The air beyond the stone gate was thin, biting cold, and tasted faintly of rusted iron and old stardust.
Kael stumbled forward.
The world around him had changed.
He no longer stood atop the tower. There was no sky above him — only a swirling dome of shifting constellations that pulsed like breathing embers. Beneath his feet lay obsidian stone, veined with glowing threads of silver mana. The structure he stood in now… it was ancient. And massive.
A coliseum, circular and hollowed by time, yet untouched by decay.
At its center stood a throne of bone-white crystal, cracked but not broken — the kind of relic that whispered to the soul. Faint voices crawled along the walls, not spoken but remembered, echoing from when the stars still bled light.
Kael's footsteps echoed eerily. There was no breeze, no life. Just… presence.
He approached the throne.
And something stirred.
From the shadows behind the throne, a massive hand emerged — but not flesh and bone.
It was a husk, a desiccated body still wrapped in armor made of living sigils. The being sat slouched behind the throne, as if watching silently through eternity. Kael didn't recognize it, yet his core pulsed as though it did.
And then, he saw it.
A seal on the corpse's chest, shaped like an interlocking spiral of three glyphs: mind, body, and core — the same triad Kael had barely begun to forge.
"A Tier 10…?" Kael whispered.
The glyphs responded with a faint flicker of mana, and for the briefest second — the corpse twitched.
Kael stepped back instinctively, but the being did not rise. It remained still, yet something had changed. The throne was no longer empty.
Kael was now within it.
A gust of memory hit him. But it wasn't his.
Flashes tore through his mind — planets collapsing, worlds born from the breath of one, figures with thousands of overlapping bodies, moving like divine machinery. A thousand eyes. A million voices.
And then — silence.
"To become the last, you must carry all that came before."
The voice again — not his father's. Not The Watcher's.
But his own, older, colder.
Kael gasped and looked down
His own hand had reached out — and rested on the throne.
He wasn't sitting in it…
He was being accepted by it.
A glyph appeared in the air, burning itself into Kael's mind. A wordless command:
"Build the second."
His next body.
His next Tier.
But Kael wasn't ready.
He backed away. The moment ended. The light receded.
The glyph faded, but remained etched inside his core.
He turned to leave — but not before looking back at the slumped figure behind the throne.
Was that what he would become?
Was that what all Transcendents ended up as — forgotten echoes in a ruin no one visited?
"No…" he said softly. "I'll be different."
Behind him, the corpse's lips cracked open just enough to whisper, in a voice that wasn't dust:
"That's what we all said."