The air in the Tapestry was a pressurized mix of anticipation and the rhythmic pounding of three billion hearts. In the lower Mortal Tier, the Iron-Ash Legion had already established its forward beachhead. The army was a sea of black-steel and flickering torches, stretching toward the horizon where the first Seat of Power lay. Radiant-Grave, built into the side of a white-gold cliff, serving as the primary anchor for the portal systems that linked the seven layers.

  Zelari stood atop a command-beast, green eyes scanning the jagged path ahead. Beside her, the twins shimmered with iridescent light, nascent souls eager to test the metal of the local guardians. The children were focused, the mothers resolute. The war was officially in motion.

  Jian, however, was miles away, both geographically and mentally.

  He hit the ground running in a sector of the external Immortal Realm that felt forgotten by the passage of time. The sky was pale sickly yellow. The wind carried the scent of dry parchment and stagnant energy. A dead town. A place that might have once been a thriving hub of commerce, now a skeletal monument to neglect.

  The architecture was strange, like a storybook illustration of a castle. Spires too thin, arches too perfect, stone a brilliant unweathered white looking like ivory. But the beauty was skin-deep. Every street, alleyway, and courtyard was carpeted in a thick crunchy layer of human and beast skeletons. Spread out, as if a billion people had simply laid down at the same moment and waited for the meat to fall off their bones.

  Jian walked through the main thoroughfare, boots making sharp rhythmic cracks as he crushed brittle remains. He didn't look at houses or abandoned stalls. He followed a scent—a heavy resinous aroma of Ancient Value wafting from the central keep.

  "Boring," Jian rasped, head tilting as he scanned the castle walls. "The Sleeping Kingdom act. I’ve seen this one. Usually there’s a thorn-curse or a sleeping princess. The Old Man loved his classics when he was in a nostalgic mood."

  He stood at the doors for a second longer than necessary. His hand found the handle instead.

  He pushed open the massive doors of the keep. They slid on silent greased hinges. Inside, the throne room was a cathedral of silver and white bone. In the center, sitting atop a throne made of fused giant skulls, was the King.

  A skeleton of polished translucent bone, draped in robes of tattered purple velvet. An obsidian and gold crown sat lopsided on his skull. Right arm resting on the side of his head, posture one of profound eternal boredom. In his left hand, he held a staff—a six-foot shaft of Living-Brier wood topped with three glowing grapefruit-sized gems pulsing with a rainbow of elemental laws.

  Jian’s nostrils flared. The staff smelled incredible. Refined stability, anchored power, and a hint of something reminding him of Saphra’s best brewing herbs.

  He walked up the steps of the dais, rags trailing over skulls. He didn't bow or announce himself. He reached out a scarred hand and grabbed the staff.

  He pulled.

  The staff didn't budge. It felt like part of the mountain's bedrock. Jian frowned, Edge Aura flickering for a second as he adjusted his grip.

  The skeleton’s head slowly rotated, empty eye-sockets igniting with faint violet flame. The arm resting on its head moved, bone-fingers twitching with a sound like dry sticks rubbing together.

  Jian didn't wait for a greeting. He planted his foot on the skeleton’s chest and pulled with a strength born from the Nothingness in his gut. The snap was a thunderclap in the silent room. The skeleton’s radius and ulna shattered into white dust. Jian leaped backward across the room, clutching the staff and a jagged piece of forearm.

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  The skeleton sat upright, purple velvet robes sliding off ribs. He looked at the stump of his arm, then at the man standing twenty feet away.

  "Foolish junior," the King rasped. His voice a psychic resonance vibrating in the air. "You enter the Grave-Sovereign’s hall and commit a theft? You have just signed a pact with the abyss. That item is the Pillar of the Seven Ends. It is tied to the life-force of this sector."

  Jian looked at the staff. He waved it around, feeling the weight. He tried to channel his energy into it. A chaotic messy blast of fire, ice, and earth erupted from the gems, punching a hole in the ceiling.

