Kael sat at his desk, scribbling in a notebook.
A gentle light spilled through the window, a warm glow stretching across the walls and softening the edges of the room.
He sighed, closed the book, and slid it into a drawer.
Walking over to the window, he picked up an apple from the counter and bit into it, chewing slowly.
'Refinement commissions.'
The idea had been lingering ever since the black market. The more he thought about it, the more it settled into place, stubborn and tempting.
Risky, yes.
But the reward… undeniable.
If he started refining custom motes, he would not only earn mindstones, he would gain access to countless recipes as more orders came in. And from what he had gathered, a rank one custom refinement could easily cost around five hundred mindstones.
He took another bite.
'I can also take half the price upfront.'
It was common among Refinement Luminaires. Refining a mote strained the mind to its limit, and if the refinement failed, the backlash could be devastating. Taking half the payment upfront was a way to ensure they wouldn't walk away empty-handed.
'But that scares customers away.'
It was a delicate balance.
If he demanded half upfront, people would hesitate. He neither currently had reputation or credibility within the field. They would assume he was incompetent or a scammer.
But if he offered full refunds on failures… he would gain a reputation fast. Rumors would spread and clients would come.
His income, however, would be anything but stable.
Kael stared out the window, finishing the apple in silence.
'It's awkward either way.'
Both paths came with problems.
Both demanded risk.
And both, in their own way, offered opportunity
He would also gain experience in the field of refinement if he committed to this path, and that alone would make his future attempts, especially the ones meant for himself, far easier.
But reality still remained the truth.
No amount of experience, no matter how many motes he refined, could alter the laws that governed refinement. He could reach a point where every step leading to the final stage became almost effortless, where his control and understanding approached perfection. Yet the final step would never change. A rank one mote would always have around a fifty percent success rate at the last stage, and rank two would remain under twenty. These constants did not bend. They were part of the nature of refinement itself.
So when Kael estimated his own chances, when he said he had around a fifty-three percent success rate on refining a rank one mote, he was not claiming to break the constant. He was calculating and comparing. Weighing his early-stage success rate against that of other Luminaires at his rank and drawing the only reasonable conclusion.
He sat down on the sofa, resting his chin on his fist, deep in thought.
From the high window he watched people move along the streets below, small dark shapes drifting like ants tracing the scent of food.
'Should I do another refinement?'
It had been months since he refined the Stone Coffin mote. The reasons were obvious, and none of them good, but he should not allow himself to grow idle. Especially when he barely had a chance to use the Obsidian Shard mote in the first place.
'I do not have any recipes though.'
His fingers tapped lightly against the sofa cushion.
Even though the recipes he had used seemed simple at first glance, only four ingredients, creating a new recipe on the spot was almost impossible. At least for him.
Take the Stone Coffin mote, for example. On paper it only used four ingredients, yet they had to be placed in a very specific order. That alone created twenty-four different combinations. And that was before considering quantity. Once the exact measurements entered the equation, the number of possibilities ballooned into something that could not realistically be solved in a lifetime.
Fail once, and the ingredients vanished completely. Fail again, and you suffered backlash. Fail too many times, and you died.
Creating motes blindly was out of the question.
'How do they even do it?'
The thought struck him hard enough to still his tapping finger.
The noble families, the ancient clans, the ones who possessed dozens of unique motes, would surely have gone through trial and error. But they could not possibly have moved blindly every single time. That would mean years upon years of constant experimentation, endless resources, and countless fallen Luminaires crushed by backlash.
'There has to be something I am missing.'
His eye narrowed.
He went over the refinement he had done in his head multiple times, every sensation, every thought, trying to grasp something that was just out of reach.
'Does it have to do with the laws of the resources?'
His eye unfocused as his thoughts drifted deeper.
Mortals might look at a rock and see it exactly as it was. A rock. Cold. Solid. Ordinary.
But Luminaires knew better.
The world was held together by unseen laws, silent frameworks dictating the behavior of all things.
A rock stayed solid because the law governing its nature demanded it.
Snow melted under warmth because the law of heat required it.
Fire consumed.
Water descended.
Roots grew toward the earth.
Light revealed.
These were not choices.
Nothing in the world decided to behave the way it did.
Everything followed the quiet patterns strung through creation, patterns older than any living creature.
'So what about the ingredients…'
Kael leaned forward slightly.
Every refinement recipe he had ever seen was built around these laws.
Every ingredient carried a purpose woven into its existence.
A stone was not simply a stone. It carried the law of hardness. Of endurance. Of permanence.
Sap carried the law of growth.
Ash carried the law of what had been consumed.
Metal carried the law of weight and structure.
Refinement worked only because the laws inside each ingredient could be arranged, provoked, and forced to interact. The order mattered because the laws themselves responded to sequence. Place them correctly, and they aligned. Place them wrong, and they rejected each other.
'They are not guessing…'
His hand tightened around the apple core.
The noble families did not create motes through blind trial and error.
They understood the laws hidden inside each resource.
They understood how one law called to another.
