“Are you absolutely certain?” Noah asked.

“There is no such thing as absolute certainty,” the Heart replied through a crackling buzz. “This location does not have optimized facilities for analysis. The Heart Room’s core purpose is to store knowledge. However, your records were compared against all the stored knowledge of the Great Library. The chances of your runes being infected with the Beyond is 0.0004%.”

That’s a really fucking low number. But… the Beyond is definitely in my soul. There’s no doubt about that.

Which means something is different.

“What metrics are you using to compare?” Noah asked, thoughts whirring through his head.

“The presence of beyond energy when a minute amount of rune force is exerted upon each of your individual runes,” the Heart replied. “All forms of energy have varying levels of Rune Force. By applying a known amount at minute levels, the amount and type of push-back from your runes identifies their composition to an extremely high accuracy. Would you like to review the papers stored within the Great Library? I have 799 references to draw from.”

“No,” Noah said, raising his hands. He only had a few minutes left with the Heart today, and he didn’t think he was going to be able to convince the Devourer to give him any more time a second time around.

Ignoring the revelation that you can use Rune Force to figure out what someone’s runes are…

That’s the flaw. It’s checking my literal runes.

Not my soul.

“The people that were corrupted by the Beyond,” Noah said, his eyes snapping back over to the glowing blue cube. “What areas of their soul was the Beyond present? Do you know?”

“I do not have a final compositional analysis on any of the infected,” the Heart said. “But final records from the Lead Researcher showed that her runes were almost all entirely corrupted.”

“What about her soul?” Noah asked. “Was it infected as well?”

The Heart was silent for a few moments. Then it let out a crackling buzz. “There are no records as to the status of her soul. It is possible they were purged.”

“Can a soul be infected?”

“There are no records of a Beyond-infected soul,” the Heart said. “But I am unaware of the extent of the Beyond’s abilities. It is possible such records were purged.”

Goddamn it. I need information.

“Do you think it’s possible for something like that to happen? A soul to be infected, that is.”

“There is insufficient information within the Great Library. I am unable to draw a conclusion.”

Noah sighed. His lips pressed thin and he shook his head, dropping back down to a seated position. The Heart wasn’t going to be able to give him any more information. The Lead Researcher had been way too thorough on purging all the information from the Citadel’s records…

So he’d just have to figure this out himself.

Noah sank back into his soul without another word.

The familiar patchwork of shadow and light met him once again. It wasn’t accurate to call it pure darkness anymore. With the Beyond shimmering all around him and the Line burning far beneath, Noah’s soul was starting to strongly resemble a very concerning Christmas light show.

He wasted no time in walking over to the nearest patch of Beyond. The staticky white energy looked exactly how it always had. It didn’t seem like there had been any major changes since the last time he’d checked his soul about a few minutes ago.

Noah’s eyes narrowed. He glanced over to his runes. They were the same as always. There were still no signs of the Beyond touching them. For once, he wished that Noah-2 were here. It would have been nice to have someone to sound ideas off.

“I’ve had the Beyond within me for months,” Noah muttered. “So what’s different? Why isn’t it affecting me the same way that it did the researchers? I need to brainstorm. The most obvious difference is that the Lead Researcher tried to form a rune with the Beyond. Does that have something to do with this?”

His brow furrowed in thought. Noah started to pace in circles around the large patch in his soul. He hadn’t ever actually tried to bring the Beyond into himself, but he doubted the strange energy cared at all about anyone’s desires.

I should go back to the start. To when I first arrived in the Beyond. Maybe I can figure shit out from there.

The Prophet of Renewal had done something to bind his soul back together before he’d gone to fight Father. Then he’d gone and basically shattered his soul completely. And then… there had been the white void.

A void where he hadn’t been able to use his runes.

That has to be the first clue. I couldn’t use my magic in the Beyond. There were no runes there at all. None beyond Hollow Symphony… but Hollow Symphony got analyzed by the Heart and didn’t have signs of the Beyond in it.

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Noah repeated that thought in his head. His eyes narrowed. Something had led the Researchers to believe that the Beyond had to be directly integrated into a rune rather than their soul.

The Researchers had been looking into the Beyond for years before their successful attempt of synthesizing it into a rune — an attempt that had destroyed the entire Citadel within a month.

Okay. So that means their fuck up was somewhere within that month. The Beyond didn’t cause difficulties up until they turned it into a rune.

The Beyond had been called anti-existence within the Great Library’s records. It apparently didn’t have any concept of space, so anything that existed within one part of it existed in all parts. The Researchers had used it to hide the Citadel from the rest of Obsidia and as a method of travel.

That was really all the information Noah had to work with.

Noah’s pacing sped up.

Strangely enough… it looked like the actual applications of the Beyond had worked. The mirror he’d gone through hadn’t had any problems, and the Citadel was still hidden from the rest of the world. There weren’t any signs of corruption or the Beyond being some malicious entity that consumed everything it touched.

