The air in the Overseer's box had been as cold as an operating theater.
It was the night before the unsanctioned deathmatch. Soren had completed his routine, weaving a shallow dream for the Tier-4 master. It was a suffocating, static game of chess—two players staring across an abyss, hungrily gathering information, yet neither willing to make the first move.
It wasn't until he returned to Vesper's suite and the heavy gilded doors clicked shut that Soren finally exhaled into the dark.
He sank his consciousness inward, touching the freezing ivory bone lodged in his soul.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 8.5% 〙
The bone was trembling. The signal it transmitted was razor-sharp—it wasn't begging for volume; it was demanding purity.
Vesper's pathetic terror of isolation, or the trivial frustrations of the upper training grounds, could no longer satisfy it. The bone now craved a vastly more agonizing, pungent vintage: the scalding humiliation of a violently exposed secret. The absolute, soul-crushing despair that erupts when a mind realizes its flawless, impenetrable calculations are completely transparent to the enemy.
That extreme psychological collapse could only be refined in the high-pressure crucible of life and death.
Tomorrow's unsanctioned match was his only hunting ground.
But in the darkness, Soren pictured Elara's cold, silver eyes. What exactly was arranged on this woman's chessboard? Until her hidden agenda intersected with his own interests, she was a lethal variable.
He needed to read her hand before deciding how to sweep the board.
The deepest level of the Crucible. An abandoned subterranean pit.
There was no light, no cheering crowd, no rules. The air stagnated like dead water, thick with a nauseating cocktail of rusted iron, fermented old blood, and the sour sweat of absolute terror.
Somewhere in the pitch-black ruins, a leaking pipe dripped.
Plip.
In the nerve-shredding silence, the sound struck like a hammer against the skull.
Elara led Soren into the pit. He sat quietly on a shattered stone pillar in the corner. With his head bowed and the pristine white silk binding his eyes, he looked like a fragile, sacrificial lamb wandering blindly into a den of starving wolves.
But behind the silk, the Death-Star Sight ignited. The suffocating darkness instantly transformed into a brilliant, terrifying map of human souls.
Six souls. Six price tags.
A short distance away, a muddy, dark-red astrolabe was boiling violently. The apprentice's breathing was as ragged as a broken bellows; his jealousy had fully metastasized into genuine murderous intent.
〘 Harvest Assessment: Muddy Dark-Red Apprentice 〙
〘 Quality: Medium 〙
〘 Impurities: Excessive fear contamination 〙
In another corner, a sickly orange soul shivered uncontrollably, the boy's legs trembling.
〘 Harvest Assessment: Sickly Orange Apprentice 〙
〘 Quality: Inferior 〙
〘 Recommendation: Ignore 〙
Soren's invisible gaze swept over the room before abruptly nailing itself to an anomaly.
Cold Blue.
It was too calm. Even the air currents around the man seemed unnaturally still. Soren zoomed his vision in, immediately catching the discrepancy—the outer edges of this cold blue soul bore the rigid, artificial marks of being forcibly flattened.
It was as if someone had wielded immense psychic pressure to weld a layer of anti-reconnaissance armor around the man's mind. He was desperately suppressing his true emotional state. This wasn't the crude, blunt-force training of the Sanctum; this was the elite cognitive shielding of a foreign intelligence agency.
〘 STAR CHART ANOMALY DETECTED 〙
〘 Subject: Unknown Male 〙
〘 Signature: Cold Blue — Artificially Suppressed 〙
〘 Shield Type: Foreign Intelligence-grade psychic armor 〙
〘 Assessment: Professional operative. NOT Sanctum personnel. 〙
〘 WARNING: High-value target for Page of Swords condensation. 〙
Soren tilted his head slightly toward Elara.
In her cold, silver astrolabe, every single string was pulled to the absolute breaking point, yet her core remained as stable as a glacier. She wasn't driven by bloodlust; she was executing a meticulous execution plan. And her invisible crosshairs were locked dead onto the cold blue outsider.
Soren leaned back, letting the shadows swallow him. His invisible, psychic net spread out soundlessly.
Let the show begin.
There was no signal, no meeting of eyes. Just the microscopic crunch of gravel under a boot.
The slaughter erupted.
Soren didn't move a muscle, but his consciousness split in two, like a greedy god preparing to feast upon his private altar.
On the surface layer, he harvested.
When the dark-red apprentice despairingly realized his proudest, most vicious strike had been anticipated three steps in advance—that his every feint looked laughably slow to his opponent—the humiliation and fury of having his pride pulverized detonated.
Soren drank in the scattered starlight.
〘 The Hermit IX — Passive Harvest 〙
〘 8.5% → 9.0% → 9.5% 〙
But on the deeper layer, his entire focus was deadlocked on Elara and the cold blue outsider.
