The months on Aerion's Rest bled into one another, each day a new verse in a long, arduous epic of self-improvement. The brutal rhythm of the Anvil of the Firmament had become Ren's new reality. He would ascend into the storm as a man and return as a scarred, living conduit for the tempest, his Aetheric core growing denser with each painful, hard-won victory.
By the end of the seventh month, his relentless efforts bore fruit. After absorbing a particularly violent chain of lightning strikes, the bottleneck he had been battering against finally gave way. In the heart of the storm, he broke through to Rank 28. The jump in power was palpable, a significant leap in both the capacity of his core and the speed at which he could channel his Aether.
This new level of spiritual resilience and raw power opened a door that had previously been sealed. The "Sermon of the Obsidian God," the poisonous scripture they had stolen from Melas, had been a source of immense danger, a text he could only glance at for fear of its psychic corrosion. Now, he felt ready. His will, forged and tempered on the Anvil, was now a shield strong enough to withstand the sermon's hateful whispers.
He approached Anya in the main laboratory of the Nautilus, where she was meticulously calibrating her second-generation Resonance Dampener.
"I'm going back into the Sermon's data," he announced, his voice steady. "All the way this time. I believe there is more to it than just a philosophy of despair. There is history. I need your help to find it."
Anya looked up from her work, her eyes sharp and analytical. She saw the new, unshakeable confidence in his posture. This was not the wounded boy she had cautioned before. This was a Rank 28 Disciple, a warrior who had intentionally scarred his own soul to make it stronger. She nodded, her own curiosity reignited. "I will build the laboratory. You will be the one handling the live specimen. What do you need?"
Their new partnership fell into a seamless rhythm. It was a tense, intellectual expedition into the heart of their enemy's doctrine. Ren would sit in a meditative state, his Soul-Forge Gauntlet connected to the ship's main console, acting as the spiritual shield and translator. He would interface directly with the Sermon's hostile data, his will a bulwark against the waves of nihilistic despair it projected. He would filter out the psychic poison and translate the core, ontological concepts into terms Anya's logical mind could process.
Anya, in turn, became the expedition's archivist and analyst. She took the stream of abstract, horrifying concepts from Ren—"The Great Zero," "Cosmic Dissonance," "The Correction"—and ran them through her advanced systems. She cross-referenced them against everything she had: GAMA's censored historical records, pre-Cataclysm myths recovered from her family's private archives, and every scrap of data they had stolen from the Pagoda. She was building a coherent, logical threat dossier on a fundamentally illogical cosmic horror.
As they delved deeper than before, Ren's refined Thunder's Echo art allowed him to perceive something new. Hidden beneath the layers of philosophical poison was another layer of data, one that was not a sermon, but a chronicle. It was a history, fragmented and ancient, of the Void's past victories.
"It speaks of a… a previous cycle," Ren said, his voice strained, sweat beading on his brow as he fought off the data's psychic assault. "A 'First Desolation.' A campaign where the Obsidian God's heralds… the 'Silent Legions'… successfully 'corrected' a spiral arm of a distant galaxy."
"Ask it for a map," Zephyrion's voice urged him, a new, cold urgency in the spirit's tone. "Their conquests would not be random. They would follow the flow of Aether, even on a cosmic scale. Show the girl their path."
Ren focused his will, pushing past the litany of despair to the hidden data beneath. He found it. It was not a map of stars, but a map of concepts, an Aetheric star chart showing the flow of cosmic-level resonance across galaxies. And at its center was a nexus of immense, terrifying power, a point of absolute silence labeled the "Hearth of the Silent Star." It was described as a place where the veil between existence and the Great Zero was at its thinnest, the source from which the Silent Legions had launched their ancient, galaxy-spanning crusade.
He relayed the impossible concept to Anya. To her, an Aetheric map of the cosmos was meaningless, like trying to navigate the ocean with a poem. But it sparked a connection in her brilliant, encyclopedic mind.
"Wait," she breathed, her fingers flying across her console. "The data we stole from the Melas facility. It wasn't just Project Chimera. There were petabytes of deep-space astronomical data the Pagoda had been secretly collecting for decades. I thought it was for a clandestine orbital weapons program, but…"
Her eyes widened. On the main viewscreen, she brought up two images side-by-side. On the left was the swirling, conceptual Aetheric map Ren was channeling from the Sermon. On the right was the Pagoda's meticulous, scientific chart of a remote, uncharted sector of their own galaxy.
"Run a comparative analysis," she commanded the Nautilus's computer. "Search for a correlation between Aetheric resonance patterns on the left and gravitational and electromagnetic anomalies on the right."
The computer churned through the terabytes of data. For a long, tense minute, the screen was a blur of shifting, overlapping star charts. Then, a single, piercing chime echoed through the bridge.
A single point of light flashed on both maps, a perfect, undeniable match. The Pagoda's astronomical survey had found a star system with gravitational and electromagnetic readings that were physically impossible, a dead system that seemed to absorb light and energy. And it was in the exact same position as the "Hearth of the Silent Star" on the Void's ancient, mystical map.
In that moment of profound, world-altering discovery, Ren felt the final barrier in his mind crumble. The immense mental and spiritual fortitude required to decipher the Sermon, to stare into the abyss and not fall, had pushed him over the edge. A wave of pure, refined power washed through him. He had reached Rank 29.
He and Anya stood in silence, staring at the flashing icon on the screen. The myth was real. The heart of their enemy was not a concept in a forgotten galaxy. It was a physical place. A destination.
They now possessed the most dangerous secret in the world: the coordinates to the throne of the Obsidian God.