Chapter 85: [85] : The Warlord’s Edict, Expanding the Borders

Declan stood alone in the quiet white glass server room of the Celestial Staircase.

He had just eaten the Ascendant Core!

The system chimes in his head were silent now, leaving behind a heavy ringing pressure in his ears.

He flexed his hands. His digital avatar felt ridiculously light, yet he knew he was carrying the physical density of a collapsing star.

His Abyssal Sovereign class was fully unlocked and his synchronization rate had skyrocketed to sixty percent!

But he could not stay in this hidden admin room forever. He had a city to run.

He just wanted to get back into the game.

The white room vanished. The transition back to the main server was way faster this time.

His code was so dense and prioritized by the broken engine that he didn’t even see a loading screen! He just slipped right through the dimensional gap.

He opened his eyes. He was standing directly in the center of the Iron Bastion.

The courtyard was a total mess. It looked like a refugee camp crammed into a shoebox.

The three thousand players who survived the Purge Wave and the Abyssal Tide were squished together on the stone floor.

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder and leaning against the heavy iron walls, huddled tightly around Bram’s massive forges just to stay warm.

The air was thick and smelled like nervous sweat, wet dirt, and cheap rusted iron gear.

The exact moment Declan materialized on the paving stones, the chaotic noise in the courtyard died down. It was as though someone hit a mute button on the entire crowd.

Players standing close to him scrambled backward frantically. They tripped over each other and knocked over weapon racks just to get out of his way!

They stared at him in absolute shock.

Declan looked exactly like he did in the real world now. His skin was incredibly pale and completely devoid of natural human color.

Dark and highly visible veins pulsed along his neck and down his arms. They weren’t pumping blood anymore. They were pumping raw volatile purple mana!

His eyes were the scariest part. They were entirely pitch black. The whites and irises were gone, replaced by endless swirling voids of dark energy.

He didn’t just look like a Warlord anymore. He looked like a hidden boss monster that had accidentally wandered into a beginner safe zone!

"Boss!" Bram yelled as he pushed his way roughly through the terrified crowd.

The Level 30 Master Artificer was carrying a massive stack of thick iron plates tucked under his new obsidian prosthetic arm.

He casually dropped the heavy metal onto the pavement with a loud ringing clang that made several players flinch.

Bram stopped a few feet away. He wiped a thick layer of grease and soot from his forehead and stared directly into Declan’s pitch black eyes.

The old NPC swallowed hard.

"You look different," Bram grunted as his mechanical fingers twitched nervously. "You feel different too. The system is literally throwing up red hazard markers on my interface just by standing near you. What did you do up there?"

"I hit the level cap," Declan replied casually and rolled his shoulders. "Then I broke it."

He didn’t explain further. He looked around the crowded courtyard.

The one kilometer red energy dome was holding strong above them. It was currently powered by the mutated Sovereign Core crystals he dumped into the generator earlier. But the physical space was way too tight.

His new citizens were practically stepping on each other’s toes!

If he wanted to build an actual functioning city with automated defenses, housing, and proper merchant stalls, he needed a lot more real estate.

Declan walked past Bram and headed straight for the central iron monolith. The players parted for him instantly and kept their heads down.

Nobody wanted to make eye contact with the guy who had just dropped a space station on a giant worm!

He stopped in front of the massive black pillar. He raised his right hand and tapped the glowing control console.

The blue holographic screen popped up right in front of his face.

[Iron Bastion Management Panel]

↳Current Population: 3,102

↳ Defenses: Level 1 Stone Walls (+20 Mutated: Thorned Aegis)

↳ Treasury: 2,450,000 Origin Points

He navigated straight to the territorial expansion tab. He wanted to push the borders out. He wanted to swallow the entire ruined Ashen Bog, eat the surrounding wasteland, and turn it all into his personal property!

He selected the maximum expansion range available on the digital slider. Ten kilometers.

[System Warning: Request Denied.]

[Territorial expansion beyond a 1-kilometer radius requires Level 80 Guild Master status. Current user level exceeds standard parameters. Verifying data...]

