"Okay… so… that sucked," Ria said, breath unsteady, one hand gripping her chest like she could keep her soul from unraveling through sheer force of will.

She glanced at the others — Yore, Barbatos, Ranah, Temptation — each of them composed to vastly different degrees, but none of them unshaken.

"I want you to know," she continued, voice brittle, "whatever the fuck he just experienced? Affected me too. And not like—'Oh, I feel a chill,' no. I'm talking—my bones folded, my soul cracked. Did you know the equation for life?"

Her voice wasn't rhetorical. It was fractured. Broken glass scraping across truth.

Yore shifted, massive arms crossing in that slow, deliberate way of one ancient and sorrowful. "Yes. Actually. Though—what you likely saw was life for a flower. Not for a person. Or a rat. Or a dog. A snake. A soldier. A king. A failure. A weapon. A—"

"Yore," Barbatos growled, her tone both sharp and weary. "While I am happy you're walking and breathing again… shut up. Please."

The giant lion of a man held up one massive paw-hand in surrender.

Ranah took a step closer to the center of the circle, where the dust still trembled, disturbed by forces long gone. Her voice, despite her steel-wrought heart, trembled. "So… how long is he going to be out for?"

"Days," Temptation replied without hesitation. Her arms were crossed, but her fingertips twitched — too tense for calm. "His mana circuits aren't just strained — they're restructuring. I don't know what inspiration hit him. I don't even want to guess. I helped forge this thing with you, Ranah, but I didn't write the fucking spiral into the base lattice."

Ranah's head snapped to face her. "You did know the language, though. You said it was a dead dialect of the Ashen Scholars. Hexerect trinary."

"Yes," Temptation said. "I could read the letters. I couldn't feel the meaning. That's different. I don't know what god — lowercase or capital — just looked into his soul and gave it a name."

"Can we please," Ria cut in sharply, "go back to the original problem?"

They turned to her. Even Barbatos, queen of snarls, gave pause.

Ria's eyes were bloodshot with strain, one hand clenching a nearby rail for balance. "I'm still feeling… echoes. Like someone stitched sacred geometry directly into my marrow and forgot to anesthetize me first. I can still hear the equations. I feel solved, but like a wrong answer — like something read my soul and said, 'Close enough,' then moved on."

She paused. Her breath caught.

"I still feel hexerects in there. I feel them. Six-dimensional cogs grinding behind my lungs. I don't think that's healthy."

There was a long, terrible silence.

Barbatos turned and finally sat, her shoulders low with restrained tension. "You two are linked. Soul-satellites, Yore said. It's rare but not unheard of. But it means whatever he undergoes, you taste it. And if that boy just cracked into divine math…"

"She cracked too," Yore rumbled, voice deep with a sorrow that was somehow mathematical. "Fragments of the sacred logic refracted through their tether. It's not contamination. It's imprinting. Sympathetic reaction."

Ranah cursed under her breath and kicked a smoldering gear pile.

Temptation didn't move. Her gaze had shifted inward. "Then she's not just echoing it. She's part of the formula now."

"Then un-write me!" Ria shouted. "I don't want to be part of his awakening. I want to go back to being a person, not some… annotation in a divine dissertation!"

No one had an answer.

Yore looked like he wanted to speak, but even he hesitated — his age and wisdom not enough to untangle this.

Ranah stepped forward, her voice softer now. "You're not an annotation, Ria. If anything… you're half the equation. Maybe even the constant."

That didn't help. It only made Ria's eyes widen with fresh panic.

The forge around them hissed with heat and embers. Something behind reality continued to turn. Still and massive, like a concept uncoiling itself in preparation.

And deep beneath the noise, they could all feel it:

Alexander wasn't just changing.

He was rewriting. And Ria was bound to every word.

Ria exhaled shakily, her hands gripping her own arms as though trying to contain herself, like her skin was the only barrier holding in something far too large.

