Diving into the book was diving into madness.

The moment I passed through the ink-lined threshold, something inside me—me—shuddered and bent the wrong way. A twist not of bone, but of soul.

I didn't feel like I belonged. Not in the uncomfortable, new-shoes way. In the existential rejection kind of way. Like every particle of my being was screaming, "You are an intruder here."

The vision—if that's even the right word—was a roiling chaos. A maelstrom of cognition, raw and unshaped. Ideas collided like battling beasts. Beliefs smashed into each other. Philosophies folded in on themselves, clawing through dogma to tear each other apart.

It wasn't just noise. It was doctrine made war. Thousands—millions—of voices, each whispering their own truths, speaking in dialects I didn't recognize and yet understood. Power is isolation. Survival demands sacrifice. To refine blood, you must first shatter the soul. All beasts kneel to stillness. Let the howl guide you, and devour what remains.

They screamed. They sang. They wept. They preached.

And over it all, I fell. And fell. And fell.

There was no up or down. No direction. Just descent. A directionless spiraling void. A sinkhole of chaos swallowing logic, time, and sensation. I tried to steady myself, to pull something—anything—from within. My Shell? Gone. Skillcubes? Nothing. My Arte? Silent. My items? Stripped. Even the sash Celeste gave me, even the Mask—gone.

I wasn't Alexander Duarte the Walker. I wasn't anything.

No robe. No sigil. No legacy. Just a white outfit so plain it was practically invisible. A blank uniform meant for no one in particular. Commoner. Lord. Beast. Ghost. It didn't matter.

It was as if the world had wiped my identity away.

But the voices never stopped. They increased.

Doctrines now spoken as commands. Let instinct reign. Claw back what was always yours. If you do not choose the predator, you will be chosen as prey. Build your core not to survive—but to dominate.

I clutched my head. I couldn't scream. I didn't have a voice here. But I knew I was unraveling.

Until—

CRACK.

A sound like a thousand thunderstorms cracking bone. It tore through the realm like a blade through silk.

The voices were silenced in a single pulse. Like a dam bursting in reverse.

And I stopped falling.

No, I didn't land. I was placed.

I stood now on an island. Alone.

There was no water surrounding it. No sea, no waves, no foam. Just a dense, gleaming silver liquid surrounding everything. It wasn't mercury—too slow. Too heavy. And it reflected the world with unnatural precision. Every movement, every breath I took, rippled across it like memory etched into glass.

Looking down at it made my stomach lurch. I felt like if I leaned too far, it would pull me in and never let me go.

The island itself was stone, ancient and warm. Smooth, but not flat. It pulsed beneath my feet like a slumbering heart.

And in the center of the island…A tree.

No.

The tree.

Its roots split the stone like they had grown through the bones of giants. Its bark shimmered with scales instead of wood, and its leaves were a saturated black-green, almost metallic, catching no light but gleaming nonetheless.

There was no sun. No sky. No ceiling or stars. Yet the tree's canopy cast everything in shadow.

Shade without source. Roots without earth. A monument to something older than laws.

I walked closer, each step echoing louder than the last. There were no insects. No birds. Just the soft thrum of presence.

I wasn't alone.

Something was watching.

Something inside the tree. Or was the tree. I couldn't tell.

I reached out to touch its bark.

And as I did, a ripple of cold ran up my arm—not painful, but deep. Like it recognized me. Like it remembered me from a time before I was born.

And the moment my skin made contact—

A voice.

But not a thousand. Not even two.

Just one. Massive. Heavy. Like a god speaking inside a tomb.

"You come not as beast. Not as man. But as bridge."

"Good. Begin."

And with that, the tree opened.

Not physically, but conceptually. The world broke into instruction.

Words carved themselves into my bones.

"What… what am I supposed to do?"

I whispered it, though I wasn't sure who I was asking. The tree? The realm? Myself?

The words barely made a ripple in the quiet. Not the world's quiet—mine. I had so many thoughts brimming under the surface. So many contradictions. Arguments. Doubts. Everything I'd read. Everything I'd learned.

Fragments of a hundred philosophies clawed at the edges of my mind, none of them willing to assemble into something usable.

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Then came the voice again. Not like before, but smaller, still alien:

"Query. What should the Visitor do?"

"Answer. Begin."

...Great. That cleared nothing up.

Cryptic as ever. Though at least now I could tell it was answering me directly.

"Begin?" I muttered, looking around.

Begin what?

There was nothing here but this island. This tree. That ocean of silvery, reflective death swirling in perfect stillness around me. I didn't trust that liquid. It was too smooth. Too dense. Like the surface tension was holding back something waiting underneath.

I looked at the tree again. It didn't move. It didn't speak.

But I could feel it.

Watching.

Judging.

Waiting.

My fists clenched unconsciously. "You're the only thing here," I said aloud, voice low, but edged with frustration. "And you're the only thing not telling me anything."

Was I supposed to meditate under it? Touch it again? Climb it?

The bark had pulsed with awareness before, but now it was still—like it had already told me everything I needed and expected me to put it together.

I took a slow breath and looked at the ocean again.

Could I swim across it? Would I sink? Would I dissolve?

