The week-long journey east from Cyrene was a return to a familiar quiet, a welcome respite from the chaotic, vibrant noise of the Rhagian capital. They left the cultivated lands and trade roads behind, following a map Cassian had procured for them, and entered the untamed, ancient wilderness.
This land, however, was fundamentally different from the Grieving Coast. Asterion's 33-year-old mind, a prisoner to his perfect memory, was constantly, automatically contrasting it with the home that had forged him. The Grieving Coast was sick. Its very Aether was sour, its trees stunted and weeping, its stones stained black. This Rhagian wilderness was merely wild. The air was clean and thrummed with a healthy, ambient Aether. The trees were lush, towering giants, their leaves a vibrant, healthy green. The sunlight, dappled and warm, felt nourishing, not like the weak, greenish-grey light of Fortitude's End.
"It's clean," Elian remarked on the third day, summing up their shared observation. He was perched on a log, sharpening his new stiletto, his movements economical and precise. "I don't like it."
Asterion, who was running diagnostic drills on his "Singularity" compression, paused. "You don't like... cleanliness?"
"I don't trust it," Elian replied, not looking up. "It's soft. It makes you soft. On the Coast, you always knew where the enemy was. The very air was trying to kill you. Here..." He gestured to the peaceful, sunlit grove. "Here, you could be ambushed by a pig and die of surprise. It's... distracting."
Asterion understood. The constant, grinding pressure of the Grieving Coast had been a whetstone. This place was a pillow. It was harder to maintain the "absolute zero" focus of his new-found practice when the birds were singing.
His Inhuman Insight, the attribute he had accidentally triggered in the duel, remained stubbornly silent. He had spent hours in meditation, trying to will it into existence, to find that perfect, cold, analytical void on command. But he couldn't. It was, his researcher's mind concluded with bitter frustration, a crisis-response mechanism, not a tool. It only appeared when he was under extreme, life-threatening pressure, as in the Tainted Wave or the duel. He couldn't just turn it on to find a hidden book.
This meant he was forced to fall back on his baseline: his own 33-year-old analytical mind, a mind that had won a Nobel prize but was, at this moment, just a frustrated 15-year-old boy's.
On the seventh day, they arrived. The ruins were not a dark, foreboding fortress, but a place of breathtaking, forgotten beauty. Cassian had been right. It was a vast, collapsed city of white marble, now completely reclaimed by nature. Giant, flowering vines, their blossoms a riot of purple and gold, clung to magnificent, fluted columns that soared into the blue sky. Overgrown courtyards had become seas of tall, green grass, and the only sound was the musical call of birdsong and the buzz of insects.
"It's... beautiful," Asterion said, his voice quiet. His mind, which had seen only the functional, grim architecture of the Sanctum and the Grieving Coast, was processing this new data. A civilization that built for beauty, not just survival.
"I don't like it," Elian murmured again, his hand resting on the hilt of his stiletto. "It's too quiet."
This time, Asterion noted, Elian was right. The birdsong they had heard on the approach had suddenly, completely, stopped.
As if summoned by his words, the peace was shattered by a low, guttural snarl. From the shadows of a collapsed amphitheater, a "small horde of tainted" boiled forth.
They were not Grave-kin. These were the "Scrappers" Cassian had mentioned. Small, hunched, goblin-like things, no more than four feet tall, with mottled green-grey skin, long arms, and faces that were all needle-like teeth and large, black, malevolent eyes. They were fast, chittering, and overwhelming in number, at least sixty of them. This was why the Nest was "low-level" but persistent—these creatures reproduced with terrifying speed.
For two veterans of a Tainted Wave, it was a target-rich environment.
"Left flank, Asterion," Elian commanded, his voice calm as he drew his blade. "Break their center. I'll clean the edges."
They moved as one, a perfect, two-man killing machine. Their teamwork was a honed, brutal ballet.
Elian was the scalpel. He was a "fluid, pragmatic, and lethal" whisper. He moved first, a blur of grey steel, his new stiletto in his left hand, his longsword in his right. He was a void of motion, a phantom darting through the chittering horde. He didn't meet their charge; he flowed through it. A Scrapper lunged, its claws out; Elian was no longer there, but his stiletto had already flashed, sinking into the creature's eye socket and piercing its brain. He didn't waste his dense, liquid Faith on overpowering them; he used it for speed, his "Inner Crucible" foundation making him a blur of lethal, efficient motion. He killed three before they even realized he was there, his movements a perfect, cold, and pragmatic dance of death.
Asterion, meanwhile, was the hammer. He strode directly into the center of the horde, his face a mask of cold, intellectual concentration. This was a laboratory. He was practicing his Singularity-level strikes. He let a half-dozen of the Scrappers swarm him, their claws and crude stone knives slashing uselessly at his Grieving-Coast plate armor. He ignored them.