"I don't think you understand," she said slowly. Her voice was soft, not to calm — but because she was afraid if she spoke too loudly, the wrong syllable might summon something. "I'm not saying I remember the equations. I'm saying they're still running. Still calculating. Like—like they're trying to resolve something about me. Or about him. Or both."

Yore narrowed his eyes. "Ongoing? That shouldn't be possible. Not without a living logic engine or—"

"I am the logic engine now," Ria snapped. "I feel numbers behind my eyes. Spinning. Seething. There's a flower blooming in twelve simultaneous directions. It's mirrored along axes that don't exist in this world. I feel spirals in my breath. Not in the air — in the shape of my inhalation. There's a tessellation of choice forming in my ribs. Every heartbeat's a proof I didn't know I was signing."

She stepped back, pressing her back against a pillar. "My teeth itch. Not physically — ontologically. Do you know what it feels like to be aware of your molars in more than three dimensions?"

No one responded.

"Right," she whispered. "You don't."

Temptation rubbed her forehead, visibly disturbed now, muttering, "That's not hexerect logic anymore. That's moving into recursive qualia fields. Those were banned before the Fall of Synapse. We used to call that 'Void Bloom.' That's the math of living abstractions. If she's feeling that…"

Barbatos clenched her jaw. "Then she's not just a tether. She's a mirror, like Yore said. He fell in, and she reflected the impact."

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Ranah's voice broke in. "We have to stop it. Shut it off. Cut the line. Do something."

"No," Temptation said, looking up sharply. "If you cut the thread mid-process, it won't just sever the connection. It'll collapse the equation. Ria could break apart — not die. Not exactly. Just… unresolve. She'd be reduced to a failed calculation, and that doesn't always mean death. But it's worse."

Ria didn't speak. She just closed her eyes. Her breath came in long, slow cycles — as though syncing herself to something far greater and far more dangerous.

"I see everything he sees," she said eventually. "Not in images. In meanings. The symmetry of suffering. The beauty in recursion. The flaw hidden inside every truth like a sliver of poisoned silver. He's seeing the Philosopher's Stone not as a thing, but as an axiom. A base assumption that if you could transmute anything into knowledge, then all pain, all loss, all war, could be rewritten into understanding."

She paused. "It's beautiful. And it's horrifying. Because he's not stopping. I can feel him going further."

Barbatos stepped toward her, kneeling slightly, one armored hand on Ria's shoulder. "Then we hold the line for him. You're feeling it because you're part of it. That means you're stronger than you think. That boy is a storm, but you're the moon keeping his tides sane. You understand?"

Ria looked down at the hand on her shoulder. Then back at Barbatos. Her eyes were glassy, but her voice steadied.

"No. I don't understand. That's the problem. I comprehend. And comprehension… hurts."

Yore let out a long breath. "Then we protect her. As she protects him."

Ranah knelt and started drawing runes — stabilizing sigils, soul insulation, anything she could recall.

Temptation stood guard at the door, scanning for any psychic bleed or extraplanar reaction.

And Barbatos didn't leave Ria's side.

Because comprehension was still unfolding, and the spiral was not yet done.

"How is he? Really?" Barbatos asked quietly, her voice low but weighted with steel. Not just concern — command. Like she couldn't allow herself to care unless the answer justified it.

Ria didn't answer right away. She was leaning against a stone wall, arms folded tight across her chest, eyes a little too still, a little too distant. When she finally spoke, her words were slow, measured — like she had to sort through data before voicing anything human.

"Terrible. Fine. Great. Somewhere in that metric," she muttered, rolling her eyes, but the motion lacked any real levity. "He's suffering. Awfully. Monstrously. But also…" she paused, lips pressing thin, "he's also breaking through thresholds that were never meant to be touched. Let alone surpassed."

Barbatos raised an eyebrow. "You're not making sense."

