Unlike the fancy evolution of my Path of the Newborn Star, which was now Path of Burning Starlight, my Acolyte Path didn’t undergo anything as extravagant. No world turning into space, no distant stars blinking at me from the walls and ceilings.

Instead, I just got the eerie sensation that I was being watched by a ton of eyes from somewhere I could never even hope to reach.

The sensation lasted for most of the rest of the day up until I went to bed. There were a lot of things I wanted to and probably should have done, but an exhaustion that was almost bone-deep at this point was tugging severely on all of me. So it was that I found myself heading to bed, lying down and just trying to let everything course through me.

Naturally, the Weave didn’t care about my current emotional state and just showed a wholly unsurprising blue screen.

[ Path Evolution

Your Path of the Acolyte has finished evolving.

New Path: Path of the Archon Apostle [Silver I] ]

That also ended the being-watched sensation I had been experiencing all that time. A part of me was once again excited, but the feeling was muted. I just closed my eyes and let everything else take a hold of me for the time being. Enrico had returned and lit up my room with a soft glow. I said goodnight to the sprite and tried to sleep.

It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen for a long time as my mind kept replaying everything that had happened. Visions of Escinca, visions of what I’d seen when poking through Glonek’s head. But eventually, I got the break my body needed.

There were a lot of things to take care of the next day. Me being me, I just focused on my status to distract myself from pesky reality for a little bit.

[ Ross Moreland

Profile

Race: Human

Weave Access: Full

Universal Language Approximator [Sovereign I]

Paths

Path of Burning Starlight: Silver II

Path of the Archon Apostle: Silver I

Core

Mana Implosion: [Unawakened]

General Attributes

Vitality: Silver IV

* Mana Heal

Power: Silver IV

* Mana Injection

Agility: Silver II

*

Path Attributes

Spirit: Silver II

*

Fervour: Silver I

*

Aspects

Gravity: Silver IV

* Infusion

* Siphon

* Field Manipulation

*

Sacrifice: Silver III

* Windfall

* Emulation

* Experientiality

*

Flare: Iron II

*

Illumination: Iron III

* Imbuement

*

Aspect 5: […]

*

Time until Mana Implosion: 9 days ]

My eyes were immediately drawn to the fact that I had new Paths to look through. Not just one, but two of them. Well, one of them had already granted me two new Aspects during the fight against Glonek, but there was the other one I needed to attend to. The one that was probably related to the fifth Aspect I could gain.

“Blessing is an Aspect, right?” I asked a bleary-eyed Aurier the next day. “I remember, uh, the Elder mentioning it before.”

We were at least trying to act normal. This meant cleaning up the place, making food, carrying out prayers, and so on. Aurier and I were involved in the middle task. Poor guy didn’t look like he had slept well, which I couldn’t blame him for, of course.

“It’s an Aspect as far as I know,” he said. He glanced at me, sleepy eyes sharpening into greater awareness for a bit. “Are you trying to learn a new one?”

I mentioned that my Path had evolved. “Mm, not ideal. Because I already have my next Aspect in mind.”

“Oh?”

“Ritual.”

“Ah. Makes sense.”

Blessing was useful, no doubt. I figured I could gain access to a lot of interesting buffs and boons and such with Blessing. But I just needed to look outside to see the power of Ritual. I just needed to look at how it could summon a small sun. Obviously, it wasn’t there now.

I wondered if I could gain a second Aspect from Path of the Archon Apostle. Of course, my other Path was Unique. I couldn’t expect them to work the same way. For instance, my Unique Path had gifted me a suitably Unique mana core as well. Path of the Archon Apostle hadn’t granted me anything of the sort. At least, not yet.

Archon Apostle was obviously different from just Apostle. The former was what would have been the natural progression, as I learned from Aurier. I was wondering if there would be more hidden interactions I’d need to discover somehow.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelBin. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

For now, Ritual felt like its base principles weren’t that different from Sacrifice, and I could use those ideas to get Ritual ranked up quickly.

I had breakfast with everybody else. Food in this world still wasn’t exactly something I looked forward to having—unless it was a free meal at a fancy Ring Two restaurant—but still. If I was supposed to be the leader, then I needed to make my presence felt. It wasn’t just about being the so-called leader of the cult though. They did need me around, now more than ever.

