warning… Then what hierarchy exists at all? What dominance means anything if the apex can fragment from within?”

​”Careful,” Nexia warned, her silver head turning sharply toward Malacia. “That line of thinking is how the Sovereign decides we’re too dangerous to keep alive.” Her voice carried the weight of centuries spent in survival, calculating how to survive.

“Skatha is correct. The soul-bond is compromised. Whatever spoke to Jack touched something fundamental between him and Ren. A creature like Ren Ryzard doesn’t simply carry that knowledge silently.”

​Skatha’s rumble held grim satisfaction. “The Soul Warden is fighting to control forces awakening inside his skeleton, while the Sovereign bound to him cannot act without risking his own erasure. Master and servant chained by blood to the same suffocating cage, each one suffocating the other.”

​The three dragons fell into silence as they watched Ren carefully hoist Jack onto his shoulders.

They observed the Sovereign-rank warrior begin his long trek back toward Caeloria with the unconscious form of their Soul Warden.

The de-winged trio remained grounded, watching the figures recede into the gray distance. Each of them understood, without needing to voice it, that the power dynamics of the world had just shifted dramatically.

——–

​Ren stood over his unconscious master, his sharp blue eyes looking down at Jack’s pale face.

Without a single word, he calmly reached down, hoisted his unconscious master onto his shoulder to clear him from the pool of cooling dragon blood, and adjusted his grip.

His posture remained perfectly upright as he turned away from the massive, ruined corpse of the Herald, his focus already shifting to the long trek ahead to bring Jack safely back to Caeloria.

​But before he took his first step, Ren’s eyes narrowed with recognition.

The threads of the soul-bond pulsed with the echo of something ancient that had briefly touched the connection between master and servant, leaving its mark there.

Ren had felt it the moment Jack’s consciousness had fractured.

A presence older than the tower itself, speaking with authority that transcended the normal order of things.

​The contact had been violent.

Not hostile toward Jack, but absolutely predatory in its certainty.

Whatever voice had spoken inside the Soul Warden’s skull had done so with the confidence of something that knew exactly what it was addressing.

It had bypassed Oscar’s crude enthusiasm, ignored Tharaxis’s analytical clarity, and crushed Emberion’s primal rage beneath the weight of revelation.

Ren had felt each of those presences recoil, retreat, and go silent in his presence.

​Ren’s jaw tightened imperceptibly.

He adjusted his grip on Jack’s unconscious form and began to walk, but his mind was already processing the implications.

A creature didn’t simply lose control to random madness. A consciousness didn’t fragment without a catalyst. And no internal presence would trigger that kind of reaction unless it carried authority that transcended the local hierarchy.

​Ren had encountered ancestors before.

Old creatures from the Prosperity Kingdoms and other long-forgotten kingdoms still lingered in the tower’s depths.

He understood the weight they carried, the gravity of their existence. But this had felt different.

The presence carried the signature of something that didn’t just exist outside of time; it existed beyond comprehension.

Something that could reshape understanding itself through sheer force of will.

​Jack’s weight on his shoulders was substantial, but it was nothing compared to the weight of this knowledge.

Ren moved carefully across the shattered stone, his every step calculated to avoid jostling his master’s still-bleeding chest wound.

The cut was severe but manageable. Ren’s own demonic physiology would ensure Jack’s survival. What concerned him was not the flesh wound but what had caused it.

​Ren looked over at Jack’s face one final time before turning toward the horizon.

​”You’re waking up too early,” he said quietly, his voice carrying the clinical tone of someone stating a fact rather than posing a genuine question.

“Why did this ancestor have to reach out to you now? You are years away from being ready for him.”

​The words hung in the barren air as Ren carried his master across the wasteland toward home.

Behind them, the ten blood spears remained embedded in the Herald’s corpse, monuments to a power that had erupted without warning or restraint.

Ren’s thoughts were already calculating the implications. If an ancestor were speaking to Jack, if the Shattered Kings were beginning to wake within their vessel, then the tower’s remaining floors would become something far more dangerous than anyone had anticipated.

​More importantly, if Jack lost himself completely to whatever was waking inside his skeleton, Ren would die alongside him.

The soul-bond worked both ways. A master’s death condemned the servant to oblivion. But a servant’s severance would drag the master down into the void just as thoroughly.

​The evening settled over the wasteland in shades of gray and purple, and Ren walked on in silence, carrying the weight of his Soul Warden and the knowledge of what was stirring in the depths below.

His mind was already formulating contingencies, already preparing for the moment when Jack woke up, and if that voice would try to speak again.