The Gods' Domain had no horizon—only endless halls of carved light and obsidian, columns that rose like mountains and floors sheened with the reflections of a thousand stars. The continent masters, the kings, the high elders of the mortal world—Azura, Gold, Mystical, Box Scan, Auralis—stood in the central dais, robes tucked and faces solemn. Beside them, Academy Master Arathor and Vice-Master Sylara stood like two pillars of the mortal realm, their gazes steady but strained.
The Messenger had called them here. The summons had burned through continents with a single command, and the air itself had thrummed with urgency. Some had traveled by tempest and spirit-ship; others had walked on paths the gods had opened for them. Now they waited, because in the Gods' Domain you did not arrive late.
A hush fell as the last of the glowing doors parted. At first nothing seemed to change—then a figure stepped forward. He was the weakest of the gods present, a being whom the mortal tongues called the Gilded Steward. By godly standards he was mild—Tier One beginning—but his entry cut the breath from the assembled masters.
When the Steward simply stepped into the dais, the pressure that spilled from him should have been negligible. Instead the hall folded inward on itself; even kings felt their knees tremble. The Steward's aura was a paradox: humble in origin, devastating in effect, the kind of presence that whispered of deeper wells.
He lifted a hand. The Messenger's voice—deep, silk-torn thunder—rewove the silence.
"You bow," it intoned, and the Steward obeyed, lowering his head in a gesture the continent masters mimicked. The Messenger's eyes, like twin novas, swept across them. "Raise your heads no more than required, mortals," the god said. "You stand before those who shape the law of existence."
A tremor ran through the room. Even the masters who had led armies and held court for decades felt their chests tighten.
The Messenger's expression hardened. "A being awoke in the mortal plane. His power… surpasses what our kind has measured. The Immortal Book is no myth. It has acted. It has chosen."
Murmurs rippled like storm wind. Kings exchanged looks, and Arathor's jaw clenched.
The Messenger continued, words like a blade: "We can sense the pattern. A current in the weave that should not be—an aperture in the law. This being carries an essence of both creation and annihilation. He can rewrite the cells of a body, he can sever fate's threads. He can… erase."
A cold stillness pressed into the dais. The idea that anything could erase—in that sterile, cosmic way—cut deeper than any sword.
"We cannot leave this to legend," the Messenger said. "The gods are bound. Our reach is wide, but our intervention unbalances the realms. If we sweep down en masse to seize the Immortal Book, the heavens will tear themselves apart. Worlds will burn."
A master from the Gold Continent—tall, plated in golden armor—spoke, voice level but urgent. "Then we shall use the mortal hands. Send your scouts. Give us the mark. We will hunt, capture, and deliver."
The Messenger's laugh was small and dry. "You think it so simple? The being is not merely hidden; he is a wound in fate. He can hide from a thousand eyes. He can erase evidence. He is… dangerous in a way you cannot forecast."
Silence, the kind that presses like ice.
At last the Steward rose. He spoke quietly, but his words landed like thunderclaps. "There is a solution that spares the heavens from collapse: you, the masters of the great continents, will find him. You will coordinate the hunt. You will bind him, not kill him. Bring him to the edge of the Gods' Domain; let the law decide."
A murmur of assent. A few faces paled. The reality of the command was monstrous: hunt a being the gods feared.
The Messenger's voice cut it short. "You have three days. Fail—and the gods will come themselves, and then everything will burn."
For a breath, the domain held its silence; then the assembled masters bowed. They could not refuse.
---
In the mortal world, at the Arathor Academy, the news arrived like a colossus: the Gods' Domain had opened, and the continent masters were summoned. The Messenger's command would ripple down through contingents, orders, and banners. Warriors readied their arms; scouts sharpened their senses; the world inhaled.
Kael, however, had a far more mundane problem.
When the courier left the academy courtyard with the royal dispatch—words stamped, gilded, an order of summoning—the hitting reality of it still shimmered in the air. The gods wanted hunters. The masters bent to a will older than time. Mortals would move, and the chase would begin.
But Kael had been left behind that afternoon. He had returned to the Veynar estate under the weight of an arranged marriage, a princess's laugh still ringing in his ears. The pressing gravity of the gods' summoning was far away—at diplomatic halls and war councils. At home, the immediate problem was far closer, and somehow far smaller: the princess's casual claim that he was betrothed in two months.
He sat under the yard's fig tree, the Immortal Book's faint mark still warm beneath his skin, and tried to cultivate.
