Seven or eight people sat in a private box suspended in the air at the center of the Golden Hall.
At the very center sat a woman dressed in a black robe. Its loose folds concealed her entire body, and only her curves gave any indication of her sex.
A cloak covered her head, and a black veil covered her face, leaving only a pair of highly unusual blue-gray eyes exposed as she quietly watched the scene outside.
The entire private box was silent. Everyone watched what was happening outside, but no one spoke.
"Flame Emperor, what do you think of Number Sixty-Six?" the woman seated in the center asked calmly.
The man she called the Flame Emperor was an elderly man of about sixty, with long, fiery-red hair falling loosely behind his head and a powerfully built frame. Though he was no longer young, his eyes were exceptionally keen.
"Forging Emperor, that young man is no ordinary talent. From the very beginning, I noticed that he was making an extremely complicated composite soul tool, but this is the first time I've seen a crafting method like his. It has seventeen core arrays in total, the largest of which is a Fusion Core Array."
"Although he worked slowly while crafting it, I couldn't see anything suspicious about the process. I can't tell what sort of soul tool it is, but my guess is that it might be a... bomb?"
"A bomb? Then what could his purpose be?" A trace of confusion appeared in the Forging Emperor's silver-gray eyes.
The Flame Emperor shook his head. "I can't guess that either. Although his level as a soul engineer isn't particularly high yet, every soul engineer has ideas of their own."
"I've encountered quite a few of this plane's so-called soul engineers, but