Chương 428: Reflections of the Scribe

For three straight weeks following our return from Crystal City, my daily routine was consumed by a single, maddening puzzle. To see Thoth, you must first see yourself seeing Thoth. I spent hours every night in deep meditation atop the high terrace of the Sanctum, testing every conceivable combination of my temporal and spatial skills.

I wove my [Micro-Glimpse] with [Void Emperor's Omnipresence], trying to project a future timeline where I met the Scribe, then using my optical arrays to watch my own future projection. I tried overlapping my [Echo of the Ashen] proxies into recursive feedback loops, forcing them to look at each other through the void. Every single attempt failed. The space around me remained dead quiet, yielding no spatial ripples, no hidden coordinates, and no response from the Scribe of the Seventh Key.

Frustrated, I pulled up my updated status sheet during my morning meditation to review my foundation and ensure my ascension metrics were consolidating properly. The system seemed to add descriptions that depict each skill's improvement as I fully integrate them.

NAME: Eren Kai STAGE: 3 QS TOTAL: 18, 420, 500, 120, 361 CORE ATTRIBUTES: SOUL STRENGTH: S+ SOUL GATE INTEGRITY: S+ ESSENCE MANIFESTATION: BODY: 921 MANA: 932 SPIRIT: 939 SKILLS (9/12 Slots Used): [Symphony of the Animus Arch] (Zeroth-Tier / Unknown): Added improved environmental resonance and white-noise masking. Bypasses Systemic blocks. [Voidflame] (Origin): Enhanced, viscous black-red entropic deletion fire. Erases spatial boundaries between coordinates.

[Primordial Shell] (Origin): Fusion of mental fortress and physical density. Allows zero-friction stasis and extreme physical durability without mana-drag. [Void Emperor's Omnipresence] (Mythic): Absolute mastery of spatial coordinates. Instantaneous, zero-friction transit across astronomical distances. [The Void-Star's Hunger] (Mythic): Primary metabolic engine. Siphons hostile spells, matter, and essence into internal silos for clean conversion.

[Domain of the Ashen] (Mythic) (Integrated Inner World): Super-imposes inner Soul dimension over physical reality. Dictates localized gravity and spatial laws. [Syntropy] (Mythic): Efficiently denies damage events and rewrites local timelines backward to wholeness. [Prime Axiom's Nullifying Veil] (Mythic): Erases causality from being tracked or recorded by Higher entities. Integrated Humming feature.

[Echo of the Ashen] (Legendary): Deploys higher-energy proxies carrying combat intelligence and dense physical shells. [Armory of the Ashen] (Epic): Storage and retrieval linked directly to internal continent folds. Integrated Sanctum functionality. SOUL ABILITY: Integrated [Micro-Glimpse / Temporal Slide]: Ten-second future-prediction loop running on hybrid soul-mana. Projects amethyst silhouettes of probabilities. My attributes were hovering right near the second stage of the Ninth Tier.

My physical density was now so concentrated that I had to constantly keep my [Primordial Shell] actively suppressed just to avoid fracturing the slate floors beneath my boots when I walked through Bastion. While I continued my search for a way to contact Thoth, I didn't let my administrative duties or the preparation for the coming war slide.

I visited the diplomatic sector at the Zenith, meeting directly with Lord Borvo — the powerful, high-tier spatial-elemental entity whom I had healed during the earlier cycles of the Confluence. Borvo sat across from me in his floating crystal pavilion, his shimmering, multi-faceted body humming with deep respect.

"Lord Sovereign… Apologies… Ascendant. It has only been a few months since you saved my core from entropic decay… How have… never mind that. How may the Zenith honor its life-debt to you?"

"I need more instructors, Borvo," I told him plainly.

"I have enemies that are gathering their legions outside our sector. When the quarantine veil drops, my people will need more than just raw mana; they will need high-tier elemental mastery. I am calling in your debt. Send me master mages and battle-hardened warriors of various elemental affinities to train the defenders of Ferra."

"It shall be done," Borvo bowed his glowing head without a second of hesitation.

"I will personally select twenty of our finest grandmasters to travel to Bastion." You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Also, if you don't mind," I added, "I specifically need an elite Wind Master. Someone who understands non-linear wind-slopes and atmospheric pressure." I was thinking of Talise and her younger brother Toby — the two Glidewalker orphans Jared and Vesk had rescued from Aetheria-Beta. They possessed a rare, innate wind-affinity that was currently bottlenecked by their lack of formal training.

I figured that having access to real teachers would allow them to properly shine and demonstrate their capabilities, which could eventually inspire generations of wind cultivators. Later that afternoon, I conducted a group training session in the central Academy grounds with my elite student cohort — Jared, Vesk, Talise, Toby, and several others. We were practicing gravity-slope maneuvers on the high basalt terraces.

Talise was floating thirty feet in the air, her small hands weaving delicate current-lines as she tried to balance her wind-conduits against my localized gravity field. She was making steady progress, her movement speed increasing with every cycle, but I could tell her core-rotations lacked the structural refinement that a dedicated Wind Master could provide. As the students cycled their core-rotations, Jared paused, landing his boots on the stone and looking at me with a curious, perceptive expression.

"Instructor Eren," Jared said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

"You've been distracted all afternoon. You're even cycling your star-cores at only half-speed. Is something wrong with the war? Have there been any more breaches of outer defenses?" The other students stopped their drills, gathering around me with eager, concerned eyes. Vesk crossed her arms, her tail flicking with sharp curiosity, while Toby set down his training daggers to listen.