Its surface mirrored me too well. Not just physically. Emotionally. It reflected my uncertainty. My indecision.

I took a step toward it… then froze.

No. That ocean was a test, or a trap—or both. Everything in my body screamed not yet. I wasn't ready. I didn't even know what I was choosing between.

And wasn't that the entire point?

Begin.

That was the answer. But I was still asking the wrong question.

I'd been searching for some external directive—a task, a trial, a voice in the sky to hand me the next line in my journey like a script I could memorize and follow.

But no one was going to give that to me.

Not here.

Not now.

The silence itself was the test.

There was no enemy. No objective. Just me, this island, this tree… and a realm that stripped away everything else.

So what was left?

Begin.

I closed my eyes. Let the question settle in me like sediment sinking in water.

What did I know?

That this place represented knowledge in chaos. Belief in contradiction. To refine bestial blood—to truly refine it—wasn't just about strength. It wasn't about molding it into something new.

It was about facing the why. The idea of the beast. The faith I'd placed in what it meant to be something more.

"How do you refine your beast blood?" I asked aloud, though there was no audience. "There were so many methods… Some bound to rituals. Some to lineages. Some to the moonlight under a certain constellation in a specific cursed realm…"

None of those methods had felt right. They were prescriptions. Not principles.

"I don't want to make a hybrid. I don't want to dilute it with metal or dreamstuff or flame. I don't want to splice it. I want to increase it. To improve it. To push it into its next natural stage."

My fingers flexed.

"I don't want to change it. Well—I do. But not in the way the alchemists suggest. I don't want to convert it. I want it to evolve. But evolution in this context isn't metamorphosis. It's not translation. It's…"

I trailed off.

"...becoming more."

But how does one become more, without becoming other?

Cosmically, I knew the equation that made up me. I'd seen glimpses. I'd felt it in the lowest halls of Danatallion's Halls, in the deepest pulse of Vanitas's Charity, in the breathing bone-temples of other realms. I could feel it humming inside the ink of every Lexicon.

It was real. My equation was real.

And yet… I would never solve it.

I could live it. Ride it. Be transformed by it.

But never solve it.

I remembered the equations I had been shown—the ones that broke minds. The ones I was not supposed to speak aloud. Equations that curled like claws and folded like lies, that felt true even though they defied every system I thought I understood.

Math that rewrote definition. Math that required the observer to agree that two wrongs made a right, provided both wrongs occurred in prime reality frames.

They weren't just paradoxes. They were constructive paradoxes. Truths built from mutually exclusive axioms that agreed to disagree.

∞ = 1/∞, so long as you count backwards.

A variable is constant only if it is defined by movement.

The set of all possible mistakes contains all solutions.

If you divide your mass by the weight of your regrets, your bestial blood determines your orbital fate.

The beast's hunger can be represented as an irrational number—forever approaching fullness, never reaching it.

Every mutation is a looped function. If you run it enough times, it becomes a new constant.

Your blood remembers equations that your ancestors forgot.

I remembered more.

To gain stability in contradiction, multiply uncertainty by intention.

Self = Σ(Beast + Memory of Man)^ΔWound.

The shape of potential is a fractal built from your fears.

To evolve is to diverge from all averages.

They were all true. They were all false. They worked when you believed them. They unraveled reality when you proved them.

And I had spent so long keeping them caged. Not because they were dangerous.

But because they were true, in a way that truth shouldn't be.

So, for once—unprompted—outside of my Shell, outside of my Cube, outside of the safety I'd wrapped around my psyche—I dove.

Not into my inner realm. Not into Lexicons. Not into some constructed space curated by training.

No.

I dove into the places I had fractured. Into the thoughts I had intentionally sealed off. The mental wounds I had cauterized in panic to avoid another cascade—another psychotic unraveling.

And I did what I promised I would never do again.

I let it in.

I let one go through.

A cascade of contradictions.

A perfect spiral of falsified truths and functional madness, laced with instinct and inheritance. Not logic. Not training. Instinct.

It hit me like a tidal wave.

And for a moment, I was nothing but instinctual math. Blood logic. Bone equations.

My blood screamed in symbols.

All of it—every strand, every pulse—was a kind of language.

My heart didn't beat. It calculated.

My cells didn't breathe. They translated.

Every twitch, every pain, every hunger and terror and drive to consume—it wasn't emotion. It was formula.

I understood it.

Not with reason. With pattern.

With recognition.

The book I had fallen into—the one I thought I had outsmarted—wasn't a book at all.

It was a lens. A refraction chamber. A calculus designed to break apart your cognition and reassemble it as something higher.

Something… capable.

And now I understood:

To refine your beast blood, you didn't need to escape it.

You had to listen to it. To parse it. To let its madness teach you.

Because bestial blood doesn't evolve by dilution. It evolves by assertion.

Not by denying its hunger.

By integrating it.

The beast's math was eldritch because we never dared to write it down.

It was never written down because to write it is folly. To understand another's equation would be useless. Pointless. 6x=3x=45y=53. Does this mean anything to me? No. Does I=(A)/Constant+Prime Root of 4? Also no. These were not my equations. These were not my meaning.

No. I wasn't supposed to "begin." I was supposed to find the end.

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