By the evening, Ashen was no longer laughing.
He checked the mark with Patient Eye for the tenth time and did the math in his head, and the answer was miserable. The outermost line of the sigil had thinned by maybe a hair's width. At this rate, he would finish around the time his grandchildren had grandchildren.
And his mana was already running low.
'Not good. Not good at all. If I keep going like this, Father's going to smash it in front of me and make me watch.'
He lay there staring at the ceiling, feeling the warm weight of the core on his chest and the endless stream of mana pouring off it into the air.
Endless.
Ashen blinked.
Then he sat up so fast that the brother sleeping next to him jerked awake and nearly drew his blade.
'I'm an idiot. The answer's been sitting on my chest this whole time.'
The core was producing mana from nothing, day and night, forever. And all of it was simply leaking away into the hall, wasted.
Any other mana source out here would have been useless for this. The surface was drowning in mana, but every drop of it was corrupted. The corruption came from countless incompatible concepts forced together inside a single vessel, clashing, grinding against one another and twisting the mana that carried them until it became poison.
Breathing it was like swallowing a small war. That was why everyone had to filter it every waking moment, and why the brothers had needed two barriers just to let them sleep.
But the mechanical force could not realize concepts.
Whatever the core produced carried no concept at all. It was mana in its plainest, purest form, as clean as fresh water.
'Thank you, scraps of metal. Truly. From the bottom of my heart.'
Ashen turned Living Temper around.
Instead of pushing his own mana into the core, he used the skill as a medium. He caught the mana flowing out of the core, ran it through the weave of Living Temper, and fed it right back inside, toward the scarred grain around the mark. The core's own endless output became the nourishment for its own repair. All Ashen had to do was hold the channel open and guide it.
And needless to say, the mana output needed to power thousands of mechanical forces and give birth to thousands more was nothing compared to what little old him could produce.
Through Patient Eye, he watched the edges of the sigil begin to dissolve. It was still slow, but now it was the slow of a candle burning down, where before it had been the slow of a mountain wearing away. By the time the brothers began settling down for the night, the first line of the brand had faded completely.
Ashen grinned up at the ceiling.
'At this pace… I'll make it before we turn back. hopefully…'
He lay there a while longer, listening to the ticking of the rings, and the grin slowly faded.
The mechanical force could not realize concepts. He had been grateful for it twice now. The first time, Bram's Red Famine had devoured them from within because they never noticed what it carried. The second time was now, with this clean mana flowing through his fingers.
'But maybe it's not that they can't understand concepts…'
He thought of the Penitents and the Copyists and the womb.
'Maybe the ones we fought were simply too low in whatever hierarchy they have to understand them.'
If the lowest of them could copy a spell after a single glance, then what would something higher up be able to copy?
A mechanical force that could take concepts as easily as its lessers took spells. That could steal a man's Sin from him and turn it back on him.
'That… would be a real nightmare, if it really existed…'
He wanted to brush it off as his imagination getting out of hand, and he couldn't.
The proof was sitting on his chest.
The mark carried a concept. Whatever the Unborn Heir was, it had at least some grasp of them.
Ashen held the core a little tighter.
'Forget it. Better get some sleep.'
It wasn't like this was his first run-in with Outer Gods.
'I'm the one who killed three of them. Who should be scared of whom is still up in the air.'
◉◉◉
After a full day of rest inside the ruins, the expedition resumed its march.
They climbed back up the spiral stairway, out through the corpse of the womb and across the rusted city, where red dust still drifted in the air and crunched under their boots. The carriages they had left behind the ridge with a handful of guards were waiting where they had been left, and the column formed up again as if nothing had happened.
The corruption was waiting for them too.
The moment they stepped out from the barriers, it pressed against Ashen's skin. Above them, the black sky hung where it always hung, and the corruption circle glared down with its thin crimson ring.
Ashen sighed and tightened his grip on Trinity Harmony.
'Missed you too.'
At least now he had something to keep his mind busy. The core sat in a pouch at his waist, wrapped in Resting Forge, and every time the column stopped for a break, he lay down flat on one of the carriages and closed his eyes. After the third time, his brothers stopped making jokes about it. After the fifth, a few of them started copying him, and Adam could only shake his head helplessly at the sight.
'Whenever he goes, the mood gets lighter with just his presence. My son's charisma is truly spectacular.'
But just from his inner thoughts, it could clearly be seen that the old man wasn't as mad at his son as he made himself out to be.
…
They marched for two more days across the same blackened land. Craters, ash and rubble, and the same dead trees standing like corpses.
Then, on the morning of the third day, something green appeared on the horizon.
At first, Ashen thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. After days of black and grey and dull crimson, the color looked almost painfully bright, like a smear of paint on a burnt canvas.
It grew as they approached. It became a line, then a wall, and then it rose above them, a forest so vast that its edges vanished into the dark on either side.
Ashen slowed down without meaning to.
There was light inside it.
With no sun in the sky, the forest made its own. The leaves glowed faintly from within, pale green and soft blue, and clusters of fruit hung from the branches like lanterns. Moss covered the trunks and the roots, and it shimmered whenever someone stepped near it. The whole forest breathed with a soft, living glow, and against the black sky above, it looked like a lamp left burning in an empty house.
And the moment they stepped beneath the canopy, Ashen nearly stumbled.
The pressure eased.
He could still feel the corruption, but it had thinned, as if the forest itself were drinking it in and breathing something cleaner back out. For the first time since leaving home, he could hold Trinity Harmony loosely without the poison creeping into his lungs.
Then he heard something unbelievable.
