The Weak Prince Is A Cultivation God

The summons of the Council did not surprise Karahad. Nothing did anymore.

He stood at the edge of the Anchor's balcony, a slab of pale stone overlooking the infinite shimmer of the Endless Expanse.

Winds screamed up from the void, carrying scents of ozone and whispers that clawed at the mind. His black cloak did not move — the wards woven into the fabric drank sound, wind, and light alike.

He had been forged for moments like this.

Karahad was not a pillar, nor did he care to be. He lived in the space between the Council's heavy decrees and the world's ignorant chaos.

When the Six needed storms, they summoned Kaelor. When they needed fire, Ishara. When they needed something ended so quietly that not even a death rattle was heard, they summoned him.

He has paid many of the League's debts before, and this time he will pay another.

The name Karahad was never written in ledgers. Never whispered in taverns. To the common kingdoms, he did not exist. And that was precisely how he preferred it.

He closed his eyes, exhaling.

Within him, power thrummed like a submerged tide.

Eighth Circle — Shadow Law.

The world's light bent at his touch, color dulled where he walked, memory itself frayed when his hand lingered too long on the skin of the living.

His spells had no roar. They did not dazzle with grandeur. His art was silence sharpened into inevitability.

The First Breath: — to walk between shadows, crossing space as if the world itself blinked.

The Second Breath: — where blades turned to smoke, spells unraveled, and perception betrayed itself.

The Third Breath: — a whisper to the spirit, the softest severing of threads that bound life to flesh.

These were more than just tools of war. They were tools of erasure. He was not meant to break armies but to make leaders vanish so that armies collapsed themselves.

And now, they wished to send him after a prince.

Lanard Solaris.

The courier's words still rang in Karahad's ears: god of the north… his army grows.

A prince with delusions of divinity. Karahad almost laughed. He had erased kings, bishops, scholars who commanded entire universities of mages — men and women who wielded power that could sunder nations.

None of them had mattered in the end. Why should a fourth-born bastard prince be any different?

And yet…

Karahad had listened carefully to the Council's silence. They feared him. Not the boy himself perhaps, but the momentum building around him.

Armies followed. Kingdoms whispered. Bloodlines trembled. The kind of wave that, left unchecked, might lap against the League's own cliffs in decades to come.

He had heard one detail that gnawed at him, though he had let no sign show: god of the north.

Not a title gave lightly.

Karahad folded the thought into the dark recesses of his mind. He would learn more soon enough.

The League existed to hold horizons steady. To correct calamities before they grew teeth. To bind storms before they ate through kingdoms.

And yet they sent him… after a boy.

Karahad's lips curled, the closest he came to a smile. He could level an entire fortress in a single night and leave nothing behind but doubts and echoes.

And for this mastery, for decades of walking unseen, he was sent after a spoiled royal upstart?

The insult was sharp, though he would never voice it aloud. Not to Drazhar. Not to any of the Six.

Still, he told himself, perhaps there was a lesson hidden. The Council did not waste pieces on trivial games. If they sent him, it meant the prince was more than trivial.

The sky was the color of old iron when Karahad left the Anchor. No procession marked his departure. No banners, no soldiers. Just one shadow peeling away from stone.

His journey began across the Western flats, leagues of salt earth cracked with old drought. He did not take horse nor cart. He walked, and each step covered miles, as if the horizon folded for him alone.

The shadow step stitched distances closed, sewing shadow to shadow until even time itself felt tricked.

Villages drifted past. Men drank in taverns, never noticing the black figure that slipped across their thresholds, listening to the gossip of tongues before vanishing again.

He heard the name "Lanard" more than once. Heard tales of a prince who bled golden fire, who struck down armies with a single swing, who commanded loyalty with presence.

Propaganda, surely. Yet propaganda was dangerous. Nations had toppled for less.

He paused one night on a hill overlooking a burned port town. The ships lay skeletoned in the harbor, masts like broken ribs against the sky. Black smoke still curled, though the fires had long since starved.

The boy had done this.

Karahad touched the air. Ash whispered against his palm, rising as if in greeting. He felt the truth of it — not a battle, not a siege. A slaughter. And it had been quick.

He murmured to himself, a rare thing: "Perhaps you are not so trivial after all."

For ten days he moved like this, stepping from ruin to ruin. The Solaris Kingdom bled in silence, its wounds hidden from neighboring nations only by distance and denial.

The closer he drew to the capital, the thicker the tension became. The air itself seemed sharpened, as though waiting for war to strike the city gates.

Karahad did not hurry. Shadows had patience.

Yet he felt it — the faint tug of inevitability, the thread that bound his work to the Council's decree. He would reach the capital. He would find the prince. He would silence the storm before it reached their shore.

It was only a matter of when.

-----

On the twelfth night, the forests thickened. Black pine, tall and whispering, hemmed in the moonlight. His boots barely bent the undergrowth. He walked as though the forest itself had forgotten him.

And then the silence shifted.

No owl called. No branch cracked. The shadows themselves seemed to coil back from the path ahead.

Karahad stopped. His hand moved beneath his cloak, fingers brushing the runes etched along his belt. Not fear — readiness.

The earth trembled. Just once, as though something vast had stepped into the world.

Two yellow eyes opened in the dark.

They were too high off the ground. Too large. Each pupil a slit the size of a man's head.

The trees bowed aside as the beast came forward. Its fur shimmered with silver, each strand bending light wrong, as though the forest struggled to decide whether it existed. Its fangs dripped a pale glow — venom, humming with mana.

An A-rank mana beast.

Karahad's lips curved faintly again. "So. The Council was right. The West burns too brightly."

The beast growled, low and thunderous, shaking the needles from the trees. The sound pressed against the air, rattling even his wards.

Karahad let his shadow stretch. Darkness bled outward from his feet, pooling like ink, swallowing root and soil. His eyes did not waver from the beast's.

"Very well," he murmured. "Let us test whether you are as strong as the expanse beasts… or merely meat."

The forest shuddered as shadow and beast lunged into each other.