Martin went looking for help, and of course the first person he sought out was the Supreme Elder's disciple. Jackson.
"Stop dreaming," Jackson said the moment Martin made his request. "I may be your leader here, but I'm not giving you a piece of my flesh. If I start doing that, then what was the point of all the self-care I've put in? What about the expensive herbs I used?"
That was Jackson through and through. A man who might risk his life for victory, reputation, or profit, but never for charity. If a thing brought him no gain, he would sooner let it rot where it fell.
Still, he did offer advice.
"I'll give you this much." Jackson pointed toward the scattered remains of the giant creatures that had attacked the wall earlier.
Broken bone fragments lay everywhere, some too large for an ordinary man to lift with ease, and strips of dense muscle still twitched where they had been hacked apart.
"There is no strict rule on what counts as muscle for your art, right? Go take some from those giant bastards. Maybe you will grow something new."
Martin paused. The suggestion actually made sense. This was the cultivation world. Stranger grafts had succeeded before.
He walked over, picked up one strand of Flesh Titan muscle, and slapped it against the wall to test it. The sound that came back was not the wet smack of meat, but the hard twang of something closer to a steel cable used in bridgework, tough, taut, and unnaturally light for its density.
Martin's eyes brightened at once. He gathered what smaller bone fragments he could manage, though even the least of them still came up near half a man's size.
"Jackson boss man, I'll get going now," Martin said with a rough snort.
Martin did not like Jackson much. The man was too sharp where benefits were concerned, too quick with money, too unwilling to yield an inch unless he had already measured what he might get back.
Martin had learned to endure him the way one endured a knife at the belt. Useful, but never warm.
When Martin brought the salvaged flesh and bone back, Lifara looked at the materials in his arms as if he were some reckless fool who had mistaken madness for initiative.
Across the arena seating, another change had begun to spread. The gathered masses had started giving people names.
Oswin drew the most attention by far. Too many had seen him at work now to think of him as only another participant.
He was the only one permitted to tend the statues, and the way he had steered men, towers, and plans with nothing but thought and scraps of information had struck the crowd harder than any flashy technique.
Before long, one name had begun to settle around him. Divine Planner.
It passed from mouth to mouth with growing certainty.
Jackson had not secured a fixed title yet, but his name was being weighed all the same. Some called him Bloodspeed for the way he moved. Others preferred Reliable Blood. A few, watching how he bargained, directed, and inserted himself into every useful place, muttered Young Cult Leader under their breath.
None of it had settled yet. But the realm had started watching, and once people began naming a man, it meant he had already done enough to be remembered.
As the brief respite settled over the battlefield, Radeon and Calyx sat beside each other atop the pavilion, looking out over the city like two men sharing a quiet that did not belong to peace.
"So you're saying you've already obtained an Immortal Inner World?" Calyx asked, stunned.
His memories had been returning in fragments, slow and uneven, but enough had come back that words like immortal and eldritch no longer sounded empty to him.
He did not grasp their full weight yet, not the way he once might have, but he understood enough to know such things were not spoken lightly.
"No," Radeon said. "I intend to make this Ghost Realm fragment my inner world. It is not the same, but it is similar in nature."
Calyx turned that over in his mind, then looked at him again.
"Then where do you plan to go after this?"
"Explore the six other continents," Radeon said. "Never go to the center of Imperia."
That answer drew a frown from Calyx.
"Why not? May I know the reason?"
Radeon did not answer at once. He had already sensed too much there.
Eldritch beings born from the wider cosmos were different from the local horrors that arose naturally within a cultivation world.
That distinction mattered. It mattered enough that he would not treat the danger lightly.
All this time, even while speaking little, Radeon had been improving his crystal brain.
At present, he could tune himself to a million prayers at once while still going about his daily life without a hitch.
If he focused fully, he could push that number to twenty million before his brain overloaded.
Even so, it was still a laughable figure compared to what he once handled, when he could listen to the cries of an entire cosmos.
Yet even in this diminished state, it was enough for his Myridion Seersight to sift through possibilities.
Again and again, the strongest convergence of eldritch presence pointed toward the Central Continent.
Radeon was not often wrong. He had no intention of testing whether this would be one of those rare times.
Calyx watched him in silence, then said, "I sent over what I learned about the Southern Continent. I heard there was once a Buddhist super force there, one that held a Court Position. It vanished overnight a few centuries ago."
Radeon's gaze sharpened.
"I do not doubt it," he said. "An anomaly would target them first. Buddhism, by its nature, demands order. It teaches stillness, restraint, the severing of desire. Ghosts which Eldritch Anomalies planned to assimilate are the opposite. They are hunger, chaos, and consumption. Of course such a force would be among the first things they would erase."
He spoke of it with a calm that made the thought feel worse, not better.
What unsettled him most was not even the vanishing itself, but the way people had come to accept it, much like their failure to establish even the simplest ranking of items.
They spoke of that disappearance as though it were some natural turn of history, just another rise and fall in the endless churn of powers.
That was the part that made his skin crawl.
How could an entire super force vanish in a single sweep and the world decide that was normal?
Still, Radeon did not probe deeper. He had already chosen his limit.
That was why he listened only to common news and passing reports. His deductions, precise as they were, always left traces. The sharper the insight, the clearer the mark.