Even Hamsik had decided to join us, though he didn’t eat like me. He was there simply providing another pillar of support for the cult.

We talked lightly, dancing around the things we really needed to take care of. Nobody was really willing to breach the topic, not even the half-vampire who was supposed to be the oldest and most mature one of us there.

Afterwards, we all parted for the time being. Gutran had come to visit, in part to pay his respects, but Aurier talked quietly with him about all that had happened.

Sreketh, Guille, and Santoire decided cleaning up the main hall would be their main task for the day.

Hamsik being Hamsik, he just disappeared, though he did promise he would be back soon.

As for me? I headed over to Escinca’s office. Unlike yesterday, I felt a lot calmer now that I had gone through the mentally exhausting process of actually feeling all my emotions. It still made my heart warble and a cloying emptiness to raise up its ugly head when I opened the office door. But I didn’t have any real trouble focusing on what I needed.

My real task was to retrieve the Pipe Missive letter I had seen when I had peeked into the room earlier. It was a message from Kostis. There wasn’t a lot to it, but apparently, he had learned of what had happened and offered his condolences. He was currently out of Zairgon on business but would be returning in a couple of days.

I wondered how he had learned about everything. At least this gave us some time to think about when to set the remembrance ceremony date.

Kostis was also surprisingly prescient enough to not only guess that I was the cult leader now, but to also suggest that I make use of Escinca’s possessions, including the information in his papers and letters.

It was kind of indecent to ransack through a dead man’s office. I felt like a grave robber as I went through the Elder’s possessions.

The feeling was exacerbated when I didn’t find the kind of information I was looking for.

There was no book detailing how people normally progressed through Paths related to being a cultist. I found no helpful notes explaining Escinca’s own experiences, such as what his Gold-ranked Path of the Hierophant looked like, what Aspects and Affixes he had, etcetera.

Considering I hadn’t done anything like that either, I wasn’t exactly unsurprised Escinca had nothing of the sort. Plus, the old man had never struck me as the sort to fixate on progressing his Paths the way I had been doing so far. The way I didn’t want to stop doing. Expecting a convenient bounty of information to land on my lap was silly.

Nevertheless, the search wasn’t completely fruitless. There were interesting documents about the cult’s finances and other dealings I would need to go through at some point, but what really caught my attention were some old letters between Kostis and Escinca.

Cursing myself mildly for the violation of privacy I was no doubt about to cause, I read through some of them.

There was a lot there I didn’t want to bother with. Several recent ones talked about me, in the same kind of glowing terms that Kanis had mentioned. It made me flush a bit. Great, now I felt like Aurier. The Elder really had seen me in a very positive light. That just made me feel a little guiltier about rifling through his letters.

I decided against reading every word and focused on some key terms.

“Aha,” I said. It had taken a few minutes, but I had found just what I was hoping for. After memorizing everything of relevance about Ritual that the letter stated, I tucked them all away to where they belonged, then went out to test what I had learned.

Ritual, as I had suspected, was similar to Sacrifice in the sense that it needed components to work. With Sacrifice, I needed a tribute. An offering. Something that belonged to me and I was willing to give up. That was its essential ingredient.

Ritual had similar requirements. At least, with the Affixes that the Elder possessed, Ritual essentially functioned like a series of conditions that had to be met to manifest a certain reward.

With Sacrifice, the reward was determined by what was Sacrificed.

With Ritual, the reward was naturally dependent on the various tributary segments of the process.

The somewhat free-form nature of it was what kind of appealed to me. If I could manipulate the events and conditions that made Ritual function, then I could earn myself the same kind of rewards that I got from Sacrifice. Maybe even better ones.

Maybe I could even combine Sacrifice and Ritual.

I enlisted the help of Sreketh to figure it out.

“What am I doing, exactly?” she asked.

She looked like she had bounced back from the events of yesterday well enough. Unless she was just hiding it.

“We’re trying to complete a ritual,” I said. “I know we’ve done this before, but I suppose my Path wasn’t Silver back then to capitalize on it.”

The familiarity arose from the fact that I was essentially redoing the induction ceremony that new people went through. That was basically a ritual, right? Had Escinca ever gained anything from inducting me?

Sreketh and I just followed the same steps of the ritual we had both undergone.

Together, we drank the red draught that the Elder had mentioned was a fermented liquid.

Together, we spoke the chant.

