Erevan didn't need strength to track his prey; he needed clarity.
The psychic static he'd felt was a flaw in the universe—a specific mathematical dissonance only he knew how to create. It was the signature of his Dream Diving methodology, a high-risk key designed to unlock the sleeping minds of dead gods. To use it untrained was to invite divine madness, but to Erevan, it was simply a breadcrumb.
He closed his eyes beneath his hood, ignoring the chants of the pilgrims and the stench of sacred blood. He didn't reach for his broken Dream Core; instead, he used the cracked mirror of his mind to reflect the psychic trace.
It led him away from the City of Veins' pulsing center, down into the lower districts where the ossified ribs of the dead god met the mud and grime of the mortal city. Here, the pulse of the divine heart was muffled by layers of illegal infrastructure—shanties built into petrified cartilage, black markets running on tainted god-blood.
The trace intensified, leading him to a narrow alley choked with rusted scrap metal and the thick, sickly-sweet scent of processed Dream Ash.
The source was a small, windowless hut. Light leaked through the cracks in the walls, stained an aggressive, paranoid green. Erevan flattened himself against the cold bone of the alley wall and listened.
Inside, a man was muttering, his voice oscillating between desperate zealotry and terrified confusion. "It's not working… the Ash is pure, the formula is correct! Why won't the dream stabilize?"
Erevan recognized the symptoms immediately. The man was using a butchered version of his initial, rudimentary meditation sequence—a rough draft Erevan had discarded centuries ago. The user was trying to force a mental connection, not understanding that true Dream Diving required submission, not effort.
He waited for the cycle to peak.
The muttering stopped, replaced by a sharp, high-pitched scream that ended abruptly in a gagging sound. A moment of violent psychic backwash hit the alley wall. The air tasted of ozone and burning sanity. The cultist had failed, as expected, and was currently wrestling with a backlash of fragmented divine consciousness.
Erevan pushed the door open.
The hut was small and suffocatingly hot. A single lantern cast the green light over a makeshift altar—a pile of coarse, silver-flecked ash, a few bloodied runes scrawled on the floor, and a man kneeling in a pool of golden ichor.
The cultist—a man with the manic eyes of a failed zealot and the soft hands of a former scribe—was choking on his own tongue. His eyes were rolled back, flickering with images too vast for a mortal mind. He was being force-fed the residual dreams of a cosmic entity.
Erevan walked past the altar, his hood still obscuring his face. He didn't rush. He observed the remnants of the failed ritual. The man had used the correct volume of Dream Ash, but his stabilizing runes were drawn in the wrong alignment. A rookie mistake, but one that required precise, heretical knowledge to even attempt.
"A flawed implementation of the Third Discipline's preparatory mantra," Erevan stated, his voice a dry rasp from misuse. "You used the key to the lock, but you turned it counter-clockwise. You didn't steal power; you invited confusion."
The cultist thrashed weakly, his breath shallow.
Erevan knelt, placing a single bare finger on the man's temple. He didn't need his full Dream Core. He needed a needle, not a hammer. He accessed the fractured point of contact between the man's mind and the divine backlash.
He didn't heal the man; he simply organized the chaos.
The swirling psychic fragments—the stolen essence of a god's fear and confusion—suddenly found a master. Erevan didn't absorb them entirely, merely rerouted them, pulling the chaotic energy into the tiny, cracked mirror of his own Dream Core.
This is what was stolen from me.
A flash of heat—more intense than the marrow-touch in the corpse—seared his spiritual center. It was a paltry amount of energy, perhaps enough to sustain a thought, but it was authority.
The cultist gasped, his eyes focusing for the first time. He stared at the hooded figure—the man who had just saved him from internal annihilation—with a pure, animal terror.
"W-who are you?" the cultist whispered, spitting ichor.
"I am the one you stole from," Erevan replied. He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a near-silent command that carried centuries of authority. "Tell me who taught you the technique. The name of the one who gave you the keys to a dead god's door."
The man hesitated, fear warring with loyalty to his master.
Erevan didn't wait. He laid his palm flat on the man's forehead. He didn't use force, he used logic. He showed the cultist a single, perfect vision: the mathematical probability of his own prolonged, agonizing descent into madness if he kept using the flawed technique.
The man broke instantly. He didn't speak the name, but he provided a location, delivered through a torrent of terrified, broken words: a high-class, forbidden gambling den in the spire of the City of Veins, known only as The Vault of Whispers.
Erevan removed his hand. He left the man shivering, saved but mentally scarred, staring at the empty altar.
The Vault of Whispers. A place where people gambled with commodities more valuable than gold: memories, secrets, and perhaps, stolen techniques. A suitable den for a betrayer.
Erevan stepped back into the alley. His body still felt brittle and weak, but the cracked mirror inside his mind no longer felt so cold. It had absorbed its first ash.
He smiled, a dark, calculating gesture hidden beneath his hood. The arc had begun.