Reincarnated Lord: I can upgrade everything!

"You mean…" Apollyon's voice dropped low, venom dripping from each word as his jaw clenched so tightly that the veins in his temple pulsed.

His aura swelled, pressing down on the room until the air itself groaned under its strain, cracks webbing faintly across the stone beneath his throne. "…this man, this boy, who is but a babe before us, was crowned Lord of Tenaria by God Himself?"

The power leaking from him thickened, oppressive as a storm-tide crashing against the walls. The space around his throne seemed to warp, as if the raw might coursing through him might at any moment shatter reality itself.

It was one thing, an unendurable thing, for Asher to have claimed the most radiant woman history had ever known as his wife.

But now, to hear that he had inherited the continent itself? That the very land they ruled bent to him?

That truth struck the gathered rulers like a blade to the gut. The faces of a few of the lords bore rage.

"What say do we have in this?" Apollyon's voice thundered, breaking the fragile air like a hammer strike.

His body trembled with vehemence, his shadow stretching long and dark across the broken hall. "I have lived for over a thousand years. I have broken nations with my will, bent lands beneath my hand! Why, why were you not given to me?!" His voice rose to a roar, shaking dust from the fractured ceiling, the fury of an immortal unaccustomed to denial.

Asher did not flinch. His golden eyes, sharp as honed blades, locked with Apollyon's storm-gray glare. It was not merely defiance, but a piercing certainty, a strength that refused to yield even beneath the suffocating weight of an Emperor's wrath.

"It is His will," Sapphira answered before her husband could speak, her tone a quiet storm that reached every ear in the hall. Her words resonated, cold and immovable as mountain stone. "Asher is His chosen—"

"All His chosen," Apollyon snapped, cutting her off with a yell that rang with centuries of bitterness, "have ended in failure! They have left ruin in their wake, dragging this world to the brink of annihilation!"

He surged to his feet, the sheer force of his rising presence making the air ripple like heat over flame. His voice rose to a furious crescendo. "Even Malrath, feared and mighty, became nothing but a puppet to an Old One! And now you expect us to bow, to believe you have not turned this boy into another puppet, another fraud, deceiving us in the name of the Creator!"

His right arm trembled violently, veins bulging with the weight of his power. His fury coiled like a serpent ready to strike, and though his words dripped venom, behind them lurked fear, the kind only one who had witnessed the great fall could know.

"You think we fear the wrath of His angels?" Apollyon's voice lowered again. His storm-gray eyes narrowed, their fury fixed not on Asher but on Sapphira herself. "If we spill the blood of His chosen with our own hands, then so be it. I cannot fear lies."

"Enough!"

Sapphira's voice boomed like a thousand mountains collapsing into the sea. The floor quaked beneath her, roots splitting further through the stone as if to anchor her presence into the heart of the hall.

Her eyes blazed, not with rage but with authority so absolute that it silenced every breath in the chamber. "I am not yours." She rose slightly from her throne, her emerald hair shimmering like a banner of life and wrath. "I am his."

Her gaze softened as it turned upon Asher, whose stillness amidst the storm was itself a declaration.

Composed, unshaken, his restraint was as frightening as Apollyon's fury, because they both knew; had it not been for the greater purpose that stayed his hand, had it not been for the shadow of the Abyss looming over them all, even the strongest Emperor in that chamber would have been dragged into a gruesome end for the insult hurled at his wife.

"I have no intention of becoming Lord of Tenaria. I can scarcely govern my own kingdom as it is. Rule as you see fit, it will mean little once the abyss swallows us all." Asher's gaze flicked briefly to Apollyon before sweeping over the others gathered.

"There exists a key to the abyssal realm. Rather than wait for the darkness to surge into our world, we shall carry the war into theirs and purge them upon their own soil." His words had barely settled into the hall when Artemis arched a brow.

"A key?" she asked, her voice laced with confusion. Only those touched by the abyss could open rifts to that cursed realm. For how long had there been a key?!

"King Asher retrieved a relic in Eden, a helm once worn by the Warfather Malrath. He has since learned that this helmet is the key itself. By shattering it, he can force open a vast gateway, wide enough for our armies to march into the abyss."

The revelation struck like the clang of a war-bell. To hold such a thing was no different from wielding a weapon capable of ending the world. None among them would have trusted any ruler with such an artifact.

Yet, knowing that the very land was bound to Asher's wife, that wherever he tore open the gateway, she would be the first to bear its scars, settled unease into a guarded calm.

"I understand now why I Am permitted your union," Samson spoke at last, his tone steady, though Geriant lingered in silence, the weight of the news pressing heavily upon him. Was this, then, the reason she refused to return?

"That is not the only truth you must hear," Asher continued, his voice carrying a solemn gravity. "Allow me to summon the Lords of the Spirit."

Even as the words left him, the air within the hall shifted. The walls seemed to bend, the floor to hum with hidden resonance, as if reality itself was being pulled taut. A tether had been forged between the mortal realm and the spirit realm, with Asher himself standing as the anchor of that bridge.