Chapter 443: Chapter443-Project Hope
"Why is there another portal here—and it leads to the past, too?"
Daniel’s eyelids twitched, the corner of his mouth tugging as if in a half-grimace, half-smile. The surprise lasted only a heartbeat.
After a brief spell of thought, he stepped forward without hesitation and went in.
When Daniel’s vision cleared again, he found himself in an even more ancient age.
He was still within the grounds of the old castle—only older, broader, stranger, as if time itself had peeled back a layer.
Standing before him was a demigod he did not recognize.
Daniel, by sheer habit, activated Eye of Insight to read the figure’s details.
[Lori][Level: 400][Talent: Conservation]
The instant Lori saw Daniel appear, his face lit with fervent excitement. His fingers tightened around the gem-set wand he carried, knuckles whitening.
"You’ve truly appeared—Great Lord Crossbridge!" he blurted out, voice trembling. "I have obeyed my father’s command and come to challenge you."
"I am now the strongest demigod among humankind. If I can defeat you, I will gain the potential to ascend and become a god."
Daniel looked at him calmly, gaze level and cool.
"You wish to challenge me? I’m not sure I have the time for that right now," he said evenly. "So—goodbye."
He raised his hand. A bolt of lightning came down like judgment from a clear sky and struck Lori where he stood.
To be blunt, the demigods of this era were shockingly weak.
Perhaps Lori possessed some special quality, some quirk of talent, but to Daniel he was fragile and incomplete.
Compared to Aurelia and the others of the same notional level, they simply were not on the same tier at all.
Lori’s body charred instantly under the thunderbolt, and his HP bar dropped to zero in a blink.
"Challenge over. You lost," Daniel stated, almost perfunctory. Then, with an absent flick of his fingers, he cast Resurrection and brought Lori back.
When Lori revived, his face remained locked in a mask of disbelief, his eyes wide and empty of comprehension.
"So," Daniel asked, tone still mild, "why did you come here to challenge me?"
He extended his mind power, threading it into Lori’s consciousness.
A strong intuition told him that Lori’s appearance here had to mean something; there was a reason behind this encounter.
Under the soft pressure of Psychic Perception, he laid a subtle suggestion in the man’s heart—tell me everything.
Lori answered without resistance, words tumbling out:
"According to the legends of our family, once someone becomes the strongest demigod among humans, they must come to this place. If they can defeat the powerful being who emerges from the portal, they will gain the potential to become a god."
"So I... I came to challenge you—to see whether I possess the potential to ascend."
Daniel listened and simultaneously probed deeper with Psychic Perception. When he confirmed Lori was telling the truth, a faint melancholy stirred in him.
He had never imagined that one day he would become someone else’s trial—an ordeal preserved in the lore of lineages, enshrined in family instruction.
Yet... were his challengers not a bit too weak?
"Can you tell me how your family learned of my existence?" he asked, continuing to listen beneath the surface of Lori’s thoughts.
This time, he found nothing useful—no image, no thread, only mist and half-remembered tales.
The portal had existed too long; all that remained across the various families was legend, the empty shell of a memory.
Realizing he could learn nothing more from Lori, Daniel shifted his focus to the other portal nearby.
He was curious—what exactly was this Circle of Destiny? What message did it intend to deliver to him?
And the portal he sensed just beyond—it still led to the past.
Should I keep going? he wondered.
At that moment, Lori’s presence before him triggered a flash of insight.
Daniel halted, his gaze returning to the demigod at his side.
Then, without another word, he activated Flashback and left the scene.
His figure reappeared upon a wild, windswept plain.
"So this is twenty thousand years ago?"
Drawing on knowledge he had obtained long ago from the Imperial Library, Daniel placed the era at once.
The entire Land of Origin spread out around him—vital, exuberant, overflowing with life.
To his surprise, the Land of Origin in this age was far vaster than it would be in the era of the old castle.
What happened? he thought. What force caused the Land of Origin to keep shrinking?