Together, we thought about what the cult and the Sun god, Arl, meant to us and everybody else.

Together, we stared up where the artificial sun, the result of a different Ritual, had hung not far outside the temple.

[ Aspect Unlocked!

Sequence accepted. Components approved. Mana connection established. Requisite Path discovered: Path of the Archon Apostle.

New Aspect: Ritual [Iron I] ]

[ Affix Unlocked!

You have acquired a new Affix for your Ritual Aspect.

Affix: Structure ]

I smiled. “Thanks, Sreketh.”

“Did it work?” she asked.

I nodded.

I was tempted to experiment around with it. Structure was one of the Affixes Escinca had mentioned in his letter to Kostis. It was the most important Affix for Ritual, according to the Elder. Now, the Aspect would be able to recognize ritualistic processes from a wide variety of selections and thereby reward the ritualist for every completed Ritual.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to tinker with it. I had decided to take a break from that and help the others out in clearing up the main hall. They said it wasn’t needed, but I wasn’t so sure about that.

I made things a lot easier with Gravity. All the lifting and moving became almost trivial when I used Siphon to turn gigantic chunks of the ceiling about as heavy as pebbles.

Around an hour later, when I was starting to wonder how best to go about fixing the temple itself, we got a visitor.

I didn’t recognize the Scalekin or the strange getup he was wearing. It looked very official though. Almost a uniform, with the short, dark coat over the pressed shirt and the white trousers tucked into boots.

“This is the Cult of the Sun, yes?” he called out.

“Yes.” I stepped up to meet him, clapping my hands together to get rid of the dust. “How can we help you?” I eyed his uniform again. “Who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The Scalekin offered me a short, professional bow, fist to chest. “I am an under-officer from the Councillors’ tribunal. Cultist Ross Moreland and Cultist Hamsik Kalnislaw are hereby summoned to the tribunal for the trial of House Kalnislaw as key witnesses to their criminal acts.”

I blinked. Oh, wow. This was happening a lot faster than I had thought it would.

“You… feeling alright there?” I asked.

It was a terrible question. No, Hamsik was not going to be feeling alright. His family was on trial. His whole House was in peril. The details of the case hadn’t been explained to us, with the Scalekin officer saying that pertinent information would be available at the court. Still, it was pretty obvious that House Kalnislaw was in dire straits.

Still. I had to get the ball rolling. We had journeyed through Rings Four, Three, and now halfway through Two as well, and we had hardly spoken a word.

“I will make sure the cult doesn’t receive any backlash from this,” Hamsik said. His overly pretty face was set in hard lines. I was pretty sure I could chop vegetables on that jawline. “I will not allow them to tarnish the cult.”

“You know,” I said. “You could try being a little less angsty. It’ll do wonders for your mental health, trust me.”

“What?”

“And what do you mean backlash? We’re the ones who got attacked. Why in the world would we receive any backlash?”

Hamsik bared a few fangs as a couple of snooty nobles seemed to stagger away, obviously drunk. Even if it looked like perpetual night, I knew it was morning. But it seemed merriment wasn’t exactly something the nobles shied away from, regardless of the time of day.

“You are trying to bring down a Great House,” Hamsik said. “You see how this is a blow against all Great Houses, don’t you? They will stick with each other, even if one of them is wrong, than allow a Great House to truly fall.”

I exhaled a tired sigh. It wasn’t just the long walk. I was tired of stupidity.

Of course, the nobles were determined to stick up for each other, regardless of their actual fault in the matter. No doubt, they hardly even saw it as a crime. It was mostly just a bunch of worthless humans who got turned into Thralls, after all. Ring Four scum. People who most of Zairgon would do fine without.

The few Ring Three residents who had got converted too were merely a rounding error.

“You know what,” I said. “I kind of liked it better when you hadn’t said anything.”

The laugh that Hamsik offered didn’t have any mirth in it.

We crested another hill, devoid of any buildings or people, until we reached a large gate of silver in the middle of walls that looked like they were made of abalone. They would have looked pretty under sunlight, although the lights they did have were doing an admirable job of making them stand out.

The guards ushered us in after taking a quick look at our invites from the Scalekin officer. We were soon walking through a magnificent boulevard, my head swivelling this way and that to take it all in.

“Come on,” Hamsik said, hurrying onwards. “The Councillors of Zairgon are the last people you want to keep waiting.”