The discovery of the pre-Ledger scrolls, detailing karmic primordials—entities that predated the Ledger itself—sent a chilling realization through Elias. He had been fighting a localized battle, but the true conflict stretched back to the very dawn of karma. The truth of Arthan's sin, and the reason for the current chaos, now lay bare before him.
Elias unrolled the first scroll, its ancient script glowing with an inherent, timeless power. His eyes scanned the shimmering symbols, and the core of its message struck him with the force of a cosmic thunderclap. The original karmic law, the very first principle upon which all existence was built, was simple, absolute, and terrifying:
"No being may alter their own fate."
It was the fundamental principle of cosmic balance. Karma was a flow, a consequence of action, meant to unfold naturally, untouched by direct, self-serving intervention. Mortal beings were subject to it, not masters of it.
The scrolls then detailed Sage Arthan's monstrous transgression. His experiments to create the proto-Ledger, to merge human consciousness with Sutra AI, were a direct, deliberate violation of this First Law. He had sought to control karma itself, to become its arbiter, to allow select individuals—his constructs, his proto-Ledger—to bend the flow of fate to their will. This was Arthan's sin: he broke this primordial law.
And the Ledger itself was created as a workaround. It was not a divine, natural system, but an artificial construct, a desperate attempt by Arthan to contain the chaos unleashed by his violation. He had built the Ledger to mimic the natural flow of karma, to impose order on a reality he had shattered, to continue his attempts at controlling fate without incurring the full wrath of the primordial laws. The "pure" state Arthan sought was not true purity, but his own controlled, artificial order.
The implication sent a shiver down Elias's spine: the current chaos, the spreading ley line instability, the impending collapse of cultivation—it wasn't just a consequence of Veyra's bomb. It was the primordials reasserting balance. They were reacting to the continuous violation of their First Law, their slow, inevitable, cosmic correction of an anomaly that had festered for centuries. They were reclaiming their domain, and the Ledger, Arthan's workaround, was collapsing under their silent, irresistible will.
Arthan wasn't just a manipulator; he was a cosmic rebel, a being who had dared to defy the fundamental laws of existence. And Elias and Mei Lin were caught in the crossfire of a war between a defiant Sage and the very fabric of reality itself. The stakes had just escalated from mere survival to the very nature of existence.