"Multiple names, multiple faces, many identities. Perfect. Nothing better than a farce with many passports."
He spoke it inwardly, a monologue cast against the fire. His eyes fixed on the corpse of Manis, body curling in on itself as the flames stripped away what remained.
"At least the trash recycles itself," he muttered, granting the blaze a grim respect—it would bury the Listener with less effort than soil.
Plans and probabilities unfurled. By the rhythm of the hours, the real world must already be nearing 10H in the morning. He did not care. What waited there was nothing. "Not a citizen, not a worker, not honest, not honorable. A recluse. An author. A game-designer. Imagine thinking that even counts as human." He smirked dryly. The thought only rooted him deeper into the test. There was no reason to log out.
Ledger checked, progress weighed. He had climbed further than expected.
[Attributes Applied]
+1 INT, +1 WIS, +1 STR, +1 PER
Emperor - Level 12
INT 38 · WIS 33 · STR 24 · PER 17 · DEX 4 · CON 8 · STA 6 · WIL 9 · CHA 1 · PRV 4
HP: 250
IP: 321
Breath: 94
Justice Points: 136
Skill Points: 1 (held)
Armor Total: 323
"Decent. Reasonable. Almost veteran." He thought the words without pride, only measure. Always sifting himself through the lower mesh: there are always addicts, always experts, always those who have no life but the game.
The cave of Manis was his now. He sat where the Listener had sat, fire still gnawing at ash, and finished the last of the faun's meat. One stage closed.
"Level 12."
The ring gleamed faint in the low light. Apprentice's Ring. Rare. He slid it on, letting his fingers brush its surface, testing weight, texture, promise. He turned it over and over, appreciating the quiet authority it carried.
[Equipped: Apprentice's Ring — Rare — Lv.10]
"One point each step. The climb doubles itself. Close paths, far paths—the ring cuts distance on both."
He pressed it to his palm, holding it as though to feel its truth.
"The way forward must be drawn."
He searched the hollow with precision, every alcove, every recess. Beyond the esoteric paraphernalia—bowls, candles, chalks in white and black—the cave yielded nothing of substance. Empty stone dressed in theatre.
But on the warped table, amid the clutter, lay a scatter of papers. Most were scribbles, crooked diagrams, words dissolving into half-phrases. One read like a diary turned rancid, a fixation on killing Aldric, a priest's rivalry twisted into ink. Nameless skimmed, then stilled.
A letter. Its words were clearer, colder: a convocation at the Circle of the Penumbra, set for the end of autumn. Close at hand.
"Culum is sending a message," Nameless thought, iron folding into his voice. "Autumn is the one season that dies louder than the rest. A convocation held at the summit of decay."
He let the thought linger, then pressed the paper flat, ledgering it into memory. The Penumbra had been no more than scaffolding, a rung on the climb. But rungs serve until higher ground is reached. He turned his eyes back to the fire. Manis was gone, ash and smoke where once he strutted, glory dissipated like wind.
"Well then. Someone must be Manis."
On the floor lay the brooch—black and white, cut with care, inscribed with a name. Manis. The mark of a Listener. Nameless took it in hand, turned it once, then dropped it into his inventory.
"Time to be a Listener."
The night he spent within the cave, its silence bent around him. By dawn he was already on his feet. At the threshold he inverted the robe, shifting the purple back into common black. The brooch unequipped, every outward sign of Penumbra cast aside. He smirked faintly.
"The inner engulfs the outer, the greater the lesser." He mocked their precepts aloud, voice dry as cinder.
The third secret waited. And what better stage to seize it than an annual convocation. Culum—overpowered, yes, but no tyrant to his faithful. No danger to one who bowed when watched. Power of that scale did not need to swat the insects that bowed beneath it.
And Manis—vain as he had been—would not be remembered. Not enough to matter. Not enough to distinguish faces if Nameless walked into the convocation wearing his title. A Listener stationed at the far fringe of Montanum: what attention could that draw?
Manis's pride had placed him here in this region of Montanum, a province no one else would covet. An outpost of bone and ash, a pile of carrion argued over by acolytes. It was clear why Manis had been sent here. No one else desired this territory. Inhospitable, barren, almost a punishment. The disciples squabbled over bones as if they were crowns. That was their prize: a heap of carrion.
"That was his crown—fighting for a graveyard. Mediocrity rewarded with obscurity."
Mediocrity had been his only credential. He had not been chosen for talent, but for his lack of it. That was his promotion: obscurity dressed as authority.
Nameless adjusted his cloak. For him, beginning at the bottom was not disgrace. It was opportunity.
"The last place is the place of maturity. The last place is the place of the wise. For fools, exile. For the wise, opportunity."
