On the day it began, the manor was quiet.
Not the brittle, waiting quiet Ren had grown used to before battles—no ticking countdowns, no gods pacing overhead, no sense of something vast drawing breath to crush them.
Just the soft, lived-in silence of a house full of people who, for the first time in a long time, actually believed they had a tomorrow.
He sat on the engawa outside the training field, back against a wooden pillar, one leg stretched out, the other bent. A mug of tea cooled at his side, sending up faint curls of steam that the morning breeze teased apart.
Inside the manor, life murmured.
Somewhere to his left, Rias and Sona's low voices tangled in the study—"this is not a date, we are simply co-working"—for the third time this week. Farther in, Asia hummed under her breath as she sorted herbs, her magic lazily brushing over leaves and roots. Upstairs, Koneko and Kuroka were arguing in whispers over snacks, the rustle of wrappers a tiny battlefield of its own.
Ren closed his eyes.
And let his senses stretch.
Not his hearing. Not his demonic senses.
His Dao.
The Immortal Soul Bone hummed along his spine, cold and ancient, patterns of otherworldly law waking in lightless bone. Complexity folded into simplicity. The world around him fell away, resolving into diagrams.
Lines and nodes. Flows and eddies. Energies, causes, consequences. Threads that knotted and unknotted in the dark.
He swept across the Underworld first.
Devils appeared in his perception as clusters of demonic power anchored to Soul Palaces he'd helped them build—tiny, newborn worlds turning slowly in the dark. Angels glittered like carefully arranged constellations, each star a hymn wrapped around a will. Fallen angels were fractured halos and sharp edges, light and shadow bickering inside the same vessel.
Dragons burned—long arcs of violent, stubborn existence carving their own rules into reality. Gods were… noisy. Too many divine authorities stacked on top of each other, too many prayers, too many contracts. Their presences crackled like radio static.
Vampires, though—
Vampires looked like ink stains on parchment. Dense. Layered. Two big blotches where their factions huddled.
One blotch cool and disciplined, outlines clean and sharp: Carmilla's domain.
One blotch wild and jagged, the edges fraying into a dozen little conflicts: Tepes.
Ren skimmed past Carmilla's territory. Their net of magic was taut, stretched thin over a shaky ceasefire. Wards overwrote wards, old covenants patched with newer ones. Alert. Wary. No immediate rot.
His awareness slid over Tepes.
Something snagged.
His eyes didn't open. Outwardly, he didn't move. A tiny furrow just smoothed out of his expression.
There was a hole there.
Not a simple absence; emptiness would have been obvious, and he would have dismissed it as "nothing happening there worth caring about." This was worse.
A place where the noise of a faction that size should have been—a churn of petty politics, soldiers training, nobles complaining, small cruelties spoken behind closed doors—
And instead his perception hit… cotton.
Soft, directionless resistance. A veil woven so carefully it looked like nothing at all.
The kind of trick you used when you weren't just hiding from the world in general.
You were hiding from someone specific.
His mouth tilted.
"Oh," he murmured. "You noticed me."
Dao-sense deepened.
He pushed, not with brute force, but with the Immortal Soul Bone's talent: turning complexity into simplicity. The cotton that tried to blur everything into white noise was seized, unraveled, and rewoven into straightforward lines.
The veil peeled back.
Beneath it, ritual circles churned like a factory's gears. Blood-red and death-cold sigils crawled over stone floors, chewing on a power they didn't understand. Life and death twisted into a machine. A Longinus being used as a generator until its wielder's mind frayed.
Sephiroth Graal… shackled. Abused.
He let the pattern of that Sacred Gear unfold for him—three Holy Grails entwined into a sub-species configuration. Life. Death. Souls. A system meant to touch the boundary between "is" and "is not," to weigh souls, to mend or cut the chain between them and their bodies.
They had strapped that onto a teenage girl and told her to keep pouring.
At the center of that storm sat a familiar presence, flickering like a candle crushed under a hurricane.
Valerie Tepes.
Around her—
Rot.
King Tepes. Marius. A little knot of opportunists, hands joined by chains of blood, greed, fear, and terrible taste. Their magic pulsed in jagged rhythms, linking the castle above to the chamber below. Channels sprouted off those rituals like diseased roots: conduits to soldiers, secret labs, allied nobles.
Ren let the currents flow into him.
He watched illusions they'd tried to sell their own people. Falsified patrol reports. Scrying logs overwritten with quiet corridors and undisturbed altars. Messages diverted, rewritten, or killed in transit. Vampires enhanced by the Graal's power: skin pale with stolen divinity, weaknesses burned out of their blood as they were pushed toward something not entirely vampire anymore.
The cover-up flexed, cotton trying to swallow his awareness again, to turn sharp outlines back into fog.
