Jaune and his father, Nicholas entered the barrier together, and for one brief instant Jaune was convinced that he had stepped into the interior of a star.
The color crimson was not merely painted across the environment but existed as the environment itself. An all-encompassing radiance that bloomed across the world.
Streams of it drifted through the air in immense currents, folding over one another and circulating through the interior of the barrier like rivers suspended in three dimensions, their movements accompanied by a low vibration that Jaune could feel through his entire body.
Every particle seemed saturated with meaning, and every current seemed to contain fragments of concepts that his mind instinctively recoiled from attempting to comprehend. The barrier had been constructed from an authority so profound that the distinction between energy and reality had become almost meaningless.
Jaune's eyes widened as his senses adjusted, and then he realized there was something else in front of them, something so enormous that his mind initially refused to properly categorize it. Roughly a kilometer away, beyond the crimson currents, there was flesh.
Black flesh.
An incomprehensibly vast expanse of it, stretching beyond his field of vision in every direction. It was the flesh of something that had apparently been born on a scale where the word gigantic was meaningless. Ridges of black tissue rose like mountain ranges. Immense layers of muscle and organic matter stretched across the interior of the barrier, disappearing into the crimson haze. Somewhere within that darkness, Jaune could perceive movement, slow and rhythmic, like the contraction and expansion of something alive.
He stared at it for several seconds before the realization finally settled into his mind with an uncomfortable weight.
This was Salem's core.
Calling it her brain would not have been entirely wrong and calling it her heart would not have been entirely wrong either.
Yet, neither words were sufficient on its own, because what Jaune was looking at was something between the two concepts, a vast biological and metaphysical organ that served as the center of Salem's consciousness, power, and existence.
Salem was not human.
None of the Rank 4 entities were anything close to human in the conventional sense. Rank 4 entities occupied an entirely different scale of existence. Their bodies could span celestial objects and their consciousness could permeate enormous regions of reality.
Their power could become indistinguishable from the laws governing the environments around them. The crimson moon beneath Jaune's feet was itself Salem's body, and this place, this impossible interior hidden behind the barrier, represented something closer to her inner mind than any physical organ could adequately describe.
They were standing within the heart of the Sleeper's existence, the place where the source of her infinity resided.
The thought alone sent an instinctive warning through Jaune's body. His father's presence beside him was the only thing that kept the enormity of what they had entered from becoming completely overwhelming.
Nicholas stood silently, staring at the colossal mass of black flesh in the distance, and Jaune noticed something rare in his father's expression.
Even Nicholas Arc looked small.
How could he look larger than life when the environment of a sleeping god seemed to overshadow his very existence.
Jaune shook his head.
In truth, the density in the air was affecting him more than he'd expected. It only seemed to increase the farther his eyes traveled inward into the landscape of the inner barrier. What had appeared red at the edge of the barrier gradually became darker, until the crimson currents began to resemble black rivers of light.
It was so concentrated that its color appeared to collapse beneath its own condensation.
Jaune could feel it pressing against him despite the fact that he and Nicholas technically remained within the time dimension.
The air was so thick that every movement required effort. Every breath felt as though it had to be pulled through a medium vastly denser than air. Jaune's body, enhanced by Rank 2 physicality, could still move through it, but there was a resistance present that did not exist outside the barrier.
More concerning, was the fact that the resistance was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore even while they occupied the temporal dimension. Nicholas had warned him that the barrier might possess dimensional properties beyond ordinary sealing, but witnessing the reality of it was another matter entirely.
The outside of the barrier and the inside were not operating under the same rules.
Outside, the temporal dimension into which they had transferred themselves was separated from the ordinary flow of time. The world had become effectively frozen around them, allowing them to move while the real world remained suspended.
Inside the barrier, however, something had changed. Jaune could feel it—time was moving.
The temporal dimension was being anchored to reality. It was as though an invisible chain had been driven through the fabric of the dimension and fastened directly to the ordinary timestream, forcing any otherwise independent flow of temporal existence to synchronize with reality.
