Seed of the Sovereign

"Welcome sweet nephew, to my personal unregistered demon realm Node." Luke said while bowing elegantly.

"What!?" Luke shouted sitting up.

"Now, now, nephew. Calm down and listen. I've brought you here and even built my beautiful home on it, so of course it's safe."

Leon said confidently. But then deflated the next second. "Well, safe as can be except for unforeseen circumstances." And continued confidently again. " But those are like one in a million. What's the chance something like that happens here huh?"

Still, his words didn't assuage Luke's worries very much and rightfully so.

A few thousand years, ago, the people of Latiara didn't know anything about other worlds or planes.

Until suddenly, one day, mysterious rifts in space began to tear open in different random places and out of those planes otherworldly creatures stepped into the world.

The inhabitants of Latiara were rightly unprepared and they hesitated on how to deal with this matters until they were struck by the invaders. Still, deciding not to attack in the dark and without information, they tried for a negotiation but it fell and the enemies continued attacking, taking a lot of lives in the process.

The world immediately made to defend and fight back but Latiara was much more divided at the time and unprepared as they were, they couldn't even launch an attack and their defenses failed time and time again as they were oppressed by the invaders.

Still, in the face of what came to be an extinction level danger, humanity adapted fast. They collected data speedily, recognized patterns and learnt the mode of operations and limitations of the invaders and they used that.

They couldn't match the the strength and raw numbers of the invaders — especially not divided — but they could hinder them in other ways.

Eventually, at the cost of many lives, sacrifices and concessions, humanity began to consolidate their power eventually forming into three continental powers able to hold their own against the invasion. While the final say for the actions of all of humanity was determined by the three overlords, each ruling over a continent.

But while in the process of this consolidation, it was humanity's adaptability and crazy learning speed that kept them from extinction.

And one of the major game changers that salvaged humanity was the understanding about the space nodes and how it worked.

Space nodes were the rifts torn in space that connected Latiara with the world of the invading species. At first humanity hadn't been able to discern anything from them. They seemingly just randomly manifested in different parts of the world. Though they were very few in number, their randomness caused great losses to humanity.

But then, humans started learning more about the invading species and their patterns — and they found that they weren't being invaded by one world but two different worlds. Two different species were racing to conquer their land.

But with this discovery, the veil of confusion and seeming randomness was removed. Humans began to understand why each species moved the way they moved.

They started learning the characteristics of each species and eventually, they learnt about the differences in the the space nodes that brought them over.

But even more importantly, humanity learnt about the space anchors. The state of destabilisation was inherently a disorder in the world, so if left to it self, space nodes would eventually close, although slowly. Space anchors changed that.

They were magical constructs that the demon used to keep the destabilisation stable. Space anchors could also be used to increase the range of an opened space node, some the oldest space nodes—the centers of the battlefields we're already as large as countries.

But strengthening space nodes were useful for one more thing. The stronger the space node, the less restrictions were laid on the traversal of beings from worlds.

This simply meant that the stronger the node, the stronger the invaders that could come through it.

When humanity learnt about the space anchors and their uses, they immediately focused on discovering the space anchors the enemies had planted in their land and uproot it.

But the invaders didn't just stand to watch.

So the war gradually evolved to be all about planting, counter planting and taking down space anchors.

With all this information and the more that was learnt during the "Age of Merging" as it was called, humans discovered that the space nodes weren't so random.

They were simply weak points in space where two worlds could be bridged under different circumstances. Using this information, it was then easy for humans to reverse engineer the formation of space nodes, causing them to be able to defend against it and finally, even be able to predict it's formation.

Now, most space nodes were under strict military surveillance and were the battlefield of the invasion and counter invasion of worlds.

But even with all of Latiara's massive advancements in the usage of aether and the understanding of space nodes, they still couldn't overcome the last gap of complete randomness in the formation of nodes, and so, sometimes space nodes formed that they couldn't predict beforehand.

Still, as long as they were close to human settlements, there were stopgaps and measures to have them under control and contact the military immediately.

As for those like this one that spontaneously formed far away from human settlements....

There was really nothing the council could do about them.

Luke's eyes darted anxiously to the window, looking out for the savages of the demon realm.

But the sight he saw beyond the window left him floored, his jaw slacking in shock.

The land a kilometer from his room was a plain of hard ice and from that plane came up large spikes of ice of different sizes.

Each of this spike held up a different demon specimen according to their sizes. From demons as short as his kneecaps to demons as big as his former mansion.

They were all pierced through, left as ornaments for his uncle and a warning to the demons. Luke couldn't even imagine the level of power needed to do this.

He'd heard of the power of top experts, but this was his first time seeing something close to that for himself.

Leon came over to look through the window as well.

Beautiful isn't it?"