# Chapter 611: The King's Counter
The Withering King did not sleep. It existed in a state of perpetual, malevolent awareness, a consciousness woven from the fabric of the Bloom's cataclysmic magic. Its realm was a nexus of anti-creation, a swirling vortex of blackened light where the souls of the consumed screamed in silent, eternal torment. For millennia, its will had been a slow, creeping tide, a patient poison seeping into the world's wounds, birthing Blights and twisting the Gifted into monstrous reflections of its own despair. It was a force of nature, a glacier of corruption, and it had been content to let the world freeze at its own pace.
But now, something disturbed the perfect, stagnant silence of its domain.
It was not a sound. It was not a physical tremor. It was a vibration, a resonance so faint and yet so fundamentally alien to its own nature that it felt like a shard of glass embedded in its infinite consciousness. The Withering King's focus, a force that could sunder continents and boil seas, narrowed from the cosmic scale to a single, infinitesimal point. It perceived the disturbance not as an event, but as a thread. A thread of pure, unblemished light, stretched taut across the canvas of its ruined world.
The King's awareness flowed along this thread, tasting its essence. It was a frequency it recognized with a fury that burned colder than the void. It was the echo of its jailer, the resonance of the soul it had shattered and scattered across the ages. Soren. The name was a curse, a memory of defiance, a symbol of the light that had once imprisoned it. This thread was not an attack. It was a retrieval. A key being turned in a lock it had long thought rusted shut.
The realization was not a slow dawning but an instantaneous, absolute comprehension. The mortals, the scurrying insects in their walled cities, had found a way to begin reassembling their fallen god. They were not trying to destroy it; they were trying to restore the one thing that could. The threat was existential. If the fragments were reunited, the prison would be reforged. Its eons of work would be undone.
A ripple of pure, silent rage passed through the nexus. The screaming souls within it momentarily fell silent, cowed by the sheer magnitude of their master's wrath. The Withering King understood that creating another Bloomblight, no matter how powerful, would be too slow. It was a scalpel when a hammer was needed. Sending its twisted champions to hunt the fragments was a fool's errand; they could not be everywhere at once. The connection itself had to be destroyed. The key had to be broken.
It began to gather its power. This was not the slow, seeping corruption it used to poison the land. This was a deliberate, focused act of war. The Withering King drew in the ambient despair of its realm, the agony of the trapped souls, the raw, untamed chaos of the Bloom itself. It coalesced this energy, not into a form or a creature, but into a single, unified concept. It was the antithesis of creation, the purest expression of the Bloom's original purpose: to unmake.
The nexus began to shrink, the swirling vortex of black light compressing inward, growing denser, hotter with a cold that could freeze stars. The air, if it could be called that, crackled with a tension that was not physical but metaphysical. The very laws of magic bent and warped around the King's will. It was preparing to strike not at a place, but at a principle. It would not sever the thread; it would poison the well from which it was drawn. It would launch a wave of anti-magic across the entire world, a silent tsunami that would unravel every enchantment, dampen every Gift, and seek out that one, fragile thread of light to extinguish it forever.
The power built to an impossible crescendo. The Withering King, a being of infinite patience, had found its limit. The time for slow decay was over. The time for annihilation had begun. With a will that was the physical equivalent of a dying universe, it pushed.
The wave was invisible. It made no sound. It did not distort the air or shake the ground. It was a silent, instantaneous change in the fundamental rules of reality. It rippled outwards from the nexus, faster than thought, faster than light, a sphere of absolute nullification expanding to encompass the world. It passed through the Bloom-Wastes, causing the twisted flora to momentarily grey and wither before springing back, fed by the very corruption the wave carried. It washed over the fortified city-states, causing a thousand candles to flicker and die, a hundred minor enchantments to fail, and every Gifted across the globe to feel a sudden, inexplicable chill, a momentary hollowing out in their soul.
In the Sunken Library, half a world away, the wave hit. The dust motes dancing in the shafts of light from the collapsed ceiling froze in mid-air. The faint, residual magic clinging to the ancient tomes on the shelves flickered like dying embers. The ethereal thread of light extending from the Scholar fragment, which had been pulsing with a steady, hopeful rhythm, shuddered violently. It dimmed, its silver light tarnishing to a dull grey, stretched thin as if under an immense, unbearable weight. The fragment itself flickered, the peaceful, focused consciousness within it wracked with a sudden, soul-deep agony. The pull was still there, but it was now a distant, muffled call, heard through a wall of suffocating static.
In the secure chamber beneath the council hall, the effect was just as immediate and far more terrifying. The air grew heavy, thick with a palpable sense of wrongness. Isolde, standing guard, gasped, her hand flying to her temple as her own Gift, a finely-tuned instrument of perception, screamed in protest. She felt the world's magic being scoured, a global-scale violation that set her teeth on edge.
Her eyes snapped to the center of the room. The Anchor Flower, which had been blazing with a soft, steady luminescence, convulsed. Its petals, which had been glowing with the captured light of Soren's essence, flared violently, then dimmed to a mere glimmer. The light within its core sputtered, a candle in a hurricane. The connection, the fragile, miraculous thread of hope they had just established, was being torn apart by an unseen, unimaginable force. The flower's light wavered, on the verge of being extinguished, the link to the Scholar fragment strained to the absolute breaking point.