Ren let it.
The veil slid back into place.
He opened his eyes to the training field and the quiet house that trusted him enough to relax.
"…Cover-up, huh," he said softly. "Cute."
He picked up his mug, took a sip of lukewarm tea, and rose to his feet.
Time to go shopping.
...
He found Gasper where Gasper always gravitated when he wasn't being nagged, trained, or emotionally cornered—
Half-hidden.
Today's "half" was the back of the living room couch. A tower of magical girl DVDs guarded one side of the coffee table; on the other lay a notebook full of cultivation diagrams, pages crowded with loops and arrows.
Gasper hunched over the notebook, fingers tracing Myriad Origin Scripture circulation lines. His lips moved soundlessly as he checked each loop, comparing them to what Ren had carved into his Soul Palace.
Touki and demonic power cycled through his small body in careful patterns. Still timid, still shy, but far less leaky than even a month ago. Behind him, his budding Soul Palace shimmered faintly—shy and shadowed, but a world nonetheless.
"Gasper."
The dhampir just about launched into orbit.
He yelped, arms windmilling, notebook almost taking flight. One purple eye and one red eye went huge when he saw who was standing in the doorway.
"R-Ren—!" He choked up, face going red. "You scared me…"
Ren leaned against the doorframe with his usual loose ease, hands in his pockets, smile lazy and warm.
"Sorry," he said, with absolutely no effort to sound convincing. "Got a minute?"
Gasper's fingers twisted in the hem of his hoodie.
"D-did I mess up the loop?" he blurted. "Did I break the formation? I was just—"
Ren crossed the room in three unhurried steps and flicked him lightly on the forehead.
"Relax," he drawled. "You're good. That loop's cleaner than half the gods I've met."
Gasper froze.
"…Really?"
"Really." Ren's smile deepened, eyes softening. "I came to ask if you want to come rescue a cute vampire with me."
Gasper's brain blue-screened.
"…What?"
"Cute vampire," Ren repeated, as calmly as if he were suggesting a run for groceries. "Civil war headache. Idiot rulers. Sacred Gear being chewed on like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Someone trying very hard to hide their sins."
He tilted his head, watching.
"Sound familiar?"
It took a heartbeat.
Then the color drained from Gasper's face.
"…Valerie," he whispered.
The name trembled.
Ren's gaze gentled. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Valerie."
Gasper's legs went weak. He sagged back onto the couch, knuckles whitening as he clutched the cushions. Old memories clawed up—cold stone halls, orders barked down at him, the smell of blood, locked doors and muffled sobs.
A girl's gentle smile as she pushed him toward an open window.
Go.
Live.
Ren rested a hand on his shoulder, thumb drawing slow circles through the fabric of Gasper's hoodie.
"She's alive," he said, voice dropping. "Hurting. Overused. They've been riding her Sacred Gear until her soul's threads are starting to fray. But she's alive."
Gasper swallowed hard, vision blurring.
"…What are you going to do?" he asked, small and hoarse.
Ren's smile stretched wider, losing all warmth.
"Kill some idiots," he said. "Fix a girl. Pick up a few vampire allies. Be back in time for dinner."
Gasper blinked at him. "…You make it sound like a shopping trip."
"That's about their level," Ren shrugged. "They're not worth an epic. More like a bad commercial."
He lifted his head slightly.
"Rias."
He didn't raise his voice much.
He didn't have to.
A moment later, she appeared in the doorway from the hall, red hair loose over a simple blouse and skirt, a stack of documents in her hands. Akeno hovered behind her, barefoot, curiosity already bright in her violet eyes. Asia peeked over the back of the couch with wide green eyes, and from the stairs came the soft thump of Koneko's feet and the light patter of Ravel's.
"What happened?" Rias asked, expression sharpening. "You found something."
"Mm." Ren brushed imaginary dust off his coat. "The Tepes side decided to get clever about hiding what they're doing with Valerie and Sephiroth Graal."
Rias' eyes narrowed. "Clever… how?"
"Covering their tracks. Blocking scrying. Fudging reports. Classic 'if we can't beat the monster, maybe it won't notice us if we play dead' strategy." His tone was lazy; the weight beneath it wasn't. "Unfortunately for them, I already felt them twitch."
Lightning danced faintly over Akeno's fingertips. Her usual teasing smile thinned.
Asia's hands flew to her mouth. "Valerie… she's…"
"Alive," Ren said again, firmly. "For now."
He tapped his temple.
"They pushed her Sacred Gear too far, too fast. Sephiroth Graal is a Longinus built to handle life and death. It's not a toy. Keep pushing like that, it melts the mind using it. If we leave it, she breaks. If we move now, she lives."
Gasper flinched.
"I… I want to go," he blurted out. "Please. I have to—"
Ren raised a hand.
