Before pushing open the heavy brass doors of the Tier-4 jurisdiction, Soren had rehearsed dozens of contingencies in his mind. He had prepared for extreme psychological probing, anticipating a suffocating aura of power that would demand every ounce of his mental fortitude to resist.
However, as the doors soundlessly glided open, the scene that greeted him caused a microscopic fracture in his absolute composure.
The Overseer—the man who had radiated god-like coldness in the private box, whose mere shadow was enough to make Vesper tremble—was currently hunched over, bowing profusely to a messenger sent by the Sanctum's upper echelons. His smile was painfully sycophantic, his tone as soft and malleable as trampled mud.
"Yes, yes, naturally... please assure the Lords that next month's quota will be delivered in excess."
The messenger didn't even bother to look him in the eye. With a cold snort of undisguised contempt, the envoy turned on his heel and strode away.
The Overseer maintained his subservient posture until the footsteps completely faded down the corridor. Then, like an actor dropping a heavy, suffocating costume, he lazily straightened his spine, rubbed his stiff neck, and muttered an indistinct complaint under his breath.
He turned his head and noticed Soren standing quietly in the doorway.
"You're here?" the Overseer said, his tone as casual as if he were addressing a misplaced piece of furniture. "Follow me."
Soren followed without a word. Behind his lowered gaze and the pristine white silk binding his eyes, his Death-Star Sight silently ignited.
Deep within that slouched, pathetic husk of a man, the colossal silver astrolabe continued its slow, majestic rotation. It showed no signs of decay or wavering. It remained as stable, freezing, and immovable as a continental glacier.
Soren's footsteps were perfectly even, but his mind accelerated to a terrifying speed. The man dragging his feet down the hall, speaking with the spineless voice of a coward—and the Tier-4 master whose soul projected absolute domination... which one was the mask?
This grotesque contrast dialed Soren's paranoia to the absolute maximum.
They walked through a series of quiet, winding corridors, leaving the decadent, blood-scented atmosphere of the lower Sanctum far behind. The Overseer pushed open a set of heavy oak doors, releasing a dry gust of air thick with the scent of aging parchment and preservative spices.
This was the Archive. The memory core of the entire Somnium Sanctum.
Tower-ing wooden shelves stood like silent behemoths in the gloom, housing tens of thousands of scrolls and dossiers. There were no windows, only the dim, flickering glow of eternal lamps casting long shadows across the dust.
"You'll stay here from now on," the Overseer said, tapping casually on a dust-covered desk. "Read whatever you want when I'm not around. No need to report to me."
No warnings. No restricted sections. No guards.
The Overseer simply dropped an invisible key at Soren's feet, yawned, and walked out. The heavy wooden doors clicked shut, leaving Soren completely alone in the dead, silent wasteland of knowledge.
Soren stood perfectly still as motes of dust danced in the halos of the lamps.
Is this absolute trust, or a meticulously laid trap?
He didn't immediately reach for a book. Instead, he began to drift between the towering shelves, slow and soundless as a ghost. His Death-Star Sight swept over the aisles like a high-precision scanner. He wasn't reading titles; he was reading the traces of the living.
Which sections had been frequently accessed? Where were the microscopic abrasions on the leather spines? Which aisles possessed a magnetic stillness that indicated decades of neglect? Before he decided what to hunt for, he needed to perfectly map the terrain.
It wasn't until late afternoon, needing to rest his straining mind, that Soren stepped out of the Archive.
And in the corridor outside, he bore witness to the Overseer's bloodcurdling "humility" once again.
Another Tier-4 master was passing through with an arrogant entourage of apprentices. They deliberately blocked the Overseer's path. The rival master used the most undisguised, venomous language to publicly mock a humiliating failure from the Overseer's past.
"I hear you recently picked up a blind, defective pet to play with?" the rival sneered, drawing a chorus of cruel laughter from his apprentices.
Facing this public, spine-piercing humiliation, the Overseer's reaction was... to laugh.
It was the soft, spineless chuckle of a man who was entirely used to being stepped on. He even chimed in with a self-deprecating joke, lowering his posture into the dirt, before awkwardly shuffling past them, hugging the wall like a shadow.
Standing in the dim alcove at the end of the hall, Soren stared dead at the Overseer's retreating back.
In the dimension of souls, throughout the entire humiliating ordeal, the Overseer's silver astrolabe did not produce a single, microscopic ripple of emotion.
No anger. No suppressed humiliation. No stoic endurance.
Only absolute, suffocating Void.
