After an hour of crawling through sealed corridors and hitting warded dead ends at every turn, Revan had circled back to the one place in the facility that even an idiot would recognize as important.

"Willing or not, my only way out is through these grand gates," Revan sneered.

During his search of the perimeter, Revan had attempted to scale the steep cliffs surrounding the facility. But what he saw from the top made his knees go weak.

The entire area was encircled by a colossal sandstorm of impossible violence, a wall of churning grit and howling wind that cut them off from the rest of the world.

"It felt impossible for anyone to get in or out of here without teleporting," Revan muttered.

"Then again, it’s just a hypothesis. Maybe the people here know a specific trick to bypass it — or perhaps, the bastard inside actually has a god-tier mage on his payroll? Well, considering how my life has gone, nothing is impossible."

Of course, Revan couldn’t shake the possibility that he wasn’t the only one here.

Even though the facility looked completely derelict, the sheer scale of the magical wards surrounding the perimeter suggested otherwise.

Whatever it was, he was a hundred percent sure that the owner of this place was hiding something incredibly valuable here.

"There’s a distinct possibility that the old Archmage could be here, isn’t there?" Revan sighed.

"Anyway, I’m fairly certain that my current mission is tied directly to this place."

He crouched behind the rusted shell of a distillation column, peering through a gap in the corroded metal at the far end of the main corridor.

He moved with extreme caution; who knew if this place had some kind of CCTV or magical surveillance watching him? He had to make sure he remained completely out of sight.

The door was impossible to miss.

It stood at the end of the hall like a monument, easily five meters tall and twice as wide, its iron surface split down the middle by a jagged ridge of brown mountain stone that had pushed through the metal from behind as if the earth itself had tried to reclaim the building and gotten stuck halfway.

’No matter how many times a person laid eyes on this, they’d be stunned. Whoever made this was a genius.’

At first glance, it looked dead.

Revan had already examined the door more closely when he first laid eyes on it, and the longer he looked, the more he saw.

The door was shielded by a complex circuit that gradually flickered into view, like stars emerging in the dark.

Faint lines of residual mana etched the iron, forming an array of interlocking patterns that pulsed with a low warmth, barely holding on against the Dead Zone’s suppression.

Constellation-class ward architecture. The kind of sealing magic that only a handful of people on the continent could cast.

Revan let out a quiet laugh through his nose and leaned back against the cold metal.

’Well. There IS one scenario rattling around in my head right now. I call that mysterious violet-eyed lady and politely ask her to blow this door open for me. But of course, that wasn’t an option. It would be way too flashy.’

He ran his fingers through his filthy hair, grimacing at the dried blood that flaked off under his nails.

’I’m not entirely sure yet, but she should be on par with the Generation of Miracles in certain aspects.’

Revan kept weighing the woman’s power in his mind, since the night she slipped the coin into his palm.

Mages in Valtheris climbed through what scholars called the Four Pillars — Logos, Sanctus, Theos, and Kenos — each with its own apex: Archmage, Seraphim, Vessel of Theos, and Abyssal respectively. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Revan had met enough powerful people in fifteen years of service to know the difference between them by feel alone.

Warriors couldn’t manipulate mana. That was the fundamental divide.

But the world had a fairness woven into its design, a compensation: warriors could sense mana with a clarity that bordered on sight.

Every mage Revan had ever stood near radiated a signature as distinct as a fingerprint. Fifteen years beside Sylvia had put him in rooms with Archmages and three separate members of the Generation of Miracles.

He’d felt each one of them.

’The first three Pillars all operated within the same fundamental physics. Positive mana. Constructive energy. Whether you earned it through decades of study like an Archmage, or channeled it through divine covenant like the Church’s Seraphim, the substance was the same — just the source and the method differed. Even the Generation of Miracles, for all their terrifying birthright, still radiated positive mana. The difference was scale, not nature.’

Revan paused mid-thought and rubbed his chin, frowning at nothing.

’Wait. Hold on. "Divine" covenant and "divine" birthright. Two pillars both claiming the word divine, but...’

He tilted his head, tapping his index finger against his knee as the distinction sharpened in his mind.

’They’re not the same gods at all, are they? The Church’s Sanctus draws from the Eternal Flame, one god, one covenant, kneel and receive. But the Theos pillar draws from something older, something the ancient texts called the Pantheon, a dozen gods tied to bloodlines rather than belief. Same word. Completely different source. The Church has spent centuries pretending the distinction doesn’t matter.’

