The B1 level was a rotting memory. Up here, in the gilded cage of Vesper's private suite, the air was perpetually thick with the suffocating scent of night-blooming jasmine and expensive incense.
It was early morning. Vesper lay asleep on the massive velvet bed, her face temporarily smoothed into an illusion of youth that would begin to fracture the moment she woke.
Soren sat in a high-backed chair across the room, perfectly still. The pristine silk blindfold rested over his eyes, but his consciousness was submerged in the cold, crystalline geometry of the Death-Star Sight.
He focused inward, touching the jagged ivory fragment lodged deep within his soul.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 7.0% 〙
The progress was stagnant. But it wasn't the slow crawl of the percentage that made his thoughts sharpen; it was the sensation radiating from the bone itself. For the first time, it wasn't transmitting hunger.
It was transmitting distaste.
He had gorged on Vesper's fear over the past few days. Her paralyzing anxiety of aging, her suffocating paranoia of being abandoned and replaced—it was a potent diet, but an entirely monotonous one. The terror of isolation was the natural sustenance of the Hermit. But a single source yielded diminishing returns. A woven dream of the exact same intensity now produced only sixty percent of the starlight it had during their first encounter.
More importantly, the bone was projecting a highly specific craving. It needed a new raw material to begin crystallizing the next card in the deck.
It craved the raw material for the Page of Swords.
And that required a very specific flavor of psychological collapse. Not the primal fear of death. Not the heat of despair. It needed the agonizing, freezing shame of having a secret pierced. The absolute frustration of a mind realizing that its meticulous calculations had fallen completely flat, and that its every move was entirely transparent to the enemy.
Vesper did not possess this. Her emotional architecture was too simple, built entirely on vanity and dependency.
The Overseer possessed it, but his cognitive defenses were a fortress. Soren's current level of intrusion couldn't scratch the surface of his deepest emotional reserves without triggering alarms.
There was only one place in the Sanctum that bled that kind of light daily.
The Crucible's training grounds. Down there, every single day, young assassins realized their carefully designed attacks were being read like open books. The sudden, burning shame and fury of being intellectually and tactically dismantled—that was the exact ore he needed to mine.
He just needed a reason to be there.
Getting there required no grand deception. It only required leveraging the leash he had already secured.
Soren had simply let a trace of fatigue bleed into his voice the night before, murmuring to Vesper that his "inner sight" felt unstable, that he needed to bathe in a more aggressive, chaotic aura to anchor the dreams he wove for her. Desperate to maintain her supply of youth, Vesper didn't hesitate. She ordered Elara to escort him.
To Elara, it was a direct command from her master. To Soren, it was his master blindly opening the door to his hunting grounds.
They walked through the winding corridors in silence. Elara stayed exactly a half-step ahead of him, her footsteps completely soundless. Behind the blindfold, Soren observed the silver astrolabe of her soul.
The invisible "strings" wound tightly around her core were pulled even more rigidly than the day of the deathmatch. One string in particular was drawn so tight it practically vibrated.
She was carrying a heavy burden. An agenda she wasn't voicing.
Soren didn't ask. It wasn't the time to pull the thread.
The training grounds were entirely different from the formal arenas above.
There were no spectator seats, no theatrical lighting, no rules of engagement. It was a brutal, subterranean cavern where dozens of young assassins fought in dangerously close quarters.
In Soren's Death-Star Sight, the room transformed. It was not a grand treasury, but rather a low-grade, high-volume ore vein.
Every few minutes, exactly what he needed would flare up in the dark. A sparring apprentice would execute a complex feint, only to be effortlessly disarmed. In that microsecond, the apprentice realized their judgment was three steps behind.
Soren found a quiet corner at the edge of the mats and sat down, pulling his knees up slightly. To the room, he was a blind, broken toy. In the psychic realm, he cast his Death-Star Sight outward like a vast, invisible net, systematically catching the fragmented spikes of shame and tactical fury.
The efficiency was painfully low. The fragments were minuscule and heavily dispersed.
But the sheer volume allowed the numbers to crawl.
〘 The Hermit IX — Passive Harvest (Training Grounds) 〙
〘 7.0% → 7.3% → 7.6% 〙
〘 Source: Apprentices' Tactical Shame [Low Quality, Contaminated] 〙
〘 Minor Arcana 'Page of Swords' — Star-Dust Purity: 15% → 18% 〙
It was a slow bleed. A tedious mining operation. He was collecting dust to forge a blade.
Midway through the session, the rhythm of the room fractured.
Soren had seen it coming three minutes in advance. Through the astrolabe vision, he had watched a jagged, venomous crack of jealousy expanding in one of the older apprentices. The pressure had reached critical mass. He had decided to turn the training spar into an actual murder.
