19th floor, 7th Set
The City of Celestials
The Primordial Tower
It was one of the greatest and gravest secrets of the Primordial Tower.
Unlike what most Contestants under the 6th Set thought, the two Empires weren't situated at the 21st Floor — The City of Eternal Thrones.
Instead, the Empires, and the Emperors ruling them, remained on the 19th Floor!
The misconception wasn't due to misunderstanding, though.
It had been planted carefully into the hearts of the Contestants, generation after generation, over millions of years.
There was a reason that not all Contestants of the 18th Floor were called Kings.
To become a King-level existence, the single most accepted condition by everyone, Characters and Contestants, was that one must have access to at least one of the top-ten ranked Manifestations of Perception.
As Perception was the glue holding the Multiverse together, one must use a Manifestation of Perception as glue too, combining Extremities of at least two different Bubbles.
In essence, one must use Mysteries to combine one's Extremities before ascending to the Throne of a King on the 18th Floor.
However, that was only one condition, and it only applied to be called a King-level existence.
Not a King.
Unlike lower Floors, where one could have many Main Missions on the same Floor until their Kill Count was completed, from the 6th Set onwards, each Floor had only one Main Mission, but was divided into many parts, like Side Missions.
To be a King, like the Purple King, Purple Mist, such a King-level Contestant needed to survive at least one part of their 18th Floor Main Mission.
And just how ridiculous this phenomenon of passing only one part was could be surmised from the handful of colored Kings having their own Castles.
It was these parts that created a gap between the strength of the Kings.
It was these parts that dictated life and death because…
To ascend to the 7th Set, the Kings of the 18th Floor needed to survive the entire Graveyard of Kings, i.e., an entire Main Mission in the World of Cartoons.
The survival rate was so minuscule that no one had ever dared to put it on paper.
Once ascended, though, these Kings might just be Gods for everyone else.
Thus, unlike the 18th Floor, all those who ascended to the 19th Floor were given the title of Emperors.
Forget strength, the Life Halt of these Emperors alone would let them spend uncountable years on the 19th floor, preparing for their eventual doom… because the difficulty of Cartoon-based Missions increased exponentially from thereon.
Every part of a 19th Floor Main Mission would be like clearing a full 18th-floor Main Mission in a Cartoon Bubble.
Despite the unimaginable and incomprehensible difficulty, one thing was clear — those who ascended to the 7th Set were worthy enough to be called Emperors.
Time cut through them anyway.
No matter how much life essence they possessed, at some point, they had to attempt a Main Mission, even if it meant dividing it into the smallest parts.
Some… taking hundreds of thousands of years… had indeed reached the end of these parts, too, before attempting that one last part.
No one knew, not even the Empires themselves, if there existed someone who had succeeded in clearing a X- Grade Mission.
Because, regardless of such a Contestant passing or failing the Main Mission, they had never returned.
Perhaps there were Contestants above the 19th floor.
Perhaps not.
They did leave behind their descendants on the 19th Floor—their legacies—mortals with Emperors' blood in their veins!
To set them apart from the insects on the lower floors, these mortals with sacred blood in their veins named themselves — Celestials!
Hence, the Floor itself was called the City of Celestials.
And that's how one ended up with Empires.
All the Celestials had voting rights, granted to them by their sacred lineage.
From the Emperors of the 19th Floor — the Contestants who managed to ascend to the 19th Floor of the 7th Set — they voted one to sit on the throne of the Empire.
Thus, the Empire itself remained eternal.
Only the Contestant who sat upon the throne of the Emperor rotated, governing the entire Primordial Tower on either Chaos' or Order's side, with the Celestials acting as a Council of Ministers.
Or, it had remained like that before the arrival of the Stormborn Empire.
In the case of the R'lyeh Empire, on Chaos' side, the Celestials had voted for Hoshar — The Father of Ghouls — as the Emperor of the Emperors.
On the Order's side, the same had been true as well… around a century ago.
Then, sporadically, shocking the living breath out of the entire Tower, Brienne — The Mother of Storms — had forced all the Celestials of the last Empire into submission, becoming the Empress of the Emperors.
Not only did she rename the Empire to the Stormborn Empire, something that had never been done before, but she also made the last Empire's name taboo.
However, despite the shocking feat, even Brienne Stormborn had held her hand when it came to dealing with the legacies of the past Emperors, accepting the Celestials and letting them become the Council of Ministers of the Stormborn Empire.
Regardless of whether a Celestial belonged to Chaos' Valley or Order's Peak, one thing was clear.
From the lowly slum that was the 1st Floor to the almighty 19th Floor, all the things that had happened, were happening, and would happen in the Primordial Tower came under the direct purview of these Celestials.
And an event that could bring these two groups of Celestials together, despite being mortal enemies to each other, could be nothing but one of the most shocking ones, with consequences that could, and would, affect the entire Tower.
Today, something like that happened.
Today, the Celestials of the R'lyeh and Stormborn Empires gathered, under the eyes of Hoshar and Brienne, to discuss one such topic.
This topic was related to another legacy of an Emperor.
This topic had a name.
Red — the Five-Crowned Prince — legacy of The Banished!
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Note: With this chapter, all the Side Stories are now fully integrated into the novel.