The deeper Kael ventured into the Verdant Maze, the more the jungle itself seemed to hold its breath. The riotous symphony of life faded into an unnerving stillness. The air grew heavy, static. He was entering a place that nature had decided to shun.
He arrived not at a temple or a ruin, but at a vast, perfectly circular clearing. The grass was pale and unnaturally uniform. In the absolute center of the clearing stood the Silent Oracle. It was a tree, but a tree from a forgotten, titanic age. It was wider than the Lyceum's great tower, its bark a grey, petrified stone, and its branches reached up like skeletal fingers trying to claw at a sky they could no longer touch. It was utterly, profoundly dead.
Kael circled the colossal trunk. There were no doors, no seams, no inscriptions he could read. It seemed to be a solid, inert monolith. He activated his Qi-sight, and the world grew stranger still. The Oracle itself had no aura. It was a void. But the ambient Qi of the Verdant Maze, a sea of green and gold, did not touch the clearing. It flowed around it, as if the clearing were a hole bored through the very fabric of the world.
The Gardener's words echoed in his mind. It doesn't talk. It shows. This was not a source of information. It was a lens, an aperture. And the map's clue: where the sky-jailer's tears water the earth. He needed a catalyst, a "tear" of celestial energy to activate the lens. He possessed no such thing. But he possessed his own anomaly. The golden Qi of his own vitality. It was a long shot, a key that might not fit the lock, but it was the only one he had.
He placed his hand on the cold, stone-like bark of the petrified tree. He closed his eyes, focused his will, and pushed a minuscule, controlled pulse of his life force into the wood.
The world did not shake. It vanished.
Kael's perception was ripped from his body. He was no longer standing in a clearing; he was floating in a silent, star-dusted void, looking down at the world of Aethelgard. It was a beautiful, swirling sphere of blue, green, and gold.
Then his perspective was pulled back, faster and faster. He saw Aethelgard was just one sphere among many, a single glowing bead in a sea of countless other worlds, all floating in the cosmic dark. The sheer scale was breathtaking.
The perspective pulled back again, and a gasp of pure horror would have escaped him if he'd had lungs to breathe. The multiverse, his entire reality, was contained. It was housed within a colossal, impossibly intricate machine of golden light and crystalline gears, a divine orrery that spanned a universe. It hummed with a silent, unimaginable power. The Gardener's word echoed with chilling clarity: the pot.
His focus was then violently wrenched towards a specific part of the celestial machine. He saw a chamber of light, and floating within it, a single, radiant mote. A soul. His soul. He watched in detached horror as he saw impossibly complex lines of energy connecting his soul to the sphere of Aethelgard. He was witnessing the mechanism of his curse. He saw the machine activate upon a "death," a great arm of light plucking his soul from the world, the memories and experiences being absorbed into the machine's archives, before re-inserting the soul into a new vessel at a new location. He was not a cursed man. He was a data point being endlessly harvested.
As he reeled from this revelation, a piercing, silent alarm blared through the divine construct. His unauthorized glimpse, his heretical act of observation, had been detected.
From a higher, more brilliant strata of the golden machine, a figure descended. It was humanoid only in its basic shape, a being of pure, blinding white light, its form shifting between a knight in radiant armor and an abstract geometrical terror. It radiated no emotion, only cold, absolute authority and a power that dwarfed anything Kael had ever conceived. A Warden.
The Warden moved towards the chamber holding Kael's soul. It raised a hand of pure light, its intent clear and horrifying: to access the mechanism, to sever the connection, to delete the rogue file that had somehow learned to look back at its user.
A primal terror, an emotion Kael had not truly felt in a century of brutal lives, seized him. This was not a beast to be fought or a cultivator to be outmaneuvered. This was a system administrator, and he was the glitch it had come to erase.
Before the Warden could touch the controls of his fate, Kael's vision shattered. He was thrown violently back into his own body, collapsing in a heap at the foot of the Silent Oracle, his heart hammering against his ribs, his breath coming in ragged, desperate gasps. The pulse of his life force had been the key that opened the door, but it had also been the silent alarm that alerted the guards.
He lay on the pale grass, trembling, not from the drain on his vitality, but from the sheer, soul-crushing weight of what he had seen. His prison wasn't a punishment from a single, malevolent god. It was a function. A cold, indifferent, cosmic process.
And he had just gotten the attention of its keepers.
He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to his very bones, that the Warden was now aware of him. No longer just a repeating data point, but a conscious anomaly. The hunt had begun. The time for quiet investigation was over.
Kael scrambled to his feet, a new, wild desperation in his eyes. He had to get back to his sect. He had to prepare his army. He had to forge his weapons. He had looked upon the face of his jailer. And now, the jailer was coming for him.