***
Time synchronization reset.
Trial iteration: 5.
***
The void was a familiar comfort now, a blank slate between failures. This time, there was no laughter from Karmen, no urge to keep going. There was only a heavy, waiting silence.
Lucid did not hesitate. He threw himself back into the memory the moment it formed. This time, he did not flirt, he did not negotiate, he did not surrender. He did the one thing he thought was truly unacceptable, the most desperate gamble of all. He chose Karmen's original path. But he chose it with everything he had. If the first path was not to his liking, and the others were clearly failing and downright failures, he decided to do the one thing Karmen could never do. He decided to outdo him, to outpace him in just about everything. Every word uttered by Ivy and Alice was just noise. He waited for that moment where he had his opening amid all of this. He was done trying to act or look like he cared. Whether he reacted or not, there was always an automated response that followed the events that had transpired from Karmen. The same exact words.
When Ivy offered her forked choice, despair or obsession, Lucid seized Karmen's hand and took the offer to search for a cure. Not with Karmen's grief stricken frenzy, but with Lucid's own cold, methodical, and utterly ruthless determination. His own will.
He went straight to the private library, hoarding every scroll, every researcher's note about the Mother of Fate and the condition of Withering. He learned that the Mother of Fate traversed his studies, a massive source not quite like a god, but a thread to the world itself where many people had a thread tying to it. Animals, mundane humans, Awakened, Enlightened, objects, there was a thread to it. And there was something that could sever this thread. Mother Alisia, the creator of everything, was responsible for the thread of everything. Yet some sources said that Mother Fate was not really Alisia, and that Alisia was a separate entity. Yet Lucid believed they were the same. It could not really be a coincidence. He heard that rebel guard back in the Sentrum Rift shouting "Mother Alisia," and that rift was connected to Fate itself. It had to link something. But it did not matter. His brain was absorbing so much information about this world and its threads.
Lucid went straight to Karmen's brother, Lyle. He did not see a beloved sibling to protect. He saw a resource. He demanded every scrap of knowledge on science, on engineering, on how to reverse engineer the thread binding to Mother Fate, on energy transduction, on anything that could interact with Fate Essence on a mechanical and biological level.
Lyle looked at Karmen, no, at Lucid at this point, with the burning passion in his eyes. Lyle was always someone driven, but seeing his younger brother Karmen like this made him uncomfortable.
"Karmen, I may tinker every now and then, but meddling with Alisia's creation is not something I can do easily."
"I am so close to figuring out what it is. Just help me out!"
"Why are you so desperate, Karmen?"
"Because this is important!
"You're life is at ris—"
"I mean we'll get an award," he fidgeted his fingers uncomfortably.
When Lyle offered what little help he could, Karmen, or rather Lucid, stormed out, closing himself off in the study. Ivy followed him, bearing witness to every report, every hypothesis, every experiment. She could not help but feel a sense of intrigue. Someone as oblivious and naive, hitting his head against a wall that the greatest scientists could not even solve.
***
Time synchronization
***
He studied until his eyes bled, until Karmen's strong body trembled with exhaustion. When Lyle fell sick, coughing blood, Lucid did not break down. He simply said, "Leave the rest to me," and took his brother's notes.
He did not yield. Not to fatigue, not to despair, not to the creeping shadow of the curse he could now perceive with a frightening clarity, thanks to the Chain of Heart's perception trait honed to a knife's edge through sheer, brutal will.
Ivy watched him. At first, she was frightened. Her plan to create a broken, obsessed lord was veering into unknown territory. This was not obsession. It was a calculated, scientific siege on the problem she represented. Then, her fear turned to fascination. She started to help him, not out of affection, but out of a scholar's curiosity. She provided obscure Maternan texts, discussed theories, became his unwilling, brilliant partner in the lab he built in the mansion's east wing.
***
Time synchronization
***
Days blurred into weeks, into months within the accelerated trial. Lucid lived on focus and desperation. He cross referenced imperial poison manuals with Tyrian folk remedies, Lyle's blueprints with Alice's whispered intuitions about divine essence. He was playing a horrific game, walking the exact same path that had led the real Karmen to ruin, but he was walking it faster, harder, and without the blinding emotion that had been Karmen's downfall.