He split off clones, sending them in all directions to reconnoiter.
In this epoch, not even Aurelia and her peers had yet been born.
As for Kartora—she was always an exception to every rule. Whether she had come here or not, Daniel could not say with certainty.
By ordinary reasoning, she should have passed through—these portals felt like the fingerprints of her interventions, as if each doorway was an imprint she had left upon the current of history.
He steadied his thoughts and opened several conduits to his Mental World.
He wanted his people—the human race—to see this world with their own eyes.
At the same time, he set Mental Deduction turning, letting its vast engines run across the surface of this era.
Under normal circumstances, a demigod’s lifespan stretched to fifty thousand years.
By that measure, Lori living until Daniel’s age should not have been difficult.
Twenty thousand years was little more than a long vigil to such beings.
Then another thought surfaced—fatalism.
In principle, whatever he did in this era would be "already written," reasonable within the weave of causality, and it would generate no paradox, no rippling change to the future he knew.
Land of Origin (Mental World).
Daniel shared his perception with all of humankind.
He let them see this ancient time through his own senses—the light, the breadth, the untamed splendor.
As he ranged across the land, he marked several Sites of Inheritance, places where one could obtain a divine seat.
The images he released onto the communication network detonated like a meteorite striking the sea—shockwaves spreading in every direction.
"His Majesty Daniel... is he leading us back to the distant age?"
"So the ancient era truly looked like this—unbelievable!"
"Time travel—so it really exists! I think I finally understand how His Majesty was able to shatter the underground labyrinth records worldwide in such a short span."
"If anyone else told me this was twenty thousand years ago, I wouldn’t believe it. But this is His Majesty Daniel!"
"If His Majesty says it, then it’s true. I’ll stake my life on it!"
"So His Majesty, the Human Emperor, is already in the world from twenty thousand years past?"
Daniel had wrought too many miracles for doubt to root.
Even Dark Star Jarvan had now slipped free of the Origin Plane’s constraints—though for the present, Jarvan still could not leave the Mental World.
In the distant past, the entity called Dark Star Jarvan already existed; two instances of the same star-being could not meet without risk.
Human awakeners peered through Daniel’s shared perception at the world of two millennia past, breath catching in their throats.
"So... in these ruins, it’s really possible to inherit a divine seat?"
Daniel, meanwhile, continued his survey.
The Land of Origin here stretched beyond the far horizon, coastlines bulging where in his future they would be sheer and broken.
Mountain ranges rose with untouched symmetry, their ley-lines singing with new power.
Rivers braided into one another, broad and slow, as if the world had not yet taught them to rush.
He sent a clone to the northern reaches, where he sensed a great confluence of wind—an echo of a future he knew too well.
Another clone strode into an inland basin where the soil breathed like a living beast.
A third threaded the labyrinth of towering stone arches that would, long from now, collapse into the scattered ridges he had already traversed in his own time.
Everything felt unspent.
The land seemed to be in the prime of its life, as if the era of ruin and compression had never been conceived.
He paused and listened—truly listened—to the currents beneath the world.
Mental Deduction sketched out possibilities in the back of his mind: the slow erosion of boundaries, the encroaching bite of other planes, the teeth of the Storm Sea worrying at the continent’s edges.
It was not a single cataclysm that shrank the Land of Origin, but a long aggregation of losses—storms, migrations, invasions by ancient systems that never should have touched this place.
He marked more sites for his people: a ring of obsidian pillars around a sunken dais; a glassy crater where the air rippled with silent hymns; a cathedral of petrified roots spiraling around a shard of night-black crystal.
Each, according to Myriad Worlds Mastery, was a locus where a fragment of godhood could be received—assuming the aspirant could endure the trial.
Messages flashed across the network in his Mental World:
"Tagging the coordinates. We’ll organize teams."
"Requesting clearance to approach the obsidian circle—readings show high risk."
"His Majesty has opened another channel—look at that valley, the sky itself is singing!"