They understood which laws clashed, and which could merge to create something entirely new.
'That is what I am missing.'
His eye widened at the realization.
He had been looking at recipes as simple lists of ingredients
when he should have been looking at them as arrangements of laws.
Kael rose from the sofa and began pacing the apartment, murmuring under his breath.
"How could that be possible? How do they know which laws align with each other? How do they calculate how much of each law is needed to form a mote?" He stopped, then continued, his voice growing more focused. "If someone understood the laws on a fundamental level, would it even be possible to fail? No. It should not. If you understand them completely, you should be able to visualize the result before ever attempting it. You would not need to try. You would finish the refinement in your mind first."
He returned to his desk and sat down, staring blankly at the wall as his thoughts churned.
'Then why do they still struggle to create new recipes? Why is it still so difficult, even for ancient families? If understanding the laws is the key, then why can they not create new motes instantly? Is it because the laws themselves cannot be fully understood?'
His breathing slowed, the weight of the idea settling heavily.
'Yes… that must be it.'
He leaned back in the chair, running a thumb across the edge of the desk.
He could grasp parts of a law, hints of its behavior and purpose, but not its whole. Nobody could. The laws were too old, too vast, too deeply woven into the foundation of the world. A Luminaire could only touch the surface, never the entire shape beneath.
'So even with centuries of refinement knowledge, they are still guessing. Educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless.'
He lowered his gaze to his hands.
'Understanding a law completely is impossible. But understanding it more than others… that is not.'
Before the thought could settle, something twitched under his stitched eyelid.
A single pulse.
Then another.
The eye, silent ever since he left the hollow mountain, lurched violently beneath the closed lid. The flesh bulged outward, strained to the point of tearing, as if the thing beneath was writhing in panic. If it had a mouth, it would have screamed.
Kael's hand moved without thought, pressing against his face as if he could restrain it. But it did not matter. The eye was not something he wore. It was a part of him.
"Why are you acting up now?"
His voice was low.
The eye did not respond. It thrashed beneath the skin, dragging itself from one side of the socket to the other, like it was searching for something it could not find. The stitched tendrils that sealed the eyelid strained under the movement, pulling at torn flesh.
A sharp tear split open near the corner of his eye.
Hot blood spilled down his cheek in thick streaks.
Another tear. More blood. The tendrils quivered, fighting to hold the eyelid shut as the eye beneath twisted in frantic, mindless movement.
Kael inhaled slowly, hand tightening against his face.
It would not stop.
And the more it struggled, the more his skin tore open, warm blood slipping down his jaw in thick streaks now. It trailed along the curve of his neck, soaking into his collar and painting dark lines against his pale skin.
Before he could form another thought, the eye went still beneath the lid.
Kael froze, breath caught in his throat.
'Is it over?'
The silence lasted only a heartbeat.
Then the eye pulsed.
A single, violent throb.
Time seemed to fold in on itself. His instincts fired too late.
"Argh!"
Pain detonated behind his eyelid.
Thousands of tendrils exploded outward, ripping through the seam of flesh like a flower forced to bloom by a knife. They tore through his skin, his nerves, his stitched eyelid bursting apart as if it had never existed.
The tendrils punched through his palm and fingers in a dozen places, spraying thin streams of blood across the desk and wall behind him. His hand trembled, pinned in place by the living needles that pierced straight through bone.
The desk in front of him suffered next.
Wherever the tendrils passed, the wood split in clean, thin as paper cuts but deep enough to carve through the entire surface. Dozens of lines appeared at once, crisscrossing eachother.
Then, as suddenly as they had erupted, the tendrils halted.
They hung in front of him, suspended in the air, gleaming with a faint wet sheen, perfectly still and utterly indifferent to gravity or the blood dribbling from their tips.
Kael dropped to his knees, catching himself with his free hand before his face hit the floor.
'What is it doing?'
His thoughts flickered, slipping like water through his fingers as pain surged through every nerve. His vision dulled, then sharpened again, just enough for him to see the floating mass of tendrils shivering in the air before him.
They hung there, unmoving, as if the eye were thinking.
Calculating.
Deciding.
Kael held their gaze, his breath growing thin. He reached out, intending to seize one and rip it free.
He never got the chance.
The tendrils moved all at once.
The motion started with the strands furthest from him. A ripple passed through them like a shiver of anticipation before they snapped forward, cracking through the air with the speed and violence of a whip. The wall behind him erupted in a spiderweb of cuts, carved into the stone as if it were soft clay. The kitchen counter split apart an instant later, collapsing into hundreds of perfectly sliced pieces.
Then the tendrils reached him.
They struck across his face in a blur, once, then again, their momentum carrying through him like blades dragged through flesh. Warm blood sprayed across the floorboards and painted the wall behind him in thin, fanned streaks.
'Is it trying to suffocate me?'
More tendrils lashed around him, curling and twisting. They wrapped across his cheeks, his jaw, his forehead, tightening in overlapping coils. The pressure built with every loop, each one pulling harder, closing in, constricting as if trying to crush his skull in its grip.