"I also remembered what you deduced before," Calyx said. "We still need to find the last six sons and daughters of the Heavenly Dao. I have heard of such people before. Children of the era. Chosen heroes. What do you intend to do with them?"
There was more in the question than curiosity. Calyx wanted to live, first and above all.
After ten thousand years spent as Radeon's slave, survival had become the one ambition no chain had managed to beat out of him.
But survival, in his case, meant understanding enough of the larger design to avoid being crushed by it. Helping Radeon was, for now, the surest way to help himself.
Radeon did not answer at once. He looked out over the ruined city, his mind still moving along lines no one else could see.
"I deduced that Heaven can still force out four to ten more heroes," he said at last. "I will let them cultivate. That is all."
Calyx stared at him. "That is all?"
"No," Radeon said. "But plans rarely keep pace with change."
That, more than anything, was the truth of it. Even so, Radeon did not let Calyx know that Fay and Thaddeus were already two of them, one tied to the Human Realm and the other to the Underworld.
He went so far as to force himself to forget such truths at times, planting false memories in their place in case some cosmic entity seized him then and there and went digging through his mind.
That was how thorough he was. In the end, for all their differences, he was not so unlike Calyx. He wanted to live just as badly.
At first, Radeon had only meant to make a brief stop in Goldkeep Crownmarkets. Take a ghost inheritance. Gather what could be gathered. Then move on to the next continent.
But cultivation devoured resources, and resources demanded labor, and labor demanded hands enough to harvest, defend, build, and bleed.
That was why he chose to stay longer. Even then, he had not neglected the beasts.
They might yet prove useful if the pattern shifted again, so he had already set aside a small territory for them. Quietly, without fanfare, he had begun secretly collecting both male and female seed from the beasts these sects and schools had brought, placing it into an array shaped like a womb.
It was a small preparation, but Radeon trusted small preparations more than grand vows.
Ghosts, by their nature, were among the strongest races in potential. Yet they were not the current Heaven favored. That much Radeon had been trying to deduce ever since arriving in this world, and the answer, once it came, was almost insultingly simple.
It was meant to be humans. Only Heaven no longer had the strength to fully support them.
It had been squeezed dry. Stripped down to the marrow of itself. That was why the samsara realm was regressing. That was why it had begun to feed upon itself from within.
So the beasts would serve as a second road.
There was, after all, a Beast Realm as well. If humans failed, if ghosts proved too far outside the current of Heaven's will, then beasts could become the bridge.
From them he could shape bloodlines, and in time perhaps even fashion true beast bodies for the ghosts to inhabit.
Radeon did not call it hope. It was simply one more answer prepared in advance before the world asked the wrong question.
"This is my plan," Radeon said flatly. "I will bring Radeon Terraces across every continent. If it comes to it, and this realm cannot be salvaged, then we will find another realm and cultivate whatever power system rules there."
Calyx let out a slow breath.
"I see. Then, I'll follow your arrangements."
It was not praise born of awe alone. It was relief. For all Radeon's terrifying breadth, there was comfort in hearing that even he still planned for retreat, for survival, for a road that did not end in noble ruin.
Calyx had no love for dying with dignity. He preferred living with answers.
While they spoke atop the pavilion, Radeon's true body was elsewhere, still undergoing tempering.
Its hardness had already reached a frightening level, enough to compare with weapons forged for those at the peak of the Nascent Embryo Stage.
Not the cultivators themselves, but the steel such people would trust in battle. That was how far his flesh had already been pushed.
Far away, on the Central Continent, another man paid a price for seeing too much.
A Supreme Elder suddenly gasped as the years began to race across him in plain sight.
Wrinkles deepened. Skin dried. His breath shortened. He was one of the strongest men left in the realm, yet strength had not satisfied him.
He had gambled with his very life for a chance, for a single glimpse of what lay ahead. He possessed a pair of eyes that could peer into a narrow stream of space and time.
Not the river. Only small streams. For two thousand years, that was all he had ever seen.
Darkness.
No future. No flourishing age. No golden road for mankind. Only a blackness so complete that lesser men would have abandoned cultivation and drowned themselves in despair.
Yet he endured. He continued to cultivate and reached the Void Traverser Stage while hiding himself from Heaven, masking his existence so thoroughly that he even slipped past heavenly tribulation altogether.
He had even burned through his fortune, buying rare life prolonging panaceas and longevity fruits, then devouring them all to make certain his message would be sent. In the span of a blink, he burned through fifteen thousand years, withering toward death and dragging himself back toward youth again and again.
"Hehe," Falcion whispered, his voice already drying with his flesh. "This young one will be presumptuous."
Then his body mummified where he sat. A breath later, it crumbled into ash.
Murmurs, vague numbers, lines, measurements, and ragged ramblings poured outward like a broad transmission. Falcion knew that if someone was altering the future while hiding from his deductions, then that person stood beyond his power to perceive.
So he chose this method. If anyone out there could still do something, then let them act.
Falcion's final act was vague, reckless, and ruinous, yet it exposed two truths, not only to Radeon, but to all those peering with hungry intent through past, present, and future.
The first was simple enough to chill the marrow.
In every one of the ten thousand deductions Falcion had dared make, the world still ended.
The second was crueler in its own way. There was still time.
Somewhere between a hundred years and a thousand remained before everything burst apart like a bubble and whatever had been called a realm became nothing at all.