"Confirmed: multiple inheritance points. Verifying which require Demigod Rank and which are accessible to high-tier awakeners."
"Someone pinch me. We’re really seeing twenty thousand years ago..."
Daniel let the tide of voices wash past him. Even Project Hope needed awe as fuel.
He bent his thoughts back to Lori. If the family legend proved anything, it was that a structure had been laid—long ago, by someone or by something—that used "Crossbridge" as a whetstone.
Perhaps Kartora’s intention had never been to crush him with paradox but to lace the time-stream with tests, with opportunities.
A door to the past.
A challenger at each station.
A promise: defeat the guardian and you earn the right to seek godhood.
He looked down at his hands."Am I the guardian—or the lure?" he murmured.
The wind stilled for an instant, as if the age itself was listening.
He re-opened the conduit to his Mental World, pinned his latest discoveries to the shared map, and released a concise directive:
PROJECT HOPE — STAGE I
Survey marked inheritance sites.
Establish safe approach corridors.
Record all trial-type indicators; do not trigger trials prematurely.
Prioritize research squads with high mental resilience.
Maintain non-interference with local causality when outside secured perimeters.
He closed the channel and exhaled.
"Demigods live for fifty thousand years," he reminded himself. "Lori could have survived until my era. By that measure, my actions now are already part of the weave."
Fatalism pressed at the edges of his mind like a black tide. He had brushed its walls too many times to pretend it didn’t exist.
The more he struggled against it, the more he felt how much had already been decided.
And yet he refused to surrender to it entirely.
If fate was a wall, then he would learn its seams. If destiny was a script, then he would find the margin and write notes between the lines.
He turned, scanning the plain again, and felt the faintest residue of another will—cool, meticulous, needle-fine.
Kartora.A signature like the glint of a scalpel, cutting along time’s ligaments, never quite making a wound.
"Are you showing me the path," Daniel asked the empty air, "or warning me not to take it?"
No answer came. Only the tall grass swayed, their seedheads flashing like little knives in the sun.
He shook himself free of the reverie and pushed forward.
At the rim of a shallow valley, he found a glyph cut into the bedrock—one he had seen in a dozen scattered eras, always with the same geometry, always at the threshold of a trial.
He traced it with a knuckle, and his mind filled with a familiar chorus:
[Choice Implies Cost]
[Potential Requires Witness]
[Inheritance Demands Proof]
He smiled without humor. "All right. Then let’s pay the price, call the witness, and offer the proof—on our terms."
He snapped a marker to the glyph’s location and opened a narrow sightline to his people. Across the network, responses bloomed:
"Received. We’ll deploy a scout pair in forty minutes."
"Psychic dampers prepped. Bringing anti-storm talismans—just in case."
"Requesting permission to bring a junior demigod for resonance checks."
"Approved," Daniel replied. "No trial triggers. Observation only."
In the silence that followed, he let himself look once more at the Land of Origin as it had been: full, brilliant, impossibly wide.
He imagined the centuries chewing at its edges, the Storm Sea’s claws, the slow gravity of other planes.
He imagined his people walking these meadows again, not as refugees of destiny but as authors of their own Chapter.
He closed his eyes.
Project Hope wasn’t a slogan; it was a scaffold across time, a way to ferry strength from an age that could still spare it to an age that desperately needed it.
He opened his eyes.
Far away, another portal whispered into being, a thin scythe of light against the blue. He did not step through—not yet.
Instead, he mapped it, marked it, and walked on, letting his clones carry word to every corner of this young world.
Behind him, in the Mental World, the chatter rose again:
"If those ruins really hold divine seats..."
"...then this is the turning point."
"For the first time, ascension might be a process, not a miracle."
"His Majesty is charting a curriculum for godhood."
Daniel allowed himself the smallest nod.
"Not a miracle," he whispered to the bright, unspent air. "A plan."
And the Land of Origin, twenty thousand years young, kept breathing—vast and unafraid—while a man from the future walked its grass and drew a blueprint called Hope.