"Already planning on it," he said. "I'm not dragging you into a warzone for fun, Gasper. You're going because when she wakes up and the world's different, she'll need a familiar face, not just my annoying grin."
Gasper's eyes went bright and wet.
Ren turned, taking in the rest of them.
"Field trip," he announced. "Rescue mission. We pick up a cute vampire, tidy some politics, and probably scare a few factions straight. Short trip. No need to drag it out—people we're dealing with don't deserve that much of our time."
Akeno's lips curled. "Ara. So we get to be the rescue party this time."
"Anyone can come if they want," Ren added. "Consider it sightseeing. With extra vampires."
Koneko appeared at the bottom of the stairs, white hair slightly mussed from a nap, cardigan sleeves covering her hands.
"…You had me at 'short trip,'" she said. "And 'idiots.'"
Rias snorted, but the corner of her mouth lifted.
"And Sona?" she asked. "Serafall-sama?"
"They're knee-deep in education and Rating Game reforms," Ren replied. "If I drag them into this, those projects stall, and the Underworld will never fix its mess. We're not doing anything big, anyway. Just pest control."
Gasper shivered. The casual tone made it worse.
Rias exhaled slowly, then nodded, crimson hair shifting around her shoulders.
"All right," she said. "I'll inform Grayfia we're leaving and that any urgent calls can be redirected to Sona or my brother."
Asia stepped closer, fingers twisting in her skirt. "Can I come?" she asked. "If Valerie is… hurt, she'll need a healer. And Gasper will… feel better if I'm there."
Ren's gaze softened when it landed on her.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I was counting on you."
Akeno's eyes curved. "I'll come too," she said lightly. "I'd like to see what kind of people think they can play with a Longinus like that."
Ren rolled his shoulders once.
"Then it's settled," he said. He looked down at Gasper. "Go change into something you won't trip over. We'll leave when you're back."
Gasper bolted for the stairs.
Ren straightened, the lazy warmth in his posture settling over a steel foundation.
"Let's go knock on a queen's door," he said.
Reality folded.
...
Carmilla's territory smelled like old stone, dark wine, and old grudges that hadn't quite faded.
They didn't arrive with a teleportation circle. No magic light, no spell chant.
The world simply decided they belonged somewhere else.
One heartbeat, they stood in the manor's living room.
The next, they were in a moonlit courtyard paved in black marble veined with white, under a sky pricked with cold stars. High walls ringed the yard, carved with age-smoothed crests and bloodline sigils. Balconies and arched windows watched like eyes.
Wards reacted first.
Lines of scarlet light rippled along the walls, flaring into layered shields. Cloaked guards on the battlements jerked like someone had poured ice water down their backs, rifles coming up. Several knights in ornate armor blurred into place around them, blades drawn, vampiric speed stretching their silhouettes.
For a breath, everyone moved at once.
Magic circles snapped open. Triggers were half-pulled. Akeno's fingers twitched toward lightning. Koneko's Touki stirred.
Then recognition hit.
Not of them.
Of him.
Ren hadn't released his aura. He didn't need to. His existence simply brushed against their senses—and too many of them had already seen his image writ across the sky. The projection of a human cultivator sealing Trihexa into his own Heaven, carving through Hell's rulers, making gods kneel.
That kind of fear didn't fade quickly.
One vampire on the battlements dropped his rifle. It clattered against the stone.
"T-that man…" he stammered. "The one who… chained the Apocalypse Dragon…!"
Several others went pale. A few made warding signs that probably didn't help much.
Ren ignored the panic. Hands still in his pockets, he tipped his head back, studying the moon.
"Nice place," he said conversationally. "Little monochrome, but the vibe works."
"Identify yourselves!"
The voice cut cleanly across the courtyard, clear and sharp.
From one of the arched doors, a woman strode forward—pale skin, long dark hair, eyes like polished garnets. A cloak fell from her shoulders, lined in dark red; a crown gleamed on her brow, not ostentatious, but undeniable.
Queen Carmilla.
Beside her walked a younger woman, blonde hair cascading over a noble dress, posture stiff with practiced pride. Elmenhilde Karnstein—envoy, princess, and very aware she was important.
Elmenhilde's steps faltered when her gaze landed on Gasper.
"Gasper Vladi…?" she breathed.
Then her eyes slid to Ren, and whatever she'd meant to say died. Her pupils shrank.
"He is—"
"Yes," Carmilla said quietly, eyes never leaving Ren. "The one who chained the Apocalypse and humiliated gods."
Silence rippled through the courtyard.
Ren smiled like a man who had walked into a café and found it mildly crowded, but acceptable.
"Evening," he said. "Carmilla. Elmenhilde. Sorry for dropping in without knocking. Time-sensitive situation."
