Two new Aspects. Not one. Two.

That was what evolving my Path had granted me. It made me feel a little crazy, and a little blessed, to realize that I had gained two entirely new evolved Aspects just from raising one Path to Silver. I had a feeling it wasn’t normal. After all, my Path was Unique.

But that euphoria of growth could wait. Could simmer and grow, built up by the real accomplishment waiting under me.

“You will not kill me,” Glonek said. He kept repeating it too, like a mantra, like saying it enough times was going to make it happen as though I was some kind of Bloody Mary.

I didn’t bother answering. Instead, I just channelled all the new strength I had, all the mana I had gained from the Sacrifice of Escinca’s heart, into my newest Aspect.

“You will not kill me,” Glonek said. “You’re just a mongrel. A mutt. You have no right to kill me.”

“Just shut up, already,” I said. “Stop and die.”

“You will not kill me.” Glonek’s expression tightened. “You will not kill us.”

The sudden change in phrase made me pause for a few heartbeats and in those few moments, Glonek unleashed a scream that ripped through the surrounding area. It had to be driven by an Aspect or Affix of his I didn’t know about, so harsh that my ears rang painfully.

I was about to continue on to finally killing the vampire, but I paused. This time, I was forced to do so.

There were more vampires now.

The Thralls all around Ring Four were coming to our location. I saw several climb the nearby houses, crowd the streets around the temple. Some came alone, others in groups with fangs bared and tongues out like a pack of hyenas sighting their next meal. But a few were dragging in other Thralls who were clearly reluctant.

My mind went back to Tural. To the boy who had been betrayed by someone he trusted and forcefully thrust into this whole Scarthrall mess.

Saving them, my ass.

“Kill him,” Glonek yelled. Yep, I was right. He really didn’t have any sense of pride, didn’t care at all about the appearance of being stuck under his adversary. Of looking like he had lost and needed saving. His miserable, vampiric life came first. “Kill him now. I will reward whoever brings me his head with a second bite.”

For some reason, this excited the vampires even more. The Scarthralls started approaching, wary but envious of the reward. They could see I was glowing and were afraid of the light, but their desperation was driving them forward.

Their greed was making them reach for death.

Light flared over my body. The sizzling strands of mana that burned bright as stars threaded in and out of my whole body, through my clothes and hair and eyes, turning my surroundings into daylight. I could hardly breathe through the power channelling through me. Was this what it felt like to be a Gold?

The Thralls screamed and cowered and fell back. They could retreat to darker safety, out of the reach of my Illumination, but the stupid vampire trapped under me had no such luck.

Glonek shrieked out as the light began eating away at him, turning his body to literal ash. His skin began crisping and burning, his glassy eyes starting to boil. He struggled, but the combination of my own weight and Field Manipulation was keeping him locked down as he burned away.

“What are you waiting for?” he shrieked out. “Destroy him before he destroys us all!”

The vampires, desperate and greedy though they were, weren’t totally dumb. I saw some of them were bringing barricades, hiding behind large shields of wood literally torn off of houses, which kept them in a safe shadow against my light.

I frowned. That was going to be an issue. At this rate, they would reach me before I finished killing off Glonek, which meant I might need to deal with them before the Scarseeker.

A gunshot cut through the vampires’ chatter. The next instant, the Thrall that had gotten closest had his head simply burst apart like a ripe melon.

We all turned to see Hamsik strolling down the street like he owned the place, his Icon glowing on his hand. The other Scarthralls screamed and cursed at him, retreating away, forgetting their master’s order to get rid of me. Mostly because the Thrall that Hamsik had shot wasn’t getting up.

Where his head should have been was a burned and blistered stump of a neck.

Ah, right. I recalled what I had seen on the night the Thralls had attacked the temple. Hamsik had the Aspect of Light.

“You bastards!” Glonek screamed. “You can’t stop now! Kill them all. Hurry!”

Even with Hamsik’s return, the odds were decidedly against us still. We were outnumbered. Unless Hamsik had brought a secret army with him, just waiting to emerge from the dark of the night. Which didn’t happen, sadly.

What did happen, however, was the Ritual finally going into effect.

A new light materialized, this one sparking to life over us all. High above the temple itself, a small sun materialized into burning being, washing everything around us for a league or more in pure daylight.

I could only marvel as, for the first time since I had arrived in this world, I caught a glimpse of what a true day would have looked like here. Outside the Preserves, that was.

