“My head… it hurts…”

  Mrs. Stass woke with a start. She stared at her clothes, the neat bedsheets… yet she couldn’t recall anything from before she blacked out. Her expression changed instantly.

  “You’re awake?”

  She saw the golden-masked leader sitting calmly nearby. Her heart tightened with unease. “We…?”

  “You fainted. I let you rest here, that is all.”

  The masked man’s voice was even, unhurried.

  “That is all…”

  Mrs. Stass didn’t know what she was feeling—relief, despair, pain, a guilty flicker of pleasure…

  It was a snarl of emotions, hopelessly tangled.

  Then the golden mask moved closer. A whisper brushed her ear.

  “In life, everyone wears a mask. Only by tearing away the disguise—shattering every affectation, letting our natural wildness return—do we learn what kind of person we truly are.”

  “Mrs. Stass… your mask is interesting.”

  Mrs. Stass went deathly pale. Terror flared in her eyes.

  “You… felt it, didn’t you? That unrestrained freedom—and the grandeur of Essence?”

  Javon’s words slid into her heart like venomous snakes.

  Her mind trembled. Inside her body, some unseen Essence seemed to cheer, to leap with joy.

  “I… I felt it… greatness,” Mrs. Stass murmured. “An indescribable greatness—beyond every worldly shackle and mortal understanding!”

  “Good. You may go.”

  The golden-masked man waved a hand. “Next time, remember to bring Metana Jacques. I’ll give you what you want.”

  “What I want?” Mrs. Stass looked lost.

  “After all…” The golden-masked man struck precisely where her weakness lay. “It shouldn’t be only you who falls into the abyss.”

  Mrs. Stass staggered as she left.

  …

  Once she was gone, the golden-masked man removed his mask, revealing an utterly ordinary, balding middle-aged face.

  In the next instant, the bald man opened his mouth—wider and wider—like a black hole. Two pale hands reached out from that darkness and, as if stripping off clothes, peeled an entire layer of human skin from his body.

  “An advanced version of Skinmask—Skinshifter.”

  Javon murmured, “Looks like my workmanship is decent. Tearing from the mouth left no damage anywhere on the skin…”

  As for the original leader of the Latter Light cult—

  Javon had turned him into this skin.

  Choosing to take his place had been a whim of inspiration. The man had been nothing but a normal person—he wasn’t even a Transcendent.

  The so-called Latter Light was nonsense he’d invented on the spot, because the middle-aged man’s own name was—

  Lattrell Lyte.

  A failed insurance salesman who’d switched careers into a shoddy cult leader, specializing in fleecing the savings of the elderly. Then he found a target truly worth hunting—Mrs. Stass.

  You could say… half the people in this Latter Light cult were hired actors, all staged to swindle Mrs. Stass and her mother…

  If I hadn’t shown up today, she would’ve lost both money and body. Arrogance really does blind a person.

  As for impersonating Lattrell Lyte, Javon had other purposes.

  I was still thinking about how to get close to Baron Jacques’s family, and an opportunity fell into my lap. Mrs. Stass will introduce Metana Jacques at the next gathering.

  And as for pretending to be a Dark God and its believers… I have experience. I can do it far better than Lattrell Lyte ever could.

  Night, 27 Phoenix Street.

  Javon wore Mr. Morley’s face and swaggered up to the door, key in hand.

  “Mr. Morley?”

  William, reading in the sitting room, looked utterly startled—he nearly reached for the double-barreled hunting shotgun on the wall.

  These days, his employer left early and returned late, insisting he keep a low profile. The unfortunate William could only stay home and study on his own.

  “It’s me.”

  Javon didn’t bother explaining. He checked the two Transposition Drawers first.

  Lilia’s drawer was empty—no further messages after the last delivery.

  As for the other—

  In the study, Javon pulled it open and found a letter. On the envelope, in clear script, were the words:

  “To Mr. Elvander.”

  “A letter from the Professor…”

  After tossing a coin and confirming it, Javon took the envelope, sat back in the high-backed chair behind the desk, and slit it open with a small knife.

  “Dear Mr. Elvander:

  Thank you for your help last time. Without you, I would never have survived the Fallen City Diat.

  Even so, I was contaminated by that monster and had to recuperate in a hot-spring town. Fortunately, after several rituals, I have rebalanced my mind and returned to Wynchester. Through Mr. Havier, I received your message.