The distinction between the two dimensions still existed, but the difference in their rates had effectively vanished.
Jaune and Nicholas could remain within the time dimension, but they could no longer treat it as a perfect sanctuary from the passage of time. The barrier had forced the dimension into accordance with the reality it enclosed.
A dimensional anchor.
Both Jaune and his father had known that this was the case before entering. Nicholas had foreseen it and both father and son duo had prepared for it.
Yet knowing something was possible and standing inside the result were two very different experiences.
The implication was obvious. If the barrier had not possessed the ability to interact with the concepts of dimensions themselves, then it would never have been capable of keeping Salem sealed.
A prison that could only restrain physical matter would have been laughably inadequate for an entity like the Sleeper. Salem's consciousness, power, and existence were too vast to be confined by something as simple as walls. The barrier had to seal concepts and had to suppress dimensional escape. It had to anchor anything that attempted to circumvent it through unconventional means.
Jaune's gaze shifted toward the enormous black flesh again.
The thought that such an entity could sleep while the entire world trembled around her was almost incomprehensible. The difference between Rank 3 and Rank 4 was not simply another numerical step, but an abyss.
The more Jaune understood about the Life Creator and the Sleeper, the more that abyss seemed to expand.
It was then, that Jaune saw Tyrian.
The Sleepless leader stood within the crimson interior several hundred meters away, though the exact distance was difficult to judge through the rivers of energy looking as if it were distorting the space around him.
His body was battered.
Arcs of runic energy crackled continuously across his flesh, crawling over his limbs and torso like lightning trapped beneath his skin.
Tyrian had paid an enormous price to get through the barrier. Jaune knew what the man had sacrificed because his father had explained the plan beforehand. Tyrian had needed to condense his entire domain, expend an enormous portion of his runic reserves, and cripple his own power, all to create an opening barely large enough for a person to slip through.
The fact that he was still standing was itself a testament to the absurdity of Tyrian's strength. But this was not the end of his sacrifices.
Tyrian still needed to reach the Supreme Runes embedded within the barrier, and doing so would require him to surrender even more of himself. He had crossed the first threshold but the final hurdle had yet to begin.
Tyrian took a step forward, then stopped.
His head turned and Jaune's spine jolted.
A sensation washed over him, liquid and cold, brushing across his body. It felt almost like stepping into water, except there was no water. Something intangible slid across his form and continued onward, passing through him without resistance.
Jaune immediately recognized it for what it was.
A domain.
Tyrian's domain had expanded through the barrier, spreading across the space around him. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been enough for Tyrian to detect them.
A Rank 3's domain allowed its user to perceive changes within the territory they claimed. Yet Jaune felt the sensation pass over him without consequence.
Null was working.
The domain could not recognize him as something that its phenomena were permitted to affect. The energy simply went through him, unable to establish the connection necessary to perceive him.
His father, however, was different.
The liquid sensation passed across Jaune and then seemed to collect around his father, pressing against him, probing him, searching for something that it could recognize. Jaune's eyes widened as the realization struck him. Tyrian could not sense him because of Null but his father had no such protection.
Truth be told, a Rank 3 should not have even been capable of detecting them. They were still technically within another dimension.
Yet Tyrian was not a normal Rank 3.
Salem's will existed within him and his Master Runes had been modified by the presence of the Sleeper. Now the temporal dimension itself had been anchored to reality by the barrier. Perhaps it was the combination of those factors that allowed Tyrian's domain to bridge the distinction between dimensions enough to recognize Nicholas's presence.
Whatever the reason, the result was the same. Tyrian knew someone was there. His eyes moved slowly through the crimson space.
He could not see them but Jaune held his breath anyway. Tyrian's head tilted slightly, his expression almost curious. Then a smile began to form.
"I can sense you..."
The voice seemed to crawl through the crimson air.
Jaune froze.
For the first time since entering the barrier, Jaune felt something approaching genuine fear despite the protection of Null. He had heard his father describe Tyrian's voice before, but descriptions were inadequate.
