Chapter 43

  The next morning, Ren didn’t head to the kitchen.

  He woke early, washed up without thinking, and went straight to the practice range. His muscles ached from the past few days—nothing sharp, just the deep kind of tired that settled into the joints when the mind refused to rest. He welcomed it.

  The targets were already set out. Humanoid outlines on sand-packed mannequins. Elemental glyphs on rotating rings. Nothing he hadn’t seen before.

  But this time, he wasn’t practicing to improve.

  He was testing limits.

  He started with the basic thread-stitch maneuver: draw, wind, release. His mana pulsed unsteadily at first—too aggressive, too quick to spark—but he corrected. Slowed his breathing. Let the threads drift wider, not pulled taut but woven in a kind of rhythm. Like simmering sauce instead of searing heat.

  He reached back, nocked an arrow and sent it spinning through three rings.

  Too wide.

  Again.

  This time, he tweaked the twist just before release—adjusting the string in just the right way at just the write time.

  “Better,” he muttered, flexing his mechanical fingers.

  He moved on to dual-target rotations. Fire and move. Trying to move as fast as possible without losing accuracy.

  Here, the movements began to blur with something else—something instinctual.

  The same motions he used to guide flavor across a simmering pot now mapped onto air resistance. Heat draw. Particle weight. The threads started to become part of him rather than just another tool.

  Hours passed. He barely noticed.

  Eventually, Leo arrived with two flasks and a lazy salute. “You planning to duel the sun next or just ignoring breakfast on principle?”

  Ren lowered his bow. “Didn’t realize the time.”

  “You didn’t realize the time,” Leo echoed, mock-scandalized, handing him one of the flasks. “You’ve gone full ghost-mode. Should I be worried?”

  Ren took the drink. “Not unless I start glowing.”

  Leo squinted. “You are kind of glowing.”

  “That’s sweat.”

  “That’s suspiciously Thread-glowy sweat.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. Leo sipped. Ren drank deeply. The flask was full of something herbal—bracing and sharp.

  Then, quieter, Leo said, “Some guy outside is looking for you. Sent by the Grand Scribe.”

  Ren sighed “Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  Leo stood and stretched. “Then I’ll be here when you get back. And we can talk about it over fried radish or whatever miserable protein you’re pretending is gourmet this week.”

  Ren smirked faintly. “Deal.”

  ________

  He followed the man into a part of the camp where he’d ever gone before. Within he saw a opulent mini-manor.

  Inside, it was cold.

  Not in temperature, but in presence. The walls were covered in ink-sigils and viewing scrolls, the floor in concentric rings of etched glass. Dozens of lenses hung from the ceiling, some crackling faintly with captured mana threads. It smelled of dust, ink, and rain-soaked stone.

  At the end of the hallway stood a door of polished obsidian inlaid with thread-silver script. It opened with no sound.

  Inside, the Grand Scribe waited.

  Soraya was seated at a round table beneath a hanging map of the camp. She wore no robe of office today. Just a long coat of shimmering grey, its cuffs marked with a intricate symbol representing her status.

  “Ren Saito,” she said, her voice smooth as poured ink. “Sit.”

  Ren obeyed. The seat was lower than expected, carved from darkwood, and somehow meant to feel like a listener’s place.

  “I assume Sinclair told you something,” she said, folding her hands.

  “He told me not to lie to you,” Ren replied.

  “Good. Then let’s not waste time.”

  A long silence followed, but it didn’t feel empty. It felt like a test. Ren didn’t squirm.

  Soraya studied him.

  Not the way someone observes an immediate problem but not exactly friendly either.

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  “The mission was supposed to be simple. They were looking for a regular abandoned relic site. Something minor. The usual anomaly briefing—residual Aether, maybe an artifact from the Ancient Days.”

  Her eyes flicked toward him. “We found more than that.”

  Ren didn’t speak.

  Soraya stood. Her movements were slow, precise, as though she were measuring the weight of her next words.

  “There’s a reason he only told me. The others don’t know the full truth. Not even Raven.”

  The wall behind her shimmered—threads unraveling with silent grace—and revealed a hidden slate embedded with glowing runes. A map bloomed to life, sketched in trembling strokes of red and gold.

  A red dot pulsed in the depths of the forest. Ren leaned closer. The terrain looked wrong—twisted and coiled like roots clenching around a secret.

  “It was supposed to be a sealed vault. Only a few layers deep. But Sinclair insisted on taking a proper team. That may well have saved him from sharing Ethan’s fate.”

  Ren flinched at the mention of Ethan.

  Ren swallowed. “What did they find?”

  Soraya didn’t answer. Not right away. She reached into her desk, pulled out a thick leather-bound journal, and laid it gently on the table. Her hand hovered over the cover like it might bite.

  That aura she gave off was now tame, almost…. Afraid.

  “Something the Order wasn’t prepared for,” she said finally. Her voice had lost its edge. “His expedition turned from a simple retrieval mission to something far deeper.”

  She opened the journal. Its pages were brittle vellum, interspersed with hand-drawn diagrams, mana-scan overlays, and several loose sketches that looked like they’d been copied from murals.

