Twenty-three minutes.
The northeastern anchor chamber was exactly where Asha's map said it would be — a natural rock formation beneath the tannery district, the ceiling domed, the walls slick with moisture, the air tasting of old iron. The entrance was a door that had no handle, no hinges, no visible mechanism.
Just stone, seamless, with a small depression at chest height in the shape of the Key of Depths.
Kael pressed the key into the depression.
The door opened inward without sound.
The anchor was immediately visible — not a physical object but a concentration of System energy so dense it was almost visible to the naked eye, a knot of pale light hovering at the chamber's center approximately the size of his fist, radiating the particular quality of something that had been maintaining itself for a hundred and forty years without interruption.
He felt it through Death Affinity before he'd fully entered the room.
It felt like a wall.
No — like a ceiling. The weight of something above that had decided this was as far as anything below it was permitted to go.
He understood viscerally, standing in that small room, what every person in Valdenmoor who had hit Level 50 had felt. This specific pressure. This specific no, embedded in the System's architecture, dressed up as natural law.
It made the cold anger burn hotter than it had since the Awakening.
Good.
He left the Commander at the door. Daren took position at his back. He walked to the anchor's center and raised his right hand.
[VEIL ANCHOR — NORTHEASTERN — DETECTED]
[STATUS: ACTIVE — FULLY POWERED]
[RESISTANCE CLASSIFICATION: HIGH]
[KEY OF DEPTHS — CHANNEL OPEN]
[UNRAVEL? Y/N]
Yes.
The resistance hit him immediately.
Not like the catacombs — Maren had been right. The catacombs binding had been passive at its core, held in place by grief and circumstance, ultimately willing to release. This was active. Intentional. The anchor recognized his Class the moment he touched the channel and pushed back with the specific force of something designed to defeat exactly what he was.
Death energy converted to reinforcement. Every push answered with a harder wall.
He stopped pushing.
Breathed.
Thought about what Maren had said. Unravel from the inside. Through the architecture, not against it.
He changed his approach entirely.
Instead of pushing death energy he pushed intelligence — not a skill, not a Class ability, but the hundred and forty-three points of Intelligence that Level 42 had built, directed through the Key's channel as pure analytical attention. Finding the architecture. Reading it. Following the threads of the binding the same way he'd followed the catacombs binding — not with force but with understanding.
The anchor's resistance calibrated for death energy.
It didn't know what to do with this.
He felt it recalibrate — slower than he'd expected, the mechanism turning to address the new approach — and in the three seconds of recalibration he found the first thread.
Thin. Almost invisible. The original thread of the binding, laid down by the second Grand Inquisitor's hand a hundred and forty years ago, before a century of reinforcement had buried it under layers of accumulated power.
He pulled it.
The anchor shuddered.
The resistance spiked — massive, the weight of a hundred and forty years pushing back through the channel with everything it had — and Kael held the thread and pulled steadily, and the cold anger that had been burning since the morning his mother had pressed three copper coins into a priest's palm kept his hands from shaking.
The thread came loose.
And with it — the cascade.
One thread pulling three. Three pulling nine. The binding unraveling from its original foundation outward, a hundred and forty years of carefully maintained architecture coming apart from the inside with the particular inevitability of something that had always been going to come apart, that had only needed someone to find the right place to begin.
[VEIL ANCHOR — NORTHEASTERN — UNRAVELING]
[RESISTANCE: HIGH → MODERATE → LOW]
[SPIRIT COST: 31%]
[COMPLETION: 4 MINUTES 47 SECONDS]
Four minutes forty-seven seconds.
Under Asha's six-minute estimate.
He held the unraveling steady and breathed and felt the anchor's light — pale and cold and authoritative — dim by degrees until it was the grey of old ash and then nothing at all.
[VEIL ANCHOR — NORTHEASTERN — DESTROYED]
[VEIL STATUS: 1 / 7 ANCHORS DESTROYED]
[VEIL INTEGRITY: 86%]
[EXP GAINED: 200,000]
[LEVEL UP — LEVEL 43]
The chamber felt different without it.
Lighter. The specific pressure — that ceiling, that no — gone from this location, a gap in the network where there had been seamless authority.
He stood in the empty chamber breathing carefully, Spirit at sixty-nine percent, and looked at the space where the anchor had been.
One down.
Six to go.
He walked out of the chamber. The Commander and Daren fell in without a word. The formation reorganized and moved.
Maren was waiting in the tunnel, codex open, stylus ready — it had acquired a stylus somewhere in the last two days and Kael had not asked where.
"Time?" Maren said.
"Four forty-seven."
The ancient eyes registered something — satisfaction, carefully contained. "Asha's estimate was conservative," it said. "Your Intelligence stat — she didn't account for it. The analytical approach was faster than pure death-energy unraveling."
"It recalibrated," Kael said. "There were three seconds when it didn't know what I was doing."
"And you used them."
"Yes."
Maren made a note. "The second anchor — the one beneath the river district — will have seen the northeastern failure by now. The network communicates." It closed the codex. "It will be ready for the analytical approach."
"Then I'll use a different one."
Maren looked at him.
"I have three approaches now," Kael said. "Death energy. Intelligence. The catacombs technique — pure will through the Class." He looked at the tunnel leading south toward the river district. "I'll rotate. It can't recalibrate for three different approaches simultaneously."
A silence.
"You worked that out in four minutes forty-seven seconds," Maren said.
"I had forty-three levels of Intelligence," Kael said. "And a good teacher."
Maren was quiet for a moment.
"Asha would have liked you," it said finally.
Kael looked at the tunnel ahead. At six remaining anchor points on a map in his coat pocket. At the System notification sitting in his vision like a clock.
[VEIL INTEGRITY: 86%]
[ANCHORS REMAINING: 6]
[SPIRIT: 69%]
[TIME ELAPSED: 31 MINUTES]
[TIME REMAINING IN WINDOW: 5 HOURS 29 MINUTES]
[VOSS IS ASLEEP.]
[HE WILL NOT BE ASLEEP WHEN YOU REACH THE SEVENTH ANCHOR.]
[MOVE.]
He moved.
1 down. 6 to go. Voss is asleep — for now. Drop a Power Stone and let's keep moving