It was the most dangerous gamble. By choosing the path of the "unchanged conclusion," he risked the trial's penalty of death. But he was betting that the conclusion was not the path, but the failure. If he could actually succeed where Karmen had failed.
And then, against all odds, he did it.
In a room smelling of ozone and smoke, he held a small, crystalline vial. Inside swirled a solution that resonated with a pure, counter harmonic frequency to the corrosive Fate Essence signature he had isolated from Karmen's mother's blood without a shred of remorse. A cure. A true breakthrough. A counter to the Withering.
Ivy stood across from him, her violet eyes wide, her veil forgotten on a desk cluttered with notes. She was astounded. This was not in any of Materna's models. This was victory. His victory.
For a single, glorious moment, Lucid thought he had won. He had out scienced the curse, out logicked the tragedy. He had trusted the process, and it had worked. He even dared to think, looking at Ivy's shocked admiration, that he might have won her over, turned an enemy into an ally through sheer, undeniable genius.
Then she moved.
It was so fast. One moment she was staring at the vial. The next, a slender dagger was in her hand, and it was buried in his chest, right over Karmen's heart. The pain was sharp and shocking.
He looked down at the hilt, then up at her face. Her expression was not one of hatred, but of profound, professional regret.
"Your solution is not bad, little caramel," she whispered, her voice tender as she watched the light fade from his eyes. "It is brilliant. Truly. It will not go to waste. The Empire will take credit for it, of course. A Maternan remedy for spiritual afflictions. Think of the lives it will save, in our hands."
She leaned in, her lips brushing his ear as his legs gave way. "Your trust was your only flaw. A beautiful, painful, blind trust in the goodness of discovery. Thank you for the gift."
He died on the floor of his lab, not from the trial's penalty, but from the stab wound of the woman whose side he thought he had won. The cure glittered, untouched, on the table beside his cooling hand.
The void returned.
Alice's presence was a silent, ringing shock. The divine maiden, who had seen millennia, was completely blindsided. Her view of Lucid, the pragmatic, often cowardly survivor, was shattered. She had just witnessed a version of him pursue a goal with such unpatriotic, focused brilliance that he had achieved the impossible, only to be betrayed at the pinnacle. It was a new, devastating kind of courage, followed by the oldest, cruelest kind of lesson.
Karmen's voice was quiet, filled with a wistful awe. "I, I never got that far," he admitted, the ghost of his own failure palpable. "The grief, the anger, it clouded my mind. I chased leads in circles. You, you really explored every corner. You tried with everything. You did what I could not."
His tone was not jealous. It was humbled. Amazed. But it was wrong. Despite all that work, the equation he had turned into a cold, calculating machine devoid of any attachments.
Lucid floated in the darkness. No despairing scream came. No furious rant. The emotion that filled him was colder, heavier, and deeper than before.
It was the absolute certainty of futility.
He had tried acceptance. He had tried complicity. He had tried romance. He had tried transcendent, focused genius.
Every single time, it ended with Karmen dead and Ivy and Materna winning. The variables changed, the methods differed, but the equation always solved the same.
He had walked the path of the unchanged conclusion and succeeded scientifically, only to learn that in this story, success itself was just another form of failure if you were the wrong person.
He was not just failing Karmen. He was proving, over and over, that in the face of a system designed to crush you, no choice mattered. Courage, cowardice, love, logic, they were all just different flavors of defeat.
The despair was no longer a storm. It was the ocean floor, dark, silent, and under immense, infinite pressure.
Karmen's voice cut through the stillness, softer now. "Lucid."
But Lucid was not listening. He was just waiting for the void to spit him back, to force him to play the scene again. To find a fifth, sixth, hundredth way to lose.
He was deeper in despair than ever before, because now he knew for sure. There was no way out. He was just cycling through hells, and the exit was a lie.
***
Time synchronization reset.
Trial iteration: 6.
***