The world returned to Ren as a low, throbbing ache and the sterile, antiseptic scent of a medical bay. He opened his eyes to the familiar white ceiling of the Nautilus's infirmary. His body felt heavy, drained, not just of Aether, but of something deeper, something fundamental.
Anya was there, sitting in a chair beside his bed, her face pale and etched with a profound exhaustion he had never seen on her before. The usual fiery curiosity in her eyes had been replaced by a deep, haunted shadow. She looked like a mathematician who had just been shown a number that didn't exist.
"Welcome back," she said, her voice a quiet, strained whisper. "You've been unconscious for eighteen hours."
Ren pushed himself into a sitting position, his muscles protesting. "What happened? The ship…"
"The Nautilus is functional," she interrupted, her voice flat. "Barely. The shockwave from your shield's collapse caused a cascade failure in the secondary power conduits. We're running on emergency life support, adrift at the bottom of the sea. But we are hidden. The… other ship did not pursue us."
She looked at him, her scientific composure gone, replaced by a raw, unnerving vulnerability. "Ren… what was that? Its weapon… it didn't register on any of my sensors. It had no mass, no energy, no frequency. It wasn't an attack. It was a subtraction. An ontological weapon. It erases things from existence. How do you fight something like that?"
Ren swung his legs over the side of the bed. He felt… empty. He reached inward to his Aetheric core and found it stable, his Rank 21 power intact. But the feeling of it was different. It was muted, scarred.
"The Void leaves a mark," Zephyrion's voice was a faint, ragged echo in his mind. The proud spirit sounded… weary. Wounded. "It does not just destroy power; it unmakes the very concept of it. Your soul was directly exposed to an anti-soul. The wound it leaves is not one of the body or of Aether, but of the spirit itself. It will heal. But it will take time. And it will never be forgotten."
Ren understood. He had faced his ancestor's doom, and while he had survived, he now carried its scar.
"They are the reason my ancestors are gone," Ren said, his voice low. "They are the Great Cataclysm, given form."
He told her everything. He told her of the memory he had relived in the Vault of Echoes, of the fall of Ouros, of the silent, geometric god that had unmade a civilization with a whisper. He told her of the Obsidian God and its heralds, the Servants of the Void.
Anya listened, her face growing paler with every word. The myths, the forgotten history, the "heretical" knowledge—it was all coalescing into a terrifying, modern-day threat. She was no longer just a scientist studying a unique phenomenon. She was a soldier who had just stared into the face of the apocalypse.
"So the Pagoda…" she breathed, the final, horrifying piece clicking into place. "Their obsession with order, with control, with silencing the chaotic song of the soul… they aren't just a rival faction. They are ideologically aligned with the Void. They are trying to become its servants."
The weight of their discovery settled in the small, silent room. Their war was no longer just against a single faction. It was against a cosmic horror and its fanatical, world-spanning cult.
Anya stood up, her exhaustion replaced by a new, hard-edged resolve. "The Nautilus's primary drive is offline. I can get it working, but I will need to cannibalize parts from the non-essential systems. The Resonance Scrambler, the deep-range sensors… even some of the lab equipment. It will take time. Days, maybe a week. And we will be blind and deaf down here while I work."
Ren nodded, standing up, his own resolve hardening. His spirit was wounded, but his will was not broken. His enemies were no longer just men like Archon Fen. They were gods and the zealots who worshipped them. The scale of the war had changed, and he would have to change with it.
"Do what you have to do," Ren said.
While Anya began the arduous process of repairing her crippled vessel, Ren returned to his own form of work. He could not cultivate, not with the scar on his soul still so raw. But he could study.
He activated the Soul-Forge Gauntlet and delved into the stolen Pagoda data. He no longer needed Anya to decrypt it. The brief, violent contact with the Void had changed his perception. He could now see the "song of stability" in the Pagoda's code, the cage that held their logic bombs together. He focused his will, not with the Thunder's Echo, but with a new, more refined art, a silent command that resonated with the code's own structure.
He didn't break the lock. He simply told it to open.
The files opened before his mind's eye, a torrent of depraved genius. He saw Archon Fen's notes, his theories on soul-splicing, his attempts to create a perfect, controllable Aether Beast. And deep within the data, he found it. A single, heavily encrypted file, buried beneath layers of security. It was not about Project Chimera. It was a historical text. A translation of a pre-Cataclysm document.
It was titled: "The First Sermon of the Obsidian God."
Ren's blood ran cold. The Pagoda had not just stumbled upon the Void. They had found its scripture. He had just stolen the bible of the enemy, and he knew that reading it would be the key to their defeat, and perhaps the price of his own sanity.