(3rd Person POV)
The Architect laid out the world he had built, piece by piece, drawing directly from the framework Arthur had handed him months ago.
The world, in short, was a complicated one.
It existed in what could broadly be called a "Tribal Age" — though not in the sense of being primitive. The label simply referred to the way its people lived. Bound to tribes. Anchored to one another. Identity carried through community rather than through nations.
The Architect explained why the world had developed that way.
It was vast. Far vaster than the world Arthur had come from. And vastness alone might have been bearable, but this world was also dangerous. The wilderness between tribes was filled with beasts that an ordinary man stood no chance against. Survival demanded numbers. It demanded protection. It demanded that the strong stand at the front of the line.
So the strong were valued above almost everything else. The way a wolf pack centered on its Alpha, every tribe centered on its Chief — a figure powerful enough to keep the rest alive.
That principle held all the way up through the world's evolution. The tribes grew. Some stayed small and barbaric, hunting to live and living to hunt. Others grew clever — learning to trade, to barter, to exchange goods between settlements. Civilizations rose along different lines, but every one of them still carried the bones of the tribal structure underneath.
As tribes grew large enough to field their own armies, their Chiefs evolved with them. A Chief became a Lord. Some Lords grew into Kings. A handful into Emperors.
And alongside that evolution, the tribes had developed a power system of their own — the Way of the Tribal Hunter.
The Architect's tone shifted slightly when he reached this part.
"It began with hunting." He glanced over the cloud sea. "A tribesman would hunt a powerful beast — and sometimes, instead of killing it, he would befriend it. Over time, the tribes discovered something. A bond formed through shared blood. A contract."
He continued. "A tribesman could offer his blood to a powerful beast, and the two would become one. Their fates linked. As the beast grew, the tribesman grew with it. As the tribesman grew, the beast strengthened in turn."
From there, civilization had bloomed in unexpected directions. Tribes developed techniques for raising contracted beasts. Arts for fighting alongside them. Methods to deepen the bond. And eventually, for those who had no beast of their own — or who refused one — the world birthed another path.
The Way of Breathing.
Cultivators who could not befriend a beast could instead cultivate their own bodies and spirits through breath work, drawing strength from within. And from breathing arts came martial arts proper — the Way of the Tiger, the Way of the Serpent, the Way of the Falling Mountain. Each one drawn from the observation of nature itself, refined into something a man could wield with his own two hands.
Together, these paths had given humanity a chance.
Weak, fragile humans, who without these arts would have been nothing but prey, could now stand against beasts that had once been the apex of the food chain. Some of them even surpassed those beasts.
There was a saying in this world, the Architect noted dryly. If you can't beat them, join them. The people of this world had taken that saying literally. They had befriended the things meant to kill them, and grown stronger alongside them.
By now, the strongest tribes had grown to the size of kingdoms. The largest had become full empires. Their Chiefs had evolved into Tribal Kings, their oldest dynasties into Tribal Emperors.
And every one of those titles meant something. A Tribal King was not a man with a crown. A Tribal King was, at minimum, a Supreme Rank cultivator. The Tribal Emperors were Exalted Rank — the very top of the mortal food chain.
Above that sat a single, legendary rank.
Divine.
No one in the world had yet achieved it.
"Even Ressète," the Architect said quietly, "who retained her memories per her agreement with you — even she sits only at the Semi-Divine Rank. She walks the world as its forgotten 'Goddess' figure. Some tribes still tell stories about her. Most have come to treat her as myth."
He let that settle for a moment.
"And the only being in this world whose rank truly exceeds all others — the one acknowledged by no one in it, except Ressète herself — is myself."
Arthur let the words sit in his head, turning them over.
"This is an impressive world, Architect." He gave a slow nod. "You've gone past what I asked for."
Firfel gave a small, almost stunned shake of her head. "Just listening to all of it is too much for my poor brain. So much, all at once. You built this in the few weeks we were gone?"
"Time moved faster in this world than in yours." The Architect's mouth curved. "I expedited it. From inside, hundreds of thousands of years have passed. From outside, only a moment."
He continued. "Even so, the world is still in its early stages. No one has ascended to the Divine Rank yet. I have prepared a Divine Land for those who eventually do — we are standing above it now. The mortal world lies below the Divine Land. The Divine Land lies below us."
