V, Fallias, Cordelia, Fractal, Sven, Wallace, Ten, and myself had assembled downstairs, with Basaroiel nestled inside my satchel, feathers rustling softly every so often as if he sensed the mood. I sat with him on my lap, nervously preening at his pin feathers while the others debated.

"What do you all think about this?" I asked finally, my voice tighter than I'd intended.

"Absolutely wretched idea," Ten said immediately, no hesitation at all. Her chains clinked as she shifted, the sound like punctuation to her disgust. "While I can't outright forbid it, or even worse give details thanks to this gods-damned slave mark, I'll still say it—things like this are never worth it. Physically, sure, maybe we won't age. But mentally? We will. We'll scar. Every day in there will burn into us, and when it's over, we'll be carrying years that nobody else remembers."

"So Cannon-Legs says no." V leaned back against the wall, hands tucked in his pockets, voice dry and sardonic. "Noted. But me? I'm for it. And here's why: you are catching up to us, Alexander. Fast. Faster than anyone expected. If we step into that tome, we don't just grind skills—we refine. We sharpen as a group. We'll learn to actually fight together, instead of as a collection of weapons flailing in the same direction."

Wallace shifted uncomfortably, armored boots scraping the floor. "Stratagems are best developed away from war, not within it." His voice was firm, measured, the way it always was when he disagreed but didn't want to insult. "And besides, even if only thirty days pass out here… Prince Alizade remains the beholder and titled regent of the Sanguine Spear. He has duties to the court. This absence could create cracks in more than just his reputation."

"Who cares about one kingdom's little court when an entire cluster of realms is on the chopping block?" Fallias interrupted, a puff of smoke slipping from her lips as if the fire inside her couldn't help but leak through. "Local politics be damned."

Ten tilted her head at that, eyeing Fallias as though measuring her anew. "Fire, huh? Not the mana primaris I expected out of you."

Fallias stiffened slightly, a shiver running through her shoulders at the callout. Cordelia quickly masked a small chuckle with her hand—though I couldn't stop mine from slipping out.

"Frankly…" Fractal's voice cut through the room with surprising clarity, soft but steady. Her pale eyes wandered the circle before settling on me. "I think what we're all asking is: what does it feel like to dive into a story? Not in theory, not in speculation. In truth. You're the only one here who's done it without help. So… we should listen to you."

The room went quiet. I felt their eyes on me—expectant, heavy. Even Basaroiel stilled in my lap. I sighed, dragging a hand through my hair.

"It's terrifying." My voice came out lower than I meant it to. "My Arte turned a children's popup book into a nightmare where I had to slaughter a… thing. Some fusion of children and candy. Sugar and flesh woven together. Bone and caramel. Every bite screamed when I cut it apart. That's what stories become when I step inside them. They twist. They turn rotten. I've never had a pleasant time—never once. Sometimes neutral, sure. Sometimes I get information, or a scrap of an item. But good? No. Not good."

Cordelia lowered her hand slightly, her voice quiet but sure. "So even your least dangerous dives still weigh on you. That's the measure we should take, isn't it? The cost to your mind—our minds."

V exhaled sharply, finishing the thought I didn't want to. "And now we're talking about diving into a collective of myths, sagas, epics. Not children's rhymes. Not fables. These are monstrous terrors, psychological labyrinths, tragedies so sharp they cut the page. Every one of them designed to break you before you reach the end."

We let the silence speak for itself. It stretched long, taut, until it was nearly unbearable.

I finally broke it with a loud sigh, one meant to cut through the tension. "I'll be blunt. What choices do we really have? Gin—the Archon of Calamity—said I'm the one who has to solve this mess. That was after I started picking up skills in social intrigue, deception, guile—the sorts of tools that the undersociety thrives on. That in itself is a hint. It suggests we're not meant to just march into this tome and bludgeon monsters until they stop twitching. This isn't a straightforward war. It's something subtler. Trickier. More insidious. How many of us have read the tale of Talistopher and the Golden Nail?"

Ten, Cordelia, and Wallace gave small nods. The rest looked on blankly.

I leaned forward. "For those who haven't had the pleasure, here's the short of it. Talistopher the devout paladin comes to a village—normal on the surface, idyllic even. But every evening, the records show the same pattern: the population drops by one. Not just dead, not missing—gone. Their names erased from memory. No one recalls they even existed."

Sven's brow furrowed. "Some sort of erasure curse?"

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"Not a curse," I corrected. "A Psychydra. The kind of creature that made psykers feared in the first place."

At that, Cordelia's lips tightened, but she said nothing.

I continued. "A Psychydra is a small reptile. Harmless-looking at first, until it devours you whole. The trick is—anyone who sees one of its heads weep without knowing why. That tear erases the memory. The victim is forgotten instantly. And what remains of them?"

"A nail," Cordelia cut in, finishing with a calm precision that suggested she knew the story by heart. "Ordinary nails, the kind you'd find in carpentry. Except this one was… different. This one turned its victims into gold. The mayor of the village used it to increase his treasury—feeding his people to the creature one by one, erasing them from history for profit. When Talistopher discovered the truth, he slew the Psychydra, but not before ensuring the mayor himself was fed to it."

