Chapter 1284 – A Queen’s Guards

Within a large morphic pool, the True Royal sat in meditation as seven large eggs were placed around her, all of them slightly poking out of the pool as energy emanated from each.

Just outside the pool stood a gathering of over a dozen gods of the Endless Empire, several of them True Royals, but the majority were Hive Queen goddesses of the Vespernat Lineage, there to observe and admire their leader as she underwent an important ritual.

Some of the True Royals looked a bit nervous and skeptical, though, as one of them spoke up. “Seven is… too many, isn’t it?”

“It’s more than I would dare recommend,” Odonestra sighed. Should Vesperia fail in her current endeavor, she was bound to suffer a severe soul injury that would take at least a few decades to heal, and that was with treasures provided by the Endless Empire to speed up the process.

“Do not doubt Her Majesty,” a Godqueen from the Vespernat Lineage said, arms crossed as she seemed to have full confidence in her True Royal. Perhaps more than confidence, she merely hoped for Vesperia’s success, as the more capable the True Royal proved herself to be, the better it was for the Vespernat Lineage.

As for what Vesperia was currently doing?

Laying the foundation for future assets that would serve her all the way to godhood and beyond.

After evolving to B-grade, Vesperia’s ability to nurture her Queen’s Guard had increased substantially, allowing her to display another aspect of what made True Royals so frightening.

Ectognamorph Hive Queens had several tiers of creatures in their eusocial colonies, ranging from mere workers and drones to the Hive Queen herself. Just under the Hive Queen were the Queen’s Guards, who were meant to ensure the safety of their Hive Queen.

For many Lineages, these Queen’s Guards were stronger combatants than even the Hive Queen herself, especially when they were all working together. Vesperia also had Queen’s Guards while in C-grade, and they had been her strongest creations by far, but they had still been very limited.

Their main problem was that they weren’t truly sapient. They were close, incredibly close, but they didn’t quite reach that level. Due to their limited faculties, they needed all their power to be directly granted by the Hive Queen herself, limiting them in both variety and power.

In B-grade, that changed, at least for True Royals. They gained the ability to create their true Queen’s Guards. Rather than being mere top-tier versions of drones, they became something fundamentally different. Something far more real.

They became truly sapient creatures, with independent thoughts and feelings, not much different from Guardians summoned by some people in the multiverse. Their existence remained tied to their Hive Queen, yes, and loyalty was not something they even had the capabilities to question, but compared to being drones, they were definitely something entirely else.

Perhaps most importantly, due to their independence in thought and actions, they no longer needed to be granted all their power directly by their Hive Queen. Sure, they were granted power by her, but they were capable of diversifying themselves after creation.

Most often, they would end up specializing in various ways. Some could become stronger warriors, relying on physical combat, while others could develop their skills in magic, becoming mages. Others would pick up other weapons, including those made by enlightened species, with very rare occasions even having Queen’s Guards adopting high-level technology into their Paths.

And that was honestly the key word: Paths. Unlike other creations from a Hive Queen, her guards had the ability to forge their own Paths, comprehend their own concepts, develop their own fighting styles, and even get their own skills and whatnot. There were even cases where Queen’s Guards proved to be extremely talented, reaching impressive levels of power and actually getting bottlenecked by their True Royal queen. Because in the end, they were still her spawn.

These Queen’s Guards would all be created at once and stick by their Hive Queen for the rest of their existence, living and dying together. Though, should a Queen’s Guard die, the True Royal Hive Queen could regenerate them once more. At a relatively steep cost, due to the complexity of the Queen’s Guard, though.

The process of creating them was exactly this ritual, which had been passed down since the very first generation of True Royals. The seven eggs Vesperia used were the vessels for her Queen’s Guards and had been carefully created by the Endless Empire precisely for an event like this. Vesperia could have made the eggs herself, even though it would have taken a long time, but it wasn’t a requirement. She technically didn’t need the morphic pool either; it just made the process smoother and easier all around.

Something all the True Royals observing her believed she truly needed.

“I am not doubting her talent, just that I’m not sure this is the time to test one’s boundaries,” another True Royal sighed, shaking her head. “In the unfortunate event she experiences failure, I fear it may leave a lasting impression, negatively affecting her confidence and future.”

“She has the right to try,” Odonestra simply said, not arguing for or against, as she, in truth, was also doubtful Vesperia would succeed.

There was no inherent limit to how many Queen’s Guards a True Royal could create. The more the better, naturally, but the Hive Queen herself did serve as a limiting factor for how many she was capable of creating.

