Alex frowned, with the gears in his mind turning.

    A wound.

    Not a door, not a gate, not a portal. A wound.

    He was sure the choice of wording wasn''t poetic embellishment – it was specific, chosen deliberately. He was sure of it. Whoever had written this verse hadn''t been speaking metaphorically.

    If it were a metaphor, the System wouldn''t have tranted it so literally. The System, for all its strange trantions and sometimes symbolic interpretations, always prioritised functional uracy.

    So if it said wound, it meant wound.

    So was he right? What had been wounded?

    A realm?

    A ne of existence?

    Or reality itself?

    ''Is this what it''s referring to? A fracture?''

    Alex cluenched his fists, knuckles turning pale beneath his skin.

    Reluun, who had gone back to nibbling on his dried fruit, looked up again and raised an eyebrow.

    "So what''s the verdict, professor brainiac? Any more riddles to fry your neurons?"

    Alex didn''t respond immediately.

    Instead, he stood up, parchment still in hand, and began pacing slowly through the archive.

    His mind raced as if his thoughts were a whirlpool.

    Just like the water rushing into a whirlpool, the closer he got to the answer, the faster and more chaotic his thoughts were.

    A wound that could be sealed.

    Forget the wound part, it was the sealed aspect that troubled Alex.

    If it was sealed, then the likelihood of Alex being able to find his way in was nil.

    If it was a ce that could seal even gods, then he, a mere B tier, was most definitely not going to be able to do anything about it.

    ''Or wait… What if I already have the key to unsealing it?''

    A neuron activation went off in Alex''s mind.

    He subconsciously looked down at Virtue''s Edge.

    Mikhail''s greatest creation.

    His unfinished piece of work.

    If anything, this had to be the key.

    But, even if he somehow impossibly did manage to unseal it, what about the gods contained inside??

    Wouldn''t they be unleashed? Possibly kill him just for being there?

    Yeah, he didn''t like the idea of that.

    However, again, the wording was weird, making Alex doubt himself once again.

    It said the wound had been sealed… but it didn''t say on which side.

    It could actually have been Mikhail that had been sealed inside, rather than some ''gods''.

    In fact, now that he thought about it this way, Alex felt it more likely.

    Mikhail had just up and mysteriously disappeared one day.

    Nobody had ever seen or heard from him again.

    However, there were some faint whispers of the ''gods'' still spreading around here and there, though even they were pushed to obscurity.

    But this was all he needed to hear.

    The gods were still out there, and Mikhail had been sealed… somewhere.

    Even still, Alex was reading a trantion by the System. Even though it had been incredibly thorough and never failed him before in this aspect, he wasn''t so trusting of it to y by the rules anymore.

    The trantion could be misleading him in thepletely wrong direction for all he knew.

    Unfortunately, he just didn''t have the time avable topletely learn a newnguage from scratch – especially one that had been pushed into obscurity, with very few even understanding it anymore.

    ''Why?''

    ''Why would Mikhail do this?''

    Reluun shifted uneasily as the silence dragged. "You''re doing that face again."

    Alex stopped pacing. "What face?"

    "The one where it looks like your brain is about to catch fire."

    The Sri exined, leaning back with his arms behind his head.

    "So? What''s the deal with thest line?"

    Alex sighed a deep and slow exhtion.

    "If the poem is literal, then Mikhail''s disappearance is likely linked to this case. And it seemed… like he was hiding."

    Reluun blinked.

    "Hiding from what?"

    ''The Gods, or… the System.'' Alex thought internally, but didn''t answer aloud.

    He''d rather keep Reluun out of matters on a scale like this.

    His question remained unanswered, while Alex looked down at the parchment again.

    "I don''t know." He lied.

    Then, quieter: "But he made sure no one could follow him."

    ***

    Over the next few hours, Alex withdrew himself again, setting the parchment aside as it had now been fullymitted to memory.

    Ideally, he''d like to take it with him, but the Sri wouldn''t allow the removal of any material from the archive, so that was off the table.

    Even though the System had tranted the text, he wanted to be doubly sure.

    He found and gathered all parchments written in that same, aged dialect and started reading them through one by one.

    He wanted to be sure before he started following this new lead – he didn''t want to be sent on a wild goose chase again for whoever knew how long.

    He''d cross reference anything that seemed even remotely rted to Mikhail.

    And as the results filtered in, he felt a chill crawl down his spine.

    The term ''Wound'' was repeated in other Pre-Primordial Expanse texts too – rarely, but this fresh outlook brought up something he had failed to consider.

    How did the author behind the parchment know about Fractures before they even knew about the Primordial Expanse itself?

    Alex had already asked Reluun, but he assured him that this piece of parchment was written before any Sri civilisation hade into contact with the Primordial Expanse, so that ruled out any possibility that the author might have been from an older Sri civilisation that had been in contact.

    This only dug the mystery behind its origins even deeper, but there were no further leads to be found in that direction.

    More importantly, was that every reference to these ''wounds'' was the recurring notion that such wounds were not natural.

    They were made.

    Torn open.

    By force.

    However, some more useful information did grace Alex''s mind through his cross referencing.

    The phrase ''Breaking the circle'' from the third line seemed to tie directly into this.

    In many of the old myth type poems, the circle represented wholeness, reality, the continuity of the world.

    To break it was to disrupt the natural order, to ''wound'' reality. This solidified the idea of the wound being a fracture in Alex''s mind.

    And the reaction to such wounding?

    The gods screamed.

    Or, god. Singur.