There was a spearhead on each page.
Dante had been staring at the Codex prints for long enough that he had stopped seeing them properly, which was the specific variety of visual fatigue that came from sustained focus on a single problem, and it was only when he stood and moved to the far wall and looked at the full grid of pages from a distance that he noticed it. Small, precise, tucked into the corner of one section on every single page without exception. Not decorative. Too consistent to be decorative. A directional marker. An instruction embedded so naturally into the visual structure of the page that it registered as background detail rather than meaningful content.
Start at the center. Follow the spearhead. Read in spirals.
The cultivation array theory had been correct as far as it went, which was to the entrance of the problem rather than through it. The array gave him the starting point, the dense central section, and the spiral gave him the path outward. The spearhead told him which direction to rotate.
The translation suite was not built to handle spiral-sequence input. It was built for linear text and had been customized for every other configuration Dante had attempted, but spiral reassembly required something the software simply could not manage autonomously. It needed a human intermediary.
He worked for two hours with a precision blade and a steel ruler, dissecting the first page of Codex prints into its individual sections and reassembling them in a linear sequence that followed the spiral path the spearhead indicated, center outward, clockwise, each bordered section placed after the one before it in the order the path prescribed. It was methodical work. It required absolute accuracy. He did not rush it.
When the reassembled page was complete, he fed it through the scanner and into the modified translation framework he had built on top of the estate's research suite, the one that used the cultivation-array character mapping he had developed overnight.
The terminal processed for four minutes, stopping twice to request confirmation on ambiguous character instances, and then the output line appeared.
File converted.
Dante's fingers were not entirely steady when he reached for the print key, which he noted and chose not to be concerned about. A single page emerged from the output tray. He picked it up and sat down and read it under the study lamp in the grey morning light.
The language was slightly formal, shaped by the translation mapping's tendency to render ancient registers with archaic cadence, but it was readable. Unmistakably, completely, historically readable.
The Codex of the Deep People.Being the laws of our cultivation and the record of our ways.
Carry me always, carry me well.I am the root from which your power grows.I am the anchor of your mana-self.Neglect me and your channels shall run thin.
One hundred commandments have been set.They hold the answer to what you have not yet asked.Healing and harming, refinement and binding,all of this shall be yours through study of what I contain.
But, Veinborn, remember this above all things:I was not written for those who take without understanding.And the fate of the one who gives away my secretsshall be the longest kind of lesson.
Dante read it twice. Then he set it down on the desk with the precise deliberateness of someone who needed a moment before the next thing happened and listened to the quiet of the estate in the early morning, the distant sound of the canal, the first birds beginning somewhere in the garden that no one maintained properly anymore.
He had them. Not them as enemies, not them as adversaries, but them as a known quantity, a comprehensible system, a civilization whose logic was now available to him in the way that any system became available once you understood its foundational language. The Deep People's every protocol, every vulnerability, every law and exception and edge case, was encoded in the document he had just unlocked. Technology had done what centuries of human cultivation scholarship had failed to accomplish.
The exhaustion arrived all at once, as it tended to after extended focused work, dropping onto him like something that had been waiting for permission. He pressed the intercom tab on his desk panel.
"Sable. Bring Linn and come to the study. The Codex pages need to be dissected and reassembled, and I need it done before I sleep. I will show you the method."
A brief pause. "On our way."
Dante leaned back in his chair and looked at the walls covered in Codex prints while he waited, forty-two remaining pages that would take hours to process manually and feed through the translation framework one by one, and felt the particular quality of satisfaction that came not from having finished something but from having found the correct path through it. The finishing was just labor. The finding was the part that mattered.
Perhaps at this point some background on the Morrow family would be useful.
The Caelum family were, in the language of those who tracked such things, a cultivation dynasty of the second tier, which was a precise and meaningful designation in the hierarchy of the northern territories. First-tier dynasties had held their sect licenses for five generations or more, operated multiple training halls, and had names that appeared in the foundational histories. Second-tier dynasties had the resources and the reach of established power without the institutional permanence, which meant they had to be considerably cleverer about how they used both.
