"I think I might've analyzed this wrong..."
Rosen was pondering how to deal with the Black Iron artificial humans when he suddenly considered another possibility.
This true Black Iron Royal City hidden in a pocket dimension, from his observations, housed roughly a hundred million Black Iron artificial humans.
Such an army, growing stronger the more it fed during wartime, could easily produce tens of millions of Sequence 1s.
That would indeed be terrifying—but also a surefire way to become a common enemy of every kingdom and empire.
Mass-produced Sequence 1s were just cheap knockoffs. Against great True Gods, they'd be wiped out eventually.
So it didn't make sense for the royal family to have spent 23,000 years stockpiling so many Black Iron artificial humans just to use them as disposable battlefield fodder. These beings must have had some other purpose.
Since a batch of artificial humans had gone missing from the nursery, the outer Black Iron Royal City had already gone into lockdown.
The royal guards were combing the city, and even two princes had come personally to search for the infiltrator.
If Rosen could capture one of the princes alive, he might uncover valuable information.
...
Second Prince Frein was walking through the nursery, using a True God-level temporal rewind spell to cover the entire facility.
But the results were disappointing. The infiltrator hadn't left a single trace.
The only deduction they could make was that the intruder had come through the spatial gate in the outer city, sneaking in with the Black Iron semifinished products, and perfectly avoided all security measures until they reached the nursery and captured some of the artificial humans.
It likely wasn't the work of a neighboring kingdom—most of them had already been conquered recently.
Only the Holy Grail Kingdom remained. That terrifying Holy Grail King had finally set his eyes on the Black Iron Kingdom.
But the Black Iron Kingdom was no ordinary kingdom. The monster sitting on the throne was no longer their father. And yet, they had no power to resist it. Maybe the Holy Grail King could help them destroy that monster.
"If you can hear me, I think we should talk."
Second Prince Frein dismissed all the Black Iron artificial humans, then quietly whispered throughout the nursery.
Rosen, listening from the other side of the World Window, was just about to act when he changed his mind.
Using the Virtual Eye technique in his left eye, he locked onto the prince outside and began forcefully pulling a sliver of the prince's divine consciousness into the virtual world.
Prince Frein instinctively tried to resist, but at the last moment, he cooperated and allowed a thread of divine consciousness to be pulled away.
As long as it wasn't his entire divine mind, losing a sliver wouldn't cause any serious damage.
Inside the virtual world, Rosen constructed a Holy Grail Castle and sat on the throne, watching as Second Prince Frein appeared in the hall.
"Second Prince Frein of the Black Iron Kingdom, it is an honor to meet the great Holy Grail King."
Frein lowered his stance and offered a respectful greeting.
"You know your father is no longer the one on that throne?" Rosen asked, slightly surprised.
"Nothing escapes your eyes... I wish to ask your help to kill that monster..."
As he spoke, Frein clenched his teeth, and his deep, seething hatred finally spilled out.
Perhaps realizing this was the opportunity he had waited 23,000 years for, Frein told Rosen everything he knew.
In the beginning, the Black Iron Kingdom hadn't been like this at all.
Although they also used the corpses of Beyonders to forge black iron, they never went so far as to treat ordinary people like livestock.
Until one day, Frein and one of his brothers, along with two sisters, noticed that their father was acting more and more abnormally. But back then, they never considered the possibility that the Black Iron King had been replaced—after all, if anything happened to the king, the first thing to be shaken would be the Flame of Civilization.
By the time they were sure something was wrong, they had already arrived on the Continent of Kings.
During the war, they discovered that the Black Iron King had been replaced by a monster.
They tried to resist—or at least escape.
But forget resisting—even escape was impossible. They were captured alive by the Black Iron King.
He even implanted unknown control mechanisms into the very essence of their divinity, forcing them to obediently carry out all the commands the Black Iron King left behind before falling into slumber. If it weren't for the techniques they had developed over the years to suppress this control, they wouldn't even be able to leak secrets about the Black Iron King.
As for the true purpose of the black iron automatons—it was indeed not to be soldiers.
But to raise them like livestock.
Newly born black iron automatons were low-level, and by feeding them human "fodder," they could grow rapidly. Once they reached Sequence 1 in extraordinary rank, they would be slaughtered to harvest high-quality black iron.
All of this high-quality black iron was then used as fuel for the Flame of Civilization.