The screen flashed an angry red. The system AI was trying to read his level to see if he qualified, but he was an Ascendant now!

He was sitting entirely outside the standard level brackets. The game didn’t know how to classify his data, so it defaulted to a hard denial.

"I really hate it when this game tells me no," Declan sighed.

He didn’t back out of the menu. He didn’t try to find a workaround.

He just pressed his hand flat against the glowing screen and forced his Abyssal Sovereign aura directly into the monolith’s core code!

Dark purple energy flared from his pitch black eyes. The veins on his arm bulged heavily as he shoved his raw unchecked administrative authority right into the base logic of the safe zone.

"Override," Declan commanded, his voice vibrating with unnatural bass. "I own this core. I own this zone. Expand the borders now."

The red warning box violently flickered. It glitched and turned into a messy block of scrambled text and error codes before shattering completely like fragile glass!

A new prompt appeared on the console. It wasn’t blue or red. It was a bright glaring gold.

[Entity Status Recognized: Abyssal Sovereign.] 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

[Administrative Privileges Granted. Bypassing standard guild requirements.]

[Initiating Territorial Expansion.]

The ground beneath their feet violently shook! It felt like a massive earthquake was ripping right through the center of the camp.

Players screamed in pure panic and dropped to the floor. Bram grabbed his heavy anvil to stay upright as his boots slid on the shifting stones.

"What are you doing?!" Bram yelled over the deafening rumbling noise. "You are going to bring the dome down!"

"I’m giving you more room to work," Declan smiled.

The heavy spiked walls of the Thorned Aegis suddenly detached from the ground. The massive iron barricades hovered a few inches in the air and glowed with bright purple runes along their edges.

Then they shot outward!

The walls pushed out in every direction at incredible speed. They dragged the red energy dome with them and stretched the barrier across the landscape.

The shield slammed into the toxic mud of the Ashen Bog. It instantly vaporized the acidic sludge and pushed the thick green miasma miles away!

The ruined ground inside the newly expanded barrier violently shifted. The cracked earth, the dead petrified trees, and the deep puddles of acid were forcefully rewritten by the game’s engine.

They smoothed out instantly and transformed from a hazardous wasteland into perfectly flat solid black stone paving.

The one kilometer dome expanded to two kilometers. Then five. Then a massive ten kilometers!

The Iron Bastion grew into a sprawling metropolis. It swallowed the entire swamp. It ate the rocky ridges and the deep ravines in the distance.

It turned a massive chunk of Sector 4 into a perfectly clean and heavily fortified empty lot completely ready for construction.

The system chimes rang out loudly in Declan’s head.

[Territory Expanded: 10 Kilometer Radius.]

[Warning: Your Safe Zone has encroached on multiple monster spawn points. Hostile entities within the new borders have been automatically deleted.]

[Origin Points +45,000]

Declan laughed out loud. Expanding his city had literally killed thousands of low level monsters just by overwriting the physical space they were currently standing in! It was the easiest money he had ever made.

The shaking finally stopped. The red energy dome settled into its new massive position high up in the sky, completely blocking out the dark clouds.

The players on the ground slowly stood up. They looked around in complete disbelief.

The claustrophobic and crowded courtyard was totally gone. They were now standing in the middle of an absolutely massive empty stone plaza. The spiked iron walls were so far away they looked like tiny black lines on the horizon.

"Boss," Bram gasped, his mechanical hand twitching as he stared at the new horizon. "You just terraformed the whole sector."

"I am the Warlord," Declan said smoothly and turned away from the console. "I needed a bigger backyard. Now get back to work. I want automated turrets on those walls by tomorrow morning."

"You got it," Bram grinned and grabbed his heavy hammer to immediately head for the raw iron pile.

Declan looked up at the sky. He had secured his piece of the Grid. The Iron Bastion was a massive and fully functioning fortress.

Now it was time to deal with the real world. Apex Paradigm was definitely tracking his power spikes, and he needed to welcome their hit squads properly.