Radeon broke apart the message and read the code hidden inside it almost at once.
Yet Falcion had asked for more than warning before sending himself to death.
He had one final request.
He wanted the great forces of this Samsara Realm to give him a proper farewell.
So they did. Above the Monasteries of Obstruse and Covert, the skies churned with blood light, divine radiance, killing frost, and a thousand tangled elements crossing one another in a grand and terrible display.
It was a sendoff worthy of a man who had spent most of his life peering where others feared to look.
Falcion had arranged even his death with care. He made it appear as natural as possible, like the end of an old diviner who had finally gone mad from too many deductions.
He let rival powers and old allies alike think he had simply broken under the weight of his own path. He let the world believe senility had hollowed him out.
That was the influence of a diviner.
The current abbot of the monastery, Vios, once Falcion's disciple, received his master's final will.
I do not see advancement ahead, and all my life's wishes have already been fulfilled.
Vios did not accept those words lightly. He began deducing at once, searching for falsehood, hidden intent, or one last buried anomaly. He burned through a hundred years of his own lifespan in the attempt. After hundreds of deductions, he found nothing.
No hidden scheme. No lurking distortion.
No final sign that his master had been forced or tampered with.
Only the same conclusion over and over again.
Falcion had simply seen no point in living any longer. And on the surface, everything supported that conclusion.
Every hundred years, like clockwork, Falcion had purchased life-extending elixirs and longevity treasures, only to consume them all in this final stretch.
To his disciple Vios, it fit neatly to question.
His master had clearly been living on borrowed time for ages already, swallowing one life-prolonging medicine after another, and by the end of it, he had left behind the image of a man who had spent himself dry before death ever reached him.
That was what made it perfect. That was what made the lie hold.
For Radeon, the message brought something close to ease.
He could glimpse faith, fortune, and the lines of fate, but not the stream of space and time itself yet.
That was a different concept entirely, not merely a matter of having enough strength.
Faith, fortune, and fate could be imagined as land. Space and time were water.
They could exist on the same world, yet they were not the same substance, not the same law.
Still, in any true cosmos, there could never be only land or only sea. One always touched the other in the end. That was how they interacted.
"A hundred years," Radeon said. "That is plenty, if you ask me."
Part of him still leaned toward the safer road.
He could devour the realm fragment now, use his eldritch soul in full, and absorb everyone in Goldkeep Crownmarkets in a single sweep. The thought came to him easily, almost naturally, but he dismissed it just as fast.
That would be the worst possible choice. The moment he stepped out of this realm, he would become one of the weakest eldritch creature in the greater dark. Worse, he would burden himself with negative cosmic karma.
In high realms, especially those whose civilizations had already reached the stars, cosmic karma was not some vague superstition. It was counted, tracked, and treated as a binding law.
To incur too much of it was to invite trouble from powers far beyond this dying place.
His second option tempted him far more.
He could steal all the seedlings before him. Every last one. In that path, he saw possibility, so much of it that it stirred a rare flicker of excitement in him.
As these thoughts were turned over in his mind, deduced, reduced, rerun, and tested from every angle, Radeon finally lifted a hand and beckoned to Calyx.
"Come. Let's watch the show with the disciples downstairs," he said.
Calyx gave a nod, but for a moment he did not move.
Something still lingered at the edge of his senses. It felt like a silent shout carried across an impossible distance, the kind of thing ghosts were strangely sensitive to.
Even from hundreds of thousands of miles away, he could taste it.
Greed. Gamble. The same sharp flavor one found in the gaming district, only richer here, fuller, almost intoxicating.
It was so savory that his foot began tapping against the floor without him noticing.
"What kind of fellow would stake everything on a gamble like that?" Calyx murmured.
Radeon carried a similar scent, but Calyx had never liked his.
It was greed stripped of thrill, greed with certainty in its bones. A cold thing. A flavor too bland to savor.
Even so, Calyx was no fool and no blind flatterer. A man who could think like that, who still carried traces of pride and other quieter fires beneath the surface, was not someone to follow carelessly, but neither was he someone to disappoint.
Calyx could feel it more and more these days. Something larger than life was waiting somewhere ahead, and if he wished to reach it alive, then he had better do his part well.
So he followed.
He went down and sat on one of the beanies nearby, easing himself into it while the disciples stole quick glances his way before returning their attention to the screens.
Their wariness had not disappeared, but the distance between them had already begun to lessen. That much was plain.
What they watched was the real thing, unfolding live before their eyes, unlike the filtered display Calyx was still censoring in the Radeon Terraces Arena through the ghosts linked to his mind.
Then Almsgiver pointed excitedly at one of the screens.
"Look over there. Big Brother Oswin started rolling his mud room."
The chubby boy's voice came out with all the careless freedom of someone too young or too shameless to bother measuring his words.
Several of the other disciples looked at him in disbelief, amazed by how unrestrained his mouth could be. Still, none of them could truly refute him. For all its cleverness and purpose, the thing really was just a hardened chamber of mud shaped into a rolling room.
Oswin's chamber was rolled as close to the abyss opening as they dared. From there, the cultivators began attaching the smaller rooms one after another, sealing each section carefully to the next.
Seen from above, the whole construct soon resembled a coiled snake forcing itself into its own burrow.
Then the descent began. Oswin fed reinforced wood through the opening at the front of his chamber while the cultivators behind him pushed the structure forward by slow increments, inching the five-hundred-meter chain of sealed rooms down into the abyss. It was not nearly enough to reach the true depth below. Everyone knew that. This was only a test run.
Even so, no one treated it lightly.
Inside, the pottery-like chambers were constantly tended. Moisture had to be balanced just right along the inner walls so the structure remained airtight and did not let even a trace of the green fog seep through.
The snake-like corridor advanced at barely ten meters a minute. Slow. Painfully slow. But certainty mattered more than speed.
Then, at last, the mud walls touched the fog.
Still the structure rolled on. Ten meters. Twenty. A hundred.
The watching cultivators held their breath until Oswin's voice came from within the foremost chamber.
"No fog detected."
The men stationed through each section reported the same in turn.
"No fog detected."
"No fog detected."
"No fog detected."
The descent continued. Two hundred meters. Still no breach.
"No fog detected," Oswin said again.
This was the path Oswin had divined as the right one. They would have to make their own way down.
Even so, he did not treat his deductions as fact or absolute law.
He still had the other cultivators labor through every easier method of descent first.
The first attempt was a sealed carriage. They packed it tight with water-hardened soil, then lined it with a layer of bubbleless ice, then sealed it again with another layer of soil.
If that was not airtight, then the word had no meaning.
Sure enough, it rolled through the fog without issue, and the craftsmen who designed it looked smug enough to burst.
Powered by an array, it even seemed like the sort of thing that could change transportation in the cultivation world.
Then it reached the granite cavern. The voices started again.
Within a hundred meters, the fortified carriage came apart. No error. No malfunction. It simply dismantled itself, just like the rope had.
They tried a second method, a sealed golem large enough to fit a man like armor.
The result was the same. Another cultivator proposed something simpler, a rolling ball with a man running inside it. That too dismantled itself.