Hearing it directly was fundamentally different.
The man's voice carried a strange resonance, as though two people were speaking through the same throat. One voice belonged to Tyrian himself, sharp and manic, carrying the confidence of a man who believed he had already won.
The other was older.
Ancient, even.
It was a woman's voice layered beneath his own, great and distant, yet somehow growing closer with every syllable. It seemed to slither through the air like a serpent crawling through grass. Jaune's skin prickled.
"Nicholas...?"
The name emerged from Tyrian's mouth, but the second voice beneath it made the word sound almost like an accusation whispered from the depths of history.
Tyrian's smile widened.
"I see... so you weren't content with my vision of the end, now were you?"
Jaune's eyes remained fixed on him.
'So that's Salem. The voice of the Sleeper.'
Jaune had felt Salem's presence before and had even received the terrifying boon of being able to read the runic script that existed beyond ordinary understanding.
But he had never heard her speak.
There was something deeply unsettling about finally hearing the voice behind the nightmare. It was not loud for it did not need to be.
Instead, the voice carried the weight of history, so long, that mortal concepts of age had become meaningless. A voice that had been waiting beneath the world for an eternity, patiently dreaming while civilizations rose and died above it.
"Among all of you," Tyrian continued, the woman's voice moving beneath his own like a second current, "I figured either Hazel or our lovely Lion would be the one to..."
His head turned slightly, his eyes narrowing.
"But it was you... my closest confidant."
Tyrian's voice rose.
"My Grand Strategist!"
The words echoed through the barrier, and the crimson currents around him seemed to tremble.
"My Dear Nicholas Arc!"
For an instant Jaune could feel the sheer weight of Salem's presence behind those words. Tyrian's body shook as arcs of energy continued crawling across his flesh, but his expression was almost ecstatic. He had found the one person he believed could threaten the plan, and yet even then there was no true fear in his eyes. There was only the conviction that victory was already inevitable.
His father did not answer him, he simply looked toward Jaune and shouted.
"Run!"
Jaune moved immediately.
Father and son dashed toward the right, their bodies forcing themselves through the dense crimson atmosphere. Every movement produced resistance, but their temporal state gave them an advantage. The energy pushed against them, yet they could move through it far more easily than Tyrian could.
Tyrian did not pursue which was somehow worse, but Jaune understood why he couldn't.
Jaune glanced back.
The Sleepless leader remained exactly where he had been, standing amid the crimson currents, arcs of runic energy crackling across his battered form. His eyes remained fixed upon the place where Jaune and Nicholas had disappeared, even though he could not see them.
Then Tyrian laughed and the sound followed them through the crimson darkness.
"You can do nothing to stop it!"
Jaune forced himself to look away. He could not afford to listen. Knowledge was ahead. The plan depended upon reaching it, before Tyrian could claim it. If Tyrian acquired the rune before Jaune, then everything changed.
Jaune wouldn't be able to reach Rank 3 and fight Tyrian. Salem's mind would descend into Tyrian's body and the Sleeper would awaken.
Jaune and Nicholas accelerated.
The barrier itself was essentially spherical, an enormous prison surrounding Salem's core. They had entered through the southeastern region which placed their current position in the southeast.
Knowledge was positioned on the eastern section of the barrier and Supreme Rune of Destruction was positioned south. The two Supreme Runes were separated intentionally, forcing anyone attempting to acquire them to traverse a considerable distance.
Tyrian had entered from the same general region, but he was now moving in the opposite direction. He would first head for the Supreme Rune of Destruction, and then return toward Knowledge.
That gave Jaune and Nicholas a narrow advantage of time.
But narrow was enough.
The density of runic energy worked against them, yet it worked against Tyrian even more severely. Tyrian had already spent essentially all of his Aura creating the opening through the barrier but the energy surrounding them was so dense that it behaved almost like solid matter.
Moving through it would be like swimming through concrete.
