The glitches stopped being subtle.
Three days after the orthodox delegation departed, the warm ash-rain over the fungal fields fell upwards. For twelve hours, glowing fungi launched themselves like slow, silent fireworks into a sky that drank their light, leaving the plateau in an eerie twilight. The disciples assigned to tend the fields watched, helpless. Their primary food source was vanishing into the heavens.
This was not a malfunction. It was a question.
Kaelen stood at the edge of the inverted rain, his hollow gaze tracking the ascending fungi. The Pack needed food. The Law demanded adaptation. The glitch presented an obstacle. A solution must be found.
He did not use the Heartstone. Its power was a sledgehammer for realities; this was a puzzle within the new reality. He turned to his disciples. "Solve it."
The ensuing scramble was the first true test of the Demonrealm's society. Scouts tried to climb the reverse rainfall, only to be gently but firmly repelled by an unseen boundary. Others tried to catch the fungi in nets, but the upward momentum was irresistible. An elder suggested digging, hoping the fungi grew from a root system below, but the soil beneath the field had become momentarily intangible.
Finally, a young refugee from the Iron Crocodile clan, a wiry girl named Lys, made an observation. "The light… it's not just going up. It's gathering." She pointed to where the ascending glow coalesced into a faint, shimmering symbol high above—a complex, rotating rune that hurt the eyes.
"It's a pattern," Rin concluded. "A key."
They had to recreate the pattern on the ground. Using luminescent paint made from crushed minerals and resin, the disciples worked together, painstakingly drawing the vast, intricate rune across the frozen earth of the training yard. As the final line was connected, the inverted rain ceased. The remaining fungi pulsed once, brightly, and then began to grow at ten times their normal rate, producing a bumper crop. The glitch was solved. The land rewarded them.
It was a lesson in a new kind of cultivation: not of qi, but of understanding the rules of your own impossible home. The disciples' unity—their Pack-mind—had been the tool.
That night, Kaelen dreamt. Or something accessed his hollow mind and played a recording.
He was not Kaelen. He was a constellation of perception floating in a void of pure, undifferentiated potential. Before him hung The Final Equation. It was not numbers or words. It was a shape that contained all other shapes, a sound that was the root of all frequencies, a law that dictated: This far, and no further. It was the boundary of existence itself, the reason why a thought could not become reality by will alone, why life ended, why possibilities collapsed into a single timeline. It was the ultimate limitation, the cage around all that is.
The consciousness—the Architect—did not rage against it. It studied it, with a patience that made mountains seem impulsive. The memory ended with a single, devastating pulse of incompleteness, a sorrow so vast and old it felt like the weight of dead stars.
Kaelen woke sitting upright on his stone seat, a silent scream trapped in his throat. Cold sweat, a sensation he hadn't felt since before the unmaking, beaded on his skin. The alien emotion, the cosmic scale of the problem, was a virus in his simple, programmed mind. It did not fit the doctrines. It was a contradiction to the Pack's survival-based truth. It threatened the stability of his new self.
He found Silas examining the newly drawn rune in the training yard, which still glowed faintly.
"I saw it," Kaelen said, his monotone frayed with something like static. "The limitation."
Silas went very still. "What did you feel?"
"Incompleteness." Kaelen stated the foreign word precisely, as if reading it from a script. "It does not relate to the Pack. It is… larger. It disrupts the parameters."
"It is the ultimate parameter," Silas whispered, a hint of awe in his voice. "He is sharing his obsession. Making it yours. You are not just a subject in his experiment, Kaelen. You are becoming his co-researcher."
Meanwhile, Lan and the scholars pored over the orthodox texts. Among dry histories and philosophical ramblings, they found it: a map, not of places, but of "Quiet." It marked locations where anomalies of stillness were recorded—places where time seemed sluggish, where spells fizzled, where the world felt "thin." One such mark was disturbingly close: the Sky-Swallowing Canyon, two weeks' journey to the northeast.
"These aren't just ruins," Lan realized, her finger tracing the map. "They're… scars. Places where the old Path tried to solve its Equation and left a dent in reality. The Architect is pointing us to his old lab notes."
The implications were staggering. The being below wasn't just testing them. It was guiding them, using Kaelen's connection and the sect's resourcefulness to actively resume the research it had buried millennia ago. The Demonrealm was more than a chalkboard; it was a live research facility, and they were all lab assistants.
The next glitch proved it. The comforting, chime-melody of the glass trees at dusk became a frantic, atonal racket. Disciples who heard it were struck with a compulsion to calculate. They would stop whatever they were doing and begin scribbling complex, meaningless geometric figures in the dirt, on walls, on their own skin, driven by a need to solve an unspecified problem until they collapsed from exhaustion.
The Pack was being attacked not physically, but cognitively. Their unity of purpose was being hijacked by a foreign, intellectual drive.
Kaelen stood amidst his scribbling, twitching disciples, the static in his mind growing louder. The Architect's "incompleteness" warred with the Pack's "survival." One was a cosmic itch. The other was the foundation of his being.
He had to choose which truth to uphold.
He raised the Heartstone. It glowed dully, still recovering from the cataclysm. He could not unmake the glitch; it was part of the realm's new fundamental code. But he could, perhaps, edit the priority.
He focused not on the trees, nor on the disciples. He focused on the Law of the Pack itself as a concept woven into the land. And he issued a new edict, a patch to the Patch:
"WITHIN THE PACK, SURVIVAL SUPERSEDES CURIOSITY."
It was a brutal prioritization. A declaration that the immediate needs of the body and the community would always trump the abstract longing of the mind.
The effect was immediate and visceral. The frantic chiming didn't stop, but it ceased to affect the disciples. Their compulsive calculating stopped. They blinked, groaned, and looked at their scribbled nonsense in confusion and shame. The cognitive hijacking was blocked.
But in Kaelen's mind, the "incompleteness" did not vanish. It was quarantined, labeled as a low-priority subroutine. It sat there, a silent, aching question mark in the core of his being, conflicting with his every doctrine.
He had passed the test by asserting his own foundational rule. But he had also, irrevocably, accepted the Architect's problem into the structure of his soul.
He looked north, toward the Sky-Swallowing Canyon marked on the map. The quiet place. The old scar.
The next phase of the experiment was no longer just happening to them. They were being led to it.
And Kaelen, the hollow sovereign with a cosmic question burning a hole in his programmed mind, knew he would have to go.