If it were, wouldn’t the Citadel have collapsed completely? Why would the passageways still be active. Surely the mirror…

Wait. That’s it. The mirror!

Noah jerked himself back into the real world and shot to his feet. The Heart was still active.

“Give me information about the imbuements used to control the Beyond,” Noah said urgently. “Like the ones on a mirror that connects two spaces. They’re not made with the Beyond Rune at all, are they?”

“The records of their formation have been removed from the Great Library, as has how to create them,” the Heart reported.

Noah’s teeth clenched. “What about their name? Do you have any information at all about them?”

“Their name remains. The imbuements you are likely referencing are the Beyond Channeling Arrays.”

A grin split Noah’s lips.

It might have just been a name, but a name was enough.

Channeling.

The Imbuements weren’t made out of Beyond Runes. They directed the Beyond. And they were still perfectly intact.

That meant the Researcher’s mistake had been trying to transform the Beyond into a rune. Something about that had caused things to go horribly awry — but that knowledge alone wasn’t enough.

Noah needed to know why it had gone wrong. He couldn’t just leave the Beyond alone if it was just a massive bio-bomb weapon waiting to go off.

He sat down and plunged back into his soul, making his way back over to the patch of Beyond he’d been examining a few moments before. Noah chewed on the insides of his cheeks in thought.

Something about the Beyond went awry when it was put into a rune. But he didn’t know if that was because the Beyond was inherently some kind of all-consuming entity that was just waiting for a chance to destroy everything around it or if the Researchers had just made a fatal mistake.

Is there any information I’m missing? I’m just working with so little right now. I wish the Lead Researcher hadn’t been so damn thorough in purging information on the Beyond. All I really know is that it has immense destructive potential, is somehow present everywhere that anywhere that a single part of it is, and does not like being turned into a rune.

The only thing I have is my experience within the Beyond. I lost access to all of my Runes… but Hollow Symphony was still there.

“Anti-existence,” Noah muttered to himself. “Damn it. I’m just not seeing the pattern. It clearly isn’t just the presence of the Beyond that destroys something. If it were, my soul would be toast already.”

He continued to pace, his jaw clenched. There was an answer. He knew there was. It was like he was sitting on a mountain of puzzle pieces, and half of them had already been assembled. He just had to figure out how to hell to slot the last few components together.

Patterns still functioned within the Beyond. They’re a universal truth. At least, I’m pretty sure they are. I also existed within the Beyond, as did Hollow Symphony. Why would we be so unaffected when the researchers — who theoretically should have less Beyond within them than I do — all got corrupted? That has to have something to do with the fact that they put it into their runes, while mine is directly part of my soul.

But why?

How does the Beyond function? Is it a sentient entity? An antibody, like the Researchers thought it was? Just some form of natural law? Something else entirely?

Noah came to a stop.

He looked back down at the pool of fractalized energy, the crease in his brow growing deeper.

And then a thought struck him.

Hold on. If the Researchers were right… if the Beyond actually acts like some kind of antibody… then wouldn’t it only target things that it views as foreign bodies?

“When you bring a new rune into your soul, it isn’t actually part of you yet,” Noah muttered. “That’s why removing it is easier. The more energy you gather while it’s connected to you, the closer the connection grows. But that also means the Rune itself gets changed. You fill it with power you gather. And if you combine it with another rune… that would change it even further still.”

A chill ran down Noah’s back.

If the Beyond is actually kind of like a magical antibody like the Researchers thought, then it saw them as foreign entities. And if they were right about the Beyond being anti-existence, then you obviously can’t mix that with other kinds of energy. On top of that, their research concluded that every part of the Beyond exists in all locations where one part is present.

That means trying to change even one tiny part of it is like an attack on the Beyond as a whole.

But Noah had never absorbed a rune. When he’d arrived in the Beyond, his soul had been tattered. He’d been basically nothing more than a tiny scrap of will. And then, as his soul had healed, he’d assimilated fragments of the Beyond into it naturally.

He hadn’t tried to influence or change the strange white energy at all.

He’d merged with it.

“Shit,” Noah breathed. “That’s it.”

The researchers had basically tried to corrupt the Beyond. They’d tried to mix it with something else, and that went against its being as anti-existence. And the Beyond had never had any issues at all with things existing within itself. If it had, it would have done something during the months he was trapped within the endless white void.

The problem was when the Beyond’s nature itself was challenged. If it were really the antithesis of existence, then there was no way such a thing could ever merge with existence and co-exist.

But the beyond within Noah’s soul was pure. It hadn’t been changed or mixed with anything. Noah’s soul had drawn it in to fill up the huge holes filling it. But the energy hadn’t been changed during that process. It had just been assimilated, used like building blocks and left untouched.

And if it was pure… that was why the Beyond hadn’t tried to corrupt him. It didn’t need to.

As far as the Beyond was concerned, Noah was already part of it.