A soft chirp somewhere above him. A rustle in the undergrowth. The thin drone of an insect passing his ear.
'Wait… actual, living, moving things…?'
After days of a world where nothing crawled or flew or sang, the sound of a single insect was enough to make him doubt his mind.
"Close your mouth," Lucan said, walking past him. "Something will fly into it."
"..."
◉
His brothers moved through the forest like men walking through a market they knew by heart. They knew which fruits to pick and which to leave alone, which roots were worth digging up and which mushrooms would kill a man in three breaths. Every few steps, someone stopped to pluck something and toss it into a sack.
And Ashen, who had spent years tending a farm underground, was quietly losing his mind.
'That's a Bloodvein lily. Those are supposed to be extinct. That vine over there has at least three rings of mana in its stem. Is that a tree or a building?!'
He wanted to touch everything. He wanted to dig everything up and bring it home and plant it in neat little rows. He had to physically stop himself from wandering off the path twice, and the second time, Orin had to grab him by the collar.
It was a few hours into the forest when the whole column suddenly stopped.
Lucan raised a fist at the front, and every warrior went still. Even their breathing seemed to stop.
Ashen looked around in confusion until Orin silently pointed upward.
Between two trees, high above the path, hung a web.
It was enormous, wider than the trees were tall, and it glimmered faintly silver in the glow of the forest. And in its center sat a spider the size of a dinner plate, pale as frost, its long thin legs folded against its body.
"A Hushweaver," Orin breathed, barely loud enough to hear. "Don't move. Don't even push your mana."
"Is it dangerous?"
"To us? No. To our chances of catching it? Hehe… Extremely."
Ashen didn't understand the excitement until Orin explained in a whisper.
The silk of a Hushweaver was one of the most precious materials a warrior could ask for. To the touch, it felt like cool water running through the fingers, so light that a whole cloak of it weighed less than a glove. A single strand could hold the weight of a grown man without snapping, and blades slid off it as if it were oiled. It did not fray in the corruption of the surface, not even after years.
But its true value was in how it carried mana. A charm stitched with Hushweaver silk lost almost nothing between the hand that powered it and the effect it produced. Armor lined with it could channel a warrior's mana across his whole body in an instant.
"Your sisters would cry if we brought home a living one," Orin whispered. "A living one means silk every season."
Ashen thought of the charms his sisters had stuffed under his armor and the way they had argued over every stitch.
'Okay. We're catching this spider.'
The problem was that nobody ever caught one.
Hushweavers felt everything. From tremors that passed through their webs to even shifts in the mana around them across an absurd distance. The slightest disturbance and they fled, and once one fled, it never came back to the same nest. Chasing one was pointless. They vanished into the canopy faster than any sense could follow.
"So how do we catch it?" Ashen whispered.
"We don't chase it," Lucan said quietly, appearing beside them. "We scare it."
"...Isn't that like the opposite of catching it?"
"A Hushweaver always runs the same way. It keeps a single thread tied from its web to its burrow, and when it's frightened, it drops down that thread and dives straight into its hole. Every time." Lucan's eyes were fixed on the pale spider. "Find the burrow, put something over the entrance, then scare it. It catches itself."
"Well then… Mr know-it-all, where's the burrow?"
"That's the hard part."
The thread was too thin to see in the forest's glow. The burrow could be anywhere within a hundred paces, hidden under any one of a thousand roots, and if they went searching for it on foot, the spider would feel them coming long before they found it.
Ashen looked at the spider for a while.
Then he raised his hand slightly. "Can I try something? It doesn't push any mana out."
Lucan glanced at Adam. Adam gave a short nod.
Ashen settled down onto the ground, crossed his legs, and let Patient Eye do its work.
He watched the Hushweaver for the better part of an hour. To his brothers, it must have looked like he had dozed off again, and he could feel at least three of them resisting the urge to poke him.
But slowly, the spider revealed itself to him. It was skittish and constantly tense, its legs twitching at every faraway sound. And every single time something startled it, even a little, its body tilted the same way. Toward a gnarled root at the base of the left tree, half buried under shimmering moss.
It was like watching a child glance at the door every time a stranger walked into the room.
Ashen opened his eyes and pointed. "There. Under that root."
What followed was the most nerve-wracking hour of Ashen's life, and nothing even tried to kill him in it.
Lucan sealed his mana down to almost nothing and crept toward the root with a jar lined in soft cloth. He moved so slowly that Ashen honestly couldn't tell whether he was moving at all. He would take a single step, wait, breathe, and take another. Every time the Hushweaver's legs twitched, Lucan froze, and the entire column froze with him.
By the time he finally knelt beside the root and pressed the jar's mouth over the hidden hole, Ashen's legs had gone numb from standing still.
Then Orin, standing far off on the other side of the web, reached out and plucked a single strand at the very edge.
The Hushweaver bolted.
It dropped from the center of its web so fast that it looked like a falling star, sliding down its invisible thread straight toward its burrow.
And straight into the jar.
Lucan slammed the lid shut.
There was a moment of silence. Then furious, frantic scratching came from inside the jar.
The column burst into quiet cheers.
Ashen let out a long breath and looked at the jar, then at his brothers, who were doing their best to celebrate in silence with monkey-like poses, afraid that their cheers might attract beasts but still unable to contain their giddiness.
He let out a light laugh. "So the elaborate trap was 'scare it into a jar.'"
"The elaborate part," Lucan said, wiping the sweat from his forehead, "was spending an hour not breathing."
It turned out… it wasn't Ashen's imagination. The man really had been barely breathing as he made his way down the burrow.