For three generations the Caelum family had operated in the space between legitimate acquisition work and the kind of consulting that did not put its full scope on official documents. They had been good at it. They had accumulated, through intelligence work and strategic recovery operations and a few arrangements that the cultivation oversight bodies had chosen not to examine closely, the kind of resources that placed them firmly at the upper boundary of their tier, perpetually adjacent to first-tier status without quite crossing into it.
Then Dante's father had decided to expand.
The eastern mana-trade routes had opened significantly following the collapse of the old Sect Compact, and Aldric Caelum the Elder had seen what other established houses had missed or been too cautious to act on: that the redistribution of cultivation resources across the newly accessible eastern territories represented an opportunity of a scale that came along perhaps twice in a century. He had committed a substantial portion of the Caelum reserve capital to establishing transit infrastructure along three primary routes, negotiating access agreements with six eastern houses simultaneously, and positioning the Caelum family as the central brokerage point for a significant new flow of cultivation commerce.
The Thornback Consortium, which had held informal control of the eastern approaches for forty years through a combination of legitimized extortion and strategic violence, had taken the view that a second-tier dynasty from the northern territories had no business repositioning itself as a major eastern trade hub. They had communicated this view in the manner for which they were known.
The transport convoy carrying Aldric Caelum the Elder and the senior members of his negotiating delegation through the Murmask Pass had been destroyed by a concentrated mana-lance strike of a scale that required either a first-tier sect's backing or several years of preparation. It had not left survivors.
The Caelum family were not ruined. The estate remained, the archive remained, the research suite and the secondary holdings and the Kren service contract all remained. But the capital that would have elevated them into the first tier had gone into the eastern routes and was not coming back, and with it had gone the man around whose continued existence Caelum's mother had organized her entire understanding of the world.
Dante had been thirteen years old. He had processed the information with the focused efficiency that his temperament allowed, identified the practical implications, and begun planning accordingly.
The family's position could be restored. He was completely certain of this in the way he was certain of things that he had examined from every angle and found structurally sound. It would require a resource acquisition of a scale that conventional Morrow operations could not produce, which meant unconventional methods, which meant finding an angle that no one else had found.
The Deep People's mana-gold reserves were not a target that anyone in the serious acquisition business had ever considered, because the serious acquisition business did not believe the Deep People existed in any practically relevant sense. This was the angle. The gap between what was dismissed as mythology and what Caelum had spent two years establishing as documented fact.
He was not returning the Morrow family to its previous position. He was going to take it somewhere considerably beyond that. He would do it in his own way, on his own timeline, using methods that were entirely his own design.
After eighteen hours of sleep and a breakfast that Linn assembled with the same caliber of professional competence she brought to everything, Dante climbed to the study to begin planning in earnest.
It was a proper scholar's room, inherited from his father, all dark paneling and floor-to-ceiling shelving units that ran from archival records to cultivation manuals to three complete sets of the northern territories' geological surveys. Dante had filled the available desk space with networked research terminals, and in one corner, projected large against the bare section of wall beside the east window, a continuous feed from the Deepvein Network's public news layer had been running for the better part of a year.
Sable was already at the terminals, running the morning's diagnostic checks.
"Shut everything down except the Codex framework," Dante said. "I need the full processing capacity on the translation work, and I need to think without the news feed."
Sable looked up from the terminal he was working at, then across to the news projection on the wall. He did not say anything, which was one of his better qualities.
The feed had been running since the convoy attack. Since the official investigation had concluded with a recovery assessment of zero percent and a formal declaration of presumed death that the Caelum estate's legal representatives had challenged twice and lost twice. Caelum had told no one why he kept the feed running. It was not a conclusion he had been willing to let calcify into accepted fact, and the feed was the expression of that refusal.
"All of them?" Sable asked.
Dante looked at the wall for a moment, at the scrolling text and the rendered images of places and events in the wider world, and felt the familiar pressure in his chest do something that he did not examine closely.
"Yes," he said. "All of them."
Sable crossed to the projection unit and shut it down. The wall became ordinary plaster again, pale grey in the morning light. On his way back to the terminals he placed one hand briefly on Caelum's shoulder, a single contact without ceremony, and then continued to his station without comment.
Dante cracked his knuckles over the primary terminal keyboard.
He had a Codex to finish translating, a cultivation civilization's complete law to analyze, a family fortune to restore, and a plan to build from its foundational logic upward.
He began.