Forty-eight hours had passed since the Page of Swords materialized in his soul.
For two days, Soren had behaved like the ultimate, patient predator. He didn't let his newly forged cold-steel blade taste blood. Instead, he brushed it against his environment like a phantom breeze, silently mapping the absolute limits of his new weapon.
He had tested it once on Vesper while she slept, her psychic defenses completely slack. The invisible needle had slipped flawlessly into her subconscious, lightly plucking the node of her deepest paranoia regarding her fading youth. Vesper had merely frowned and rolled over in her sleep, completely oblivious to the violation.
It was highly effective. Zero perception. Millimeter precision.
But against the Tier-4 Overseer, Soren maintained absolute radio silence. The Overseer's mind was an abyss wrapped in razor wire; one reckless probe would be fatal.
Until today.
Sitting in the dim corner of the suite, Soren opened his blindfolded eyes in the dark.
It's time.
The tension between Vesper and the Overseer was a static equilibrium. Vesper feared and envied him; the Overseer viewed her with cold, aristocratic disdain. This balance was too stable, and far too boring. Soren didn't need parallel lines on his chessboard. He needed those lines to violently intersect. He needed them to grind against each other until they sparked a bloodbath he could harvest.
He was going to shatter their equilibrium. And he would do it without leaving a single fingerprint.
Afternoon. Vesper's routine "recharge."
Sprawled across her lavish bed, Vesper was deeply submerged in the dream Soren wove for her. It was her favorite, most addictive poison: a power fantasy where she reclaimed her flawless twenty-year-old body, stepped on the Overseer's severed head, and reveled in absolute supremacy.
But today, Soren added a single, microscopic drop of lethal venom to her wine.
As the dream reached its climax, right before Vesper could slice the Overseer's throat, the phantom Overseer suddenly looked up. His silver-gray eyes locked onto hers, stripping away the illusion of her power.
He didn't beg. Instead, he spoke with the absolute, freezing apathy of a judge delivering a death sentence.
"You are rotting from the inside out, Vesper. A dull blade pretending to be sharp. Your only value is the furnace."
The dream violently shattered.
Vesper gasped, bolting upright on her velvet pillows. Her chest heaved frantically. The usual sickening euphoria was entirely gone, replaced by a marrow-deep, paralyzing chill.
What she didn't know was that Soren hadn't invented that line. It was a genuine fragment he had harvested from the Overseer's own subconscious during a previous session. It was exactly how the Tier-4 master viewed her behind closed doors.
Vesper didn't ask Soren where the line came from. She assumed it was a manifestation of her own deepest insecurities. But through his Death-Star Sight, Soren watched the truth unfold: Vesper's astrolabe, usually glowing with a delusional, artificial purple, suddenly boiled over with a toxic, malignant crimson.
Her fear had just mutated into pure, unadulterated hatred.
The poisoned seed had been perfectly planted in her soul.
As her suffocating paranoia and isolation spiked, the Hermit bone in Soren's chest vibrated with a low, satisfied hum.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion Update 〙
〘 13% → 14% 〙
〘 Source: Vesper's Fear-to-Hatred Mutation [High Quality] 〙
〘 Note: Poisoned seed successfully implanted. Emotional trajectory: Escalation. 〙
Hidden in the shadows, a dead, chilling smile crept across Soren's face.
Evening. The Overseer's box.
The air was as suffocating as a crypt. The Overseer stood by the window, bringing up the prompt he had demanded the day before: "I want to see what choice a person makes... the exact moment they realize their absolute deepest secret has been completely seen through."
"As you wish, My Lord."
Soren's consciousness cascaded outward like liquid silver. He didn't use the Page of Swords to pierce the Overseer's mind. Instead, using the most exquisite, traditional weaving techniques, he held up a "mirror."
In the dream, a woman appeared. Soren intentionally blurred her face, but he rendered the core of her soul with terrifying accuracy: she was irreversibly aging; she used hysterical aggression to mask her paralyzing fear; she clung like a parasite to a vastly superior entity to fill the void inside her, even willing to sacrifice young blood on the altar of her vanity.
He never explicitly stated it was Vesper.
But in the second the avatar appeared, Soren's Death-Star Sight caught a microscopic, razor-sharp spike of "recognition" ripple across the Overseer's massive, glacier-like astrolabe.
The dream ended.
The Overseer turned around. His silver-gray eyes nailed Soren to the floor. After thirty seconds of suffocating silence, he finally spoke.
"Your way of observing people... is very interesting."
It wasn't a compliment. It was the cold, calculating evaluation of an apex predator recognizing a potential peer.
Soren bowed slightly, executing the role of the humble, blind servant flawlessly. "I am merely a mirror, My Lord. I only weave what your subconscious has already seen, but has not yet chosen to look at."
The Overseer didn't ask another question. But in his astrolabe, chains of logic that had lain dormant for years quietly began to restructure themselves.
Soren knew that from this moment on, the Overseer's tolerance for Vesper had fundamentally shifted. He no longer viewed her as an obedient, pathetic tool. He now viewed her as a hysterical liability that might lash out in fear.
The two lines were finally on a collision course.