He folded his hands.
"I also installed The Oracle into the mortal world. She serves as its quiet guide. And as this is a Matrix construct, an anomaly will inevitably emerge — a One, the variable no system can fully account for. In time, this world will produce its own chosen one."
Arthur nodded slowly. The more he heard, the more the design caught him.
"And I assume you've come down here for a reason," the Architect continued, going straight to it. "You want to harvest the fruits. To take in the laws and enlightenments your humans have developed during their time here."
"That's exactly it." Arthur let out a short laugh. "Space-time, in particular. I've been brushing against those laws lately, and I'm looking for something to push my understanding forward."
"There are clans here that specialize in space-time arts." The Architect inclined his head. "If that is what you seek, you've come to the right place."
He gestured outward.
"Why don't we go down to the mortal world?"
"Sure." Arthur exchanged a look with Firfel. Both of them stepped forward.
The Architect raised a hand, and a soft shimmer passed over Arthur and Firfel. Their clothing changed — refit in the same fitted hide-and-cloth style of the tribes, decorated with woven trim and bone clasps. Tribal markings spread across their arms and along their cheekbones, ritual lines drawn in dark ink.
Then with a thought, the Architect opened a portal.
He gestured to Arthur and Firfel to step through first. They were, after all, his bosses.
Arthur went, Firfel close behind. The Architect followed last, his own brilliance dimming as he passed through, his presence shrinking until it would no longer stand out against the world below.
---
The mortal world did not feel the portal arrive.
It opened quietly somewhere deep within the Great Vast Forest, on the Taren Continent — the second-largest landmass on the world.
Arthur and Firfel stepped through and immediately stopped walking.
The forest stretched around them in every direction. Ancient. Untouched. Trees thick enough to shelter entire villages within their roots. The sun fell in long, slanting columns through a canopy that had not been disturbed in centuries.
But it was not the sight that stopped them.
It was the air.
Something moved in it that felt like mana, but was not mana. A presence woven through every leaf, every breath, every column of light. It carried weight. Mass. It felt real in a way mana never quite had.
"This —" Arthur's brow drew together. He turned his palm upward, and a current of the foreign energy gathered against his skin without effort. "This is..."
"It's stronger than mana." Firfel's voice was hushed. "And it has weight and density. I can feel it pressing against my divine sense. Arthur — this energy is reaching the level of Divine Energy itself!"
The Architect, walking up behind them, looked pleased.
"Ah. You felt it that quickly." His smile widened. "What you're sensing in the air — that's something I drew from Ressète's memories. The energy the ancient deities of the old world cultivated, alongside Divine Energy itself."
He let the pause draw.
"It is called Om."
"Om?" Arthur repeated the word.
"Yes." The Architect's tone settled into something almost reverent. "Om is said to contain the truth of the world. Of the universe. Of the laws beneath the laws. It is the beginning and the end, and the end of the beginning. It is the truth that lies on the far side of the barrier between mortal and divine — the ultimate, sacred energy underlying all worlds."
The breath caught quietly in Arthur's chest.
He had heard fragments of this from Ressète, back during the negotiation in the Unseen World. But she had spoken in generalities — old deities had built their strength without faith, drawing from something internal. She had never named it. She had never given it a shape.
Now the Architect had.
"What you are feeling at the moment is only mortal Om." The Architect lifted his palm into the slanted light, and the energy curled visibly around his fingers like fine smoke. "Weak. Faint. Diffuse. But there are regions in this world where Om has gathered and focused — pure pools of it, dense enough to overwhelm an unprepared cultivator."
He looked at the two of them.
"And the more you cultivate Om, the stronger it becomes against Divine Energy. Past a certain threshold, it begins to exceed Divine Energy entirely. It also amplifies any Divine Energy a cultivator already holds. The two complement each other. Sharpen each other."
Arthur's eyes widened slowly.
Beside him, Firfel had gone very still. She knew, perhaps better than anyone present, what Divine Energy was capable of — the sheer, terrifying weight of it, the shape of its power, the way it could reorder small pieces of reality with a word.
And there was something more than that. Something built underneath it. Something the old deities had known about and chosen to cultivate before they had ever needed to be worshipped.
Arthur drew a slow breath of the forest air, and felt the thread of Om move into his lungs along with it.
His mind was already racing.