Nameless stepped out from the cave, cloak dark, the fire behind him guttering into ash. The air tasted of stone and smoke, but the horizon stretched clean. He walked, steady, as though each footfall had already been written.
His mind turned to the ledger of distance. The Circle of the Penumbra—if Culum had not moved it—still stood at the farthest western edge of Montanum. West of west. The last boundary before nothing.
Montanum was not a map's sketch, not a toy province. It sprawled with the breadth of nations—vales, forests, mountains, rivers, each as wide as their real analogues. To cross it on foot was not travel but ordeal. A march that measured weeks, not hours.
"Like the real world, the virtual one loses nothing in extension. If anything, it feels larger… I wrote it this way myself. Countries vast as countries, distances brutal as their models. Virtual as vast as real —Montanum alone stretches the same as Bulgaria."
He paused on the slope, gaze settling over the land as if weighing it in bulk. "A petit promenade, yes. Only the length of a whole country. Only weeks upon weeks with nothing but dirt and silence to escort me."
The irony hung, cold as stone. He adjusted the strap of his staff, the ring pressing faint against his hand, then stepped forward again.
The world did not shrink. It unfolded.
He lowered his gaze to the blade. It had drunk well—more than enough. The steel was no longer what it had been when first drawn from dead hands. It had fed on occult blood, thick and black, blood drawn from the deepest veins of corruption. He was surprised that he had received an extra point in STR, and now he knew why.
[Blessed Shortsword — Steel — Lvl 7]
+1 STR
Once it had been level 5. Now, silent and without fanfare, it had risen—each kill dragging power into its edge, each death etched into its weight. A minor bonus for now, but proof that the ledger of blood had begun to compound.
He let the point rest toward the soil, eyes tracing its sheen before lifting back to the path.
"Only the beginning," he thought, iron curling in the words.
His stride resumed, steady, the horizon pale with distance. He smirked faintly, whispering to himself:
"The same road as Domine. Long, long beyond measure."
Dawn stretched slow across the land, a light that did not soften but exposed. The soil was dark, heavy, streaked with stone. Hills rolled in long shadows, neither gentle nor grand, but worn—scarred like an old back under gray cloth.
The fields had once been tilled; traces lingered, furrows ghosted beneath weeds, low walls collapsed into lines of rubble. Charred beams jutted from the ground, blackened ribs of villages long dead. A broken cart lay half-swallowed by mud, its wheel propped like an empty eye. Civilization clung here only as afterimage, thin and brittle.
The air itself was undecided. Summer still pressed, warm and stubborn, clinging like sweat. But autumn had entered the contest—its chill whispered along the low river valleys, its fog hovered at the edge of woods, its scent carried in the leaves just beginning to curl. Summer flared, desperate, but its defeat was already sealed. The victory was determined before the struggle began. Inevitability breathed in every gust.
The forests thickened eastward, pines rising dark, birches shedding pale bark in strips like flayed parchment. The undergrowth tangled with thorn, vines curling around forgotten stones. Beyond, the land dipped toward plains wide and hollow, where wind moved like a restless hand across tall grass.
Nameless paused, mask turned toward the horizon. The land ahead was no longer soft with hedgerows and damp meadows, where oaks scattered their shade across gentle slopes. Here the lines grew sharper: ridges abrupt, fields stone-laden, forests dense with fir and birch, their bark peeling in pale ribbons. Valleys held fog like breath not yet released, and the air tasted of iron and soil.
The season sharpened the difference. In the west, autumn bled in quietly, woven through vineyards and orchards, a patient fading. Here it declared itself early, harsh and undeniable—leaves already curling bronze, grasses crisping under cold winds, rivers carrying the first scent of decay. Summer lingered, hot and stubborn, but its strength was brittle; the balance had shifted, and the outcome was already written.
He walked on, boots pressing the soil that shifted from dust to stone, from stone to the brittle crack of leaves already dead before their time. The air smelled of smoke and damp iron, the breath of a land that never healed, only endured.
Each step carried the ledger forward. The cave was behind him, its ash dispersed; the Listener was gone, his name dissolved into dust. Ahead lay distance without measure, weeks folded into weeks, until the season itself would break and the circle convene at the summit of autumn's death.
Nameless touched the ring viciously, felt the brooch hidden deep in inventory, and let the thought settle cold: "The third secret waits. The convocation will open its mouth, and I will step inside it—not as a novice, not as prey, but as Listener."
He did not look back. The road west was long, long enough to kill the careless. He smirked faint, adjusting the blade at his side.
"A march across bones, toward a circle that feeds on its own shadow. So be it."
And with that, he advanced, the horizon already dim with autumn's certainty.