If a man pretends not to care, his soul will tighten from the sheer effort of suppression. If a man is truly angry, his astrolabe will violently shift color. But the Overseer's soul was as smooth and dead as a mirror. The insults passed through his physical body like wind through an empty ruin. They simply did not touch his reality.
Soren slowly clenched his fingers in the dark.
An enemy who knows how to endure is dangerous. But a man who has surgically stripped away his own pride and emotion, exiling his ego into an absolute void... that is a true monster.
〘 Target Profile Update — The Overseer 〙
〘 Combat Tier: 4 〙
〘 True Threat Level: EXTREME 〙
〘 Key Observation: Soul shows ZERO emotional fluctuation during public humiliation 〙
〘 Assessment: Not endurance. Surgical self-mutilation of ego. Identity dissolved into void. 〙
〘 WARNING: This man is far more dangerous than his public persona suggests. 〙
Night finally fell. The distant clamor of the Sanctum faded beyond the thick stone walls.
Soren returned to the Archive. The glow of the eternal lamps felt even dimmer in the dead of night.
He walked without hesitation, heading straight for a specific corner he had mapped that afternoon. It was an incredibly inconspicuous archive box, wedged between a stack of yellowing, mundane tax ledgers.
To a man who didn't know what he was looking for, the box was invisible. But to a hunter with a specific target, its placement was far too "perfect." Through the Death-Star Sight, the faint wear on its edges and the microscopic traces of recent, repeated handling were glaringly obvious.
It was deliberately placed bait.
Soren reached out and pulled the box from the shelf.
He gently lifted the lid. In the dim light, he used his fingertips and his psychic perception to sweep over the brittle pages.
It was a batch of internal disposal records, classified as "Top Secret."
Every single entry was bizarrely concentrated within a narrow, three-month window exactly eighteen years ago. The list of the dead spanned over a dozen pages, and the variance in their status was staggering—high-ranking illusionists, newly initiated assassin apprentices, and even the lowest tier of maintenance janitors.
They shared no obvious connections. No bloodlines. No overlapping jurisdictions.
But it was another detail that made the air around Soren plummet to absolute zero.
Under the column labeled Reason for Disposal... every single entry was blank.
In a draconian institution like the Sanctum, where every drop of spilled blood had to be accounted for, even the execution of the lowest slave required a corresponding penal code. But the reason columns for these records were as clean as untouched snow.
There were no indentations from a quill. No traces of magical erasure. It was as if an invisible, colossal hand had simply reached down and violently scooped these people, and the reasons for their deaths, entirely out of the Sanctum's history.
No reason required.
That meant whoever ordered this mass purge possessed authority that completely bypassed the laws of the Sanctum. They answered to absolutely no one.
〘 INTEL ACQUIRED — CLASSIFIED 〙
〘 Document: Sanctum Internal Disposal Records — 18 Years Ago 〙
〘 Timeframe: 3-month window [Exact year of Soren's birth] 〙
〘 Victims: Dozens — high-ranking to janitorial, no apparent connection 〙
〘 Reason for Disposal: ALL BLANK 〙
〘 Significance: Purge ordered by authority ABOVE Sanctum law 〙
〘 Assessment: DIRECTLY RELATED TO SELENE'S EXECUTION 〙
Soren gently closed the archive box. He stood in the gloom of the Archive for a long time, as still as a stone statue.
Through his pristine white robes, he felt the temperature of the bone embedded in his chest. It was as freezing as ever, but right now, that coldness seemed to flow backward through his veins, piercing straight into his brain.
Eighteen years ago.
The year of his birth. The year his mother died.
How were these violently erased lives connected to the woman they called a "Heretic"?
Soren slowly pushed the archive box back into its slot, ensuring it aligned perfectly.
He knew the Overseer was aware this record was here. He knew the Overseer wanted him to find it.
The man had handed him an entire library, just to hand him this single box. That man, with a soul like an abyssal void, was standing in the shadows, quietly waiting to see what move the blind boy would make after staring into the blankness of history.
Soren turned and walked toward the heavy doors, his white robes carving a cold arc through the dark.
Tomorrow, he needed to re-evaluate everything.
Was this "fool" of a mentor merely a ghostly bystander? Or was he the executioner who wielded the blade during that bloodbath?
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 18% 〙
〘 Selene's Legacy: 0/22 Messages 〙
〘 Origin Investigation: 18-year purge records — ACQUIRED 〙
〘 Overseer Threat Level: Re-evaluating... 〙