Wrath Domain, Behind the Wall, February 13, 2026
Ashen collapsed against the cold stone wall, chest heaving, every muscle screaming in protest.
Thirty seconds.
That was all he'd managed with one hundred percent of his mana plus Alice's contribution before his body gave out completely.
The doubled intensity had carved through him like lightning through copper wire.
"Haah..." He let his head fall back against the wall, eyes closed, and surrendered to Vital Drift's work.
The familiar tingling sensation spread through torn muscle fibers, ruptured blood vessels, and microfractured bones. Slowly and methodically, his body knit itself back together.
While he waited, Ashen pulled up his status window with a thought.
[3. Physical Level]
Strength: D+ | Endurance: C- | Agility: D+
Perception: C+ | Stamina: D+ | Mana: E-
He stared at the numbers with mixed feelings.
Endurance had broken through to C-rank. Aside from Perception, it was the only stat that had breached the D barrier… and he'd bet that was only possible thanks to his body being particularly talented at enduring due to Sloth's influence.
Sloth pathwalkers were always famous for their resilience, after all.
Ironically, their talent for endurance only stemmed from their wish to ignore and brush off anything so they could just lie there in peace. The trade-off was abysmal agility, but Ashen had managed to remedy that somewhat with his training program.
Still...
"Haah…" He sighed tiredly.
The stats looked impressive now, sure. But they were effectively stuck.
The gains from today's training were the same minuscule increments as yesterday's. And the day before that. Diminishing returns had set in hard, and no amount of additional punishment seemed to push past the plateau.
This last session had been more desperate than anything else. He was hoping for a miracle, or perhaps just deluding himself that repeating the same thing would somehow yield different results.
Spoilers… It hadn't.
"Still the same?" Alice's voice drifted from across the cell, amused.
She was lounging on the bed, propped up on one elbow, watching him with barely concealed mirth.
"Yeah…" Ashen admitted.
"It's cute how foolish you can be sometimes." She regarded him with exasperation. "I've told you it's pointless…"
"I know… But I can't stay still…"
"Ironic, hearing that from a Sloth user…" Alice rolled her eyes.
Then her expression softened slightly. "Well, I understand where you're coming from…"
Her gaze drifted to the desk, where filled notebooks sat in neat stacks.
In just one day, Ashen and Alice had pieced together everything that had transpired two hundred years ago from the scattered information they possessed. Ashen had recorded it all down to the smallest details… battles, conversations, even the weather when Rowan gave his final speech.
The notebooks were comprehensive, thorough, and utterly Complete.
…And still not enough.
Ashen's mind turned inward, touching that familiar space where his pathway resided.
The void opened before him, endless and dark.
And there… walking with that same eternal, steady pace, was the figure.
The Candlebearer.
A middle-aged man in lavish English noble attire from centuries past. Tall hat, pristine coat, posture impeccable. He moved forward with unchanging rhythm, neither slowing nor speeding, as if he would march endlessly through the darkness.
In his cupped hands, an ancient candle burned.
The flame flickered crimson, its light spilling across his silhouette in wavering shadows.
Red… Still red.
Ashen focused on the flame's core, measuring the transformation. A third of the way to amber, perhaps slightly more.
Progress, certainly—the chronicling had pushed it closer…. But not nearly enough to advance.
'Is this the best I could do in these conditions?'
The question gnawed at him as he withdrew from the visualization, returning his awareness to his aching body and the cold cell wall.
"Since you're done," Alice's voice pulled him back, "use Dreamweaving on me. I want to test something in the dreamscape."
"Sure thing." Ashen nodded automatically.
Then his legs refused to move.
The exhaustion was overwhelming him. Every fiber of his being screamed for rest, for stillness, for the blessed relief of doing absolutely nothing.
He could force himself to stand and walk over to touch her and activate the skill properly.
But he was honestly just too lazy to move right now.
'There has to be a better way…'
In a moment of inspiration, Ashen reached for Mana Authority.
A tendril of mana extended from his fingertip, visible as a faint milky-white thread in the dim cell light. It stretched across the space between them, guided by will alone, and latched onto Alice's dangling leg.
Through that connection, he channeled mana for Dreamweaving and triggered the skill with her as the target.
{Activated Path Skill: Lucid Dreamweaving}
Alice's eyes fluttered closed. The feedback of her dreamscape bloomed in the back of his mind. The warmth that tinged with her particular brand of ordered chaos was familiar to him at this point.
But his focus was on something else.
It worked.
"..."
Ashen stared at the tendril connecting them, mind suddenly racing despite his physical exhaustion.
'Wait…'
An idea crystallized with startling clarity.
'Can't I use this?'
While recording the events of two hundred years ago, Ashen had noticed something peculiar: he'd gotten stronger pathway feedback on the parts where he focused on Rowan, Morikawa, and Cassius.
He'd first assumed it was because they were the most essential characters at that point in history. And that was probably true.
But there was an additional reason he'd only recently considered.
'Isn't it because I focused more on them specifically? On their tales? On their... personal histories?'
Each person had their own history. From the story that brought their existence to life, up to the reason they drew their last breath; Individual narratives and complete arcs.
'I was too narrow in my thinking.'
A chronicle didn't have to be some famous historical moment, nor an event that concerned the whole world.
It could be the life of a single farmer just as well... even if it was only a few lines.
The quality between someone like Cassius, who had influenced countless others—or Rowan, who had millions under his command, each with their own stories—would naturally be incomparable to the tale of a common man.
But...
'If quality is missing, then quantity will do just fine.'
The Idle Chronicler didn't specify the scale of history. Just that it had to be true.
As to where he would find so many people to narrate their lives for him...
Ashen's eyes drifted back to the tendril of mana connecting him to Alice, then to the cell walls surrounding them.
'Do I even need permission?'
Take the current Alice, for example. Through Dreamweaving, he had access to her unconsciousness, and there was a terrifying amount of a person's memories stored in there.
Memories he could gradually glean into, piece together, and eventually turn into stories… into Chronicles.
Of course, he'd never do that to Alice without her knowledge. She was his partner, not a resource to be mined.
But...
Alice was hardly the only person here.
Ashen was in a continental prison. The Pit held at least millions of prisoners across its seven layers. Criminals, traitors, collaborators, political prisoners—each one with their own history and their own story to tell.
Stories he could chronicle while they slept, unaware that their dreams were woven into narratives only he could read.
As to how he would access them from his own cell...
Ashen glanced at the tendril of mana connecting him with Alice… the very thing that had sparked this inspiration, and his lips curled into a grin.
Mana Authority let him manipulate mana with supreme control. Dreamweaving let him access the unconscious mind. The prison was contained, with relatively fixed positions for each prisoner.
If he could extend one tendril, why not two? Three? A dozen?
Why not hundreds?
'Hehe… It's time to unleash the tentacles on those criminals.'
The image was darkly amusing: ethereal threads of mana spreading through the prison like roots, latching onto sleeping prisoners layer by layer, drinking in their memories and dreams, chronicling their lives one by one.
They'd never even know…the existence of a new harvester would harvest, not their souls, but their histories like an archivist in the night.
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