On the following night, in the impenetrable darkness of the Chamber of Stillness, where the heavy silence was broken by nothing but the pale, intermittent blue illumination emanating from the mana instruments and arrays placed to monitor the Duke's imminent death, Dex and Lumia returned.
The infiltration on this night was several times more difficult and complex than the previous one. Sylvester, driven by the paranoia of betrayal that was devouring his mind, had drastically intensified patrol frequency. He had planted new sensory magical traps relying on body heat in the corridors, and had replaced some of the ordinary guards with units of hyper-sensitive acoustic detection. But all these human countermeasures were worthless against Lumia. She deployed her Space Folding ability with breathtaking and terrifying mastery, she did not merely render them invisible, but folded the dimensions around them, reducing them to extremely fine ripples in the fabric of the air, mere "spatial probabilities" that only a god or a mage possessed of a transcendent magical sight surpassing the boundaries of the human world could see or sense. They slipped through the crystal walls and sealed doors as though walking through a dream.
When they finally stood beside the marble bed, Dex wasted not a single second. He drew the golden vial with extreme care, his hands moving with the precision of an expert surgeon. The second drop of the World Tree's Nectar had already gathered at the vial's tip, glimmering in the darkness, appearing like a small, dense star of pure and concentrated life.
Dex looked at his father's face. The initial improvement was plain to anyone possessing magical sight, the black veins had retreated slightly, yet the body was still in a state of deep hibernation. With an extraordinarily gentle touch, and a hand that did not tremble by a single hair's breadth despite the historic weight of the moment, Dex parted his father's lips and poured the second drop directly onto his tongue.
Dex had expected a quiet, slow reaction as in the previous instance, but the reaction this time was anything but ordinary or peaceful.
The instant the second drop penetrated the internal mana pathways and reached the shattered core, something resembling a nuclear explosion erupted on the spiritual plane. Lord Marcus's massive body shuddered with sudden and terrifying violence, his back arching high above the marble bed, going rigid as though a bolt of lightning had struck his spine. From the pores of his skin burst a massive wave of golden heat, blindingly intense. This was raw vital energy, pure and furious, the energy of life attempting to expel death by sheer compulsive force. The wave was so powerful and dense that it caused the surface of the marble bed to crack, and nearly shattered the sensitive monitoring crystals suspended above him, which would have exposed their position and ruined the entire plan.
"Dex! The energy is leaking madly! I cannot contain it with the void alone!" Lumia whispered in a rare panic, raising her hands in a desperate attempt to weave doubled layers of void netting to suppress the dimensional and luminous fluctuations and prevent them from escaping the room.
Dex did not think. He acted on the instinct of survival and the instinct of a son. He threw his entire body over his father's convulsing frame and seized his withered hand with every ounce of physical strength he possessed.
"I will not allow this to escape! You will not die here, and we will not be discovered here!" Dex screamed inwardly from the depths of his consciousness.
He opened the Solar Heart in his chest to its maximum capacity and pumped Blue Phoenix Mana with its full ferocity. But he used it not for attack, for protection. He enveloped his body and his father's in a dense, sealed cocoon of cold blue fire. In this state, the phoenix flames functioned as an absolute magical insulator, a wall of cold flame that violently absorbed the overflowing golden energy of the Nectar as it tried to escape, forcing it to rebound and return to the interior of Marcus's pathways. The process was terrifying, converting an energetic explosion that could have demolished the entire wing into an intense and microscopic internal restoration, rebuilding shattered cells under immense pressure. Dex was drenched in sweat, his teeth grinding from the effort required to tame an energy that far surpassed his current level.
And suddenly, while Dex was diving with his deep consciousness into his father's energy pathways to direct the fire, the world around him changed. The vault vanished, and Lumia vanished, and the marble bed vanished. He found himself in a dark mental space, a space representing the spiritual landscape of Lord Marcus's mind. The place resembled a destroyed and burned fortress surrounded by seas of black mud, the poison, but at its center was a golden beam slowly widening.
A silent cry thundered through this mental space, so powerful and majestic that it made Dex's spiritual vision shake and fracture: "Who, who are you?! This mana surrounding me... it is strange and frightening... yet it carries the fragrance of my blood... it carries the scent of the stormy western winds!"
Dex's spiritual body went completely rigid in this dimension. He understood immediately what was happening. This was a direct mental connection through pure mana, the legendary Spiritual Telepathy technique he had read about, which only monsters whose cores had reached rank S or higher could master and activate. Lord Marcus, despite his profound physical coma and the destruction of his organs, had begun awakening his strategic and spiritual consciousness with tremendous force, powered by the second dose of Nectar.
Dex answered in his mind with iron concentration, trying to suppress the emotions that nearly shattered the connection: "Father... it is I, Dex. Do not open your eyes in the real world! Do not move even a single finger! Sylvester is monitoring the security instruments around you around the clock, and any sudden change in your physical state will mean triggering an alarm and the end of us all. Stay still as you are, pretend to be dead, I beg you!"
A long and heavy mental silence reigned in that cognitive space, a silence filled only by the booming of the heartbeat that had begun to grow stronger and more regular thanks to the Nectar, a booming resembling war drums beating on the distant horizon.
Then Marcus's voice arrived in Dex's mind. It was a trembling, exhausted voice, yet it was filled with a complex mixture of astonishment, deep pain, and a hope he did not dare believe: "Dex? My son? Is this a death-dream? That traitor, my brother Sylvester, told me you had been killed in an ambush. He told me, laughing, that your body had turned to ash and been scattered by the winds. I have lived months in this darkness with the pain of your loss."
Marcus fell silent for a moment, as though testing Dex's energy in the spiritual space, then added with even greater astonishment: "But this power surrounding me now... this is not the energy of my son that I knew. This aura, where did these terrifying blue flames come from? They are burning the poison of Beelzebub's Tear in my veins as though they were sacred fire purging filth."
"I have returned from death, Father," Dex replied with harsh bitterness, his mental voice carrying the wisdom and cruelty of a man who had lived multiple lives. "I truly faced death in that ambush as Sylvester planned, but I refused to surrender to the darkness. I was born again in the depths of hell, and I returned to reclaim what was stolen from us through treachery. Rest now. Let the Sacred Nectar rebuild your shattered core. We have only ten days remaining until the Coronation."
Dex's blue flames were merging with the golden Nectar, weaving a network of life around his father's soul.
"In these ten days," Dex swore in words carved into the soul, "I will be the shadow that no one sees, and the sword that severs the necks of traitors in the darkness."
In the real world, on the cold marble bed, under the absolute weight of the surrounding silence, Dex felt an extremely faint pressure, barely perceptible, unregistered by Sylvester's instruments, on the palm of the hand that was holding his father's hand. It was a simple motion from a single finger, yet it carried the weight of mountains. That was the only way the dying Lion was able to say, in the material world: "I trust you... my son."