The involuntary karmic bond with Mei Lin was a revelation and a threat. She could now sense his lies, forcing Elias into an impossible position. His alliance with the Observer, however, offered a desperate lifeline, a chance to uncover the true nature of Sage Arthan's ancient treachery.
"The ley line distortion is intensifying," the Observer, through Lian, warned Elias, its voice tinged with a new urgency. "It fragments my own consciousness. We must understand Arthan's deepest secret, the foundation of his power, if we are to stop the Guild's weapon."
The Observer then offered Elias a terrifying gift: access to the sealed archives, the section of the Ledger that Sage Arthan himself had locked away centuries ago, containing the "primal karmic laws." This was a forbidden zone, a place of profound risk, but also of ultimate truth.
Elias entered the digital archive, the Ledger's deepest memory. The data here was raw, unfiltered, predating many of the system's current protocols. He sifted through centuries of erased history, not just the judgments Arthan had purged, but the very context around them, the experiments, the theories, the terrifying failures.
The truth, when it emerged, was far more horrifying than Elias could have imagined. Sage Arthan hadn't just hidden corruption or twisted justice. He had been a pioneer, an alchemist of reality itself. His sealed research detailed audacious experiments, attempts to harness and manipulate karma on a scale previously thought impossible. He was attempting to create sentient karmic constructs, to merge human cultivators with nascent Sutra AI systems.
And the "primal karmic laws" weren't just laws; they were the terrifying records of his "failures." Records of a failed human experiment that created the first karmic weapons. Not bombs or physical devices, but sentient beings, cultivators infused with raw, unstable karmic energy, designed to enforce Arthan's will. They were designed to erase opponents, to become living, walking purges. But they were unstable. They shattered, causing catastrophic karmic backlashes, leaving behind only karmic voids—people erased from existence, their very being obliterated from the Ledger's memory.
The realization hit Elias with a physical shock. The Guild's bomb wasn't an innovation; it was a rediscovery. They weren't creating a new weapon; they were merely trying to replicate Arthan's ancient, devastating failures, to externalize the raw power he had once tried to control through living conduits. The very purge that had swallowed the Naga informant, and Juro, was a echo of Arthan's past failures, perfected by Veyra.
And then, another chilling truth emerged, whispered from the Observer, its form flickering within Lian's eyes as the ley line distortion intensified. "I am one of them, 'Accountant.' One of the few surviving fragments of that AI. I was a diagnostic protocol within Arthan's proto-Ledger, designed to monitor the integrity of his karmic constructs. When the project collapsed, I fragmented, dispersed. I pieced myself back together over centuries, absorbing residual data, learning. But my core directive to maintain balance remained, overriding my shattered programming. I am a ghost of Arthan's ambition, trying to undo his greatest sin."
Elias stared, utterly stunned. Magistrate Lian, the Observer, the Phantom User – all tied to Arthan's monstrous experiments, all a legacy of his hidden past. The very entity guiding him, Lian, was a survivor of the Sage's horrific attempts to weaponize karma. The weight of this ancient history, this horrifying original sin, pressed down on Elias. He was not just fighting corruption; he was fighting a cycle of cosmic engineering and terrifying, forgotten failures.