  Ren leaned forward instinctively, gaze caught by a charcoal drawing that showed a figure standing before a massive, arched doorway lined with jagged, spiraling symbols.

  “That was the seal,” Soraya said. “Or what was left of it.”

  “What happened?”

  Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “The Church found it first.”

  The room chilled.

  “Sinclair’s team arrived just hours after their break-in. The seal was already damaged—through millennia of it trashing against it’s binds and the church finished the job.”

  Ren’s mouth was dry. “And something was inside.”

  “A being,” she said, her voice flat. “Divine, in every sense of the word. A presence beyond mana. Beyond comprehension.”

  “The church’s goddess, Sinclair told me.”

  Soraya paused.

  “We can’t confirm that. We know the Church believes she is their god. And if she isn’t, they certainly worship her like one. But what we saw… what Sinclair’s team witnessed… it wasn’t salvation.”

  She turned another page.

  The sketch here was different—rushed, desperate, torn at one corner. It showed a cratered hall, lined with collapsed pillars. A shadowy, humanoid form stood in the middle, emerging from the remnants of a broken seal.

  “The seal failed completely. Sinclair described it as… the world tilting sideways. Like gravity had forgotten which way was down.”

  Ren’s stomach twisted. “How did they escape?”

  “Barely.” Soraya’s voice tightened. “The seal breaking destroyed most of the central chamber. Crushed half the ruins beneath a cascade of falling stone. Sinclair and his scouts barely escaped.”

  Ren said nothing. The image of a collapsing ruin, of something ancient and hungry clawing its way free, pressed behind his eyes. That presence—he could almost feel it again, like the wolf in the cave. Massive. Watching. Waiting.

  “That’s not all of it,” Soraya continued, her voice low now. Measured. “Sinclair’s group stumbled on more than just the seal. The chamber beyond it was carved with murals. Intact. It was almost as if the ruin itself wanted them to see it.”

  She opened the journal again, flipping carefully through aged pages until she landed on one near the middle. A sketch—finer than the rest, likely copied directly by Sinclair himself—depicted a long hall lit by glowing glyphs. Along the walls, carvings stretched from floor to ceiling: scenes of a man standing beside enormous beasts, teaching hooded figures, kneeling in front of something shrouded in light.

  “This wasn’t a tomb,” Soraya said. “It was a record.”

  Ren leaned forward, not blinking.

  She tapped the figure in the center. “They show him over and over. Always with different people, different places. Teaching. Creating. Binding things together. Never once wielding a weapon.”

  The man carved in the stone looked—ordinary. No glowing eyes, no divine halo, no symbols of dominion. Just a man with calloused hands, sleeves rolled up, leaning over a bubbling pot.

  Ren stared. “That’s Atreus?”

  “According to Mallin, the exact translation would be ‘He who stilled the hunger’.”

  Ren felt a chill. “That’s… metaphor, right?”

  Soraya didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she turned the page.

  Another mural. This one darker. The same man—Atreus—standing before a great rift in the world, threads of light coiled between his fingers. Behind him, the land was cracked and burning. Ahead, a shadow curled, vaguely humanoid, but with too many limbs and a hollow where a face should be.

  “He sealed her,” she said. “That’s what the Order believes. That this man, whoever he was, used something deeper than mana. Something older. To trap a being we now call a god.”

  Ren’s throat was tight. “A cook sealed a god.”

  Soraya nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  The word lingered in the air like the echo of something too large to fully understand.

  Ren stared at her, but it was the kind of staring that came after your mind had already stopped keeping up. He didn’t know what part to grab onto. That the Divine—the god the Church worshipped—was real. That she had been sealed. That she had awakened. Or that some outsider named Atreus had once stood against her and somehow won.

  And cooked.

  “How?” he finally asked, the word flat. “How does someone like that exist?”

  “We don’t know,” she said quietly. “But we intend to find out, and we need you to do that.”

  Ren didn’t answer right away.

  The old instinct bubbled up again—Why me? He could almost hear himself asking it. Confused. Bitter. With that edge of anger that anyone could suspect him. That he would ever do anything that could lead someone—especially someone like Ethan—to die.

  The cave. The wolf. The Threads. Ethan’s death. The way how so much weird stuff seemed to happened all around him. Not even mentioning the complete absurdity of it compared to his life back on Earth.

  Every step had felt accidental, like stumbling into a story meant for someone else.

  And yet he was still here.

  Not just alive—needed.

  Ren let out a slow breath, grounding himself. His fingers flexed around the reinforced edge of his mechanical arm.

  No more pretending this was normal. No more pretending he was just a cook with some odd magic tricks.

  “I’ll do it,” he said softly.

  Soraya gave a small nod, not triumphant, just tired. She stood, tucking the journal under one arm like it weighed more than it should. For a moment, the flicker of her old sharpness returned—the commander who had outlived too many secrets.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “You’ll need it.”

  She left without another word, boots echoing softly down the corridor.

  Ren stood alone in the war room, the lanternlight casting shadows across the maps, the scattered notes, the thick dust of a thousand unanswered questions.

  He didn’t move for a long time.

  But when he did, it was with purpose. Quiet. Certain.

  He would prepare…while he still could.