“No. Stop. Wait,” Aster says, raising both hands like he’s surrendering to the metaphysical police. “Before we touch anything, before I pick up some sentient bible verse that buries into my spinal column—I need you to answer one thing.”

  Musa blinks. “Okay…”

  “What. The. Hell. Is Scripture?”

  Aster’s voice echoes through the chamber like it just fired itself from a cannon of frustration.

  Musa blinks again.

  Aster keeps going.

  “Because so far, everyone I’ve asked has either smiled vaguely, nodded like a cult leader, or told me I’d ‘feel it when the time comes.’ Which is not helpful. I’ve been patient. I’ve nodded. I’ve smiled. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. But I swear on the goddamn Faith economy, if one more person tells me to trust the vibe, I am going to start screaming and not stop until someone surgically removes the mystery with a knife.”

  There is a pause.

  Then Musa—very gently, like he’s defusing a bomb—speaks.

  “Scripture,” he says, “isn’t a book. It’s a memory. A soulprint. A technique encoded so deeply into the Astral Plane that it can be bound to your Vessel.”

  Aster stares at him.

  “You mean like… a combat manual?”

  “No. I mean like a possessed combat manual.”

  Musa steps closer, more serious now.

  “When you accept a scripture, it doesn’t just teach you how to fight. It imprints your spirit with the person who first wrote it. The way they moved. Thought. Breathed. You don’t just learn the technique—you let it carve itself into you.”

  Aster swallows.

  Musa continues. “It uploads. Like a spell burned into the blueprint of your soul. You’ll feel your instincts change. Your reactions. Even your fighting mindset.”

  “You’re telling me I can… download a kung fu ghost.”

  Musa grins. “Basically. But some ghosts bite.”

  He gestures to the passage leading into the distance, which Aster assumes is where the Scriptures are stored.

  “There are more scriptures than stars. Some passed down from masters who spent their lives refining the perfect stance. Others left by madmen who believed pain was a language the body could sing. Some are beautiful. Some are cursed. Some literally don’t work unless you believe in imaginary numbers.”

  Aster blinks. “What.”

  “And the worst part? Some of them work better if you’re already broken.”

  He lets that hang in the air.

  “Your Typing—Spirit—is hyper-receptive. If you pick the wrong scripture, it can unmake you. Rewire you in the wrong image. But if you pick the right one…”

  He points toward Aster’s chest.

  “It won’t just amplify your power. It’ll show you what kind of person you were always meant to become.”

  Aster looks around again—at the vault, the glowing shelves, the holy-chaos symphony of it all.

  He laughs.

  It isn’t a happy sound.

  “Great,” he mutters. “So less bible study, more spiritual personality override with possible side effects, limited warranty, and a non-zero chance of spontaneous inner monologue replacement.”

  Musa pats him on the back. “You’re catching on.”

  Aster looks at the staff and chain.

  and realizes: this isn’t about style.

  This is about becoming a mirror to someone else’s madness—and praying it looks good on him.

  Musa doesn’t allow further questions as he leads Aster deeper into the Depository, past racks of weapons and tomes thick with dust and intent, where the lanterns flicker like they’re thinking twice about staying lit. The air here has weight. Age. Like the walls remember better fighters than either of them.

  Then they reach it.

  Another part of the library, ancient and unbothered, about the size of a hangar. No weapons. Just scrolls.

  Thousands of them. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Some stacked. Some floating. A couple are chained to the ceiling, rotating slowly like lazy predators. Others sit in vats of glowing fluid that definitely don’t look like they passed safety regulations.

  “Wait here,” Musa says, already moving.

  Aster crosses his arms, watching as Musa begins sorting through madness. He picks up a scroll, sniffs it—why?—reads a line, then mutters something like, “No, too stabby,” or “Fungal themes—pass.” At one point he recoils from a tome that hisses at him and immediately shoves it behind a glowing panel labeled “Probation.”

  “Is this normal?” Aster asks.

  “For scriptures?” Musa calls over his shoulder. “This is normal.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Aster blinks. “What happens if you imprint the wrong one?”