He tried three times.
The first time he inhaled, folded, and tried to spin qi into his dantian—only to imagine Elira's laugh, the way she'd leaned so close his head had slipped back comically, and he ended up practicing a very elegant double-take instead of forming a jade wheel.
The second time he settled his breath, fingers forming mudra, intent narrowing—immediately, an image of his sister shrieking dramatized jealousy popped into his head. He clenched his teeth and accidentally channeled a burst of minor qi into the garden koi. A moment later the fish lept like startled missiles and the gardener shouted.
The third time he tried, and this time he was successful for thirty glorious seconds. A clean circulation, a warm spreading like honey. He opened his eyes to feel… proud. Then a servant arrived with tea, tripped on the terrace, and splashed hot jasmine onto Kael's robes. His perfect circulation broke. He exploded into a spring of curses that would have made a battle general blush.
By the time midnight came, Kael lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, palms splayed. He had not only failed to cultivate—he had inadvertently turned the Veynar estate into a minor catastrophe zone. The thought that he was to be married in two months—married to a princess no less—loomed over him like a comedic thunderhead. His morale was not at a high tide.
"Why me?" he muttered into the pillow. "Why does the universe give me a book that rewrites gods and then send a princess who… who barges into rooms and calls me a prize?"
Below the floorboards, his brother Darius was plotting revenge and furiously laundering his ruined robes. Above, servants whispered of the Messenger and the summons—and the Veynar home hummed with secrets that were too large for a family to carry alone.
There was, however, one safe place Kael always trusted: his training courtyard. If all else failed, he did pushups. Eight hundred and thirty-two, to be precise.
Kael hauled himself up at dawn, hair like a storm-tossed mop, and limped out to the courtyard. He pressed his hands to the cold stone, breathed, and—mid pushup—was interrupted.
"Kael!" A small figure pelted across the grounds. It was Mirae Solinar's junior cousin—an overeager youth who'd tried to impress during the Third Trial. "Master Arathor has sent word! The gods—"
"Yes, I know!" Kael wheezed, popping up like a jack with a very bad back. "They want continent masters. They don't want me—yet." He glanced up. "Besides, I'm busy. I have a wedding in two months. I have to pick a robe. Does the royal tailor accept bloodstone as a fashion statement?"
The boy blinked. "Bloodstone? What—?"
"Never mind," Kael said quickly. "Just go fetch me four steaming buns and tell my sister I will not be joining the family chorus today."
The boy sprinted away. Kael stared after him, a ridiculous grin creeping across his face. He was, he realized with something like horror and amusement, exactly the kind of mortal the gods would never expect to make trouble for the heavens.
---
Back in the Gods' Domain, the Messenger ended the assembly with a final, terrible decree. "Make every mortal count. Let no name be ignored. Three days."
Three days. A span long enough to move armies—short enough to make mistakes fatal.
As the masters dispersed, the Steward remained, staring into the pattern like a weaver at an unfinished cloth. His voice lowered to Arathor, who lingered.
"Master Arathor," the Steward said gently, "be careful. The book's mark can attract. Mortals who hold it burn bright—and quickly."
Arathor bowed his head, hand tightening on the pommel of his sword. "Understood."
But in his chest, Arathor carried a dangerous, impossible memory that the ritual had not erased entirely: a comforting warmth from the boy's awakening; the brittle determination that had refused to die. Perhaps that was why he had allowed Kael to live.
Even gods could be sentimental fools.
---
Three days later, as contingents stirred and banners unfurled, Kael still could not entirely focus. He practiced a new drill he'd invented—rolling avoidance while reciting insults at imaginary noblemen—and laughed at his own antics until the cook asked him to stop frightening the geese.
If the gods were to hunt him—with empires and titans in tow—he would greet them not with a fearful face but with a grin. He would train, quarrel, eat terrible food, and maybe, if he had time, teach Darius how not to apply cologne as if it were a weapon.
The sky above the Veynar estate was the same blue as ever. The gods' summons had made the world hold its breath, but life, delightfully, stubbornly, went on.
And somewhere between his ridiculous pushups and the sound of the messenger's horns, Kael's hand brushed the Immortal Book's mark under his sleeve. It pulsed softly—no longer a blinding nova, but a heartbeat. A reminder.
He clenched his fist.
"All right," he said to the wind, to the gods, to the coming storm. "If you want a being beyond gods, you'll get one. But you'll get him with tastebuds, terrible jokes, and a slightly singed robe."