Pressure. Control. Stillness.
He found it—the "absolute zero" state, the perfect, cold stillness he had touched in the duel. He willed his Faith to compress.
He didn't draw his sword. He struck.
He drove his open palm forward in a single, controlled strike. A pulse of dense, heavy, viscous Faith erupted from his hand. It wasn't a loud explosion. It was an implosion. The air seemed to suck inward, and the Scrappers nearest to him didn't fly apart; they simply crumbled, their corrupted bodies collapsing into piles of black dust and brittle, shattered bone.
He felt the familiar, draining cost of the Singularity strike, but it was less than before. He was getting better at it.
Elian, seeing the gap Asterion had created, flowed into it, his blades flashing, cutting the horde in two. Asterion, in turn, anchored his feet, his dense body becoming a wall as a larger, brute-like Scrapper tried to bowl him over. He caught its charge, his arm rigid, and held it in place. "Elian!"
Elian was already there. A silver flash, and his stiletto was buried in the creature's neck.
In less than three minutes, the small horde was annihilated. The birdsong, which had paused, slowly returned.
"Show off," Elian said, wiping a fleck of black ichor from his stiletto.
"It was efficient," Asterion replied, his researcher's mind already cataloging the energy cost versus the result. "Now, we find what the priests missed."
They began their exploration. The task was daunting. The city was massive, and they were looking for a "book" in what was once a civilization of libraries.
Asterion's frustration grew. His "Inhuman Insight" remained stubbornly random and uncontrollable. It was a flash of brilliance in a crisis, not a tool he could summon at view. He was forced to fall back on his baseline: his own 33-year-old analytical mind. He was meticulous, a researcher. He started mapping the ruins, looking for structural anomalies, checking load-bearing walls, using his 22-year-old laureate's knowledge of physics and architecture. He found nothing. He gets annoyed.
After an hour of fruitless searching, it was Elian who found the clue.
He wasn't looking at the grand structures. He was observing the environment, his high "social awareness" translating perfectly into situational awareness. He treated the ruins like a person, reading its subtle "tells."
"Asterion," he called out. He was standing in a large, seemingly empty plaza, dominated by the collapsed, multi-ton base of a marble statue. "This erosion pattern is wrong."
Asterion joined him, his own analytical mind immediately seeing what Elian had sensed. "You're right."
Elian pointed to the base of the statue. "The wind here comes from the west. All the marble on that side of the plaza is worn smooth. But the erosion here," he ran his hand along the statue's base, "is circular. Swirling. As if from a constant draft".
Asterion knelt, his scientific curiosity piqued. He put his hand near a hairline crack at the bottom of the statue. "And it's cold. There's a draft coming from under it".
They had found it.
"Together," Asterion said.
They wedged their gauntlets into the crack, planted their feet, and heaved. They poured their "Inner Crucible" Faith into their limbs, their bodies becoming inhumanly dense and strong. With a deep, tortured groan of ancient stone, the multi-ton statue base scraped, shifted, and tilted, revealing a dark, square hole in the plaza floor.
They lit a torch and descended into a "hidden, collapsed section of the library". The air was cold, dry, and smelled of dust and something else... something metallic and wrong. The room was perfectly preserved, its walls lined with empty, stone-carved shelves. It was utterly empty, save for a single, intricately carved marble pedestal in the exact center of the chamber.
On it sat two massive books.
They were not bound in leather. The covers felt slick and cold, like the carapace of some deep-sea creature. The pages were not vellum, but a thin, impossibly durable material that felt almost... alive. And they were covered in a flowing, complex, "ancient language" that neither of them recognized.
A faint, cold, and terribly familiar aura pulsed from the pages.
"This…" Asterion murmured, his hand hovering over one cover, not daring to touch it. "This feels like the Grieving Coast. It feels like the air around a 'Lament' storm."
"It feels like Tainted Malice," Elian agreed, his voice a grim whisper. "Concentrated. Refined."
They looked at each other, the same chilling thought in their minds. A "book of great knowledge" that the Tainted were drawn to, that the Church, with all its holy power, could not sense, and that felt like it was made from the very essence of their enemy.
"This is what we were looking for," Asterion said.
"This is more important than any duel," Elian replied.
They sensed their importance. This was a secret that could change the war—or get them burned as heretics.
Without another word, they wrapped the two massive tomes in their spare cloaks, hiding them deep within their saddlebags. They rolled the statue base back into place, concealing the entrance, and rode out of the beautiful, haunted ruins, the weight of their discovery far heavier than the books themselves.