  By the way, although Mr. Havier was recently raided by the Bureau of Occult Affairs, he has thankfully come through unharmed—and has transferred away most of his castle.

  As for your two questions, it is my honor to answer them, though this can scarcely repay one ten-thousandth of the debt I owe you.

  First, regarding Transcendent advancement: we all know the Fourth Sephiroth is—Vitality. In a certain period of history, this was nearly considered the limit of a Transcendent, until Glory and Crown were discovered later…

  According to records and my own research, the opening of the Fifth and Sixth Sephiroth will directly involve the Ethereal Realm. From this, I infer that the final stage of a World-Sanctioned Immortal ritual may require the Transcendent to enter a certain special region within the Ethereal Realm to complete the ultimate ascension…

  In addition, do not underestimate any The Crowned One. Not only can they respond to prayer within a certain range and display miracles, they also possess a strange power known as LAW. I know little of LAW, only that, within certain limits and degrees, it can twist certain rules as we know them…

  Second, regarding the Tower-path Beyond Mortality-grade remnant: my school cannot sell such a thing, but I do have a lead. In our history, there was once a Beyond Mortality who took great interest in the Fallen City Diat. He vanished during that exploration. That is why I have long dreamed of Diat—after the Fourth Sephiroth, all Transcendents may choose to enter the Ethereal Realm with their physical bodies, and that predecessor may have perished in Diat’s depths, leaving behind his remnant…

  I wished to obtain that remnant as the primary material for my own advancement. But after my later expedition, I realized I had overestimated myself. Diat is far beyond what I can explore.

  Finally, I wish you health.

  —The Professor”

  Using Havier to contact the Professor and ask questions was something Javon had been doing all along.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He lit the letter and watched it burn, thinking through the reply in silence.

  “After Beyond Mortality… every advancement directly involves the Ethereal Realm?” he murmured. “That makes sense…”

  As for the power of LAW…

  Javon remembered the curse that had once been bound to the Crying Blade—spreading without reason, infecting through remembered wounds.

  “A kind of force akin to a meme… already grazing the rules themselves? For low-tier Transcendents, that means—unsolvable.”

  “And the relic of The Blood of Decay can be confirmed as the work of a high-tier Transcendent, but not a World-Sanctioned Immortal… That propagation trait could be named the Law of Diffusion—is that the true might of a Sixth Sephiroth The Crowned One?”

  “And as for why the God of Suffering has suddenly become so active… besides advancement, what else does such a Transcendent pursue? All of it was provoked by the appearance of the Greenforest Earl…” Javon exhaled soundlessly. “In a sense, their speculation wasn’t wrong.”

  “My awakening itself signifies the resurgence of the world’s mystic tide—no, that it has developed to a point where a vast threshold has been crossed. The Seventh Sephiroth—true immortality, the World-Sanctioned Immortal—no longer lies in fantasy.”

  “Those Sixth Sephiroth reaching for the Seventh… at least in theory, can succeed.”

  “The world is about to face a new wave…”

  When the digression passed, Javon returned to the most practical matter.

  “To advance as The Omniforge, I still lack the final Tower-path Beyond Mortality remnant.” His gaze cooled. “I didn’t expect to return to the Fallen City Diat.”

  Thinking of that expedition, his expression grew grave.

  To be blunt, they had only reached the outer edges before encountering a Black Umbral Beast—and deeper within, there were clearly packs of them.

  Worse still, that region was steeped in a power of corruption that heavily suppressed any Path outside Umbral. Even if the entire team had opened the Fourth Sephiroth and become Beyond Mortality, success would never have been guaranteed.

  For Javon now, his strongest asset was Oclair—a tool-spirit. And it had been getting blown apart with unsettling frequency.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “Fortunately… if it’s only reconnaissance, there’s no need to send Oclair. The Spirit of Null Observance is best.”

  “As for the key to locating Diat—my connection to Diat has always existed, and it’s very strong. It simply wasn’t ‘activated’ at first due to changes within the Ethereal Realm. After I went there once, the connection has been re-established.”

  With that, Javon stopped hesitating. After sealing the study, he began to chant the true name of the Spirit of Null Observance:

  “Creator above the Creator!”

  “Absolute Observer beyond the many Veils!”

  “Spirit of Null Observance that wanders the unknown—an absolutely neutral Obscured Existence—Silent Observer!”

  As his own invocation received its response, Javon’s Essence tore free of his body. He saw himself—eyes shut, face blank, sitting rigidly in the chair.