"Nothing is wrong with the defenses, Jared," I chuckled softly, shaking my head.

"I'm just stuck on a problem. A riddle given to me by an ancient Patriarch."

"A riddle?" Vesk asked, her reptilian eyes flashing.

"Can we help? We've been studying theoretical casuality and spatial geometry in Kasian's classes!" I looked at their eager faces and smiled.

"Alright. Consider it a mental exercise. The riddle is this: To see a specific, ancient entity who exists outside standard coordinates... you must first see yourself seeing him. What do you think that means?" The students immediately began brainstorming, blurting out wild, creative ideas.

"It's gotta be your temporal loop!" Jared suggested excitedly.

"You have to project a future clone into a time-dilemma, then use your [Micro-Glimpse] to watch the clone's optical perspective!"

"I've tried that," I replied.

"The temporal feedback collapses before the link can stabilize. Besides, I can't just perceive a future that doesn't exist with my skill…"

"Maybe it's a spatial illusion?" Vesk offered, tapping her chin.

"You overlap your Domain's gravity to bend light until your own eyes look at the back of your own head?"

"Tried that too," I said.

"It just creates a weird optical refraction. Besides, no Thoth." As the students argued back and forth, young Toby — who had been sitting quietly on a basalt bench playing with a small piece of polished glass — raised his hand timidly.

"Um... Instructor Eren?" Toby asked softly.

"Why are you only using time and spatial skills? What if it's just about a mirror?" The other students turned to look at Toby, a few of them letting out light chuckles.

"A mirror, Toby?" Jared laughed good-naturedly, clapping the younger boy on the shoulder.

"Instructor Eren is a Tier 9 Ascendant! He doesn't need a piece of silvered glass to see his reflection!"

"No, listen!" Toby insisted, blushing slightly but standing his ground, gesturing with his piece of glass.

"Back on our home world, the old elders told us stories about ancient glass mirrors. They said people used to fear them because a mirror doesn't just reflect you — it reflects your soul's presence back at you. If you look into two mirrors facing each other, you see an infinite line of yourself. What if 'seeing yourself seeing him' means using a physical reflection to create an infinite feedback loop for your perception?" The other students fell silent, looking at Toby as if his idea was silly.

Jared opened his mouth to joke again, but stopped when he saw the expression on my face. I stood frozen on the basalt terrace, my eyes widening as his words echoed through my brain-cores. A mirror. I had been approaching the riddle purely as a high-tier cultivator — relying entirely on complex temporal loops, spatial tears, and skill-based projections. I had treated "seeing yourself" as an abstract, four-dimensional concept.

But back on Earth, long before the Integration had rewritten our world, ancient folklore and old superstitions had always treated mirrors with quiet dread. People believed mirrors were dimensional thresholds — surfaces that trapped a reflection of the soul in a parallel plane. What if Aurelius hadn't been speaking in abstract temporal terms? What if he meant a literal, reflective feedback loop?

"Class dismissed," I said suddenly, stepping off the terrace.

"Wait, Instructor Eren!" Jared called out, his jaw dropping as he watched me move.

"Was Toby actually on to something?"

"Toby might have just solved a problem that has bothered me for three weeks," I replied, giving the young boy a proud, nodding smile that made Toby beam with delight.

"We will throw a big party in his name if this works!" I translated my physical coordinates instantly, appearing inside the quiet, absolute privacy of my inner sanctum. I sat cross-legged on the floor, closing my eyes as I shifted my consciousness deep into my inner world. I stood on the vast, ash-capped basalt continent of my soul-realm. With a single thought, I wove my uncompiled essence, conjuring hundreds of massive, polished mirrors made of pure, flawless quartz.

I arranged the mirrors in a giant, spherical circle around my central coordinates, facing inward toward each other. The sheer density of my neutron-heavy gravity field bent the light passing through the glass, creating an intricate web of shimmering reflections. I sat in the center of the mirror sphere. Every single mirror reflected my image, which reflected into the mirror opposite it, creating an infinite, endless hall of reflections that stretched into the non-Euclidean distance of my inner world.

Then, I activated my [Micro-Glimpse]. I directed the ten-second future-prediction loop into the infinite reflections of the mirrors. I watched my reflection, watching its reflection, watching another reflection... forcing my [Omnipresence] Perception to trace the infinite line of my own gaze back through the reflective feedback loop. And then, I wove a single, quiet image into the center of the infinite reflections: I pictured myself sitting at a tea table, looking directly at Thoth. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, the infinite mirrors in my inner world began to hum with a high-pitched, glass-shattering frequency. The polished quartz surfaces didn't break; instead, the reflections of my face began to desynchronize. In the hundredth mirror, my image stopped moving. In the thousandth reflection down the line, my dark reflection dissolved entirely, replaced by a towering, shadowy figure wrapped in ancient parchment robes, wearing a silver ibis mask that glowed with starlight.

The infinite reflective feedback loop had opened a doorway through causality. Deep within the thousandth mirror, the masked figure leaned forward over an ancient desk covered in floating, gold-bound scrolls. He looked directly at my reflection through the glass, his glowing silver eyes narrowing behind his ibis mask. From deep within the infinite reflections of the mirrors, a dry, ancient voice echoed softly across my soul-realm, sounding like dry parchment rustling in the wind.

"Persistent... and much too stubborn."