Chapter 26: The Unwritten Scripture
Decades passed. Lives came and went like breaths.
The boy who had won the tournament in Aeridor died an old man in a quiet, secluded valley, his body a roadmap of self-inflicted scars and arcane runes. The Artificial Core, once a flawed prototype, became a perfected engine of terrifying efficiency. His Adamantine Body reached a pinnacle of resilience that bordered on true immortality. He spent lifetimes in monastic solitude, mastering his unique power, becoming a ghost of unimaginable strength that the world never knew existed. He was a god in a cage, testing the limits of his cell, waiting.
He awoke, as he always did, at seventeen. This was his 142nd life. He opened his eyes to the smell of salt and tar in a bustling, lawless port city known as Freeport, a wretched hive of scum and villainy nestled between the crumbling edge of the Valerian Empire and the Scourged Wastes. It was a place where empires were forgotten and the only law was coin and steel. A perfect place for a new kind of beginning.
For over a hundred lifetimes, Kael's mantra had been self-reliance. He had trusted no one, built nothing that could be taken from him. But solitude, he had learned, was a limited strategy. A single man, no matter how powerful, could not investigate a conspiracy that spanned the heavens. A god in a cage is still a prisoner. To find the architect of his loop, he needed more than just personal power. He needed leverage. He needed an organization. He needed a legacy.
In this life, he would conduct a new experiment. He would see if his heretical scripture could be taught.
He didn't seek the talented or the powerful. He walked the grimy docks and shadowy alleys of Freeport, and with his Qi-sight, he looked not for bright auras, but for the opposite. He looked for the rootless, the cast-offs, the mortals whose dim, flickering life force was slowly being extinguished by a world that had deemed them worthless. But he looked for something else within that dimness: a stubborn, iron-hard glint of defiance.
His first recruit was a man named Borin, a former Valerian legionary in his late fifties. Borin was a master of strategy and logistics, but his career had stalled and died because his lack of a spiritual root barred him from the officer corps. Kael found him working as a drunken bouncer, his tactical genius wasted on managing tavern brawls.
His second was a girl named Elara, barely sixteen. She had been cast out of a merchant family for the shame of being born rootless. She was quick-witted, fiercely intelligent, and fueled by a rage that burned hotter than any cultivator's Qi. Kael found her picking pockets, her sharp mind dedicated to mere survival.
His third was a failed scholar named Finch, a man who had dedicated his life to memorizing cultivation theory but could never feel a wisp of the energy he so adored. He was desperate, knowledgeable, and on the verge of taking his own life.
Kael gathered these three, and a dozen others like them, in an abandoned warehouse overlooking the sea. They looked at him, a boy of seventeen, with suspicion and weary cynicism.
He didn't offer them salvation. He offered them a transaction.
"The world has told you that you are nothing," Kael said, his voice quiet but resonant with the authority of ages. "It has told you that power is a gift of birth, and you were not chosen. That is a lie."
He picked up a solid iron anchor lying on the floor, a weight of several hundred pounds. With a casual, one-handed motion, he crushed it, the dense metal groaning and twisting in his grip like wet clay. He tossed the mangled remains at their feet.
Their cynical expressions vanished, replaced by stunned disbelief.
"The path I offer is not a gift," Kael continued, his eyes cold and intense. "It is a forge. It is built on a foundation of pain you cannot yet imagine. You will learn to carve runes into your own bones. You will temper your flesh in agony. You will turn your bodies into weapons because the heavens denied you the ones you were supposed to have. Most of you will fail. Many of you may die during the training. It is a path of heresy, and it will earn you no love from gods or men."
He paused, letting the brutal truth sink in.
"But if you succeed," he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper, "you will hold a power that is truly your own. A power that was not given, but earned in blood and will. I am not your savior. I am your first teacher. The choice is yours."
No one left. In their eyes, he saw the desperate, hungry glimmer of those with nothing left to lose.
That night, in the echoing space of the warehouse, the first lesson began. Kael had them submerge their limbs in barrels of electrified seawater, a crude but effective imitation of the sludge pools from his 137th life.
The warehouse filled with the sounds of gritted teeth and choked screams of agony. It was a horrifying, brutal symphony. But to Kael, it was the first hymn of his new sect. The Rootless Sect.
He looked upon his first disciples, their bodies convulsing in the first trial of the Adamantine Body Forging. He felt no pity. He felt the cold, dispassionate focus of a master craftsman laying the foundation of his masterwork. He was no longer just a man defying his fate. He was forging an army. He was creating a legacy that would ripple through the world, a conspiracy of the powerless aimed at the very heart of heaven. And he knew, with a certainty born of endless lifetimes, that the consequences would be terrible and beautiful.