In many ways, this ritual was also seen as a way to determine potential and talent among True Royal Hive Queens. All of them were naturally supremely talented simply on account of their Lineage, but there was still a difference in talent between them.

The more Queen’s Guards a True Royal could create, the better their potential, at least that was the general rule. For the vast majority, they could create four, with no one falling below this number, as they were all supremely talented by general multiversal standards. This was true for in excess of nine out of ten, and not because these True Royals didn’t try to make more.

By nature, True Royals were arrogant creatures, so many believed themselves far more capable than they actually were. Hence, many tried to create more Queen’s Guards than they could, failing in the process and thus forced to take a step back and be more realistic.

Most realized right away when they had bitten off more than they could chew, quickly stopping the ritual, lessening any backlash from failure. The True Royals who tried to go way beyond their potential would also fail right away, without suffering the worst backlash.

Due to that, perhaps a bit paradoxically, the riskiest rituals tended to be for those who were actually standout talents.

While most could indeed only create four Queen’s Guards, some successfully created five. These were viewed as elite True Royals and often served as leaders of their generation. Of the less than one out of ten that managed to create more than four Queen’s Guards, nearly everyone managed five, with the statistics of those making more not even reaching one in ten thousand True Royals.

Odonestra herself was one such talent, having six Queen’s Guards, all of them more than powerful enough in their own right to slaughter Godkings and Godqueens. All the leaders among the True Royal Hive Queen goddesses had six Queen’s Guards, except for four, who were viewed as the hidden power of the Endless Empire. They were the ones who served as the main reason why Rigoria had never dared a direct invasion, a quartet known as the Endless Empresses.

These four all had seven Queen’s Guards. Besides them, only a handful of other True Royals throughout history had managed to create seven, none of whom ever successfully achieved godhood. Even with such supreme talent, breaking through to godhood was never a guarantee, and the Path to ascension was fraught with danger and uncertainty.

In all those cases where someone successfully created seven Royal Guards, the True Royals had been trained from birth to reach their full potential, with some even having Bloodlines or Transcendent skills allowing them to stand head and shoulders above everyone else in their generation. What’s more, they tended to have been on the older side, having purposefully delayed their progress to reach B-grade in their most optimal state possible.

Vesperia was very different. She was incredibly young, not even a century old yet, counting the time she’d insisted on spending in Nevermore. Going to the World Wonder was a risk the leadership of the Endless Empire didn’t agree with, but Vesperia seemed to be almost in a rush compared to what they’d hoped.

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To them, if she took a few millennia to reach B-grade, it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest. In fact, they probably would have preferred it. Unfortunately, as a fellow True Royal leading her own Lineage, not even the most powerful gods of the Endless Empire had the right to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.

Her seemingly rushed evolution and lack of having grown up with the guidance of the Endless Empire were why Odonestra remained skeptical as she observed the ritual. A small part of her had hoped to see Vesperia fail instantly, realized she’d tried to do more than she could, and tempered her expectations.

Yet, at the same time, she wanted to see if Vesperia could truly do it. As the god who had spent the most time with the Vespernat True Royal, Odonestra knew that the young Hive Queen was never to be underestimated. She had exceeded expectations repeatedly, and the more potential she proved herself to have, the better it was for the Endless Empire.

Right then, all the gods were shaken awake as there was a change in the ritual chamber. Vesperia, sitting inside the morphic pool, frowned, and for a moment her energy seemed to grow unstable, as if something had annoyed or disturbed her concentration.

A few of the gods from the Vespernat Lineage started to look incredibly worried, but they quickly squashed any doubts and tried to stay confident in their True Royal. Odonestra used her senses to inspect the ritual, finding that, fortunately, nothing seemed to have gone wrong despite the small hiccup.

The next half an hour passed by uneventfully as complex runic scriptures spread across all the large human-sized eggs in the pool. These runes looked very different from what was usually seen in magic circles or formations, the writing cursive, weaving and winding around themselves in patterns that didn’t even seem physically possible.

Another hour passed, and Vesperia showed no signs of exhaustion, despite how long it had been. She simply sat there with her eyes closed, her mind fully preoccupied with creating the lives of the seven guards who would, hopefully, serve her for the rest of eternity.

Finally, the ritual reached its last stage as all the eggs were fully covered with runes. Each echoed with powerful life energy, but that didn’t mean they were successes. While all ectognamorphs, even the lowest clones, had Truesouls, many still didn’t even consider them genuine lifeforms. They lacked certain qualities that the True Royal was meant to infuse into her Queen’s Guards, and failure was very much an option until the final stage.