The Genius Mage Was Reincarnated Into A Swordsman Family - Chapter 328

Chapter 328: The Price of the Covenant

*Three Hours Before the Bell Rang*

The air in the Lionhart Secret Chamber was dead. No circulation, no dust, no scent—just an ancient, sterile stillness that promised finality. Roman, Patriarch of the Lionhart family, was already there, kneeling shirtless on the cold stone floor. His muscles were rigid, his shoulders broad. He looked like a man in his late fifties, handsome and powerful, but his true age was well into the seventies. His eyes, a chilling, glacial blue, were fixed on the opening door.

Seven figures entered.

They were old. Impossibly old. Each looked frail, skin like ancient parchment stretched over thin bone, but the aura they carried was a crushing, silent weight. These were the Seven Grand Elders of the Lionhart, men who preceded his father, men whose true age and history were mysteries Roman had never dared to pierce.

“So,” began the Elder leading them, known simply as Elder Laurent, his voice dry and brittle, cutting through the silence. “It’s your generation that finally breaks the Covenant?”

Roman’s posture remained unmoving. “The others already broke it,” he replied flatly, referring to the other Monarchs who had shed their shackles.

“Well, there are still two candles lit in the great hall,” the second Elder commented, his tone thick with condescension. “I suppose the Beast Emperor is as wise as his predecessor.”

The third Elder scoffed, shuffling closer. “Can you blame him? He is scared that the Lionhart line will be annihilated if he doesn’t follow the herd.”

“And I,” a fourth Elder chimed in, stepping into the light, “used to think you were the second-best Patriarch since our founding ancestor. I guess I was wrong. You’re just as weak-willed as your father was.”

Weak-willed.

Roman’s left eye twitched. An involuntary, barely perceptible movement. Of all the insults, all the slights, being compared to his late father—a man Roman viewed as a failure who clung too tightly to outdated traditions—was the only thing that could pierce his composure. He crushed the reaction instantly.

“I hope you understand the risk,” Elder Laurent continued, his face showing no sympathy. “By doing this, your lifespan will be halved. Do you understand the risk, child?”

The word child—thrown at a man over seventy, the absolute Monarch of the continent’s most powerful family—was a hammer blow of dismissive authority.

“I do, Elder Laurent,” Roman replied, his voice a low, hard vibration in his chest.

The seven frail figures formed a tight circle around him.

The Covenant was a five-hundred-year-old pact, a twisted agreement made by the twelve strongest men in the Runiya Continent, including the first Monarchs and certain Sins leaders. Its purpose was to limit power, to enforce a semblance of peace by preventing cataclysmic warfare. The pact achieved this by imposing a seal on the leader of each succeeding faction, limiting their power core to the Golden Core Stage.

This was the brutal genius: the seal didn’t just suppress power; it contained it. For five hundred years, every ounce of excess power generated by each leader, every failed attempt at breaking through the limit, had been trapped in the seal, strengthening it. The seal was now a colossal battery, holding five centuries of concentrated, unused arcane potential. Releasing it meant that torrent of accumulated energy would flood the current leader’s body, shattering the Golden Core Stage limit and launching them into untold power.

A complex network of glowing, intricate lines—like a frozen, silver spiderweb—suddenly appeared on Roman’s back, covering him from shoulder to waist. It was the Seal.

The Elders began to chant.

The sound was not music; it was friction. A low, grating noise of ancient syllables that vibrated in Roman’s teeth.

The sterile air immediately changed. It grew impossibly cold. The walls of the stone chamber began to shimmer, hardening instantly into thick, black ice. The shift was violent, the humidity freezing out of the air in white clouds.

Roman felt the Seal on his back tighten. The silver spiderweb turned blue, then opaque white, freezing solid into his flesh.

Then, the Pain.

It was nothing like a blade, nothing like fire. It was the absolute opposite of pain: a cold, deep burning in the core of his bones, as if his soul was being flash-frozen and shattered simultaneously.

His consciousness retreated from his limbs, gathering tight around his mana core. His glacial blue eyes bleached. The color vanished, leaving only a terrifying, seamless white globe in his sockets.

He was no longer kneeling. His body, rigid as a marble statue, levitated slowly off the floor. Then, the ice invaded. It crept up his feet, turning his skin to crystal, consuming his legs, chest, and face until Roman was encased in a perfect, human-shaped glacier suspended in the air.

One by one, the seven Elders bit their own fingers. The sight was startling: thin streams of dark, thick blood spilled onto the black ice of the floor. The blood instantly froze, forming crimson lines that extended outward from the Elders’ feet, etching a second, massive geometric circle into the ice beneath Roman.

Clink. Crack.

The frozen bloodlines shattered.

At that moment, the glacier encasing Roman began to melt. It did not drip or pool; it simply vaporized, turning to warm mist that cascaded gently onto the floor. Roman’s body dropped softly onto the stone, no longer stiff, but impossibly relaxed.

Roman felt the change before he saw it. The countless scars that crisscrossed his body—decades of war and political violence—were gone. Vanished. His skin was taut, fresh. He looked, surprisingly, younger than before—no longer a man in his late fifties, but a man barely past forty.

Then, the final, cataclysmic moment.

The silver spiderweb on his back fractured. The Seal broke.

A torrent of blinding, concentrated energy—five centuries of suppressed power—slammed into Roman’s mana core. It was less like a flow and more like a violent, sustained explosion that lasted an agonizing hour, reshaping his essence at the molecular level.

The chamber responded to the influx of power. The thick ice coating the walls and floor did not melt, but boiled, evaporating into steam and then vanishing instantly, leaving the stone perfectly dry and hot.

The sound of the seal breaking—a single, massive CRUNCH of ancient ice splitting—was the loudest sound the chamber had heard in five hundred years.

Then, silence. Absolute stillness.

The seven Elders dropped simultaneously. Their strength was utterly drained, their bodies collapsing onto the floor like puppets whose strings had been cut.

Elder Laurent, gasping, managed a single, raspy question.

“Was it a success?”

The Seventh Elder, too weak to lift his head, whispered back. “Who knows?”

As if in answer, Roman’s body stirred. He was still on the floor, but the pristine white of his eyes began to retract. Slowly, the color returned. A deep, crystalline shade, vibrant and cold, filling the pitch-white space.

He blinked once, slowly. Then his eyes opened again.