Rosen anchored a spatial marker on Frein and followed him to witness the Black Iron Kingdom's Flame of Civilization.
A pure black Flame of Civilization, constantly burning black iron.
This wasn't a pure Flame of Civilization. Even through the Window of the World, Rosen's Miracle Flame was greedily yearning to devour this several-meter-high Flame of Civilization. But before he could understand its nature, he wasn't about to let his Miracle Flame randomly consume things.
Frein threw a large amount of black iron into it, then used a bottle forged from black iron to collect a small portion of the Flame of Civilization.
That tiny flame would later be combined with certain special materials to form the unique fire used to forge black iron semi-finished products. Because it was a consumable, it needed to be collected and replenished constantly. However, this time, Rosen planned to keep a portion for his own research.
Holding a flame the size of a soybean in his hand, Rosen immediately began carefully studying it.
With the help of his Miracle Flame and Omniscient Magic Eye, the research process was surprisingly smooth and easy.
Only then did Rosen realize he had misjudged everything from the start.
Black iron, silver, and gold—these likely weren't just references to metals.
These three terms often referred to civilizations themselves.
The Black Iron Civilization, the Silver Civilization, and the Golden Civilization—different eras of the same civilization could be described using these terms. Of course, ordinary civilizations weren't qualified to be categorized this way. Only those of at least the Fifth Calamity level and above could segment their eras like that.
Rosen had encountered many Flames of Civilization, and their quality varied drastically depending on the civilization.
Take the angelic civilization of Paradise Mountain—it had existed for tens of thousands of years. Yet even when the World Government had just been founded, its Flame of Civilization already far surpassed the angelic civilization. That was because the World Government was the current dominant civilization.
However, even among dominant civilizations, the World Government's Flame of Civilization wasn't even qualified to carry the shoes of the Flame from the Ancient God Civilization.
Because the Ancient God Civilization was a Tenth Calamity civilization, while the World Government was merely a Second Calamity civilization.
If there was such a gap between dominant civilizations, how much more so between mere human kingdoms?
And yet the Black Iron Kingdom, through some unknown means, had turned black iron—the core of its civilization—into fuel. Gradually, its Flame of Civilization acquired special black iron traits. That level of evolution was something only Fifth Calamity-level dominant civilizations could hope to attain.
If, one day, the Black Iron, Silver, and Gold Kingdoms were to merge into an empire…
And if the Flames of Civilization containing three distinct civilizational characteristics fused together, the resulting Flame of Civilization might undergo an evolution beyond imagination.
Of course, this was just an analysis. For Rosen, the Black Iron Flame of Civilization was extremely suitable nourishment for the Eternal Flame Core.
The Miracle Flame was, after all, the seed of the Eternal Flame Core, and it currently needed other Flames of Civilization to repair itself.
Ordinary Flames of Civilization might have quantity, but lacked the quality to be of true use. But if the Flames of the Black Iron, Silver, and Gold Kingdoms could be fused into one, it might significantly accelerate the healing of the Eternal Flame Core.
One must give to gain. Rosen took out a flame formed from the source of the Eternal Flame Core.Then, relying on the Eternal Root, he transformed this flame into a seed.
In the end, he handed the seed to Frein, instructing him to secretly mix it into the black iron fuel of the Black Iron Civilization's Flame of Civilization.
At the same time, Rosen's other two Eternal Avatars had already infiltrated the Silver Kingdom and the Gold Kingdom.
As expected, the three kingdoms were more or less the same. In the Silver Kingdom, he stirred up some trouble and then turned a prince to his side.
But in the Gold Kingdom, the investigating prince actually refused.Even though he clearly knew the king was a fake, and didn't appear to be particularly loyal, it turned out that the prince had such a terrible relationship with his father that he didn't even want to avenge him, nor did he wish to take this opportunity to set things right.
Fortunately, Rosen already knew the secret hidden behind it all, so with the help of the Mysterious Study Room, he located the fuel storage site.
Although things weren't as smooth as the previous two, in the end, nothing went wrong.
In the blink of an eye, half a month passed, and the seed planted in the Gold Kingdom's fuel was finally burned.
At this point, all three seeds had already merged into the Flames of Civilization.
The Eternal Flame Core was the source of all Flames of Civilization. Its voluntary integration into the three civilizations' Flames of Civilization wasn't met with any rejection.
