The last hundred steps were the hardest of all.
They sat on their eleven peaks for three more days, cores turning slow around each of them, and the closer the numbers crept toward a thousand, the more the world seemed to push back. Each point of essence had to be earned twice, first taken and then held.
But they were patient people now, in a way they had not been when they first woke beside a soundless river, and they did not rush it.
On the fourth morning, Erix felt the last of it settle. The three numbers in the back of his mind stood at nine hundred and ninety-nine in every column, and then, quietly, with no fanfare at all, they turned over.
One thousand. Body, Soul, and Axiom, all three.
And the moment they did, a notification unfolded in his mind, and across the range he saw ten other figures go still on ten other peaks as the same words reached them all at once.
[ Skyward Breakthrough Quest ]
