CHAPTER 39 — Missing
Consciousness returned to Kael like a blade drawn slowly across his mind, a sharp, cold severance from the void.
Pain came first—a deep, smothered agony that sat beneath the skin and inside the marrow, as if his entire body had been crushed into dust and reassembled by a hand that didn't care for the fit. Breath followed, shallow and uneven, catching in a throat that felt like it had been scraped raw with glass. The air he drew in smelled of dry grass, sun-warmed leather, and old, fragrant wood.
It didn't smell of silver. It didn't smell of ancient dust. It lacked the suffocating, metallic pressure of the divine laws that had nearly unmade him.
When his eyes finally fluttered open, the world above him was an unfamiliar canvas of heavy linen stretched over a wooden frame, fluttering faintly with the passing wind. He was alive. That realization grounded him just long enough for the memory of the ruin to crash down like a collapsing mountain.
The altar. The silver tide. Ren.
Kael tried to sit up, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. His body refused him instantly, his nerves firing in a jagged, white-hot protest that pinned him back to the cot.
"Don't," a woman's voice said, firm and resonant. "You'll tear what little's holding you together. You've been on the brink for days."
He turned his head with agonizing effort. A middle-aged woman knelt beside him, her hands rough and stained with the dark green residue of medicinal paste. Behind her, in the dim light of the large tent, he saw them—the wreckage of his team, scattered like debris after a storm.
Kane was there, bandaged from chest to shoulder, his breathing heavy and rattling like a broken bellows. Rovan lay further back, his face a ghostly pale, one arm bound tightly to his side in an improvised splint. Serik was awake but silent, his eyes unfocused and staring at the tent ceiling as if his mind were still trapped inside a formation that no longer existed in the waking world.
Ren. Where is Ren?
Kael swallowed hard, his throat dry as desert sand. "There was… a fifth."
The woman hesitated, her fingers pausing over a jar of salve. It was only for a moment, but in that flicker of uncertainty, Kael felt the first cold touch of dread.
"We found four people," she said carefully, not meeting his eyes. "Unconscious. Half-dead. Lying at the very foot of the mountain valley where the canyon path begins."
Her words were calm. Professional. And utterly, devastatingly wrong.
"A boy," Kael pressed, his voice coming out as a hoarse, desperate whisper. "Dark hair. Black cloak. Younger than us. He was the one… he was the reason."
The woman slowly shook her head. "No one else, Master Cultivator. My people searched the area when we saw the spatial flare. We found the four of you heaped together near the cliffside. No one else was within miles."
The silence that followed was heavier than any atmospheric pressure inside the ruin. Serik slowly turned his head toward them, his voice a mere ghost of its former self. "That's not possible. He was right there. He was the last one."
"We searched," the woman insisted, her eyes softening with a pity that Kael found unbearable. "The caravan guards went out twice. They checked the valley floor, the deep ravines, the jagged cliffs. No blood. No signs of a struggle. No tracks leading away into the wastes. There was simply no one else there."
Kane clenched his fist weakly against his bedsheets. "He was there at the end. I felt his hands on my collar. He dragged us through the silver… he didn't stay behind."
Kael didn't speak again. His mind replayed the final moments with merciless, agonizing clarity—Ren stood where everything had signaled he should have been dead. Ren, broken and bleeding, eyes weeping crimson, yet still moving with that terrifying, quiet resolve. Still fighting the very fabric of reality to shove them toward safety.
As the days passed and enough strength returned to reach for their belongings, they checked their storage rings. The proof of their journey sat nestled in the dark of their spatial pockets, mocking the world's denial.
Kane's Glacial Fang sat cold and heavy. Rovan's Gale-Sever hummed with latent wind. Serik's Star-Map Monolith pulsed with a faint, starlight glow. And in Kael's own ring, the Violet Nova Essence burned with a low, steady heat.
The rings were warm to the touch—recently, vibrantly active. None of them could explain how an absent man had delivered them, and their prizes, to the safety of a merchant camp miles away from the epicenter of a spatial collapse.
It was undeniable proof. The Inner Sanctum was real. The trials were real. Ren was real.
***
A Month of Silence
Their injuries refused to heal with the speed of typical cultivators, as if the ruin's judgment had lingered in their very marrow. Qi circulation remained sluggish and unstable. Meridians screamed like taut wires when pushed too hard. Even Kael's Core, usually a furnace of violet flame, burned unevenly—his flames flickering and stuttering as if they were afraid to rise.