However, the power of the Eternal Root activated slowly out of caution—not wanting to awaken the three kings.
Still, a few months later, the Flames of Civilization of the three kingdoms began to take root, sprout, blossom, and bear fruit.
The Black Iron Civilization's Flame of Civilization sprouted and produced two fruits.
The first contained the origin of the Flame of Civilization, while the second was a special piece of black iron shaped like an apple.
Since both fruits originated from the Eternal Root, Rosen used the Root's source seed to directly harvest all the fruits across space.
At the same time, the four fruits grown from the Flames of Civilization of the Silver and Gold Kingdoms were also harvested.
Rosen casually tossed the three origin fruits into the Miracle Flame, then picked up the three apple-shaped pieces of black iron, silver, and gold. These three metals had reached the quality of a Great True God and could be used to forge three extraordinary items of that same level.
But that was something to consider later—because the Flames of Civilization had been stolen, the three kings had already begun to awaken.
Having lost their Flames of Civilization, the three kings suffered a backlash.
Without the national fortune generated by the Flames of Civilization, and with the fact that none of the kings were popular with the people—two of them even facing uprisings led by princes—they could barely draw on external power through their kingly Sequences.
The Black Iron King and the Silver King, after awakening, were at most at True God level.
Only the Gold Kingdom, which hadn't experienced internal rebellion, had a king who could barely maintain the strength of a Great True God upon awakening.
Rosen left the Black Iron and Silver Kings to be dealt with by a few of his avatars.
As for the Gold King, his true body entered the battlefield with the full force of the Mysterious Study Room.
Unlike the Black Iron Kingdom, which developed steam technology, the Gold Kingdom specialized in creating golden divine artifacts.
These were a special kind of extraordinary item—crafted from a fusion of gold and the corpses of Beyonders—allowing them to inherit part of a Beyonder's power and even devour similar golden divine artifacts to grow stronger.
The highest-tier golden divine artifacts of the entire Gold Kingdom were the Golden King's Golden Throne and the Golden Archer's Sacred Armor, which came with its own weapons.
The Golden King lay in slumber inside a golden coffin reshaped from the Golden Archer's Sacred Armor. Ancient godly shackles wrapped around the coffin, with a golden divine ox pulling it from the front and a miracle stone golem pushing it from behind. At last, they managed to push the coffin through the Interplanar Gate before the king fully awakened.
The moment the Interplanar Gate closed, the Mysterious Study Room was sealed off both inside and out.
As the golden coffin reshaped and reassembled, the repeatedly triggered Golden King finally woke up.
The Sacred Armor turned into full-body armor, and the Golden King instinctively tried to create distance.
However, the Mysterious Study Room wasn't that big, and under suppression from the Immortal World, even establishing a domain to gain distance was impossible. Helpless, the Golden King could only draw his bow and attempt to kill Rosen within the limited space.
Fearing the Golden King's terrifying power, Rosen had preserved the Study Room's restroom this time.
He teleported to the restroom and shut the door, letting the golden arrows wreak havoc on the Mysterious Study Room.
But the Study Room remained unscathed. The power accumulated in the golden arrows slammed into the door, and the resulting damage rebounded throughout the room, reflecting back at the Golden King. As a result, he had to constantly dissipate his own unleashed power.
Meanwhile, Rosen had already exited the Study Room and appeared in the Silver Kingdom.
Things had gone very smoothly in the Black Iron Kingdom—the king had already been dragged into the battle chessboard before awakening.
At first, this thing was thought to be a miraculous treasure—no one expected it to be an even rarer Miracle World.
Although it couldn't compare to the Mysterious Study Room, it was more than enough to trap the Black Iron King, whose power had fallen back to the level of a True God.
The real trouble was the Silver King, who had been pulled into the True Realm of the Ancient Gods.
However, at the final moment, the Silver King actually awakened early.
Black Iron corresponded to Black Iron Steam, Gold to Golden Relics, and as for Silver—it corresponded to Silver Relics.
Silver Relics, like Golden Relics, were a special type of extraordinary wondrous item. But while Golden Relics were better at enhancing offense and defense, Silver Relics excelled in strengthening and protecting one's divine origin. As a result, the divine consciousness of the Silver King awakened much faster.
And that's when the real problem arose: the shared divine consciousness of the three Kings pointed to the game's GM.
