First Intergalactic Emperor: Starting With The Ancient Goddess-Chapter 452: Underground City Bazar

Xavier woke up later than he should have, not because he was tired but because nothing around him made noise. The room felt abandoned rather than quiet, the kind of silence that came after people left in a hurry or decided not to wake you. He sat up, rewrapped the parts of his face that still needed covering, and stepped out into the corridor.

No one was there.

He checked Rin’s room first. Bed untouched, nothing moved, no sign Rin had even come back after the night. Klatos’s room was next. Same thing. Arlen’s door stood open, the sheets folded back, no personal items left behind. That was enough to irritate him.

Xavier walked through the base without rushing, boots echoing against metal flooring that carried sound too well. Guards passed him now and then, gave short nods, didn’t stop, didn’t ask questions. When he reached the main chamber where Veyr had hosted them, the place looked reset. Table cleared, lights dimmed, displays shut down. It looked like a room that had already moved on.

"Great," Xavier muttered.

He grabbed the nearest guard who looked alert enough to answer without stalling. "Where did everyone go?"

The guard answered immediately. "Lower market sector. Under-city bazaar with Lord Veyr. For supplies, and personal errands."

Xavier swore under his breath and waved him off before anything else could be said. He didn’t bother trying to track the others. If they were together, they were fine. He just didn’t like being the last to know.

He left the residential wing and followed the transit tunnels downward instead of up. Deeper into Helior Prime’s underbelly. Lighting shifted from clean white to industrial amber. The underworld didn’t pretend to be pretty. It existed to function.

The market opened up slowly rather than all at once. A wide cavern reinforced with layered scaffolding and suspended walkways. Cargo rails ran overhead. Steam vents hissed from the walls. Vendors packed into metal stalls bolted directly into rock and concrete. Voices overlapped in half a dozen languages, most of them not human. No daylight here, just artificial cycles that mimicked it badly.

Xavier walked without a goal at first. He wasn’t hunting leads. He wasn’t shopping for weapons. He caught his reflection in a polished panel near a biotech stall and stopped.

Bandages. Scars underneath. The damage wasn’t just physical anymore. People didn’t stare here out of fear. They stared because he didn’t match the usual kinds of broken that passed through this place.

"Let’s fix this..." he muttered.

That was when he noticed the shop.

It didn’t look flashy or illegal. No neon, no loud ads, no promises plastered across the windows. Just a clean frontage wedged between a biotech tailor and a memory clinic. The sign was etched, not projected, old enough that someone had bothered to maintain it instead of replacing it. Through the glass, he saw equipment laid out with care rather than intimidation. Dermal printers. Neural stabilizers. Cranial frames built for precision,

Xavier stood there longer than he meant to.

Then he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

A soft chime sounded overhead.

He glanced around once, slow and deliberate, then let out a breath through his nose. "Alright," he said under his breath. "Let’s see what you can do about a face like this."

Xavier stepped fully inside and the door sealed behind him with a soft hydraulic sigh. The shop smelled like antiseptic, old metal, and something faintly organic that didn’t belong in any medical room he’d ever seen.

The old surgeon looked up from a workbench cluttered with instruments that had been repaired more times than replaced. She was short, wide in the shoulders, hair cut close to the scalp, skin lined like she’d spent decades squinting at bad decisions. Her eyes landed on his bandaged face and stayed there longer than polite.

She clicked her tongue.

"You know," she said, voice dry and unimpressed, "most people come in here hoping to look better. You come in like you’re trying to scare business away. Keep that thing wrapped. I charge extra for emotional distress."

"You’re the first person today who didn’t ask how I’m still alive."

She snorted and waved a hand. "Alive is cheap down here. Presentable costs." Her gaze slid over him again, slower this time. "Sit. And don’t bleed on the chair. It’s not leather, it just looks like it."

The chair unfolded from the floor when he sat, clamps adjusting around his shoulders and head without asking permission. A lattice of scanners dropped down, humming as light traced every uneven surface beneath the bandages. The display beside her lit up with layered images, cross-sections, density maps, neural overlays. She leaned in, squinted, then laughed once, sharp and humorless.

"Oh, this is a mess," she said, tapping the screen. "You didn’t just lose skin. You rearranged bone, nerve clusters, micro-muscle fibers. Whoever hit you didn’t aim to kill you. They aimed to erase you."

Xavier watched his own face rotate in translucent layers. "You’re exaggerating."

She zoomed in on a section near the eye socket. "This used to be symmetrical. That alone makes it a tragedy."

She straightened and crossed her arms. "I can patch it. Replace tissue, rebuild structure, print you something close enough that strangers won’t stare too long. But it won’t be you. It’ll be maintenance-heavy, sensitive to impact, sensitive to stress, sensitive to bad sleep. You look like someone who collects all three." Her eyes flicked to him. "You are a fighter. Mercenary, raider, problem-solver with fists. This kind of face hates that lifestyle." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Xavier leaned back as far as the restraints allowed. "So you’re saying I’m stuck like this."

"I’m saying," she replied, calm and precise, "that fixing this the normal way would turn your head into a liability."

He went quiet for a moment, then asked, "Anything that restores it instead of rebuilding it. Pill. Serum. Infusion. I don’t care what shelf it’s on."

That made her pause.

She didn’t look at him right away. She shut down the scanner, cleaned her hands, and only then met his eyes. "There is," she said, slower now. "But it’s not medicine. It’s correction."

She reached under the counter and pulled up a sealed slate, old code etched into its casing. On the screen bloomed a name written in archaic trade-script: Axiom Vitae Residuum.

"People shorten it to Axiom Vitae," she continued. "Residual life-binding compound. Not grown, not synthesized. Harvested. It doesn’t replace damaged tissue. It tells your body it never broke in the first place and forces it to remember."

Xavier frowned. "Sounds illegal."

She smiled without warmth. "Sounds expensive. It’s derived from organisms that regenerate at a cellular memory level. Pre-colonial stock. Most of them don’t exist anymore. The ones that do are guarded, hoarded, or already dead."

He glanced back at the screen. "And the risks?"

She shrugged. "If your body rejects it, you die. If it accepts it, you heal completely. Same face. Same structure. Same scars you were always meant to have." She leaned closer. "And if you’ve been altered too many times already, it might decide you’re lying and tear you apart trying to fix the contradiction."

Xavier stared at the slate for a long moment. Then he let out a quiet breath that sounded almost amused.

"So," he said, "just another gamble."

The surgeon reached over and snapped the restraints open. "That’s the underworld for you," she replied. "Nothing’s impossible. Everything’s cruel. And miracles always come with a receipt."