  He did not linger.

  He stepped straight into the Dreamworld.

  This time, the scene was utterly different.

  Javon was already standing amid the ruins of a dark city. By the surroundings, it was unmistakably the deepest point their party had once reached.

  “My connection is far stronger than the key the Professor described. I don’t need to enter from the outskirts—I can appear inside Diat instantly.” He scanned the skyline of broken silhouettes. “If I hadn’t been unable to go deeper last time, perhaps I could have reached the city’s core in a single step.”

  He moved slowly.

  Passing one shattered black concrete frame after another, he saw Black Umbral Beasts wandering the ruins.

  Dog-bodied, human-headed, they roamed without purpose through the wreckage like loyal sentries.

  Some packs numbered as many as twenty. And among them, the leaders were larger still—some with two heads, some with three.

  Clearly, these were advanced Black Umbral Beasts—Ethereal Realm creatures whose strength matched Fifth or Sixth Sephiroth Transcendents.

  Javon walked past a two-headed Black Umbral Beast.

  Its two human heads—one male, one female—noticed nothing. Their eyes were crazed as they searched for prey, as though eager to find an opponent to tear apart.

  At times, the beasts would erupt into sudden slaughter among themselves, fighting until death. Yet none of them sensed the ghostlike figure passing through their midst…

  “Diat’s core… should be the headquarters of The Light of Salvation.” With a faint, complicated feeling, Javon reached the remembered location.

  Here the beasts clustered more densely, and the buildings were even more ruined.

  He drifted through a field of collapsed structures, a strange note in his expression—nostalgia braided with something harder to name.

  “This place… seems to have endured a brutal battle.”

  “After the sun fell and I slept, did The Light of Salvation suffer a joint strike from the Black Sun cult and other forces?”

  “And in that process… what happened that allowed Lynn and Irene to ascend, becoming an Obscured Existence—The Mother of Nature?”

  The more he saw, the more questions multiplied.

  He slipped deeper into the ruins. In the broken stone, he seemed to glimpse a faint radiance that had once covered these walls—and the blood that had come later…

  But time had scoured it all away, leaving only fragments—enough for later generations to excavate, to gaze upon, and to guess at.

  At last, he reached what had once been the heart of The Light of Salvation—his altar.

  It had been leveled into nothing but a vast black pit.

  Black flames burned in the void above it and within it, quiet and patient, as though they had been burning for ten thousand years and would burn until time’s end.

  “Undying black fire.” Javon’s voice thinned. “This is destruction wrought on the level of a Velthyr. The Fallen Corona?”

  At that moment, a long, lingering sigh appeared in his ears.

  It felt engraved here—carved into history, into the Ethereal Realm’s memory itself.

  Any being whose gaze fell upon those black flames would hear that sigh.

  Around Javon’s intangible form, strands of black fire rose, as if trying to scorch even what did not truly exist…

  The flames burned pointlessly against emptiness—yet stubbornly followed him.

  “A sigh… I’ve heard before…”

  Secret Power surged within him. The black flames went out.

  When he looked at the pit again, his expression turned deeply complex.

  “This… is a Velthyr’s place of death.”

  “The Velthyr that fell here… should be It.”

  Javon sighed. He did not enter the pit. Instead, he circled it, continuing his search.

  Before long, he found something on the far side of the crater—a half-broken wall, or perhaps a raised slab of earth, bearing a mural.

  It seemed painted in blood—mad, symbolic. The blood had dried into a dark crust, yet retained an eerie allure.

  The painting used stark abstraction to depict a horrifying scene.

  —A black corona took up half the mural. Dark flames were consuming another indistinct existence.

  That existence was rendered with only a few strokes—but for anyone with sufficient intuition, those strokes alone were enough to conjure the sound of a sigh within the mind.

  “Three have passed: one devoured by the Great Serpent; one burned by the Corona; one stripped until nothing could be stripped… yet the secret history shall still remember…”

  Javon murmured a passage from The Dreamwalker’s Travelogue.

  Lilia’s predecessor had clearly received a flood of hidden knowledge within the Ethereal Realm, and recorded it faithfully.

  “One burned by the Corona… So this is how The Fallen Corona recovered. Here, It devoured The Wind of Incineration—a being born from the sun’s fall—seizing all Its Sovereignty and power, thus stabilizing Its own existence and rank…”

  The Wind of Incineration had been formed from a sigh at the death of the Crimson Creator. It should have possessed the rank of a Velthyr.