Late night. Soren was navigating the winding, lightless corridors back to the B1 level.
At a blind corner, a flash of cold silver materialized from behind a stone pillar.
It was Elara.
She didn't draw her blade, but the tightest string in her silver astrolabe was vibrating with suppressed urgency.
"Before he went under, he spat out the final piece of the puzzle," Elara whispered, her voice so low it barely disturbed the dust. "The operative... his target was never the Crucible. We are just a stepping stone."
Soren stopped walking.
"His true objective is in the upper levels of the Sanctum," Elara said, her eyes locked onto the white silk binding Soren's eyes. "There is something hidden in the high floors. Something they are willing to burn this place down to find."
Soren remained silent in the dark for a second. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because there are things my eyes cannot see," Elara admitted, stripping away her usual icy deflection. "But you... you can see exactly what it is they are so terrified of."
It was the first time Elara had directly acknowledged Soren's unnatural perception.
Soren rapidly reorganized his chips. A high-level secret coveted by foreign factions? He didn't care what the item actually was. In the vortex of power, the more desperately someone wanted something, the sharper the blade he could forge from their desperation.
"Understood," Soren said simply, brushing past her into the dark.
Deep into the night, Vesper's suite fell entirely silent.
Soren sat alone in the deepest shadows. He raised his pale, slender right hand, pressing it against his chest over his white robe, feeling the temperature of the ivory fragment embedded in his soul.
It radiated absolute, unforgiving cold.
Soren's mind held no warm, nostalgic memories of his past. He only remembered the cheap, pungent powder on Madam Mandragora's face when she lied to him about his origins.
"Your mother was just a low-tier illusionist... accidentally heard a secret she shouldn't have, and the higher-ups disposed of her. You're lucky to be alive."
Lies.
Soren's breathing slowed to a crawl. From the absolute deepest, most violently suppressed vault of his memories, an image surfaced: a pair of immaculately polished, blood-spattered military boots.
He remembered the crushing weight of that boot grinding his ten-year-old face into the mud, seconds before he was kicked into a mass grave of rotting corpses.
He remembered the nobleman heir looking down at him, spitting on him, and sneering two specific words with absolute, venomous disgust.
Son of a whore.
Son of a Heretic.
Heretic.
Soren's fingers tightened against his chest. In a cesspool like the Somnium Sanctum—a place that fed on slaughter and extreme debauchery—moral codes did not exist. A lowly prostitute or a bottom-tier illusionist, no matter what rule they broke, would never earn the title of "Heretic" from the ruling class. That word carried the heavy, suffocating weight of religion and ultimate taboo.
The woman who gave him life, the woman whose spine had turned into this terrifying Tarot bone, was not just a girl who "heard the wrong thing."
Her death was a massive, meticulously engineered black hole.
"I will find the truth," Soren whispered to the empty room. His voice was as cold as a read death warrant.
Instantly reeling in his emotions, Soren's brain snapped back into the state of an absolutely rational calculating machine.
He recapped the board.
Line One: Vesper. The seed of hatred was planted. Paranoia would soon consume her. Line Two: The Overseer. The evaluation to purge Vesper had been initiated. It just needed a final push. Line Three: Elara. The intel on the foreign faction had been shared. She was now his most dangerous, yet sharpest, ally. Line Four: The Third-Party Faction. The phantom searching for the high-level secret, threatening to detonate the entire Sanctum.
Four lines. All visible under his Death-Star Sight. All still within manageable parameters.
But his terrifying intuition told him that these four lines would inevitably, violently crash together at a specific point in the near future. When that singularity arrived, the resulting variables would destroy anyone who wasn't prepared.
I need more chips, Soren thought. More fusion percentage. More Minor Arcana cards. A deeper dimension of control.
He stood up and walked to the door. Through the crack, he spotted a low-tier guard yawning in the hallway.
In his mind, the cold-steel Page of Swords instantly narrowed into a microscopic needle. It crossed fifteen meters in total silence and surgically pierced a tiny pain-node in the guard's nervous system.
The guard's yawn choked off. He stiffened for a second, rubbed his temples in sudden, inexplicable discomfort, and kept walking.
Soren withdrew his consciousness, a flicker of calculation in his eyes.
That was the third piercing of the day. A faint, tearing exhaustion echoed in his soul. Three consecutive uses caused the mental drain to spike exponentially, and the final strike suffered a microscopic deviation in accuracy.
〘 Page of Swords — Usage Log 〙
〘 Piercings today: 3/3 〙
〘 Mental Stamina: DEPLETING 〙
〘 Accuracy Decay: Final strike deviated ~2mm 〙
〘 Recommendation: Rest required before next deployment 〙
It was a god-tier weapon, but it could not be abused. He needed to give his soul time to recover, or... he needed to force his fusion percentage higher by orchestrating a slaughter of unprecedented scale.
"Patience."
Soren stepped back into the shadows, merging completely with the dark.
The board was set. Now, all he had to do was wait for the blood to flow.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 14% 〙
〘 Minor Arcana: Page of Swords [FORGED] 〙
〘 Selene's Legacy: 0/22 Messages 〙
〘 Board Status: 4 threads active — convergence imminent 〙