Awakened bodies could overcome the resistance, but it was exhausting. Tyrian had to rely on his physical body alone. Whatever remained of his Aura was insufficient to simply blast a path through the energy without further compromising himself. The sacrifice he had made to enter the barrier was already beginning to work against him.
Jaune and Nicholas, meanwhile, were technically still within the time dimension.
That distinction mattered.
The dimensional anchorage forced their temporal state to obey the flow of reality, but it did not completely erase the advantages of their position. The runic energy's resistance affected them, but not nearly as severely as it affected Tyrian.
They could move faster and could conserve more of their strength. And most importantly, they could reach Knowledge before Tyrian finished claiming Destruction.
Jaune pushed harder though his his attention was gradually moving towards the colossal mass of black flesh.
The entire continental mass contracted, and a vibration rolled outward through the barrier. Crimson energy surged from it in enormous waves, spreading across the interior like blood pumped through impossible veins. Another contraction followed and out came another wave.
Each beat sent an ocean of runic energy through the surrounding space.
An infinite generator.
That was the only comparison Jaune's mind could produce.
The source of Salem's power was not merely sitting there dormant. It was continuously generating an incomprehensible quantity of energy even while sealed. The barrier suppressed it, contained it, forced it into eternal slumber, but it could not make the entity cease existing. Salem remained alive.
And they were running directly toward her.
Jaune's father said nothing as they continued forward. He didn't need to as both of them understood the stakes.
Eventually the chaotic crimson currents began changing. The energy ahead became increasingly concentrated, bending inward toward a single point. Jaune could see the currents twisting into enormous spirals, all of them flowing toward something in the distance. The closer they came, the more obvious the structure became.
A hurricane made entirely from runic energy.
The vortex stretched across kilometers, rotating around a central point where the density of energy was so immense that Jaune could barely look at it directly. Every current in the surrounding atmosphere was being drawn toward that center. The energy twisted and spiraled inward, creating an enormous funnel of crimson-black light. It was as though the entire interior of the barrier was being pulled toward one singular concept.
Jaune knew immediately what it was.
Knowledge.
They had found it.
The Supreme Rune hung within the center of the vortex, suspended in the air. Its shape was strange, resembling a crown, though the comparison was inadequate. It radiated authority rather than light, and the runic script carved across its surface was unmistakable. Jaune could read it.
Knowledge.
The moment his eyes settled upon it, something changed inside his mind.
Ideas began appearing.
Not complete thoughts or information in the conventional sense. But rather, possibilities. Connections and patterns.
Jaune's mind suddenly began recognizing relationships between runes that he had never consciously considered before.
He could feel the underlying principles of rune synchronicity brushing against his consciousness. Specifically rune synchronicity involving runic energy he had once previously stolen. His understanding of previously plundered runes began shifting as tiny fragments of comprehension surfaced within his mind.
It was not yet the full might of the Supreme Rune's power but merely its ambient influence. And even that was enough to inspire ideas that would have taken years to develop through ordinary experimentation.
Jaune slowed for half a second.
His father's gaze caught his eye yet neither needed to speak.
Nicholas nodded.
It was time.
Jaune's body tensed.
The hurricane of Supreme energy roared around him, yet he did not hesitate. He pushed forward, entering the vortex.
The sheer density was monstrous. Every current contained enough power to annihilate a human body.
But Jaune was not ordinary.
Null answered and as the crimson energy attempted to impose itself upon him, and Null denied it.
Jaune couldn't dally.
His aura would only last for so long.
His father remained behind him, watching carefully as Jaune approached the center. Nicholas didn't know what would happen next. He had seen countless possibilities through Foresight, but none of those visions could completely capture what it meant for a human being to touch a Supreme Rune. All he could do was hope that Jaune's Null rune was strong enough to overcome it's torrential flood.
Jaune was about to do exactly what everyone else had considered impossible. He reached the center and the crown-shaped Supreme Rune hovered before him. For a moment, the entire world seemed silent.
Even Salem's colossal heartbeat felt distant.
Jaune's fingers outstretched to touch the surface of Knowledge. The instant contact was made, the universe inside his mind exploded open.