  That was why the pit still echoed with a sigh.

  “After devouring The Wind of Incineration, it’s not strange that The Fallen Corona could maintain a Velthyr rank. What’s strange is that The Fallen Corona should have been the weakest. I always thought that in a Velthyr war, It would be the first to fall—yet It turned the tables.”

  “Did It seize a rare opportunity… or did another existence help It?”

  Javon shook his head and stopped chasing that thought. He stepped closer to the mural.

  On the ground, he saw a scatter of ash. Within it lay a blue-gold crystal, gleaming.

  —A Tower-path Fourth Sephiroth remnant.

  “It seems even the Black Umbral Beasts don’t dare approach too closely. Once they cross a certain range, they hear the sigh… and are burned.”

  “That resentment from a Velthyr’s death is enough to curse-kill any Transcendent beneath a World-Sanctioned Immortal. The Beyond Mortality from the Professor’s school must have been unlucky—heard the sigh, and was burned to ash.”

  “And before dying, he left this mural—painting what he saw within that sigh.”

  Javon let out a dry chuckle.

  “In the mystic world, the more secrets you know, the faster you die. Cause of death—you knew too much.”

  To paint even a Velthyr’s history—if he didn’t die, who would?

  “But how did he get here in the first place? An arcane artifact? A special high-tier sigil that concealed him?” Javon scanned the area. “Chasing knowledge too far is an easy way to get yourself killed. From that alone… the Tower Path is dangerous.”

  He searched a little longer, found no other arcane artifact remains, and vanished.

  After the Spirit of Null Observance departed, the region returned to its previous stillness without the slightest change.

  Because the Spirit of Null Observance could not be observed, could not be touched…

  When he came, not even a breeze stirred. When he left, he carried away not a speck of dust.

  Moments later.

  At the outskirts of The Light of Salvation’s headquarters, a Black Umbral Beast—massive as a young elephant—jerked its head up.

  Around its neck were nine human heads—male and female, old and young alike.

  All of them opened their eyes at once and stared toward the blood mural.

  Before the mural.

  Space rippled faintly, and a figure in ornate ceremonial dress appeared out of nothing.

  The Malevolent Spirit—Oclair!

  Using the special bond with Diat and the earlier expedition, Javon precisely fixed this point as the anchor for Oclair’s entry into the Dreamworld!

  Oclair did not linger. It reached out and seized the blue-gold faceted crystal from the ash.

  “Rrrrgh!”

  The nine-headed Black Umbral Beast fixed eighteen eyes on the scene, its gaze terrifying. Even so, it did not dare draw too near—so deep was its fear of the sigh that haunted this place.

  Oclair’s expression did not change as it took the crystal.

  At the same time, within its body, faces began to bloom—phantom, fallen copies of the same visage.

  Some laughed madly. Some wept. Some screamed. Some twisted in agony…

  In a single breath, Oclair fell—splintering into fractured minds and personalities. Worse, those personalities began tearing at its spirit-body, as if to devour it alive.

  It was a curse.

  Those splintered personalities were Oclair—parts of it. And so they held the Malevolent Spirit’s power, capable of turning inward and tearing it apart from within…

  Then, in the next instant, a blazing radiance erupted from Oclair’s body.

  Beneath that light, the phantom faces first became confused—then dissolved, one after another.

  They had been purified.

  This was the purification of Javon’s Secret Power—and the very thing The Light of Salvation had pursued with tireless devotion—

  The Light of Salvation.

  A thousand years after it vanished, the light of redemption descended upon this land once more.

  Hummm—

  As though something resonated, a faint sheen suddenly blossomed across the ruins that had been black for so long. Weak, yet stubborn—enduring.

  The nine heads of the Black Umbral Beast all wore the same bewildered expression.

  And in that moment, Oclair was already gone.

  The beast’s confusion drained away. Rage replaced it. Nine faces contorted in fury as it smashed and tore at everything around it—until it began hunting its own kind…

  In the study.

  Javon woke, staring at the Tower remnant before him.

  With it—together with the Truth Scales in Lilia’s hands—he finally had all seven materials. He could attempt to open the gate of Beyond Mortality.

  Yet there was little joy on his face.

  Only a muted desolation.

  “A thousand years of waiting… a thousand years of persistence…”

  “In the end… what is left?”