His breathing hitched.
And still the tendrils wrapped around his face again and again, relentless, tightening as if determined to erase him.
Kael snapped his fingers and the golden rod answered at once, tearing through the air in a streak of light before stopping vertically, flush against his face like a blade meant to divide eye from skull.
'I cannot let it—'
The thought died instantly.
The tendrils moved with perfect indifference.
They slipped through the golden rod as if it were made of wet paper.The mote shattered on contact, bursting into a cloud of gold dust that scattered across the floor like crushed stars before fading out of existence.
A sound tore out of Kael's throat.
"UGGHH—!"
The backlash hit him like a hammer swung at his very soul.
His body spasmed. His vision bled into white. His knees slammed into the floor and he vomited a mouthful of blood that splattered across the cut desk ahead. The ground tilted beneath him and a wave of nausea dragged him down again. More blood spilled from his lips in violent heaves until his stomach clenched empty.
His arm buckled under him. For a moment he lay there, convulsing, feeling the metaphysical wound gouged into his existence.
His pulse thrashed painfully against his skull. His remaining motes flickered inside his inner realm, recoiling like frightened animals. One faltered entirely, forcing him to grit his teeth to stop another scream.
Kael dragged in a breath that stung like cold fire.
He pushed himself up on trembling limbs.
His left hand remained pinned to his face. The tendrils had pierced through the palm cleanly, threading through bone and flesh with grotesque precision. And in the time he had been reeling, they had not been idle. They had spiraled again and again around his head, looping, tightening, weaving into a suffocating mesh.
What little skin still showed beneath them was sliced open, bleeding in fine red lines.
He pulled once. Nothing moved.
He tried again, harder. His bones creaked, but the tendrils held fast, burying deeper.
The tendrils were not simply holding him.
They were cocooning him.
He had to do something. And fast.
He did not need to enter his inner realm to understand the danger. He felt it.
After his soulbound mote had been destroyed so effortlessly, every mote within his inner realm had fallen into something like a panic.
He tried to summon them, one after another, but none responded.
They recoiled from him, terrified of the thing sitting inside his body.
'Something…'
He burned through thousands of Thoughts each second, tearing through every possible solution he could imagine, but nothing held weight long enough to use.
He tore his consciousness inward, scanning through the inner realm with brutal speed, searching the only place that might offer an answer.
But every mote he reached for slipped away from him, ignoring his call entirely.
It was as if the Weeping Eye had crowned itself the apex predator of his own soul, and every mote fled from it instinctively.
Kael collapsed to his knees in the inner realm, breath ragged, sweat dripping from his chin.
'Nothing…'
The moment the word formed, despair followed close behind.
But before it could take root, a sound broke through the chaos.
Thud…
Thud…
Thud…
Kael turned his head sharply.
Point Aegis mote, the same mote Emberveil Gale Demon Paragon had once trusted with his life, came rolling across the void.
It moved with its usual steady rhythm, completely indifferent to the Eye's oppressive presence.
Kael did not need another second.
In the physical world the Weeping Eye had wrapped entirely around his head and hand, thousands of tendrils coiling and tightening in a desperate attempt to crush his skull.
'Point Aegis.'
The thought was the only thing he had left.
And the mote responded instantly.
A pulse rippled across his skin as the tendrils suddenly halted, frozen in place.
They still writhed, still strained, still coiled with murderous intent, but they could not penetrate further.
Each time they pushed, the invisible resistance of Point Aegis met them, solid and unyielding, like steel forged in the heart of a collapsing star.
For the first time since the Eye awakened, the tendrils failed to advance.
Kael supported himself with his three limbs, waiting for the next strike. The tendrils had wrapped around his head so many times that they formed something close to a mask, created of uncanny white. Breathing had become a deliberate act, every inhale scraping against the constriction.
Minutes crawled by.
Five.
Seven.
Ten.
Neither of them yielded.
At last, the pressure began to ease. The tendrils loosened, unwinding one by one from around his skull. They peeled away in spiraling layers, sliding past his ears and cheeks, rising like a slow, vortex before hovering once more in front of him.
Kael raised his head.
Blood covered him. Tin crimson lines covered every inch of his face, a thousand shallow cuts forming a net of raw stinging flesh. His hair clung wetly to his jaw. Drops fell from his chin, pattering softly into the growing pool beneath him.
His vision trembled, but he did not move.
The floating tendrils quivered once, then descended.
They retracted the same way they had burst forth. They slid straight through his pierced hand, threading through muscle and bone, returning through his eyelid as if nothing had ever stopped them. He felt them push back into his eye socket, felt the pressure behind the lid, and then felt the familiar tightening.
It sewed his eye shut again.
Stitch by stitch.
Thread by thread.
Then silence.
The Eye had gone dormant again.
Kael swayed. His vision blurred completely before slowly stabilizing into a fog.
He lowered himself slowly, letting his hand press into the crimson pool as he tried to steady his breathing.
Only one thought drifted through the haze:
'I've advanced...'