Even if they were weakened to the level of a True God, with control over the game's permissions, there was still a chance to turn the tables.
So, Rosen's true body immediately arrived at the Silver King City through the Interworld Gate. Seeing that the Silver King had no physical body left, only his divine soul, Rosen didn't hesitate—he unfolded the miracle painting Terrifying Paradise, and activated Descent of the Painted Realm to merge it into his own Law Domain.
The game rules of the King's Game were extremely powerful. Back in the Sky Kingdom, even Rosen had been unable to resist them effectively.
But game rules weren't something that could be used casually—otherwise, the Sky King could've just wiped him out using them from the start.
Clearly, even though they had obtained part of the game's permissions, it was only surface-level, not the foundational permissions.
Although Terrifying Paradise was only at the level of a True God, it contained countless eerie scenarios and mysterious rules shaped by painters through those scenes. As the master of Terrifying Paradise, Rosen fused all the mysterious rules and created its core rule:
Without his permission, Terrifying Paradise was a one-way door—entry allowed, exit forbidden.
There were only three ways to leave Terrifying Paradise:
Rosen voluntarily lets someone out,
Use overwhelming power to break through the mysterious rules and force an escape,
Follow the rules and fulfill the conditions to leave—because all mysterious rules had to leave a sliver of hope.
The sliver of hope in Terrifying Paradise was to consecutively clear nine mysterious dreamscapes.
The rules of Terrifying Paradise were unique. The smaller the path of survival, the lower the relative danger of the mysterious rules.
The larger the path of survival, the more dangerous the mysterious rules became.
To enhance its power to trap enemies, Rosen had deliberately left the path of survival very wide.
But that led to a problem: weak enemies could be trapped easily without even needing the mysterious rules.
Strong enemies, once caught in Terrifying Paradise, were unlikely to obediently play along with the horror-game-like scenarios. So even though the way out was right in front of them and relatively easy to take, the stronger the enemy, the less likely they were to follow the rules to get out.
And once a certain amount of time passed without escape, the second layer of the mysterious rules would activate:
The terrifying assimilation ability. The longer an intruder stayed in Terrifying Paradise, the more they would gradually assimilate with it. Once the assimilation was complete, they would become a part of Terrifying Paradise and never be able to leave.
Rosen retracted Terrifying Paradise and trapped the Silver King inside the painting.
Only then did he return to the Mysterious Study Room with the painting in hand to deal with the Golden King.
Just like when he had trapped and slain the Chess King, the Golden King was gradually boiled alive like a frog in warming water. The Mysterious Study Room's accumulating attacks pierced through the terrifying defenses of the Golden Archer's Sacred Armor little by little, until the King was finally decapitated by the Imperial Holy Sword and had his sea of consciousness shattered, his godhood suppressed.
At this point, the Silver King was also trapped within Terrifying Paradise, and it was only a matter of time before full assimilation occurred.
Only then did Rosen rush to the Black Iron Kingdom, where several of his clones had already teamed up inside the Chessboard Realm to subdue the Black Iron King.
With all three Kings captured alive, Rosen simply fused the Black Iron King and the Golden King into Terrifying Paradise as well.
Because while assimilating the Silver King, he had discovered that the game permissions the Silver King held were also being gradually assimilated by Terrifying Paradise. This was because the mysterious rules of Terrifying Paradise had also been fused with the Eternal Compatibility Source and the Eternal Game Source.
The Eternal Sources that Rosen had once controlled in his Eternal Godhood were gone—because they couldn't threaten the Eternal Root Seed.
But that didn't mean those Eternal Sources had left no traces. Whether it was the Root Ancestor Tree or various artifacts he had obtained, they all retained bits and pieces of Eternal Source. That was why Terrifying Paradise could be compatible with and fuse the game permissions the Silver King had held.
The Eternal Game Source was fine—after all, the source seed was still unclaimed, so there was no immediate danger.
But the Eternal Compatibility Source would eventually have to be stripped from Terrifying Paradise, or it might one day be seized by the World Tree and used to wrest away control.
As the three Kings were gradually assimilated by Terrifying Paradise, their game permissions fused with the Eternal Game Source, and unexpectedly, a new mysterious dreamscape formed within Terrifying Paradise—a place called Civilization Game.
Through this dreamscape, Rosen could now gain limited access to the game permissions of the King's Game.
(End of Chapter)