Kael placed the spatula on the counter.
'I'll need to refine the mote today.'
His gaze lingered on the meat sizzling in the pan. Six days had passed since he accepted Cain's commission. He could have rushed the refinement, forced it through sheer will, but he chose otherwise. Instead, he had spent each day studying the ingredients one by one, activating the Obsidian Shard mote again and again, trying to understand them on a deeper level.
He flipped the meat once more, then set the spatula aside again.
Under normal circumstances, the coming refinement would not have left him restless. But nothing about his situation was normal anymore. His soul was already fractured, barely holding itself together. He did not know what another backlash from a failed refinement would do to him.
In truth, he had considered backing out. Telling Cain the refinement had failed before even attempting it. The thought had lingered longer than Kael liked to admit.
But after weighing it carefully, he dismissed it.
The first result set the foundation. In a trade like this, reputation mattered more than survival. A single failure at the start would echo far longer than a quiet success, and Kael knew better than to poison his own path before it had truly begun.
His thoughts shattered when Mael stepped out of the guest room, arms raised high as she stretched.
"Morning," she said, sniffing the air.
"Made enough for me too?"
Her gaze flicked to the pan.
Kael glanced at her, then at the pan, then back again.
"Sure."
She nodded approvingly and disappeared into the bathroom.
'Cain…'
Kael slid the pan onto a pot holder.
Cain was still an unknown. Just like Kael, he suppressed his Luminaire aura. While anyone could learn how, very few bothered. That alone made Kael uneasy. And then there was the recipe. A mote from the soul-pathway.
'Where did he even get that?'
Kael washed his hands and set two plates on the dining table.
It was possible Cain was not skilled in refinement, but logic pushed back against that idea. If Cain truly had the experience, why come to Kael at all? Why take the risk of revealing such a recipe without knowing how Kael would react?
'Why not refine it himself?'
Kael placed the utensils and glasses beside the plates.
'Does he lack confidence? No… that doesn't fit at all.'
'Does he have a fractured soul like mine, wary of the consequences? Is that a possibility?'
He carried the pan to the table with a sigh.
"I don't know… too many variables."
He murmured under his breath as he sat down at the table.
Mael stepped out of the bathroom, shaking the water from her hands.
"What are you doing, sitting here talking to yourself?"
She asked while drying the last drops on her woollen sweater.
"I was just thinking about something,"
Kael replied, already scooping food onto his plate.
She raised an eyebrow, then let out a faint, amused smile.
"You're so strange,"
She said lightly as she took a seat across from him.
"Looks delicious,"
She added, piling food onto her own plate without a hint of restraint.
After the meal and the routine of washing the dishes, Kael grabbed his coat and left the apartment. The walk to the cabin took him just over half an hour, the city gradually giving way to snow-laden trees and silence.
When the cabin finally came into view, Kael raised his hand and summoned the stone coffin. It emerged with a low rumble, towering beside the small wooden structure like a Titanwood tree standing over a sapling.
'Can't wait any longer.'
Kael walked over to the stone coffin and gathered the ingredients one by one, placing them carefully on the dining table inside the cabin. The fire crackled softly in the fireplace, its warmth slowly pulling the frost from his hair as he sat down and studied what lay before him.
A head.
A hand.
Organs.
A tongue.
Strips of serpent skin.
And a piece of Cain's flesh.
'Such a troublesome recipe.'
He arranged the items neatly along the edge of the table. The ingredients themselves were not difficult to acquire in practice. It was the consequences tied to obtaining them that made the recipe dangerous.
Six components in total.
Five of them human.
Compared to the Stone Coffin mote, which had required only a single human heart, the difference was staggering.
'However…'
His gaze narrowed as he thought over the recipe once again..
'The required quantities aren't as exact as the Stone Coffin's.'
At least, not at first glance.
In reality, he knew better. Even a few excess pieces from a single component would be enough to ruin the refinement entirely. The margin for error was still razor-thin. The recipe merely hid its cruelty behind looser-looking measurements.
He extended his hand and shaped a refinement orb in his palm.
The red Will condensed rapidly, thickening until the orb stabilized. Kael reached for the first ingredient.
He snapped off one finger from the severed hand and lowered it into the orb. It dissolved the moment it touched the surface, vanishing without resistance.
'First ingredient down.'
As with all refinement, the chance of failure at the beginning was low. With only one set of laws present, there was nothing yet to clash, nothing to destabilize the process.
Kael moved on.