The outsider moved. Facing the dark-red apprentice's frantic lunge, he didn't waste a single millimeter of motion. A sidestep. A twisted wrist. His blade slipped through the dark-red apprentice's throat at an impossibly unnatural angle.
Clean, precise. A machine processing meat.
In the exact microsecond of that flawless kill, the faintest ripple finally disturbed the outsider's soul. It wasn't the thrill of murder; it was the mechanical "confirmation" of a system verifying its own efficiency. He was testing his disguise against the Crucible's standards.
But during that fleeting microsecond of confirmation, the artificial armor shielding his soul fluxed.
Soren was waiting for exactly that crack.
The blind boy on the pillar remained entirely motionless. But in the psychic dimension, a colossal, freezing, abyssal will violently pierced through that microscopic gap and drove straight into the outsider's mind!
The cold blue outsider stiffened.
His pupils dilated to pinpricks, his perfectly controlled breathing instantly paralyzing in his throat. He felt it. He felt a pair of unfathomable, unlocatable eyes forcibly tearing open his heavily armored mind, casually flipping through his deepest secrets and failsafes like a cheap picture book!
Who?! What is looking at me?!
The outsider's psychological defenses underwent a catastrophic avalanche. The sheer horror of believing he was the apex predator, only to realize he had been a bug in a glass jar the entire time—the absolute, naked humiliation of having his heavily guarded mind completely exposed to an entity he couldn't even see—erupted into a tidal wave of panic and fury!
This was the ultimate delicacy the Page of Swords hungered for! Zero impurities of physical fear. Just the pure, unadulterated agony of total intellectual and spiritual domination!
Soren's heart pounded against his ribs as the bone violently inhaled the pristine starlight.
〘 The Hermit IX — CRITICAL HARVEST 〙
〘 9.5% → 11.0% → 12.0% 〙
〘 Source: Foreign Operative's Shame of Total Psychic Exposure [SUPREME QUALITY] 〙
〘 Minor Arcana 'Page of Swords' — Star-Dust Purity: 22% → 67% → 89% 〙
The ivory fragment hummed at the edge of critical mass!
In that fatal half-second where the outsider's body locked up from the psychic intrusion—Elara struck.
She tore through the darkness like a silver lightning bolt. She didn't aim to kill. Capitalizing on his momentary paralysis, she shattered his kneecap with a brutal kick, instantly following through with the heavy pommel of her dagger crashing into the base of his skull.
The outsider collapsed, incapacitated, but breathing.
The fight was over. The surviving apprentices, staring in absolute horror at the speed and brutality of the takedown, scrambled away, fleeing into the dark tunnels like ghosts.
Only Elara, the unconscious outsider, and Soren remained in the blood-soaked pit.
Elara wiped her blade clean, walking slowly toward the corner where Soren sat. Her breathing was even, but her eyes were lethal.
"What did you see?" she asked, her voice dropping to a harsh, demanding whisper.
She wasn't asking for a play-by-play of the physical fight. She was verifying elite intelligence with the abyss itself.
Soren let his lips curve into the faintest ghost of a smile. He let the silence stretch for two seconds, maximizing the psychological weight of his words.
"He does not belong to the Sanctum," Soren's voice was as light as a cold breeze, yet every word cut to the bone. "He came with a mission. The perimeter of his soul was plated with a shield designed specifically to repel psychic perception... Unfortunately, the architect of that shield has absolutely no concept of what a true 'gaze' is."
He tilted his head up, the white silk catching the faint ambient light.
"You kept him alive because you need to pry his mouth open."
Elara fell completely silent. The tightest string in her astrolabe hummed with a dangerous, lethal resonance.
"Follow me," she finally commanded, grabbing the unconscious operative by the collar.
Soren didn't immediately rise. "Where?"
"To ask him exactly who sent him."
In the dark, Soren stood up. His white robes brushed against the rough stone.
His mind was racing, entirely rewriting the rules of the board. An outsider with anti-psychic armor meant a massive faction beyond the Sanctum knew soul-readers existed here. And Elara—a supposedly bottom-tier Crucible apprentice—had not only possessed the intel on this operative beforehand but had perfectly orchestrated his capture.
Whoever held her leash was playing a game far above Vesper's petty tier.
〘 Minor Arcana 'Page of Swords' — Star-Dust Purity: 89% 〙
〘 Status: Approaching condensation threshold 〙
〘 Next Step: Interrogation — Supreme-quality shame harvest imminent 〙
More importantly... Soren felt the bone vibrating at 12%.
If a mere "glance" during a fight had provoked such high-quality starlight from the outsider, then what would happen next? Systematically peeling back a hardened professional's deepest secrets during an interrogation. Forcing him to experience the ultimate humiliation of his entire mission crumbling into dust.
It would be the perfect, absolute feast required to materialize the Page of Swords.
Two apex predators, each hiding their teeth, walking together toward the bleeding prey.
Soren smiled. The game was finally getting interesting.