Sophie and Syleena stepped through the illusion into the hiding spot.
Kael stood at the desk, fiddling with something. Beside him sat a bag that reached his hip, its mouth open, a few mindstones having spilled from it and scattered across the floor beneath the desk.
Syleena's eyes moved past him to a notebook spread open on the desk. A feather quill moved across its pages on its own.
Before she could get a closer look Kael reached out and stopped it, then dismissed it. He closed the notebook and turned to face them fully.
The three stood in silence, looking at each other.
Sophie's eyes moved from Syleena to Kael and back again.
Feeling the tension settling into something awkward, and knowing how much first impressions mattered, Sophie stepped forward and extended her hand.
"Sophie."
Kael glanced at Syleena. Then he shook it.
"Kael."
"Sophie will have to stay here until things have settled." Syleena said, tossing her coat onto the bed.
"That's fine." Kael said, turning back toward the desk.
Syleena watched as he reached for a handful of mindstones and crushed them in his palm.
'Is he working in his inner realm?'
It was only a hunch, but it felt close to the truth. It made sense on multiple levels. He had sought her out to rest, and under the current circumstances there was little freedom to move through the city. Occupying himself within his inner realm was a reasonable way to use the time.
But there was another layer to it she suspected. If Kael kept part of his consciousness anchored in his inner realm it would make it nearly impossible for someone like her to reach his thoughts. Particularly someone as attentive as Kael, who would notice the attempt before it had any chance of taking hold.
She wasn't sure whether that was deliberate or simply habit. With him, the distinction was difficult to draw.
An hour passed quickly. Syleena wrapped her coat around her again.
'Midnight… and there are still things I must do.'
She didn't like the idea of leaving the two of them alone, but she had no real choice.
"I'll be back in a few hours," Syleena said, stepping through the wall and back onto the street.
Neither Kael nor Sophie managed to wave her goodbye before she was gone.
—
Kael exhaled slowly and looked out over the red river of Will.
He hadn't even studied Point Aegis for a full day, yet he had already burned through more than two hundred mindstones keeping Obsidian Shard activated. This was the first time he had used the obsidian shard mote since it reached rank three, and it was incredibly potent compared to its lower-rank versions. Its advancement hadn't brought anything flashy, but the speed at which he could understand and process new information had more than doubled.
He knew that.
But still… no matter how many mindstones and Thoughts he poured into studying Point Aegis, it only seemed to grow more complex and incomprehensible the deeper he went. It made sense. The more he learned, the thinner his ignorance became, and the clearer his understanding of his own limitations grew.
But even knowing all this… wasn't it a little too much?
Kael had never doubted the complexity of a finished mote, but reverse engineering one compared to refining it, he wouldn't call it a stretch if someone argued it was ten times more difficult.
Even so, if the results on the Point Aegis side weren't too impressive, he had come to value the Obsidian Shard mote far more now than he had before. It was truly incredible.
Not in its offensive capabilities, but in its sheer overall potential.
When activating Obsidian Shard rank three on a mote, he didn't just get a sensation of it. Something else happened. Something he hadn't read about, something he had never even thought to consider.
Upon activation, Obsidian Shard seemed to take a piece of Kael's consciousness and transfer it into the mote. In the same way Kael could transfer his consciousness into his inner realm, Obsidian Shard carried it even further, into the mote itself.
This was where Kael's eyes almost gleamed with greed.
It was easy to be wise in hindsight. To say it made perfect sense. But the reality was, Kael had never thought of it before.
Just like Kael, every mote had an inner realm where it contained its Will and Thoughts. This Kael had known… or not that it was stored in an inner realm exactly, but that somehow it held the two. But if that wasn't mindboggling enough, when Obsidian Shard activated, a part of him had been transferred into the mote's inner realm.
And this was where Kael genuinely started to lack the words to describe it.
Unlike the traditional belief that a mote consisted of two elements, there was another. Compared to a human's inner realm, which contained a Soul that held everything in place, a mote had no such thing.
So how was a mote even able to create the idea of an inner realm?