One ingredient after another was added, each with increasing care. His movements slowed, precision tightening with every step. By the time only two components remained, sweat had begun to bead on his forehead, trailing down his face and dripping onto the table.
His gaze shifted to the head beside him.
He picked it up and crushed it in his grip alone. Bone cracked. The skull gave way. Pinkish white matter spilled out, pooling across the table. When the flow finally steadied, Kael tipped the remains over the orb and watched as it swallowed everything greedily.
'One. Two. Three.'
After the third second, he tossed the ruined head aside.
'This recipe demands more Thoughts than I expected.'
He crushed a mindstone in his hand, feeling the surge replenish him, and activated the Obsidian Shard mote.
A sigh of relief escaped him.
At rank two, the mote had allowed him to guide the laws of ingredients with greater precision, easing refinement. After advancing, he had feared the effect would change, that it would drag his consciousness into the object as it now did with direct analysis. Thankfully, that was not the case here.
'It still works the same.'
With the mote's assistance, Kael began nudging the laws within the orb, carefully aligning them, easing their friction, coaxing them toward harmony.
Once the orb stabilized again, he reached for the final ingredient.
A strip of Cain's flesh fell into the orb.
The orb pulsed once, violently, as if something inside it strained to escape.
Kael crushed another mindstone and closed his eyes.
'The final step.'
Only when the light of the morning sun seeped through the windows did Kael lower his hands to his thighs.
The fire in the fireplace had long since burned out, and the brutal winter cold outside had begun creeping back in, pushing the last traces of warmth away.
Kael's face was pale, and the blindfold had darkened from the sweat it had absorbed.
"It's done."
His shoulders relaxed as his gaze settled on the mote resting before him.
The table was almost bare now. Only a few remnants remained, scraps of unused material and dark stains where blood had dried into the wood.
Kael picked up a small black pearl from the table.
'He never mentioned its name.'
He released his Will, letting it coil carefully around the pearl.
His eyes widened, and he pulled it back at once.
"I see…"
His voice was thoughtful, as he placed the pearl back down on the table.
When Kael had pushed his Will forward, he had been met with resistance.
Not the dormant stillness of a newly refined mote, but something active and opposing.
Something he had only ever felt from wild motes.
'Must be Cain's Will.'
Kael had spent the entire week turning the recipe over in his mind. Every ingredient had made sense except one.
The piece of flesh Cain had bitten from himself.
Why not take it from one of the many humans he had already slaughtered?
Why add himself?
The answer was suddenly obvious.
'So you can bind a mote temporarily… if the Will inside the ingredient is dense enough.'
The flesh had not altered the recipe's structure.
It had overwritten it.
Much like the Lure mote Kael had left in the Hollow Mountain, still his as long as his Will fed it, the black pearl now belonged to Cain.
Not permanently. But for now.
The Will inside would eventually run dry.
Until then, the mote remained claimed.
His thoughts drifted just a fraction too far.
Suddenly, Kael's eyes snapped wide beneath the blindfold, and the fabric of his coat cracked sharply as he shot his arm forward. The motion was violent, instinctive, faster than thought itself. To a mortal eye, it would have looked like nothing more than a blur, air tearing where his hand passed.
His fingers closed in around the black pearl.
Almost.
A soft, almost polite sound rang out. Not a shatter or a crack, more like a chime.
The mote came apart.
Black light fractured into countless glittering motes of dust, dispersing like ash caught in an unseen current. The particles shimmered once, then were pulled away, drawn somewhere far beyond the cabin, beyond the forest, beyond Kael's reach.
His fingers snapped shut on empty air.
Kael froze, arm still outstretched, muscles locked as if he could somehow rewind the moment through sheer refusal. The cold crept back into the room, unnoticed. The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute.
Then his hand slowly curled into a fist.
'He got me.'
The realization settled with brutal clarity.
Cain had never intended to retrieve the mote from Kael's hands. He had never needed to. The refinement had been completed under Cain's Will, anchored by his flesh, his intent, his authority. The moment the mote stabilized, it had already belonged to him.
And with a thought, Cain had dismissed it.
Kael lowered his arm at last.
A quiet, humorless breath escaped him.
'Half the payment. All the risk.'
The fire had long gone out. The table was stained with blood and ash. And somewhere, far away, Cain was likely already holding the black pearl in his palm, watching it gleam.
Kael tilted his head back slightly, blindfold hiding the sharpness of his gaze.
'Well played.'
The words were not spoken aloud.
But the bitterness in them lingered, heavy as iron, as Kael finally accepted the truth.
He had been outmaneuvered.