Chapter 196: Big Secret?

The term appeared in a catalogue of dead and restricted languages, followed by three warning marks and almost no useful explanation. The few preserved examples did not resemble sentences so much as compressed arrangements of symbols, each capable of changing its meaning according to its position, the intention behind it, and the concepts surrounding it.

Ravian spent several minutes studying a copied fragment before closing the book.

’So that’s why it looked like someone tried to turn a mental breakdown into writing.’

Ravian could understand the language perfectly. When he encountered the author’s scrawled attempts to decipher the fragment, he realized just how vast the difference was between the instantaneous comprehension Sovereign Pride had granted him and the efforts of someone attempting to unravel something nearly impossible with the limited information available to them.

Ravian memorized everything the book contained and moved on.

Whenever he entered another floor or attempted to touch a book, he immediately sensed something examining the authorization he carried to determine whether he was permitted to be there. Ravian could not identify exactly what was performing the inspection, but the sensation resembled the examination conducted by the black magic at the fortress gate.

That suggested one possibility.

’Mana...’

It was the first conclusion that entered Ravian’s mind when he focused upon whatever was inspecting him.

Nevertheless, he did not devote much attention to it and continued onward.

This time, he reached one of the subjects he had most wanted to understand, since it would tell him exactly what he might face at the border in the future. Even so, he had not expected any of what he was about to read on that high floor, where no one else appeared to be present. Judging by everything surrounding him, the emptiness had more to do with the authorization required to enter than with the section being dull or unimportant.

The racial histories consumed the next stretch of time.

The first thing he learned overturned a misconception widespread among ordinary humans: the Children of Sin were not demons. The term appeared constantly in common accounts, sermons, military propaganda, and personal memoirs, but academic works treated it as a derogatory label rather than a legitimate racial classification.

Their older name was the Seven Forbidden Lineages.

According to the oldest surviving consensus, every one of those lineages had begun with humans.

In an age so distant that even the calendar used by its survivors had been lost, the Seven Deadly Sins had intervened directly in human bodies and bloodlines. The books disagreed on whether those interventions had been experiments, rewards, punishments, or attempts to create vessels capable of bearing the Sins’ powers. They agreed only upon the result.

The altered bloodlines survived.

Then they reproduced, stabilized, diverged, and became races of their own.

The Nurians carried the legacy of Arrogance and its Radiance. The Saraxians descended from Greed and Metal, the Ormanians from Envy and Usurpation, and the Rassasians from Desire and Mirage. The remaining three lineages belonged to Wrath and Flame, Sloth and Gravity, and Gluttony and Devouring, though the books before Ravian offered more arguments than certainty concerning how their earliest bloodlines had taken shape.

None of them regarded themselves as failed humans.

Each lineage possessed its own history, culture, nobility, and empire. Seven empires belonging to the Children of Sin existed across the main continent, standing beside three human empires, one of which was Viera. Smaller kingdoms and territories survived between their borders, but the ten empires shaped most wars, trade routes, and political alliances recorded in modern history.

The relationship between humans and the Children of Sin was exactly as ugly as Ravian expected.

Human texts frequently described them as corrupted, inferior, or inherently treacherous. Their own surviving works returned that contempt with interest, portraying unaltered humanity as frail, short-lived, and abandoned by higher powers. Border conflicts, enslavement, massacres, and centuries of religious hatred had ensured that neither side lacked evidence with which to justify its prejudice.

Yet the seven nonhuman empires had never formed a lasting alliance against humanity.

They shared enemies, not unity.

Their lineages competed with one another, inherited hatreds of their own, and served powers whose purposes rarely aligned for long. Humans had survived partly because the Children of Sin were as willing to fight one another as they were to fight humanity.

’Ten empires on one continent, all convinced the others are beneath them,’ Ravian thought. ’At least politics remained simple in every world.’

The mention of the powers they served drew him into another section.

The Taboos did not merely exist as distant entities whose names appeared in myths. They possessed sects, churches, bloodline orders, hidden organizations, and political patrons. Some operated openly under accepted religious titles, while others survived through cells that changed names whenever an empire turned against them.

One name appeared far more often in Viera’s records than Ravian found comfortable.

The Sect of Fate.

Its oldest symbol depicted a serpent coiled around a field of stars, and the formal title repeated throughout the restricted commentaries was unmistakable.

That title was...

The Star-Coiling Serpent.

Ravian’s fingers stopped upon the edge of the page.

Older histories described the Sect of Fate as an adviser, mediator, and quiet participant in several turning points within Viera. Later political studies used more cautious language, referring to old exchanges, noble patronage, and relationships too deeply established to be dismissed as coincidence. Whatever form those ties currently took, the Sect of Fate had roots inside the empire in which Ravian now stood.

’Of course it does,’ he thought. ’Why would the thing that tried to write my death choose an inconveniently distant country?’

He resisted the temptation to chase every reference. The subject deserved its own investigation, preferably after he understood enough to recognize which parts had been omitted or deliberately distorted.

’Not now. But soon...’

Instead, he turned to maps.

Every modern chart placed the ten great empires upon one immense primary continent. Beyond its shores lay several islands, but the precision that defined the continental borders vanished whenever the maps reached them. Coastlines became approximations, distances contradicted one another, and entire regions were covered by warnings rather than geographic information.

According to the records before him, expeditions had attempted to reach those islands, but none had ever returned.

The accounts differed on the number of ships, the ranks of the Awakened aboard them, and which empires had financed the voyages, but every credible record ended in the same absence. No survivor had returned to describe what waited there, and no reliable message had ever crossed back to the continent.

’Okay,’ Ravian thought. ’Now that’s genuinely terrifying.’

Most of the islands possessed no confirmed names.

The largest was the sole exception.

The Forgotten Island.

Ravian found the name written beneath a blurred shape at the edge of an old map, accompanied by a warning that contained more certainty than every geographic detail surrounding it.

Never approach this island.

He stared at the words for several seconds, then closed the atlas.

’Later.’

He had entered the Grand Archive to understand the power already resting inside him, not to acquire a longer list of places capable of killing him.

Ravian returned the final historical volume to its cart and raised his eyes toward the floors devoted to soul power.

The true work began there, though that name refused to leave his mind.