Chapter 1287: Uneasiness
How many of them were there? What did they want? Were they Awakened? What did the other world look like?
Fei Yuhan had no answers. She had only inference, and inference stacked on inference had its limits.
What she could observe was what they had done — and what they had done, at every point she could trace, was fight the Erosion. Roland had killed Fallen Evils on every occasion she was aware of. The joint mission was the cleanest example: she had lost consciousness, and before she had, she’d heard a voice report “Your Majesty, everyone has been knocked out.” She had also noticed Roland avoiding her deliberately, in the precise way a person avoids someone who has noticed something they’d prefer unnoticed. Any one of those details could be coincidence. Together they described a pattern.
More importantly: if Roland had wanted to conceal what happened that night, he could have simply let the magic creature finish the work and left the scene. The creature would have taken the blame. Nobody would have questioned it. He had chosen not to.
She believed Roland was helping this world.
That was why she had said nothing to the Association. She had no hard evidence, and she had something more valuable than evidence: a working theory she was not yet ready to surrender to other people’s judgment.
Both Roland and Valkries were concealing their true identities. She did not know why. She wanted to understand before she decided what to do about it, and the only way to understand was to keep watching.
The telephone rang.
”…I see. Got it.”
She hung up and nodded to Valkries. “Mr. Rock needs something from me. I have to go.”
“Of course. Go.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Wait —” Valkries caught her at the doorway. “Captain. Could you bring some books about technology tomorrow? Anything — encyclopedias, whatever you can find.”
“There are several kinds of encyclopedias,” Fei Yuhan said, considering. “I’ll find what I can. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Anything is fine. Really.” A brief, genuine warmth in the voice. “Thank you.”
“No trouble.”
Fei Yuhan closed the door and let her face settle back into its ordinary expression.
Valkries did not like history only.
She was mapping this world.
In the room behind the closed door, Valkries exhaled.
She knew she was moving too quickly — asking for technology books a month after arriving would read to any attentive observer as hunger, not curiosity. But she had no better option. Fei Yuhan was the only available window onto this world, and the time she was losing in this bed was time she could not recover.
If Hackzord’s plan had held, the Western Front Army would have stepped into human territory by now. He would be in a fury over her disappearance at the moment when he most needed commanders. She felt something at the thought — not quite guilt, not quite relief, something that sat uncomfortably between the two.
Part of her wanted Hackzord to simply wake her at the Red Mist pond, regardless of what memories she lost in the transition, regardless of the risk of head injury. Let the Realm of Mind collapse behind her. Let whatever she’d learned here dissolve like a dream after waking.
And part of her wanted to stay.
The reason was not complicated. The further she had pushed into this world, the more it had disturbed her — not with ugliness, but with a kind of fecundity she had not expected. Knowledge arriving daily, a future that looked nothing like anything she had been prepared for. It felt, in some unsettling way, like returning to the Cloud School, to the time before she had hardened into what she was — learning for the sake of learning, without the weight of purpose pressing down on every hour.
She would not say that. She would not even hold the thought too long.
Anyway: the Battle of Divine Will had run for hundreds of years. Nothing she felt or wished could stop its mechanism. Her task was to survive, and her clan’s task was to win. Whatever advantage Roland held — and she was nearly certain now that the changes in human civilization traced directly to his contact with this world — that advantage would, once her clan achieved victory, pass to them. Including his secret. Including everything he had carried from here.
The reason she wanted to stay longer was that the Transformer, Heathtalese, had warned them: even victory in the Battle of Divine Will would not bring them to the Divine Domain. Her mentor’s last words, carried for years like a splinter she could not reach. If victory could not save them, where was the answer? Was it here, in this impossible Realm of Mind?
She had another reason, quieter and less justifiable, that she would not name even to herself.
Valkries reached into the bag on the nightstand and drew out the box of desserts from the Cargarde Peninsula.
The packaging was beautiful — each color coded to a distinct flavor, the box itself a small, carefully considered object. When she opened it, the smell reached her first: complex, layered, something sweet and something deeper beneath the sweet.
She had never, in the full span of her life, eaten anything that tasted like this.
The inferior members of the clan — the Inferior Demons, the Primal Demons — consumed food with their mouths, as humans did. To an Upgraded, this was considered somewhat undignified. They obtained their energy from the Red Mist instead; food, when processed for consumption, went through the Red Mist pond first, softened the way men softened things with fire, and emerged providing sustenance but nothing else. After she had ascended, Valkries had not eaten in a very long time. Some clansmen associated eating with low life forms — with humans, specifically, who required three meals a day simply to maintain function.
She had held that opinion once.
She put a piece of cake in her mouth and held still.
The original taste of the Cargarde Peninsula food was present — she recognized it beneath everything — but what surrounded it, what had been built on top of it through human culinary technology, transformed the thing entirely. It was still itself, and it was also something new.
She finished the box without deciding to.
Could the Cloud School have made something like this? Could the Transformer? Valkries shook her head and set the box aside.
The Battle of Divine Will had lasted centuries and would last until it ended. This sentiment was a distraction. The correct question was survival. The clan’s survival.
But she always arrived back at the same place.
She knew now why she was uneasy.
A month of research had made it clear: the transformation of the human race ran through this world, and Roland was the mechanism — the conduit between what he had learned here and what humans had built in the real world. The firearms in the history books matched Ursrook’s intelligence with a specificity that left no room for coincidence. She had finally found the last piece. She understood now why humanity had changed so rapidly, why the clan was no longer facing the Union of Witches from four hundred years ago but something else entirely — a civilization still accelerating, still compounding its own knowledge, still building.
And she had found something worse than that in the history books.
When a human civilization reached a certain threshold, its rate of change stopped being linear. It bent upward sharply. Thousands of years ago, humans had been fighting with edged iron. Now, in this world, they had crossed the sky and the ocean; their weapons contained enough force to extinguish continents.
The trajectory was the problem.
How far along that trajectory was Roland’s world?
Heathtalese had warned them. For the first time in her existence — for the first time in a life measured in centuries of certainty about who would prevail — Valkries could not say with confidence that her clan would win.
That was what she carried. That was the uneasiness she could not put down.