A dry smirk crossed his lips.

’It does.’

He exhaled and let the theological tangent go. It wasn’t relevant to the problem in front of him, but it narrowed the picture.

’All three of them, Logos, Sanctus, Theos, played by the same rules. Positive mana in, positive mana out. The ward on that door was built to handle exactly that kind of energy.’

His eyes drifted back to the coin in his pocket, and the smirk faded.

’I didn’t even need to feel it deeply; I could tell just by looking from the outside. The woman in the alley played by different rules entirely.’

His features tightened slightly at the thought of it.

’If conventional mana was matter, hers was anti-matter. Standing near her hadn’t felt like standing near a source of power. It had felt like standing near something that swallowed power whole, a presence that pulled everything inward rather than radiating outward.’

Revan exhaled slowly, scratching the back of his head with the kind of nervous energy that came from knowing you’d accidentally befriended something that belonged in a containment facility.

’That’s either the most terrifying or the most useful contact I’ve ever made. Possibly both.’

He shook off the dread and turned his attention to the door.

If he was going to use the coin, he wanted to understand exactly what he was asking for.

The ward’s architecture, while breathtakingly complex, followed the same principles as every constellation-class ward.

Nodes where mana pooled, lines of force connecting them. The strength lived in the intersections. The more connections feeding into a node, the stronger it became.

But strength in one place always meant weakness in another.

’Prince Rupert’s Drop,’ Revan murmured, tracing the ward lines with his eyes.

A tadpole-shaped piece of tempered glass. Head indestructible. But snap the thin tail where all the internal stress concentrated, and the entire thing exploded into powder.

The constellation nodes were the head.

But the terminal points, the endpoints where circuit lines reached their farthest extension, those were the tails.

Revan had found three. Two reinforced. One at the base of the door, partially hidden by mountain stone, sitting in a depression where the iron had buckled under geological pressure.

But breaking it required energy the ward couldn’t process.

Positive mana would just be redistributed and absorbed. What the ward couldn’t handle was negative phase energy, the erosive counterpart that would corrode the connections between nodes like acid through wire.

And here was where Revan’s grin widened, because the final piece clicked into place with the satisfying weight of a loaded gun.

’The Dead Zone suppresses positive mana. Crushes ambient reserves, kills passive regeneration. But negative mana doesn’t exist in the environment. It doesn’t radiate outward, it pulls inward. The suppression field was built to catch energy that expands, not energy that contracts.’

Were it not for the biting cold of the air, Revan would have been soaked in sweat, driven by the pure horror of facing this pillar.

’She could walk in here at full power and the Dead Zone wouldn’t even notice her. One pulse of negative mana at that terminal point and the entire constellation unravels from the inside.’

Revan reached back into his pocket for the obsidian coin and held it up in the dim light.

The wilting flower in chains caught the faint glow bleeding through the ceiling fissures, its engraved petals seeming to curl inward as if recoiling from the light.

He could feel the resonance pathways etched into the coin’s structure, waiting for someone to channel Aura through and complete the circuit.

But pushing his own energy into an artifact crafted by a potential Abyssal whose motivations he understood about as well as the mating habits of deep-sea fish was not happening.

"I’ll activate it the hard way," he whispered.

But not here. Not in the open corridor with a direct line of sight to the main door.

He slipped away from the distillation column and moved deeper into the facility until he found what he needed: a wide storage bay wedged between the mountain wall and a row of decommissioned machinery, enclosed enough to muffle light and sound but spacious enough to give him a running start if something came through that he didn’t like.

He settled into the far corner, put his back against the mountain stone, and got to work.

The factory floor was caked with decades of dried alchemical residue.

Revan scraped a handful from a nearby work tray, packed it into a small mound on the floor, and nestled the coin into the center.

He snapped a strip of corroded iron from a pipe, found a rough patch of stone, and struck the two together.

With a shower of sparks, the residue finally caught on the third strike.

A pale flame licked upward, burning with a color between orange and blue.

The heat reached the coin.

The obsidian surface drank the fire.

The engraved flower began to glow, its petals brightening from black to deep violet, the chains around it pulsing with a warmth Revan could feel against his face from half a meter away.

Then the coin pulsed.

A resonant throb that vibrated through the floor and into his knees.

The flower’s petals unfurled in the engraving as if waking from a long sleep.

"Alright, mysterious lady," Revan murmured. "I hope you’re listening."