The surrounding assassins immediately backed away. No one intervened.
Beside Soren, Elara went completely rigid. In his vision, the thinnest, most violently taut string in her soul strained to the absolute limit. She knew the boy about to be slaughtered.
She was calculating.
Soren was calculating too, but on a vastly different scale.
The unscripted explosion of genuine lethal intent flooded the room. The targeted apprentice's wooden blade was shattered. As the lethal strike descended, the boy realized that every single one of his defensive calculations had been perfectly anticipated and bypassed.
The shame, the fury of absolute exposure, and the terror of being seen through spiked massively. It was a concentration far higher than the baseline of the training grounds.
Soren widened the net, swallowing the turbulent energy whole.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion Update 〙
〘 7.6% → 8.0% → 8.5% 〙
〘 Source: Apprentice's Shame of Total Exposure [Medium Quality] 〙
〘 Note: Contaminated with primal death-fear. Filtration required. 〙
It was a sharp jump, but still not pure enough. The shame was too tangled with the messy, primal fear of impending death. It would take the Hermit bone a long time to filter out the impurities.
It was still low-grade ore. Usable, but heavily contaminated.
Elara moved.
She didn't shout. She simply crossed the distance in a blur of silver. A single, surgically precise strike disarmed the aggressor, followed by a sweeping kick that dropped him to the stone floor. Clean, perfect, and executed with zero collateral damage.
The training ground fell into a brief, heavy silence before the ambient sounds of sparring tentatively resumed.
A few of the older apprentices exchanged glances. One of them—a broad-shouldered Tier-2 with a jagged scar across his chin—looked directly at the blind boy sitting in the corner. Not at Elara. At Soren.
There was something wrong about that boy. He had arrived with Elara, Vesper's pet, the one the Overseer had personally summoned after the deathmatch. He sat in the corner like a piece of decorative furniture, his white silk blindfold pristine, his posture fragile and unassuming.
But in the instant the murder had erupted, the blind boy hadn't flinched. Hadn't gasped. Hadn't even tilted his head.
He had sat perfectly, unnaturally still, as if he had known exactly what was about to happen three seconds before it did.
The Tier-2 looked away, muttering under his breath to his sparring partner: "That blind one from B1. Keep your distance."
Elara walked back and sat down beside him. Her breathing was perfectly even, but the air around her felt heavy.
She stared at the wall opposite them for a long time before she spoke.
"What do you want?"
Not 'Why are you here?' but 'What do you want?' She was hyper-aware. She knew his presence in this room wasn't just to "feel the aura."
Soren didn't deny it. He turned his head slowly, 'looking' directly at her, feeling the taut strings that had just been violently plucked and were now slowly humming back to a tense stillness.
"I need to see the exact moment a person realizes that every single one of their calculations has been exposed," Soren said, his voice a soft, chilling caress over the brutality of the words. "Not in a training spar. In reality. That specific feeling is only pure when the stakes are absolute."
Elara fell completely silent. The ambient noise of the room seemed to fade.
"Next week," she said finally, her voice dropping to a barely audible register. "There is an unsanctioned deathmatch in the lower pits. Not on the official schedule. No audience. No rules. Someone is going to die."
She paused, letting the weight of the shadow fall between them.
"I will be in it."
Soren took the sentence, turned it over in his mind, and felt its jagged edges. Suddenly, the taut strings in Elara's soul made perfect sense.
She wasn't just a tool being driven by Vesper's paranoia. She had her own unfinished slaughter waiting in the dark.
And she had just voluntarily handed him the invitation.
A faint, ghostly smile curved Soren's lips.
"I want to go," he said quietly.
Elara didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She simply stood up and walked away, her silver strings vibrating in the gloom.
Soren remained seated on the cold stone, taking inventory of his harvest. The fusion had climbed from 7% to 8.5%. A microscopic victory, but the trajectory was set. The training grounds were just a low-grade vein. They provided the shape of the ore, but not the purity.
The true motherlode awaited in the blood and dirt of next week's match.
More importantly, Elara was far more valuable than he had calculated. She wasn't just a blade he could borrow. She was a fellow predator with her own board and her own agenda.
Two hunters walking in the same pitch-black room. Sooner or later, they would have to sit down and decide who was the hound, and who was the prey.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 8.5% 〙
〘 Minor Arcana 'Page of Swords' — Star-Dust Purity: 18% → 22% 〙
〘 Status: CONDENSING 〙
〘 Target Event: Unscheduled deathmatch (7 days) 〙
〘 Projected Yield: HIGH — if pure shame-of-exposure is achieved 〙