The reunion had ended, and Yeon had returned to her team with a clarity she had not possessed before.

She had given them the instruction before she left for the reunion — a pre-planned deployment, the team briefed on routes and targets, Rose holding the operational authority in her absence. When Yeon returned, the team was three dungeons into a rotation she had designed to maximize their individual growth while she was unavailable. They had, in her estimation, executed it well. She reviewed the logs, noted two minor inefficiencies in their formation during the second dungeon’s boss fight, and filed corrections for the next briefing.

She gathered them in the common room of their guild quarters—fifteen faces, ranging from bored to curious to quietly apprehensive—and told them she would be stepping back. Not leaving. Stepping back. The distinction mattered, and she made sure they understood it.

"I’ll be taking a leave from the team’s dungeon clears for a while. Rose will handle the formations. You’ll continue as you have been."

Rose, standing at the back of the room with her arms crossed, gave a small nod. She had known this was coming. She had been preparing for it.

"How long?" someone asked.

"I don’t know."

That was the honest answer. Yeon did not believe in lying to people who trusted her with their lives.

"The trial accounts for this. I can sacrifice my individual completion rank so the group can continue without me. You won’t need to delay the trial for my absence."

The tension in the room shifted. Some of the younger members still looked uncertain, but the veterans—the ones who had been with her longest—had already moved on to logistics. Rose was already dividing the party into squads, assigning temporary leadership roles, reshuffling the formations to account for the missing anchor.

Yeon watched her work and felt something settle in her chest.

She had chosen well.

———

Then she went to the guild’s archive.

The archives of the Althelgard Guild were extensive. Not the public sections—the public sections were for show, for new recruits who needed to feel like they had access to something important. The real archives were three floors below ground, accessible only to members who had been vetted and approved, and Yeon had been vetted and approved years ago.

She spent two weeks there.

Not in seclusion—she returned to her quarters at night, ate meals with the team when their schedules aligned, responded to messages from the group chat with varying degrees of engagement. But during the daylight hours, she was in the archives, reading, cross-referencing, building a framework for what she was about to attempt.

The breakthrough to sainthood was not a mystery. It was documented extensively. What the documents disagreed on was the method.

The guild’s archive on sainthood advancement was not comprehensive — no single source was, because sainthood was one of those subjects where the people who knew the most were also the people least inclined to document their knowledge in ways that others could easily access. What the archive held was a collection of partial accounts: first-hand testimonies from saints who had agreed to be interviewed, secondhand reports from people who had witnessed advancements, theoretical frameworks developed by scholars who had studied the subject without experiencing it, and a small section of what the archive catalogued as anomalous cases — advancements that had not followed the patterns the theoretical frameworks predicted.

Yeon read all of it. She took notes on the parts that contradicted each other, which was most of it, and additional notes on the parts that agreed, which pointed toward a narrower set of conclusions than the volume of material suggested.

The conclusions, distilled:

Sainthood was not a numerical threshold. The threshold existed — one thousand five hundred and ninety-nine total stat points, with a minimum expression required across all five stats rather than a single overwhelming concentration — but reaching the threshold did not produce advancement. It produced eligibility. The advancement itself required something the archive’s sources called, variously, sublimation, crystallization, the settling of the self, and, in one account from a saint who had apparently found the scholarly terminology irritating, just knowing who you are.

The timeline for this secondary requirement was, per the archive’s records, essentially undefined. The shortest documented advancement after threshold was reached had taken seconds. The longest had taken hundreds of years. The distribution between those extremes was not a curve — it was a scatter, with no reliable correlation between the candidate’s strength, background, innate ability, or cultivation method and how long the sublimation took.

Some accounts emphasized physical conditioning — training the body to the point where it could no longer be distinguished from the will that moved it. Others emphasized mental clarity — meditation, focus, the stilling of the internal noise that prevented the spirit from expanding into the space the stats had prepared. Others emphasized something closer to surrender: the idea that sainthood was not achieved but received, that one prepared the vessel and then waited for it to be filled.

There were people who did not suffer this bottleneck at all. They simply added stat points and advanced to sainthood.

Those persons were barely mentioned. The authors of the archives seemed to hold a quiet disdain for them — after all, the books in the archives were not even for people like them. They were for people who faced the issue most people faced.

The separate case section was the most useful. It contained accounts of advancements that had happened during ordinary activities — a saint who had advanced mid-conversation, one who had advanced while eating breakfast, one who had advanced during a dungeon clear that she described as routine enough to be boring. The common thread across the anomalous cases was not what the candidate had been doing but what they had stopped doing: in every account, the advancement had come when the candidate had, for whatever reason, stopped actively pursuing it.

Yeon read all of them. She made notes. She cross-referenced the accounts of saints she knew personally — their experiences, their breakthroughs, the specific moments when something had shifted and they had become something more than they had been. The cross-referencing took most of the second week. Some of what she found confirmed the archive’s patterns. Some of it didn’t. She filed the contradictions separately and sat with them until she understood whether they were exceptions or evidence of a category the archive had not thought to name.

The common thread, as far as she could determine, was readiness.

Not power. Not desperation. Not the accumulation of enough stat points to force the issue.

Readiness.

She closed the last book on the fourteenth day and sat in the archive’s dim light, thinking about what that meant for her.

She was close. Her total stats sat at 1,319 — 281 points below the 1,600 benchmark. A batch of A-rank stat potions would close the gap. She had purchased them before the reunion, anticipating this phase of her training. They sat in her inventory, waiting.

The gap was not the obstacle.

The obstacle was the shift. The sublimation. The movement from the person who had the stats to the person who was the stats.

She had two weeks before she planned to begin the training in earnest. She used them to settle her affairs — to ensure the team’s dungeon schedule was sustainable without her, to brief Rose on the contingencies she had not yet considered, to make herself unnecessary in every operational sense so that her absence would be an inconvenience and nothing more. Rose absorbed the briefings with the focused attention of someone who had been quietly preparing for this responsibility for longer than she had let on. Yeon noticed. She did not say anything about it, because there was nothing useful to say. Some things were better acknowledged through action than named aloud. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

She sent Zeke a message on the last evening before seclusion: going quiet for a bit. don’t get lonely.

The reply arrived three minutes later: too late, already lonely, hurry back.

She smiled at her phone. She did not respond.

——

The training room she rented was on the forty-seventh floor of the guild headquarters, a space designed for members who needed to be alone. It was small, windowless, and insulated against external interference — mana fluctuations, sound, the ambient pressure of other people’s presence. The walls were plain grey stone. The floor was smooth, unmarked. There was a mat in the center, and nothing else.

She drank the potions in the training room, alone, on the first morning of seclusion. The warmth of it moved through her system with the familiar efficiency of a potion doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

She allocated her stat points.

Her status window updated.

[Strength: 965(S Rank) > 1,170(SS Rank)

Agility: 1,080(S Rank) > 1,380(SS Rank)

Endurance: 1,000(S Rank) > 1,200(SS Rank)

Perception: 1,050(S Rank) > 1,350(SS Rank)

Magic Power: 2,500(SSS Rank) > 2,900(SSS Rank)]

Nothing else happened.

She had expected this. She stood in the training room for a moment, confirming that she felt exactly as she had before, then began her training.