The charts led him to a region of the desert that even the nomads avoided. The red sands slowly gave way to a fine, black dust that seemed to swallow the light. The air grew still and cold, despite the unrelenting sun. This was the aftermath of the cataclysm the soul-artist had spoken of, a place where the very laws of nature had been wounded.
After two days of walking through this oppressive silence, he found it.
Or rather, he found the top of it. Rising from a vast crater in the black sand were the broken spires and shattered domes of a once-great city. Al'Khar. It was not a city of sandstone, but of a strange, dark metal that did not reflect the light. Runes of power, now dormant, were etched into every surface, hinting at a civilization that had wielded unimaginable energies.
Getting inside was the first test. The main gates were buried under a mountain of sand. Kael, using his knowledge of ancient architecture, identified a smaller, load-bearing archway in a collapsed library tower. His body, a tool of precision and power, allowed him to clear the rubble and squeeze through a gap that would have been impossible for a normal man.
He dropped into darkness and silence. The air was stale, thick with the dust of millennia. He stood in a grand hall, its ceiling lost in the gloom above. Faded murals on the walls depicted beings of light and shadow locked in a cosmic war.
He was not alone.
As he moved deeper, the ruins began to play tricks on him. A flicker of movement in the corner of his eye would resolve into nothing. A whisper on the edge of hearing would fade as he tried to focus on it. These were Mirage Fiends, ethereal parasites that fed on regret and memory.
One of them took a form that made his blood run cold. It was the Old Gardener, the cryptic figure who appeared across his lifetimes, but his face was twisted in a malevolent grin. "Still running in your circle, little mouse?" the mirage hissed. "You can't forge a key to a prison that is made of your own soul."
Kael's hand, calloused and scarred, clenched into a fist. The Kael of fifty lives ago might have faltered, might have let the psychological venom find its mark. But now, he simply looked at the apparition, his eyes holding the weight of 137 deaths.
"You are just an echo," Kael said, his voice calm and steady. "And I am done listening to ghosts."
He walked straight through the illusion. The fiend shrieked as his solid, physically forged presence disrupted its ethereal form, and it dissolved into dust. He had no Qi to fight it with, but his will, tempered in the crucible of endless recurrence, was a weapon all its own.
He followed the soul-artist's directions, navigating the dead city by the alignment of the ruined star-towers. He bypassed ancient pressure plates and crumbling floors, his heightened senses warning him of dangers his eyes couldn't see. Finally, he found the landmark he was looking for: a shattered statue of a weeping goddess, her tears carving a path down into the city's foundations.
He descended into the catacombs. Here, the air hummed with a faint, nauseating energy. He passed niches filled with the armored dead of Al'Khar, Tomb Guardians who would animate at the presence of Qi. To them, Kael was invisible, a being of pure flesh and blood, a ghost in their spiritual world.
At the lowest level, he found a sealed door, covered in the same runes he'd seen on the weeping goddess. There was no lock, no handle. He placed his hand on the cold metal. The soul-artist's last piece of advice echoed in his mind: It does not open for the powerful, but for the desperate. It requires a sacrifice of life.
Kael drew a sharpened piece of obsidian from his pack and, without hesitation, drew it across his palm. Blood, rich and vital, welled up. He pressed his bleeding hand to the door.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the runes began to glow, not with Qi, but with a hungry, crimson light. They drank his blood, and the massive door slid open with a grinding groan.
He stepped inside. The room was small, circular, and bare, save for a single pedestal in the center. And on that pedestal, floating just above its surface, was the Heart-Stone Parasite.
It was not a stone. It was a fist-sized lattice of crystalline silver and pulsing, vein-like crimson lines. It looked like a living, anatomical diagram of a heart, crafted from starlight and blood. It thrummed with a silent, hypnotic rhythm, and Kael could feel a palpable, predatory hunger emanating from it. It did not radiate Qi. It radiated want. This was not a tool. It was a predator, waiting for a host. This was the key. And the price of turning it was to let it sink its fangs into his soul.