The next seven days were a grueling study in adaptation.
Brom worked with Kiran. His earth magic was weakened, his connection to the World-Spine shard muted on his left side. Kiran, with his new void-folding ability, had an idea. He couldn't restore what was erased, but he could create a support structure.
Using void-energy, Kiran painstakingly fashioned a lattice of solidified spatial force that attached to Brom's remaining shoulder stump. It wasn't an arm. It was a void-brace, invisible to the naked eye but felt as a cold, firm presence. It could lock in place to provide stability for hammer swings, or channel a trickle of Brom's earth energy to create a temporary, spectral shield of packed dirt. It was clumsy, but it returned his combat effectiveness to about 85%.
Kiran trained with his new perception. He could now see the "stress points" in space. He practiced creating Void-Folds—not tears, but precise creases that could redirect attacks or trap limbs. He and Damien sparred, a deadly dance of phased daggers against folding space. Kiran won three out of ten matches now—a marked improvement.
Lyra, pushed by the near-catastrophe, broke through her mental block. The strain of maintaining reality-edits against the Void's erasure had forced her foxfire to evolve. She could now perform Sustained Edits—small changes to reality that lasted for hours without constant mana drain. She could make a patch of ground permanently slick, or a wall permanently harder. It was a game-changer for fortifications and battlefield control.
Damien focused on integration. He began the slow, dangerous process of absorbing his one-third share of the Void-Nexus Core. Unlike the Abyssal taint, which was hunger, the Void essence was stillness. It resisted being incorporated into his dynamic Glacial-Phoenix system. He had to use his frost to "freeze" the void-essence in place within his core, and his spatial aspect to weave it into his meridian structure without letting it unravel his other energies.
It was a week of internal, silent agony. But the results were profound.
[Glacial-Phoenix Constitution Evolution: 8% → 15% Integration.]
[New Hybrid Property Unlocked: 'Event Horizon Frost' - Frost attacks now carry a minor spatial-lock effect, slowing and pinning targets in place.]
[Void Integration: Partial. Can now create 'Rime-Void Anchors' - points of frozen space that disrupt teleportation and spiritual movement within a small radius.]
His cultivation finally tipped over the threshold. 4th Order, 3rd Rank. The advancement wasn't a surge of power, but a deepening, a solidification. His mana sea became denser, colder. His Storm-Eyes could now see probabilistic futures for up to five seconds ahead, though using it caused splitting headaches.
Sylvia's reports came in at dawn each day, crisp and professional. She mapped a viable route, identified two stable oases for rest, and warned of a massive Chaos-Storm—a roaming weather pattern of pure chaotic mana—that was drifting across their intended path. She also reported signs of other hunters: a camp belonging to a group called the Ashen Talons, and solitary tracks from what she called a "Soul-Artist"—a rare cultivator who worked with raw soul-stuff, extremely dangerous.
On the seventh day, she returned to the cave as they were packing. She looked more worn, a new scar on her cheek, but her eyes were sharp.
"The route is clear if we move in the next three days. After that, the Chaos-Storm makes it impassable for at least a month. The Ashen Talons are moving parallel to us, about twenty miles south. They haven't detected us. The Soul-Artist... vanished. But the feeling they left behind... it's like being stared at by a ghost."
"Understood," Damien said. "We leave at first light tomorrow. You take point. Maintain one-mile separation. Use the crystals if you encounter immediate threat level above 4th Order, 5th Rank."
She nodded, then her eyes fell on Brom's void-brace, invisible but causing a slight heat-haze shimmer. "You fixed him?"
"Adapted him," Damien corrected.
She looked at Kiran's black-silver eyes, at Lyra's tails which now occasionally flickered with solid-looking foxfire, and finally at Damien's own storm-swirled gaze. "You're all changing. Getting... stranger."
"It is necessary," Damien said.
The next morning, they moved out. The Quartet—now a Quintet with Sylvia—trekked into the deeper, wilder Shattered Lands. Brom moved with a new, careful solidity, his hammer now strapped to his back, his void-brace glinting faintly. Kiran scouted ahead with Sylvia, his void-senses complementing her wilderness savvy. Lyra walked in the middle, her staff gently brushing the ground, leaving faint, sustained edits behind them—a trail only they could follow back. Damien took the rear, his Storm-Eyes constantly scanning the probabilistic branches of the immediate future, watching for ambushes.
They were no longer students or even just fugitives. They were a specialized unit, honed by loss, adapting to survive a world that was actively trying to unmake them. And at their center was a cold, calculating mind that saw friends as assets, injuries as data points, and cosmic horrors as meals to be consumed.
The intersection of the Abyssal and Void scars was not a subtle place.
From five miles away, they could see it: a colossal, weeping canyon of gray dust (the Abyssal scar) being slowly, methodically erased along one edge by an advancing wall of perfect stillness (the Void scar). Where they met was a maelstrom of conflicting realities. Matter decayed into nothingness, only for the nothingness to be filled with chaotic, hungry growth that was then erased again. It was a perpetual, silent war.
Sylvia called a halt on a stable mesa overlooking the conflict. "This is as close as we get without being pulled in. The border zone is... unstable."
Damien's Storm-Eyes watered from the input. He saw the storm-patterns clearly: a raging, purple-black hurricane of Abyssal hunger grinding against a serene, gray typhoon of Void erasure. At the epicenter, the energies were so dense they had crystallized into physical phenomena—floating islands of decaying rock, rivers of silent light that ate sound, and patches of wild, over-saturated life that bloomed and died in seconds.
"Perfect," Kiran murmured, his void-eyes hungry. "They're fighting each other. Weakening each other."
Lyra shuddered. "It's horrible. It's like watching two diseases argue over a corpse."
Brom simply stared, his stone-face unreadable.
"Our objective," Damien said, pulling their focus, "is not to intervene. It is to harvest residual manifestations—pieces of each Singularity's power that have been torn loose in the conflict and now exist independently in the border zone. Sylvia, you identified three such zones?"
Sylvia pointed. "There. The Bleeding Stones—chunks of rock saturated with Abyssal energy that weep.
The path to the intersecting taints lay ahead. A battlefield of gods. And Damien Karyon intended to be the scavenger king who feasted on the aftermath.