Chapter 1402: Cradle
Everything in the letter is true.
Valkries was right.
The Origin of Magic. At the bottom of a sinkhole on a hidden island, waiting for a key no one in the race yet holds.
Hackzord stood at the pit’s edge with the five-colored magic stone still warm in his palm and let the implications move through him in order, the way a general accounts for casualties before deciding on the next advance.
If the letter was true in this—if the Bottomless Land existed and the Origin was here—then some of the letter’s other contents were true as well. And some were not.
The upgrade of the race, for instance.
During the apocalypse, the Origin of Magic had always been described as elevated, remote, belonging to God the way the sun belongs to no one country. The race’s revelation held that only a competitor who had gathered all the legacy shards could even approach it—that it would remain literally above all others until the right key opened the right door. And so the demons had named their floating city Deity of Gods, reaching toward something they understood as sacred and unreachable and tied somehow to the Bloody Moon.
But the Origin of Magic was here. On an island at sea level. Slightly below sea level, if anything, given that its gate was a pit descending into the earth. It occupied the same altitude as every other living thing. It had hidden itself in fog, but it had not elevated itself beyond reach. The sacred distance the race had preserved in reverence for over a thousand years was simply: incorrect.
And more: standing at this gate had done nothing for him. No surge of power. No qualitative change in his body’s magic. If he hadn’t raised the five-colored stone to his eye, the pit would have been indistinguishable from any other geological feature. For all the race’s suffering—the long campaigns, the countless dead, the wars fought on two fronts for the sake of legacy shards—the reward, apparently, required a complete key before it yielded anything at all.
If this is a farce, it should at least pretend to be a better one.
If Valkries is right about everything, then a thousand years of work becomes a joke.
“Sky Lord?”
The Guardian’s voice was gentle. Not insistent—she was giving him the word the way one offers something fragile, without expectation.
Right. The Guardian. She’s been here for years. She’s disguised herself as a higher ascendant. She has almost certainly witnessed multiple Battles of Divine Will. If anyone holds the information that matters—
He moved without further deliberation.
Two Distortion Doors, precisely placed. The first took her arms at the shoulder. The second took her legs. She had no time to respond. By the time shock registered in her expression, she was already falling, and there was nothing left to catch herself with.
He had used the five-colored magic stone on her while she was speaking—quietly, without signaling the action. The light above her head was dim. Her personal magic power was negligible. He had calculated that severing her limbs would neutralize any threat she posed, and the calculation appeared correct.
Even so, he stayed in the air and watched until he was certain. Then he descended, took her by what remained of her shoulders, and brought her face close to his.
Her white cotton robes had gone blue-soaked and no longer looked graceful.
“Answer my questions and I will save you.” He did not soften the words. “What is the ultimate outcome of the so-called upgrade? Does God truly exist? Why fabricate this entire structure of revelation and war? I want everything you know—and my patience is not infinite. Tell me.”
She did not show hatred. She did not show fear. She looked up at him for a moment, then sighed the way someone sighs who has seen this particular version of events before and finds it sad without being surprised.
“Why,” she asked, “do you have to do this?”
“Why.” He felt the fury rise again, the clean and righteous kind. “Every legacy shard hidden underground was left by the losers of previous Battles of Divine Will—I understand that now. My race is walking the same road, moving toward the same end, and you’re asking me why? The races fight and tear each other apart and when it’s done the strongest survivor comes to this island and then what? Is this all some spectacle designed to entertain whoever sits above the Bloody Moon? Is that what this world is?”
He stopped. Something in the Guardian’s eyes had changed.
There was grief there. Clear and specific and not performed.
“I see,” she said quietly. “You are not one who has lost their way. You came here with the questions already formed. I’m sorry for that—because there are times when knowing the answer is worse than not knowing. Particularly when you find yourself helpless to change what the answer implies.” A pause. Her voice had softened to something near a murmur. “This world is imperfect in many ways. But for all of you, it is the best cradle you will ever have.”
“Cra—dle?”
He had not expected that word. It stopped something in him—not the anger, but the direction of it. He found he had no immediate response.
The Guardian’s breathing had become shallow. She lifted one blue-stained shoulder, straining—reaching toward his face with a gesture that had no way to complete itself. “All of you are God’s children. How could he treat you as stage props for his own amusement? It is time to leave now. Go. Before you have the key—never, ever return to this island.”
“You haven’t answered anything!”
She was already fading. Not dying in any conventional sense—she was becoming less present, her outline losing definition as though the light behind her eyes was moving somewhere else. In the space of a few breaths she was gone: the Guardian, the scattered stone tablets, all of it dissolved back into mist and grass and silence. Only the pit remained, and the fog, and the green ground around it.
And the blood on Hackzord’s hands.
Which was real. Which meant she had been real.
He wiped his hands and stood still for a moment, trying to make sense of what he felt—which was, he realized, the specific discomfort of having used violence against something that chose not to fight back and then disappeared anyway. The frustration of having gotten nothing he came for—and also, beneath that, something that might have been the beginning of a feeling he did not have a name for and was not inclined to examine at length.
He shook it off.
At minimum: Valkries is alive. And she may already be closer to the truth of the Battle of Divine Will than anyone else in the race. The next step was finding a reliable way to communicate with the Nightmare Lord. He had too many questions waiting for her.
He stood and prepared to leave.
The pain arrived before he understood what was happening.
It came from inside his chest—tearing through, penetrating. He looked down. His armor had a new shape: a protrusion, deforming outward, and then a sharp bone claw emerged slowly through the gap in the plate.
The blade from the Sky-sea Realm.
He recognized it. Nearly transparent in motion, with exceptional concealment—detectable only through direct magic power perception. He had been here, distracted, the Guardian’s impossible exit taking all his attention, his senses turned inward instead of out.
I was careless.
The poison declared itself immediately—burning, rapid, spreading outward from the wound through his magic channels faster than any blade-wound had ever managed. When had the Sky-sea Realm’s blades been able to break a Senior Lord’s barrier, let alone penetrate the armor beneath? A Nest Eye’s hunting claw was a threat to prey, not to higher ascendants. Something had changed about them. Something had changed significantly.
He turned his head.
The creature behind him shared the Nest Eye’s silhouette—the curved bone claw, the constricting abdomen—but that was where the resemblance ended. This was larger. Different. Wrong in the way that things are wrong when they have been remade according to a new and better-considered design.
And further in the mist, through the shifting white: more of them. Moving slowly but steadily in his direction. Many.
When the Guardian said there wasn’t much time—she meant this.
His vision was already going soft at the edges. The thing behind him opened its mouth.
On the other side of the world, Silent Disaster opened his eyes.