I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 268: A Continent! I
Lancelot of the Glacivane Dynasty stood silently above the frozen expanse, his gaze never leaving the figure of the young man below.

Achilles Adrastia Maxwell.

Or as the whispers he was told begun to call him…Emperor King Adrastia.

Lancelot watched closely as the young ruler raised his hands, the cold air around him shimmering with raw, pulsing force. Waves of Evolutius Energy, a rich violet deeper than the darkest dusk, burst forth. They came alive with threads of starlight, weaving and folding into Runescriptures that sparkled as if the skies themselves had been spun into sigils.

Lancelot narrowed his eyes, his senses, sharpened by centuries, tracing the currents of power. Within the young man’s body, he could see it- seas of Evolutius Energy flooded his blood and bones, but it was not Evolutius Energy as Lancelot knew it. It shimmered, thick and lustrous, but wreathed in starlight, as though a star lived within every drop.

And then his attention shifted.

To the other hand.

Golden light unfurled, luminous and bold, forming Runescriptures of its own. Waves of golden energy surged out, equally dense, equally pure. But this energy- this was something Lancelot recognized all too well.

It was the power the Ancient Ones used.

He stiffened.

Instinct demanded caution, yet…

There was no vileness. No cloying corruption. The golden light was pure, so pure that it cut through the frigid air without leaving behind the faintest stench of decay that he had learned to associate with the Ancients’ taint.

Still, it was a sight that gave him pause.

Achilles’ mastery over these energies, his ability to intertwine and weave them into shimmering, living scripts- this was no trickery. It was a marvel, a forging of power into form that Lancelot himself, for all his age and might, had never seen before.

He watched, rapt, as the dense, concentrated mass of Living Scripts pulsed and grew, a singularity of purple and gold.

It spun, twisting tighter with each heartbeat.

This young man, the one Aliya had spoken of so highly, wielded energy as easily as other men wielded breath. Regardless of his age, regardless of his years, he emanated a weight, a presence that Lancelot had only seen in the oldest and most powerful beings towards the end of their life. An authority and royalty woven into his very existence.

Unique.

Utterly unique.

Emperor King Adrastia, indeed!

And now, he moved.

Without hesitation, Achilles lowered his hands. The swirling singularity of power, no larger than his palm, flew downward in a blur of violet and gold.

Lancelot’s gaze tracked it effortlessly.

It sank, sinking through layers of frozen stone and ancient glacier with effortless grace, descending to the heart of the mountain that cradled their clustered Colony Cities.

The Glacivane Dynasty had always prided itself on unity- keeping their cities close, building their strength from togetherness, from bonds forged in shared hardship.

Now, Lancelot watched as Achilles’ will answered that principle in kind.

HUUM!

A deep, resonant hum thrummed through the frozen world.

The singularity of energy, once so small, exploded outward underground. Not violently, but with purpose. The purple and gold scaffolding bloomed, stretching out horizontally beneath the surface, branching out in all directions like the roots of a world tree, swift and sure.

It spread.

Wide.

Vast.

Unstoppable.

Not just beneath one city.

Not just a single bastion.

The scaffold unfurled beneath them all, racing across the tundra at a pace no mortal eye could fully track. In mere heartbeats, it covered hundreds of miles. A framework of power, a foundation more intricate and more beautiful than any mortal engineer could conceive, laid down with the precision of the stars themselves.

Lancelot watched, shock slowly creeping into the corners of his heart. He had lived long, seen much. But this?

This was new.

This was the mark of something greater than kingship!

Lancelot hovered silently above the tundra, the cold forgotten. His sharp eyes, forged through centuries of vigilance, tracked every strand of light, every woven thread of that impossible lattice unfurling beneath his feet.

The scaffold of violet and gold had already spread farther than he had dared to imagine, snaking outward beneath the frozen soil, intricate and inevitable. The power being expended was staggering, more than any single being should have been able to command, yet Achilles stood unshaken, his form alight with the soft, terrible glory of it.

The scaffold didn’t merely grow outward.

No, it changed.

Lancelot’s lips thinned as he watched, his body tense, his senses stretched to their limits.

It began.

The humming.

Soft at first, like the whisper of the deep places beneath the world, but rising, growing sharper, denser.

The scaffolding of power that had sprawled so patiently across the land now pulsed as one.

And then it shifted.

The threads of purple and gold began to curve- not outward, but upward.

…!

The earth answered with a sound deeper than thunder, a slow, groaning protest as the ground itself began to change.

Lancelot’s hands tightened into fists at his sides as he focused. He felt it- through the bones of the land, through the icy veins of the mountains.

The scaffold wasn’t just burrowing. It was cutting.

Cutting through the old paths, the ancient, hidden arteries that the Evolutius Catacombs had burrowed like worms through flesh. Severing the bindings that tied this place to the Wild Lands and the ancient chains of the past.

It was severance.

It was liberation.

HUUM!

A pulse ran out, silent yet deafening, and Lancelot’s breath caught in his throat.

Across hundreds of miles, the ground cracked.

Not a fissure.

Not a mere tremble.

Cracks spiderwebbed through the land, luminous veins of gold and violet that split the frozen ground as easily as a knife through silk. Light spilled upward, searing through the darkness of the tundra.

And then the earth itself… rose.

Slow.

Implacable.

Entire valleys lifted.

Frozen rivers shifted.

Ice-laden forests groaned as they were pulled upward.

The clustered Colony Cities- fourteen in total- did not falter. Their foundations did not crumble. No, they rose together, carried by a new foundation, a scaffold of power so vast it defied comprehension.

A small continent.

Wrenching free from the chains of earth.

…!

Lancelot stared, his breath misting faintly in the frigid air, though he did not feel the cold.

“No way,” he whispered, voice tight, raw with wonder.

He was told. He saw the videos. But…

His eyes remained locked on the spectacle below, disbelieving and yet unable to look away.

He had seen kings raise cities from ashes.

Had seen Astral Core Ascension beings bend the mountains.

But this?

This was different.

This was not the lifting of a city.

It was the lifting of an entire domain.

Over a thousand miles in diameter, if his senses did not deceive him. A continent being reborn, pulled into the skies by the will of one man.

One young man, whose presence was as steady as the sun and as inevitable as the turning of time.

Achilles Adrastia Maxwell.

Emperor King Adrastia!