High above the choking "Heavy-Taint," where the sky was no longer blue but a blinding, shadowless ivory, sat the Aethel-Gard.
Inside the High Sanctum, the Zen-Zun—the architects of the surface—gathered. Though their true essences were cosmic and terrifying, here they wore the "Mortal-Mask." They appeared as humans of impossible perfection: skin like polished marble, hair of spun gold, and eyes that held the cold vacuum of space.
They sat around a table of condensed starlight. Behind each Zen-Zun stood a Pilgrim. These were not soldiers, but the high-butlers of the Heavens—ancient, terrifyingly calm entities in cowled robes of white silk. They stood in eternal vigil, ready to pour starlight wine or shatter an entire city at their master's whim. To the Underworld, a single Pilgrim would be a god; here, they were merely the ones who kept the Zen-Zun's robes from touching the floor.
In the center of the hall, a vast Choir of Apostles stood in a tiered circle. Hundreds of them, their eyes sewn shut with gold thread, began a low, rhythmic chant. The language was not human; it was a series of guttural, clicking phonetics that sounded like tectonic plates grinding together. It was a terrifying, discordant sound that vibrated through the marrow of anyone who heard it.
Asha knelt in the center of the hall, her forehead touching the cold starlight floor. Her armor was scorched, and a smear of Underworld soot stained her cheek.
"Look at it," sneered the Zen-Zun Valerius, a man with hair like white fire. He gestured with a gloved hand, and his Pilgrim instantly stepped forward to adjust the drape of his cape. "Our 'Perfect Apostle,' returned with the smell of the gutter on her skin. I told you, Hestia, that the human stock was too weak."
Hestia, a woman whose eyes flickered like dying embers, did not look up from her chalice. "She was equipped with the Solar-Scepter, Valerius. The fault is not in the stock, but in the target. The boy has the Lament."
"Excuses for a failure!" Valerius snapped, standing up. The starlight table flared at his anger. He stepped toward Asha, his hand raised to strike. "Perhaps we should melt her down and use her ichor for—"
Then, the world glitched.
The choir's chant shifted instantly. The low drone turned into a high-pitched, harmonic scream that defied the laws of music. It was a sound of pure terror, a vocalized corruption of reality that forced Asha to press her hands against her ears as blood leaked from her nose.
Every light in the room—the table, the halos, the eyes of the Gods—flickered and died, replaced by a violent, digital static.
The Luminous appeared.
He did not walk; he occupied the space. He sat at the head of the table, a jagged, stuttering silhouette of blinding white light that glitched and warped every second. His "face" was a shifting mosaic of shattered code and white fire. To look at him was to hear the sound of the universe being deleted.
The choir fell into a rhythmic, terrifying whisper, their sewn eyes weeping gold as they praised the glitching God in that unknown, clicking tongue.
Silence followed—a silence so heavy it felt like being buried alive. Valerius instantly dropped to his knees, his face pale with a genuine, primal fear. Even the stoic Pilgrims bowed their cowled heads, their powerful auras extinguished in a heartbeat.
"Conflict... is... inefficiency," the Luminous spoke. His voice didn't come from the air; it vibrated inside their skulls, accompanied by a high-pitched electronic whine. "The Grave-Blood... is... active. He has swallowed... the Liturgy."
The Luminous turned his glitching, radiant head toward Asha. Every time he looked at her, the reality around her person seemed to tear and reset.
"Asha... you... failed," the God glitched. "But the boy... he is hungry. He thinks... he is a King."
The Luminous leaned forward, his form stretching out of proportion and then snapping back with a sickening crack.
"We will not send a hammer to crush a bug. We will send a parasite. Asha... you will return. You will carry... the 'Celestial Blight.' Let the King feed on you. Let him take your power. And when he is full... his soul will be ours to delete."
The choir's whisper rose to a fever pitch, a terrifying wall of sound as the Apex-Prime's form flared with a blinding, jagged brilliance. Asha felt her soul being rewritten by the glitching light, her body becoming a vessel for a divine poison.