  Musa runs a thumb across the scroll’s edge, eyes narrowing. “As long as you’ve got a decent Mental Fortitude higher than the prerequisite shown on the scripture, it won’t turn you into a twitching proverb factory.”

  He glances at Aster. “What’s your MF sitting at?”

  “One-twenty-five,” Aster says.

  Musa gives a low whistle. “That’s high for a first-timer. Greater-F pushing into Lesser-E. Most kids get stuck with flavourless Lesser-F grade Scriptures: ‘Stance of the Mildly Annoyed Crane’ or some knock-off of ‘Stick Hit Real Fast.’ But you?” He sets the scroll down with reverence. “You’ve got enough grit to start with something real. Something that remembers its author.”

  “Oh good, Soul malware,” Aster mutters. “What if my MF isn’t high enough?”

  “You’d either fail the imprint… or worse—succeed in absorbing something your mind can’t hold. Seen it before. One kid thought he was a spider for a month.”

  Aster nods slowly. “So, high MF means I’m not a spider.”

  “Exactly.” Musa grins.

  Finally, after far too many scrolls have judged them both, Musa returns with two. He places them down with care—side by side—like sacred riddles.

  “These are the best I could find,” he says. “Compatible. Complementary. Weird enough that if anyone could pull it off, it’d be you.”

  Aster leans in.

  The first scroll is old—edges frayed, ink faded—but the moment his fingers near it, something pulls—like gravity with opinions.

  “Point Burst Staff,” Musa says. “Written by Herphon: genius, tournament winner, tactical maniac. Built the whole style during his four years in the Astral Archipelago. Staff work refined to an art form. He turned single strikes into detonations. Pressure-point precision. Not brute force—burst force. He mostly designed it while surviving alone on an especially dangerous island full of sentient stone golems and covered year-round in hallucinogenic gasses.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He trained by letting the golems hunt him while tripping on doses that would fracture the sanity of a small city,” Musa says, completely deadpan. “Said it helped with reaction time.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “The result?” Musa taps the scroll. “A staff style built around microbursts of devastating force. You don’t just hit. You detonate. Every strike targets a joint, a nerve cluster, a pressure point. You break them faster than they can understand they’re broken.”

  Aster arches a brow. “Sounds violent.”

  “He wrote poetry about cartilage,” Musa adds.

  Aster recoils. “We’re moving on.”

  Musa taps the second scroll.

  This one pulses erratically. The calligraphy dances, flickering in and out of his peripheral vision like it doesn’t want to be caught thinking.

  “Infinite Chain Link Squall,” Musa says. “Scripture of Anasi Yaw. Spirit-Typer. Partial empath. Claimed she could hear the voices of every ‘Man’ she’d ever killed, and wrote this style to drown them out.”

  Aster blinks. “That’s... comforting.”

  “She built it to never stop moving,” Musa continues. “You’re everywhere at once—sweeps, lashes, pierces, binds. Fluid, unrelenting, deceptive. You’re not attacking. You’re unfolding. Your enemy can’t react because they never know what’s coming.”

  He taps the two scrolls again.

  “Point Burst gives you focus. Anchors you. Squall unleashes you. One punches through guards. The other pulls them out of position.”

  Aster stares at them.

  At the edges of both scrolls, diagrams begin to form—like ink moving of its own accord. He can almost see the forms, the stances, the movements. Not words. Intuitions.

  “So,” he says slowly. “If I take both…?”

  “You start with the staff,” Musa says. “Let it teach you when to strike. How to wait. Then, when your Vessel’s strong enough, you learn the chain—and forget everything you thought you knew about control. Eventually, if you survive, you’ll be able to wield them both. At once. Together.”

  “Then I fuse them?”

  “Then you fuse them. Through your Artefact. Through your cultivation. Through sheer stubborn metaphysical violence.”

  Aster stares down at them.

  One scroll pulses like a heartbeat.

  The other like a seizure.

  “…I hate how much I want this.”

  Musa smiles. “Good. The best styles are forged by people too reckless to walk the line.”