The Star-Scripture Altar was not a simple stone slab. It was a monolith of shifting liquid metal, suspended in a permanent state of flux, mirroring the constellations of a sky that had long since been extinguished.
As Vincy's hand hovered inches from the surface, the "Glitch" stabilized into a profound, heavy silence. Piet's presence didn't just overlap with Vincy anymore; he seemed to bleed into the very atmosphere, his consciousness expanding through the liquid metal like ink in water.
"Do you see it, Vincy?" Piet's voice was no longer sharp or mocking. It was hollow, echoing with the weight of ages. "This Altar... I stood before its twin on the day of my coronation. My father, the Star-Emperor, told me that our lineage was eternal. He said we were the scribes of the universe."
The silver surface of the Altar rippled, showing a vision of a city built of light, where the citizens glided on currents of pure Qi. But the image distorted, flickering like a dying flame. A face began to form in the mercury—a man who looked remarkably like Piet, but with eyes of cold, calculating obsidian.
"And I remember him," Piet hissed, the violet starlight around them turning a jagged, angry crimson. "My brother. Prince Kael. He didn't want the responsibility of the stars; he wanted the power of the void they contained. While I was here, praying at the Altar for our people's prosperity, he was moving in the shadows of the throne room."
The vision shifted, showing a blurred image of a golden hall and a sudden, sharp betrayal.
"I can still feel it, Vincy. The coldness of the dagger he plunged into my back. It wasn't just steel; it was a soul-thief's blade. He didn't want to kill me; he wanted to empty me. He drained my connection to the Scripture, stealing the birthright of a thousand generations while I choked on my own blood. He laughed, Vincy. He called me a 'scribe of a dead language' while he climbed over my body to take the crown."
Piet's grief turned into a physical pressure, making Vincy's knees buckle. "He's the reason I'm a ghost in your head, kid. He's the reason my stars went dark long before the world actually ended."
While Piet drifted in the wreckage of his memories, Seraphina remained a creature of the present. She was driven by a hunger that the Ancestral Clans could never understand. She didn't look at the visions of the fallen empire; she looked at the Altar as a catalyst for her own secret ascension.
She stepped toward the base of the monolith, pulling a small, crystalline vial from her scaled armor. Her hands, usually as steady as ice, trembled slightly.
"The records said the Altar would react to the blood of the 'Unwritten,'" she murmured, her voice a sharp contrast to Piet's melancholy.
She knelt at the Altar's base, where a small indentation shaped like a crescent moon waited. With a swift movement of her silver rapier, she cut her palm. Her blood hit the Altar, and the liquid metal hissed and swirled.
A cold, silver light began to spiral up Seraphina's arms, but the nature of the power she was drawing remained obscured—a chilling, ancient mystery that even Piet couldn't quite identify.
She let out a choked gasp, her eyes turning entirely silver as she began to absorb the "Cold Truth" of the Altar. Whatever she was becoming, it wasn't human, and it certainly wasn't what the Myriad School had taught her.
For an hour, they remained like that: the ghost of a Prince mourning a world lost to his own brother's treachery, and the prodigy of a dying Kingdom birthing a power she refused to name.
Vincy stood in the middle, the bridge between a past he didn't understand and a future he was terrified of. He could feel Seraphina's Qi rising, becoming sharper and colder, while Piet's energy felt like a dying ember suddenly finding a new breath of air through the sheer force of his spite.
"She's successful," Piet noted, snapping back to the present with a bitter chuckle. "The girl has a spine of winter. She's using the Altar's resonance to jump-start her cultivation. She'll be a Foundation Establishment master before we hit the exit."
"Is that a good thing?" Vincy asked, his voice still vibrating from Piet's rage.
"For her? Yes. For us? It means she's no longer just a partner, Vincy. She's a rival who knows our scent. But," Piet's voice regained its predatory edge, "while she was busy stealing a spark, I was remembering how Kael bypassed the locks after he stabbed me. I've just remembered how to turn the exit portal into a one-way mirror."
Seraphina stood up, her wounds already healed by the silver light. She looked at Vincy, and for the first time, there was a flicker of genuine respect—and wariness—in her eyes.
"I have what I came for," she said, her voice sounding like bells in the cold air. "Now, let us go see if the Shadow-Stalkers are as patient as they are brave."