The air in the service tunnel burned. Not with heat, but with raw, unfocused mana bleeding from the ruptured conduits and the Vault's wounded seal. It was a cacophony of power, a storm of amber and violet light that tore at my senses and made my cracked core flutter like a dying moth. The backsurge had worked, but it was a crude, violent act of sabotage. The Vault wasn't breathing; it was choking.
Before me, the wall where the hidden entrance lay was no longer seamless stone. The Venati's elegant perceptual bypass was a distant dream. This was a wound. The energy door, usually a vertical pool of iridescent harmony, was a boiling, concave blister of distorted force, pulsing erratically. Geomantic runes etched into the surrounding rock glowed a feverish, warning red, struggling to contain the instability. I had maybe seconds before they either failed catastrophically or the Headmaster, having contained the crisis at the Coliseum, turned his attention to this new, deeper tremor.
There was no finesse. No subtlety. Only a desperate, closing window.
I threw myself at the distortion.
Passing through was an agony beyond any [Flicker Step]. It was not a step but a rending. The chaotic energy fields didn't part; they abraded, scraping against my soul, my flesh, my very essence. My [Kinetic Dispersal] trait, designed for physical blows, screamed under the magical onslaught, dissipating what it could in pathetic, sparking flares. My passive Null-Filter, a whisper against this roar, was overwhelmed instantly.
I emerged into the antechamber of the Vault of Echoes, stumbling and gasping. The serene, crystalline beauty I had witnessed through the Venati's eyes was gone. The resonant crystals on the walls flickered like strobe lights, casting jagged, insane shadows. The geomantic mosaic on the floor pulsed with sickly light, some of its lines dark and dead, others blazing with runaway power. The air shrieked with a high-pitched harmonic whine that drilled into my teeth.
But the door to the inner sanctum, for now, was open. Not a polite aperture, but a ragged, shimmering tear in reality, edges fraying and sparking.
I didn't look at the glowing pedestals holding artifacts of immense power. I didn't glance at the floating orbs of captured starlight or the crystalline swords humming with ancestral wrath. My [Mana-Sense], battered and bleeding input, was locked on a single signature: a dull, profound stillness amidst the chaos.
On a plain obsidian stand against the far wall lay the Stasis-Beetle carapace fragment. It was smaller than I'd imagined, no larger than my palm, a curved shard of iridescent black chitin that seemed to drink the frenetic light around it, giving back only a perfect, unyielding calm. It was the eye of the storm.
I lunged for it, my boots slipping on the unstable, glowing lines of the floor. A lashing tendril of wild energy, spitting from a cracked crystal, snapped toward me. I had no time for [Flicker Step]. I twisted, letting it graze my side. My tunic smoked, and a line of searing cold-numbness burned across my ribs—not heat, but a localized negation of sensation, a tiny echo of the void I carried.
I reached the stand. My fingers closed around the carapace fragment.
The moment of contact was… nothing.
No surge of power. No transfer of energy. It was like grabbing a piece of absolute zero. A perfect, immovable stillness that refused to interact with the chaos, with my frantic heartbeat, with the screaming magic in the air. It was the antithesis of my cracking, leaking, void-tainted core. It was stability, given form.
I had it.
The Vault shuddered. A deep, groaning crack echoed through the chamber, stone grinding on stone. The geomantic seal was attempting to re-stabilize, to heal the wound I'd inflicted. The tear in the inner door began to knit itself shut with violent, snapping arcs of energy.
I had to go. Now.
But as I turned, my gaze snagged on another pedestal, one closer to the dying entrance. It held a simple, unadorned box of pale wood. And from it, my [Mana-Sense], even in its overloaded state, detected a familiar, terrifying signature. A signature I had felt once before, in a dead arcanist's hidden cavern. A whisper of structured nothingness. A God-Touched fragment. But this one felt… different. Not the screaming, terminal silence of the first, but a dormant, deeper quiet. A seed, not a corpse.
The thief in me, the part that archived compulsively, screamed to take it. The survivor screamed to run.
The calculus, for once, had no clear answer. The Headmaster's attention was a tsunami I could feel building at the edges of my perception, about to crash down upon this chamber.
I made a choice born of pure, avaricious instinct. Not with my hands—I couldn't carry both and hope to escape. But with my function. As the carapace fragment's stillness radiated up my arm, calming the frantic tremors in my flesh, I focused my entire will on the wooden box. I didn't try to archive its contents; that was impossible in a glance. I tried to archive its location, its resonant signature, the unique "flavor" of its dormant void. A snapshot. A bookmark for a future, more prepared theft.
I activated [Adaptive Mimicry] on the concept of the artifact's presence.
A searing cold, different from the carapace, lanced into my mind. Not the pattern of the void itself, but the address of it. A set of metaphysical coordinates, a sensory imprint so specific it burned itself into my memory.
[PARTIAL ARCHIVAL ACHIEVED: 'RESONANT SIGNATURE – DORMANT NULL-SEED' LOGGED. SPATIAL/CONCEPTUAL COORDINATES SAVED.]
The inner door sealed with a final, thunderous clap of reintegrating force. The antichamber's chaos began to dampen, the system reasserting control.
I was out of time. I shoved the Stasis-Beetle carapace into my tunic, its cold a brand against my skin, and ran for the still-wavering, wounded outer entrance.
I dove through just as the geomantic runes flared one last time, the wall of stone and energy solidifying behind me with a groan that felt like the mountain's disapproval.
I lay in the service tunnel, panting, retching, the capacitor array a melted, smoking ruin beside me. The tunnel was dark now, the mana surge spent. Distant alarms still echoed from the Coliseum, but a new, deeper silence was descending—the silence of the Headmaster's focused investigation.
I had to move. I had the prize. But I was a beacon of wrongness—a boy with a crack in his soul, now carrying a fragment of absolute stillness and the fresh, burning memory of a God-Touched seed.
I used the last dregs of my mana, ignoring the fiery protest from my core, to activate [Flicker Step] in a series of short, desperate bursts, not toward my barracks, but toward Professor Vane's tower. It was the last place anyone would look for a thief. And it was the only place where the object I carried would not be seen as stolen treasure, but as a fascinating specimen.
I collapsed against the Tower of Weeping Stone's iron door just as the first true waves of the Headmaster's searching consciousness began to sweep the lower academy grounds like searchlights.
The door opened. Professor Vane stood there, his magnified eyes taking in my ashen face, my smoking clothes, the wild panic in my eyes, and the unmistakable, deadening aura of the Stasis-Beetle carapace radiating from my tunic.
He didn't speak. He grabbed me by the collar, hauled me inside, and slammed the door shut, plunging us into the dusty, silent dark.
"Fool," he rasped, his voice barely a whisper. "Reckless, catastrophic fool." He peered at me, then at the lump in my tunic. A flicker of something that might have been awe, or sheer professional horror, crossed his face. "You didn't just study decay, boy. You performed it. On the Vault of Echoes." He shook his head slowly. "And you brought me a piece of the cure. Get to the sub-basement. Now. And pray Caelum is too busy with the screaming prodigy to notice the missing band-aid."
The thief had made his harvest. He had paid in chaos, in risk, in a piece of his own dwindling time. He had stolen stillness to mend his breaking soul, and the address of a deeper silence for a later date. The Professor of Dust would now become his accomplice in the crime of survival. The game had escalated. The stakes were now the integrity of my own existence, balanced against the wrath of a demigod and the hungry void within.