"Exactly," Ria snapped. "Because none of this makes sense in a language you or I have. That's the problem. It's not like watching someone bleed or break. It's like watching someone write with pain — carving arithmetic into their own soul until the universe responds. He's not just enduring something — he's solving something. Becoming something."

Barbatos crossed her arms, but her stance softened, just barely. "And his truth?"

Ria's gaze flicked toward her. "His truth is loud. It echoes like a prayer shouted inside a hollow cathedral. Everything has a price. It's not a metaphor. It's a law he lives in now. It burns through him. And the worst part?"

She took a shaky breath.

"He's trying to calculate the price of everything. Every moment. Every choice. His mana, his miasma, his soul, his potential. Every memory. Every possibility. Every inch of power. Every skillcube he's earned, every one he might earn. Your training. Ranah's concern. Yore's guidance. My bond with him. Every cost is being measured and weighed against every outcome he can see. And he sees so many."

Barbatos said nothing, but the look in her eyes changed — not softened, not entirely. But something gave. A shard of breath caught between worry and grim admiration.

Ria's voice dropped, quieter now.

"It's not just exhausting. It's… inhuman. Like he's in a room with a thousand ledgers and the numbers never stop updating. And he's trying to pay for it all — with himself. With anything he can reach. And I can feel it. Like nails on the inside of my skull. Like someone opened a vault in my chest and started filling it with equations too heavy to lift."

She looked up at Barbatos again.

"And the worst part is… he's not afraid of the price. He just wants to know it. Like that alone would be enough. That if he just knew what everything cost, he could plan the future. Could spare us. Could save us."

Barbatos let out a slow exhale, tilting her head back slightly, eyes to the ceiling.

"So he's already trying to pay for a future none of us have lived yet."

Ria nodded. "Exactly."

"Idiot boy."

Ria smirked faintly, but the tremble in her lip betrayed the pain still laced beneath the surface.

"Yeah. But he's our idiot boy."

***

476.

Four hundred seventy-six what?

I couldn't say. But the value—the answer—for the Gluttony of the Golden Hydra had resolved itself cleanly into that number.

A unit of 476.

I didn't know if it was currency, energy, cost in soul fragments or fractured seconds of my lifespan. But it felt true. Felt final. As if the universe had sighed, scribbled a figure onto an invisible invoice, and handed it back to me with a cosmic shrug.

Then more numbers came. A flood. Spiraling outward from the first like ripples in an ocean I couldn't see the edge of.

Thirty-two for a memory I forgot to protect.

Seventy-eight for every secret I held too long.

Nine thousand, two hundred and ten for what it would cost to be loved unconditionally.

Everything had a number. A precise cost. Down to the grain. Mana, miasma, thoughts, truths, falsehoods. Every gesture I'd ever made. Every glance. Every word I hadn't said. The calculations weren't just external—they were me. My soul became a ledger, my blood its ink.

Until—

It stopped.

All the cascading streams of figures and formulas froze. Numbers halted mid-air, as if the ledger itself refused to process anything further.

Stillness.

Silence.

And then, in front of me, it rose.

A massive stone pillar, erupting from the ground like a buried god coming to kneel. Carved not with symbols, but rules. Laws older than language. I didn't need to read them to know them. They weren't words, they were axioms written into the marrow of reality.

It called to me.

Not like a voice, not even like a pull. More like inevitability. Like a magnetism of fate. I had to step forward. Not because I wanted to. Because I was meant to.

I knew what it wanted.

No whispers. No riddles. The answer pulsed in the center of the pillar like a heart that had never known rest.

Blood.

My blood.

Not for sacrifice. Not for pain. For clarity. The stone demanded equivalence. A physical act of acknowledgment. A payment for the knowledge it would bestow.

My hand trembled.

I'd faced monsters. Faced truths. This… this was different. This wasn't death or danger. This was value. The first real transaction.

I could feel it before I touched the stone.

Once this began, there would be no haggling. No refunds.

Only the math.

And the price.

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