The room went still at her words. Even Fallias, lounging as if this was all beneath her, tapped her claws against the table in a rare show of thought.

"That's the point," I said after a beat. "Not every battle is won by force. Sometimes it's corruption, lies, and shadows that we're meant to fight. That's what these tomes are. Terror. Tragedy. Myth. Each one a lesson wrapped in horror. And if Gin is right, then this is the path we have—whether or not we want it."

"So, let me understand your Arte before we consider this any deeper." Sven's voice was sharp, but not unkind. He had a notepad balanced on his knee, and his pen scratched quickly as he spoke. "If you, perchance, entered Talistopher's tale—you'd emerge with some kind of boon. An item, a skillcube, or perhaps a unique relic or ability, yes?"

"That would be… for the most part, correct." I leaned back, exhaling slowly. "It'd probably tie to the Psychydra—a golden nail, a shard of its memory, or one of Talistopher's own gifts. But specifics? I wouldn't know until I walked out with it. Just… possibilities. Ideas."

Sven tapped his pen against the page, already calculating angles. "And what if you entered The Grandis Conspiracy? Would you then return with the authority to rule over a cluster?"

I shook my head before he could build that theory any further. "Sven, I trust your ability to manage people, but I don't have the soul-realm to oversee a cluster. My inner world right now? It has a bird. That's it."

At that, Wallace clapped once, loud and deliberate, as if he were in a cathedral. "Bravo, My Grace! A Life-Realm is the first step toward ascending to a Dominus."

"No." Cordelia's tone cut sharp as glass, her eyes narrowing. "It's the prerequisite for the first step. Do try not to skip half the staircase in your enthusiasm, Wallace. Also—" she flicked her wrist, irritation dripping from the motion "—not the time."

"We're running in circles," Ten muttered, slouching back in her seat, shackles clinking faintly as her ankle shifted. "I really don't want to step into a chronomaly. We all know why you're not even asking Lumivis about this—he's thirty percent of your combat strength, at least, and you can't drag him into a temporal trap. What does that leave us with? A baby griffin you're still preening like a damn falconer."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "We're all upset. That's clear. But does anyone know why this is happening?"

"Me," I admitted after a beat, rolling my eyes at their blank stares. "Have none of you noticed? Whenever someone gets even the faintest whiff of my mana—or worse, sees what it does—their curiosity spikes like wildfire. It doesn't help that it leaves a forest."

That earned me a chorus of raised brows, everyone's gaze snapping toward me. Everyone except Cordelia. She simply folded her arms and watched.

"Forest?" Wallace was the first to voice what they were all thinking.

"When I linger in a place too long, my aura plants seeds of star mana. They sprout into bonsai-like trees—miniature, crystalline, luminescent. They're projections of my inner realm's crystallized forest. A mark I can't help but leave behind."

Silence. The weight of it pressed down.

Sven blinked, then scribbled something furiously into his notes before looking back up at me. His voice was tight with both awe and fear. "Star mana. At Soul Realm one. That would… oh, that would do it." He nodded once, emphatically. Then, almost too casually, he leaned back and muttered: "So tell me, how does it feel being a walking fusion reactor?"

"Excuse me?" I raised a brow.

Sven didn't even glance up from his notes. "Technically, you break thermodynamics. We are all taught energy cannot be created or destroyed—mana must have a source. That source, for everyone else, is a star. Each of us is tethered to one, often far outside our own cluster. It's why star-forged artifacts are so dangerous; they cheat that law. You, however—" he finally looked up, pen poised midair—"you're not cheating it. You're rewriting it. You're a living font of stellar energy, as long as you can feed yourself mana. And with your dimension primaris, that… well, it suggests expansion. Growth."

He paused, gaze flicking over me as though reassessing everything he thought he knew. "But you're also a half-blood. So the question is—when your almiraj awakening hit, which of your mana types did it absorb?"

I smiled, just faintly. Only Fractal and Cordelia knew the truth. "Would you believe me if I told you it was my acquired one?"

The silence that followed was thick. Sven's pen slipped from his fingers and hit the floor with a soft clatter.

Cordelia's lips curved in something caught between amusement and grim inevitability. Fractal tilted her head, innocent eyes glittering as if she'd been waiting for this moment to surface. Wallace muttered a low, reverent, "By the moons…" while Ten swore under her breath.

"Okay." Sven's voice was unusually steady, unusually flat. "So… your blood. Is rich. In star mana."

He stared at me for a long moment, his quill dangling loose between his fingers. Then, without a word, he snapped to motion, scratching down notes so quickly the ink spattered. His lips moved silently, equations and theories running off them like prayers, until suddenly he stopped.

The pen fell from his hand, clattering against the floor. He didn't reach for it.

Instead, Sven's eyes—sharp, fever-bright—lifted and swept across the room, lingering on each of us in turn as if weighing more than our worth. His posture was taut, like a bowstring drawn to its limit.

When he finally spoke again, his voice carried no jest, no flippancy. Just cold calculation.

"Which of you," Sven asked, every word deliberate, "is willing to become a vampire. Right here. Right now?"

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