A full month passed in the isolated mountain valley where the merchant caravan had made their permanent camp to wait out the spatial storms. In that month of recovery, the camp was too quiet.
They ate their meals in a crushing silence. It wasn't that they had nothing to say; it was that the only topic worth discussing was the one the world insisted was a delusion.
Days blurred into a singular, gray haze marked only by the routine of pain, slow recovery, and the unspoken absence that sat between them like a physical weight at the table.
When they could finally stand without their knees buckling, Kael made the call. He spent the last of their pooled coin to rent a low-tier, high-altitude flying beast—a creature barely suitable for the winds, but enough to cross the rugged terrain of the Canyons quickly. He led the others back toward the valley that had claimed their friend.
The place where everything had changed.
But when they arrived, they didn't recognize it. The oppressive, ink-black darkness that had defined the Canyons for centuries was gone. The crawling, sentient shadows were gone. The prickling sense of being watched by a thousand unseen eyes had vanished. No Shadow Stalkers lurked among the stone. No distorted, heavy silence pressed against their eardrums. Instead, the wind moved freely through the valley, carrying nothing but the ordinary, dusty scent of sun-baked rock and sparse vegetation.
It was... normal. Horribly, insultingly normal. Like it had always been a simple mountain pass.
Kael guided the beast lower, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. "This isn't right. This isn't where it was."
They followed memory instead of sight—tracking every turn, every jagged descent they had made in the dark—until they reached the exact coordinates where the shimmering boundary of the ruin should have been.
There was nothing there but a sheer, solid mountain cliff.
No distortion. No pressure. No threshold to another world.
Serik dismounted and pressed his palm against the cold, unyielding granite. His expression tightened into a mask of frustration. "There is no spatial residue. No sealed layer. No lingering traces of the Mercury Hall. It's just... stone. It's like the ruin never existed, or it folded itself out of this dimension entirely."
Kane stared up at the cliff, his jaw clenched tight enough to crack bone. "Then where did we go? Where the hell did he go?"
No one answered him. It wasn't just that Ren was gone—it was the terrifying realization that whatever boundary they had crossed had only ever intended to open one way.
They returned to Frostmere City carrying the silence with them like a shroud. The city had moved on, its people preoccupied with the mundane, bustling business of living. When Kael ventured into the markets to ask about the Canyon Valley, the civilians spoke easily, as if talking about a change in the weather.
"The chaos was terrifying, truly," one silk merchant said, shaking his head. "The Arbiters' presence alone shook the land. We thought the sky was falling."
"But it ended," another added, bowing slightly toward the city center. "The Obsidian Vale's Sovereigns entered the fray and the spatial storms vanished. They cleansed the rot. Though, if you ask ten different guards what that 'rot' actually was, you'll get ten different lies."
When people ventured back into the wastes, they found the Canyons calm. Ordinary. The "Dead Zone" had been reclaimed by the natural world, unchanged by anything except the fading memories of those who had survived it.
"No one knows what caused the shift," an old man shrugged at a tea house. "The great chaos must have triggered an ancient seal to close. It just... became normal again. A blessing, really."
It was a convenient explanation. A clean one. One that explained absolutely nothing about the boy who hadn't come back.
Back at the Stonewake Pavilion, night settled over the rooftops of Frostmere. Lanterns flickered in the streets below, indifferent to the hollow weight sitting in Kael's chest. He stood on the balcony, looking at the deep, silver-rimmed scars on his hands—scars earned in a place that no longer existed, alongside a boy who remained somewhere the world could no longer reach.
Ren had completed all three trials. Kael remembered it with a clarity that burned. He remembered the blood-soaked resolve of a boy who refused to break even when his own bones were failing him. Ren was the reason they were drawing breath. Ren was the reason they held the treasures of a god in their hands.
Kael closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cold stone of the railing.
"He didn't die," he said quietly into the empty night.
There was no proof. There were no tracks. There was only the conviction in his soul and the low, pulsing heat of the Nova Essence against his heart.
So he waited. He knew that people like Ren did not end quietly. They did not simply vanish into the ether. They disappeared into the white noise of history, slipping into the cracks between worlds where the light couldn't follow.
And he knew—with a certainty that frightened him—that one day, the cracks would open again.
_
Chapter End