Upon entering, Kael wasn't surrounded by a white void created by a Soul. Instead it was a blinding gold. A space built from billions of golden threads, floating carefully, weaving themselves into something close solid.
At first, his mind had gone numb just looking at it, as if it were trying to comprehend a mountain of knowledge every single second. But as time went on he grew more resistant to the mind-numbing pain, and with it came some understanding.
The golden threads were not a soul. They were rules. Rules that functioned like a living code, making the very idea of something like a mote possible. The same rules one followed during refinement, the same rules one carefully ensured worked in harmony with each other.
This also explained why reverse engineering was so difficult. When refining a mote from ingredients, you pulled each thread one after another, which meant you knew exactly what went into it. But inside, the threads of rules had no real pattern. Every single thread moved independently, drifting past each other, tangling together and then untangling.
So for Kael to gain full understanding, he would have to study a group of threads, somehow hold them in memory, move on to the next, and not only remember those too but find a pattern connecting them to the previous ones before too much had changed.
It was immense work, and at a glance, easily considered impossible. The only comparison Kael could think of was studying every individual wave of a crossing sea for years, and then not only memorising each wave's length, time of appearance and disappearance, but also the wind that caused it, and somehow mapping all of it out to perfection.
"Will three thousand mindstones even be enough for me to achieve a real understanding?" Kael murmured, lifting Point Aegis in front of him.
It really did just look like a once perfect cube, worn down by time, wind and water.
But he saw it differently now. Not as just Point Aegis, but as something impossible, carefully woven into existence by the heavens.
Kael set the cube down and reached out his hand. A feather quill appeared.
He had considered studying a lower rank mote first, to get a feel for how to move forward with Point Aegis. But the moment he had actually entered Point Aegis, he discarded that idea.
If he was truly going to reverse engineer it he would need every resource he had, and even then the odds looked slim. Wasting time and resources on a meaningless rank one mote just to familiarise himself was not something he could afford.
Still… It couldn't hurt to take a look.
He activated Obsidian Shard on the feather quill. In an instant, everything changed around him. Kael clenched his teeth against the pain. He was splitting his consciousness three ways at once. Roughly twenty percent to his physical body at the desk, another twenty in his inner realm, and sixty percent into the feather quill mote.
He did this not only to stay aware of what was happening at the desk and to keep consuming mindstones, but because he was in no position to move his consciousness fully into his inner realm and leave himself helpless at the surface.
That alone put immense strain on his mind. Combine that with the inner realm of a mote, and the result was an explosive migraine the moment he entered.
And this was coming from someone who was no longer a novice at splitting consciousness. Ever since he had learned to do it in the fight club, he had always kept around twenty percent of his consciousness in his inner realm. While this lowered his raw battle strength, weakening his reflexes and slowing his mind somewhat, it offered strong protection against motes that could affect Thoughts, such as mind pathway. It was also the reason he felt somewhat comfortable around Syleena, knowing she couldn't do anything he wouldn't notice.
Kael's eyes settled on its river of Will.
Just like his own inner realm, the mote had one too, but this one was the natural mote's gold tinted with Kael's red. It had no white void, just countless golden threads of rules forming the space itself. There were noticeably fewer threads than Point Aegis, but that was to be expected given it was an entire rank lower.
The river of Will's current was immense, even more oppressive than Kael's own, but he wasn't surprised. Anything this close to nature was always complex beyond reason.
Kael was just about to examine its Will when he sensed something and retracted his consciousness.
He pulled back through the mote, into his inner realm, then into his physical body, where his hand found his knife in the same motion and sent it across the room toward Sophie, who was sitting in Syleena's bed reading.
The blade tore past her and buried itself deep into the wall beside her neck.
Pages scattered chaotically as she flinched, sending the book tumbling from her hands.
"You're doing something," Kael said in a cold tone, rising from his chair.
Sophie's breathing turned short and uneven.
"What… how did you…" she managed in a shaky voice.
Kael ignored her completely. He walked up and crouched down to meet her at eye level.
"What pathway are you, Sophie?" he asked coldly