There was a reason Winston had stayed behind.

The Blood Emperor had said things during the fight that didn’t fit into any framework he’d been given at Nightwing.

Before other class holders arrived to process the cleared gate and take over the region, Winston wanted to work through every piece of it while the words were still fresh.

He had roughly one hour, which was the standard waiting period after the first person exited a newly formed golden gate before Earth-side class holders could cross through.

One hour to figure out what he actually knew.

"There are two things the guardian said that I need to focus on," he said. Neither Zelda nor Freya interrupted.

He hadn’t fully directed it at them, it was more thinking out loud, but having them present helped him organize it.

"The first is the mental block."

When the Blood Emperor had asked who he was working with, the end of the sentence had simply stopped registering.

It was as if the concept itself had been removed before it could land.

Winston had noticed it in the moment but had been too focused on surviving to process it.

Now, standing in the quiet of the wrecked throne room, the implication of it settled in properly.

His mind had been tampered with. Something had been placed inside him, without his knowledge or consent, and it had been there long enough that he hadn’t noticed it until a Rank Four guardian pointed it out.

A cold feeling worked its way up from his stomach.

The Blood Emperor’s illusion had been terrifying.

That had been an external attack, something imposed on him from outside that he could fight against once he understood it.

A mental block built into his own cognition was different. He had no way to locate it, no way to confirm its edges, no way to know what else it might be shielding him from seeing. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

The emperor’s phrasing had been specific too.

It had spoken as though the people responsible for the block were the same ones who had placed Winston here, in the Astral Heaven, in this situation, with this class.

That implication was significantly larger than a single mental restriction.

Everything taught at the academy framed the Astral Heaven as a natural phenomenon — an intersection between Earth and another realm that had unlocked latent human potential through the Trait Factor system.

Monsters came through Red Gates. Classes awakened in Blue Gates. The whole structure was presented as something that simply existed, like gravity or weather.

But if the Blood Emperor was telling the truth and if deliberate hands had shaped the system and placed safeguards on the people inside it, then the foundation of everything Winston had been taught was either incomplete or wrong.

He pressed two fingers against his temple. He didn’t think this deeply often, and when he did it produced headaches.

This one was already building behind his right eye.

The answers weren’t here. Not yet. But the questions were real, and they weren’t going away.

Winston laid out his speculations to Freya and Zelda; he spoke about the mental block, the implied architects behind the system and the Blood Emperor’s certainty that the Astral Heaven was something deliberately constructed rather than naturally occurring.

He kept it factual and direct, the same way he’d processed it himself.

However it didn’t help either of them.

What it did instead was pull the floor out from under two people who had built their entire understanding of the world on foundations that now had serious cracks in them.

Zelda went quiet in a way that meant she was running through everything she had been taught since childhood and measuring it against what she had just heard.

Freya’s expression stayed composed on the surface, but the stillness behind her violet eyes said something different.

The analogy that kept surfacing in Winston’s mind was a typhoon.

A natural disaster was horrible, but it was acceptable in a certain way, the world was indifferent and sometimes catastrophic things happened.

The moment someone revealed the typhoon had been engineered, a new layer of horror appeared underneath the original one.

That was what they were sitting with now.

"Could it be that the higher-ranked class holders already know?" Zelda asked. "Something this significant, it’s hard to imagine it stayed completely hidden."

Both she and Winston turned to Freya.

The logic was straightforward.

If anyone in Key City had access to information that didn’t reach ordinary class holders, it was the daughter of Richard Valeria, patriarch of the strongest class holder family in the city, one of only three demigods, a man with resources and reach that most people couldn’t fully conceptualize.

Freya shook her head slowly.

"I’m not aware of any of this. Either it was kept from me deliberately, or my father genuinely doesn’t know."

Winston stayed quiet. Privately, he leaned heavily toward the first option.

He let the silence settle for a moment before moving on.

There was a second thing the Blood Emperor had said that he hadn’t addressed yet and right now he was genuinely grateful that Zelda and Freya had stayed behind.

They were actually useful for thinking this through.

"Do either of you know anything about a primordial trait?"

Winston had only ever known three trait classifications.

Natural, Physical, and Abstract.

These three categories were what separated class holders from everyone else.

They were the foundation of everything: the reason holders could awaken classes, develop Realizations, and cast spells.

Every holder had one.

The classification determined the nature of their class, the direction of their Realization, and in some cases the specific characteristics their trait granted them beyond combat.

The system had placed Winston’s Soul Trait under Abstract. That was the category for intangible forces and concepts that governed how the world functioned rather than what it was made of.

Soul fit that framework cleanly. It had never occurred to him to question it.

Until the Blood Emperor had looked at him and used a completely different word.

Primordial.

A fourth classification entirely different and one that apparently had no business appearing in the mortal realm, according to a Rank Four guardian that had existed long enough to know the difference.

Winston turned to Freya and Zelda to see what they made of it.

Both of them were staring ahead with blank expressions and there was a particular vacancy of someone whose mind had briefly disconnected from the conversation without their awareness.

Then, almost simultaneously, the light came back into their eyes.

Zelda blinked.

"What did you say again?"

Winston went still.

He looked at her. Then at Freya, who had the same slightly unfocused expression of someone returning from somewhere they hadn’t chosen to go.

Neither of them had any idea the gap had occurred.

He understood immediately what had happened.