Real colours. The wood around me that made up the few ramshackle houses really was far too dark and ashy to be the kind of real, natural wood. Both the mud huts and the streets of packed earth were solid brown. I saw the blistering white and gold of Hamsik’s cult robes, the coppery gleam of his Icon, the brightness of the blood from Glonek.

All sights that I knew were going to be etched in my mind forever. Sights that were mundane but lit up in a way I probably wasn’t going to see ever again.

And of course, the collective screams that echoed through all of Ring Four would help me recall them pretty well.

The vampires shrieked out in unison. It wasn’t just the Thralls around us, many of whom immediately pelted away and tried to hide even as the light burned them to ash. Glonek, their master, their creator for all intents and purposes, was screeching his lungs out too.

“I will not die,” he shrieked, somehow still understandable despite the screaming and struggling. “I will not be killed!”

“Like I said.” I channelled my Aspect of Illumination, turning my fist into a mace of pure radiance. “Just shut up and die.”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That finally crossed whatever threshold the Weave needed to recognize an Affix.

[ Affix Unlocked!

You have acquired a new Affix for your Illumination Aspect.

Affix: Imbuement ]

I punched straight into his heart. His dying scream ripped into my ears again, and I was sure something in there broke because could feel warm liquid dripping down the sides of my face.

It wasn’t really an issue. My hearing was gone for only a second. The last pummel had driven out more mana thanks to Mana Injection, with Mana Heal immediately using it to patch up my eardrums. I was able to once again enjoy the blissful screams and shrieks of dying vampires all around me.

Our eyes met, mine unyielding and his slowly fading. I recalled all of our little back-and-forth spat when we had been brutalizing each other.

A vampire who was so convinced he was right, even when he was steeped in pure evil. The contradiction didn’t make sense. Could he really be that deluded, that unaware, that uncaring about his actions?

Then I remembered my little conversation with the facilitator Rakshasa at the Mage Guild, and what he had said about Soul Sight.

Burning pain lanced through my body again as I held the vampire’s dying eyes. I was focusing on Sacrifice, sending the sizzling white threads to the bits and pieces of him in my hand, crushed to pulp and unrecognizable. I was keeping the Sacrifice tribute small on purpose.

Would a little focus be enough? Or would the Weave think opt for Emulation instead, despite the minimal offering, turning me into a vampiric facsimile of a Scarseeker?

Looked like my little theory on how to activate Soul Sight.

[ Sacrifice

You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Innards of a Silver-ranked Scarseeker. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Soul Sight activated ]

Glonek Ilverang had worked hard to get appointed as the trusted accountant of a Great House of Zairgon. Growing up as a poor Scarseeker brat in the slums of Claderov hadn’t given him a lot of prospects, so attaining a post of that calibre was a major accomplishment in and of itself.

Plus, he was glad to be leaving Claderov behind. A city that almost officially hated its Scarseeker populace wasn’t one worth living in. That he had even gained the right education, experience, and connections necessary to land such a lucrative offer was incredible.

Something he could only appreciate once he was far from his blasted homeland and in the significantly different Zairgon.

Sure, there were all the obvious differences from Claderov—Zairgon was on a Pits-cursed volcano of all things—but it was the subtler changes from his home city that caught Glonek’s attention. There were not one, not two, but three different Great Scarseeker Houses in the volcanic city.

He had, a bit naively perhaps, thought that he was migrating to a haven for Scarseekers. Where people like him weren’t ostracized from their society in all but name.

What he found was… rather unexpected.

There were the three Scarseeker Great Houses, and that was about it. What few Scarseekers the city of Zairgon possessed were all locked away on one of its highest planes, in Ring Two, far removed from not only the daily running of the majority of the city, but also most of its administration as well. There was only one Scarseeker on the Zairgon Council, and that too was apparently an almost honorary position dating back a few centuries.

Which wasn’t to say it was unfamiliar. He knew the real structure of Zairgon oh so well. He had seen it on his very first day.

All those poor, pathetic, downtrodden humans stuck to their meagre posts on Ring Four and Ring Three. They didn’t know hope. They had no dreams, would never understand what it meant to hold real power. He was so very familiar with it from Claderov.

Although, the difference between them and him was that he wasn’t powerless.

No matter how others saw him.

He might be a Scarseeker with valuable training on how to run a business’s financials, but that didn’t mean the nobles would ever see him as one of their own. Lord Kalnislaw treated him little better than the other servants in his manor, and the young masters

were almost menaces, despite being old enough to be Glonek’s father on their own.