  "I thought it was valuable," Jian said, voice flat with disappointment. "But it’s just trash. It doesn't focus the power; it just leaks it. A leaky bucket with shiny rocks on top."

  "You... you cannot even use it right!" the King shrieked, violet flames flaring. He raised his remaining hand. A wall of solidified spirit-energy erupted between them, a shield humming with the weight of a High Immortal’s domain. "You are a barbarian! A savage who knows nothing of the High Arts!"

  "I don't care about your arts," Jian said.

  He gripped the Living-Brier wood in both hands and snapped the staff in half with a sickening crack. He tossed the wooden shaft aside, pried the three gems out of the wreckage, and tucked them into a pocket of his rags.

  "The wood is just filler. These are the only things with any real weight," Jian muttered.

  The Skeleton King stood up, jaw unhinging in a silent cosmic scream. "You broke it... you broke the Pillar... a billion years of history, shattered for a handful of stones!"

  Jian looked at the king, head tilting in a rhythmic way. "Are you happy to stay hidden away here forever, bone-man? Sitting in the dark, watching the dust settle on your puppets? Is this the Quiet Ending you negotiated for yourself?"

  The King paused, violet flames dimming. "I have nothing better to do. I have lived my eras. I have seen the rise and fall of the Sun. I tempted fate once before, and it left me with nothing but this throne and a kingdom of silence. I will not tempt it again."

  "Right," Jian smirked. "Following the script to the very last line. The Safe Retreat arc. Boring."

  He turned to leave. The barrier surrounding the throne room flared to life. A high-tier Seal of the Sovereign, a geometric cage of Law designed to trap anything below a God. The air within the barrier turned into a solid unyielding block of violet light.

  Jian didn't break the barrier. He didn't hit it. He simply kept walking.

  As his chest touched the violet light, his Nothingness manifested. Not a flare; a lack of friction. He slipped through the barrier, body passing through solidified Law like a puff of smoke. To the Skeleton King, it looked like a glitch in reality, as if the man had simply been edited out of the cage.

  The King stared, violet eyes flickering in terror. He had never seen someone ignore a Sovereign Seal like that. It wasn't power; it was a fundamental refusal to be governed by the world's rules.

  "What... what are you?" the King whispered.

  Jian didn't answer. He was already at the door.

  The Skeleton King cursed Jian with a voice shaking the castle. He reached into a hidden compartment in the arm of his throne and pulled out a ring of emerald-glass—a 'pay-to-win' relic purchased from a wandering merchant of the Higher Realms eons ago. He activated the ring. A dark oily curse-thread lashed out to latch onto Jian’s shadow.

  "May your path be salted with the tears of your own blood!" the King roared.

  Jian felt the curse touch his shadow. He paused, then let out a dry wheezing laugh. "Cursing a man who’s already spent ten million years in the Director’s lap? That’s like threatening a drowning man with a glass of water. Keep your ring, bone-man. You’re going to need it when the script changes."

  Jian walked out of the keep, leaving the King to resume his position on the throne. Another servant, a shambling headless construct, emerged from shadows to deliver a new staff. The King took it, adjusted his crown, and went back to staring at the wall. He had no intention of chasing the lunatic. He had survived the Great Purge by being invisible, and he would survive the Calamity by being still.

  Outside, Jian stood in the center of the dead town, looking at the yellow sky. He pulled the three gems out and looked at them. Almost pure Law-seeds that would help anchor the Conceptual Expansion of his kids' next breakthrough or help his wives. But the town itself... the flavor was stale. It tasted of old dust and cowardice.

  "No spice," Jian muttered, tossing a small bone-shard into the air.

  He looked toward the northern horizon, where the portal-energy of the Tapestry pulsed like a beacon. His family was going to war, and the first Seat of Power was waiting. He felt a sudden sharp pang of a feeling he still couldn't quite name.

  Expectation? No. That was a trap. There's always a trap.

  Hunger? Always.

  He had a new target and distance meant little to him...