Lady Kalnislaw wasn’t as awful, but Glonek had at first sought outside company. He had tried to see if he could find a sense of belonging in Zairgon that wasn’t possible in Claderov.

But a couple of trips to Ring Three had convinced him he wasn’t welcome there either. Not really.

When he visited taverns, no one ever sat at his tables and made sure to stick a good distance away from him. Businesses treated him with minimum respect and were always happy to see his back, often urging him to complete his tasks as fast as he could. Establishments performed services only as far as they really had to.

Glonek wasn’t welcome. He had started to see why the Scarseekers, powerful nobles though they were, tended to stick to themselves, holed up in their Ring Two mansions.

He hated it.

He detested it.

This wasn’t better than Claderov. A pretence. That was what it was. A careful façade to suggest that things weren’t awful because everyone seemed to exist in an equilibrium. But Glonek Ilverang saw it for what it truly was.

A situation balanced on the edge of a knife.

That was partly what had made him determined to grow stronger. To prove that he was no less than any of them. A mere Silver? So they thought, but he would show them.

He wasn’t alone in thinking that way. Glonek hadn’t stopped going to Ring Three despite his early experiences. He just now went there a lot more discretely, disguised enough that most people were unable to even tell that he was a Scarseeker. It helped that he was ranking up his Aspect of Ensorcellment to help with it.

But he didn’t go to regular establishments and enterprises and such anymore, not unless his duties as the business-steward of House Kalnislaw required it. Instead, he searched for and found kindred company.

There were little nooks and crannies secreted away in Ring Three where the humans from Ring Four tended to gather. The poorer denizens of Ring Three had capitalized on this and turned such locations into seedy little bars and canteens, though most barely even qualified as such. Nevertheless, the poor humans found some camaraderie there.

And so did Glonek. In a certain fashion. He never truly made friends there, never truly got to know any single person in particular.

But he wasn’t removed from them entirely either. They didn’t stay away from him, helped in part because they obviously didn’t recognize him as a Scarseeker at first after the care he took to suppress his visual tells as best as he could—the occasional times his fangs were on display were taken care of by Ensorcellment.

So, Glonek found himself sharing the same frustrations. The same moans about how Zairgon was structured, the same curses at the prejudices, the same basic hatred of how they were all forced to be a part of this machine they had no hope of ever changing.

Because the humans were powerless. Pathless. The few who did have Paths were only employment-based ones that could never really amount to anything special.

None of them were like Glonek.

And that powerlessness made them meek. Made them whiny. It had felt encouraging to discover a place he thought he could belong in, to some capacity. But they had started to nag at him before long. Within a few weeks, their complaints grated, their gripes and grievances sounded like toddlers crying about spilled milk.

Their powerlessness had given way to hopelessness, which he had once again been a little too naïve to realize at the start.

He hated it.

“I can’t take this anymore,” a man said. He had sat down at Glonek’s table with a huff. Despite being a regular at their little hole, Glonek didn’t recall his name. “I think I’m going to go home.” He looked up, sunken eyes trying to peer at the other occupant table. “You know, I don’t think I ever caught where you live.”

Glonek tutted and waved away at the question. It was all getting to him. The same talks, the same little conversations where the meaningless daily goings-on interrupted the latest news about how someone was getting screwed over by Zairgon’s real inhabitants.

The anger that had driven him so well over the last half a year was starting to turn into a torpor.

And he detested it.

“Hey pal—”

Glonek shut the man up with a direct look into his eyes, channelling Ensorcellment. “Aren’t you tired of all this?”

The man blinked several times before a new light came into his eyes. “Curse the Pits, I’m tired to my bones. To my soul.”

“So am I. But I’m not too tired to change things.”

“Change… things?” He swallowed as he leaned forward. “What in the world you talking about, friend?”

Glonek smiled, baring his fangs. He had gained a new Affix for Ensorcellment a few days ago. It had come with a lot of trial and error, with a great deal of effort he had needed to hide from everyone.

An Affix called Fanged Binding.

Glonek kept his eyes on the man’s, dug into his consciousness to locate the soul he was talking about. “Come with me.” He slowly got up, and the man mimicked his motion, almost enthralled. “It’s a bit… sensitive. But I promise, it will show you a whole new world. You’ve never heard of the Woven Way, have you?”