Carmilla's fingers tightened once on the railing as she descended the last step.
"Our wards did not register any intrusion," she said.
"Your wards tried very hard," Ren replied. "I'm just rude."
He gave her a small, almost apologetic half-shrug.
"The good news is: I didn't come to cause problems for you."
"…No?" Her eyes narrowed.
"No." He tipped his chin toward the far horizon, where Tepes territory lurked beyond mountains and forests. "Your charming counterparts, on the other hand, have been busy."
Elmenhilde's jaw tightened.
"What kind of 'busy'?" Carmilla asked.
"The kind that wraps a blanket over one of my student's childhood friends and hopes I go away," Ren said. "The kind that uses Sephiroth Graal to burn out a girl's soul for military gains. Enhancing soldiers. Stripping away sunlight, crosses, holy weakness. Building an army of fake 'perfect' vampires and planning to drag everyone else into their mess."
Gasper stepped forward, hands shaking.
"Valerie," he forced out. "Valerie Tepes. She's… she's being—"
"Used as a battery," Ren said bluntly. "Hung between life and death until the lines blur, forced to call the Graal over and over. Her mind is starting to fray."
Carmilla's perfect composure cracked along one edge. Only a little. Enough.
"You know of the Sephiroth Graal," she said, voice cool but taut.
"I know enough," Ren answered. "I know your 'King' let his son push her past her limits. I know they colluded with people they shouldn't. And I know they're trying very hard to hide all that from me in particular."
He smiled, teeth just barely showing.
"That was unwise."
Elmenhilde swallowed. Her carefully maintained haughtiness wavered, worry seeping through.
"What do you intend to do?" Carmilla asked quietly.
Ren met her gaze.
"Kill King Tepes," he said calmly. "Erase Marius. Remove every parasite currently feeding on Valerie's Sacred Gear. Then hand you a cleaner board and tell you to sort your people out like a proper ruler."
The courtyard air stopped.
Carmilla studied him, weighing the man who spoke so casually of erasing a faction's core.
"…Just like that," she said.
"Just like that." He shrugged lightly. "No extra charge. You've been at least trying to work with the alliance. You don't need that kind of trash dragging your future into the gutter."
Elmenhilde glanced at him sharply. "If you fail—"
"I won't," Ren cut her off, not unkindly. "They're not interesting enough to make me work for it."
He took a single step forward.
A ripple of Dao washed across the courtyard. Knights flinched. Several dropped to one knee without meaning to, bodies recognizing a pressure their minds couldn't name.
Ren's gaze softened again when it returned to Carmilla.
"Get ready, Queen," he said. "When I'm done, you're going to have a country full of confused vampires, a shattered power structure, and a dhampir girl who deserves better than being treated like a piece on a board. You'll have to decide what your people are without monsters at the top."
Carmilla held his gaze.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Three.
Then she inclined her head.
"…Very well," she said. "Do what you will. If you truly remove those men from the board, the Carmilla faction will listen to what you say next."
Ren's smile tilted.
"Oh, I'm counting on it."
He turned back to his group.
"Field trip, part two," he said lightly. "Everyone with me."
Gasper grabbed his sleeve.
"W-wait, we're going now?"
Ren's hand closed over Gasper's in a firm squeeze.
"Now," he said. "Before they get any bright ideas about running."
Reality bent.
....
The chamber they stepped into was deep under Tepes stone, built less like a room and more like a tomb that had been repurposed into a workshop.
Red candles guttered in black iron holders, their flames swallowing the light around them instead of giving it. Magic circles crawled over floor, walls, and ceiling—dense with blood curses, sacrificial scripts, and experimental patches added in different hands over time.
At the center of it all stood a stone platform.
Chains of light and shadow bound the girl lying on it.
Valerie Tepes looked like a broken doll someone had tried to repair with bandages and hope.
Silver hair spilled over the slab, dull with exhaustion, clinging where sweat had dried. Her eyes were half-open, irises unfocused, pupils blown wide. Her lips moved in faint whispers, fragments of prayer, nonsense, and old conversations no one here cared to listen to.
Above her chest, the Sephiroth Graal manifested. A golden grail etched with Sephirothic patterns, overflowing with light that was too many colors at once. The glow didn't just illuminate the room—it reached past it, touching the boundary between life and death, making the air itself taste thinner.
Around the platform stood a small crowd of vampires and magicians. Armor, robes, smug faces. Their auras were swollen with borrowed power, the stink of divinity forced into vessels that hadn't been made for it.
At their head—
Marius Tepes.
He smirked, red eyes bright with a madman's satisfaction. Ornate armor clung to him, overdecorated and underearned. Confidence rolled off him, the kind born from never having been hit hard enough to learn.
The air tasted like stale arrogance and stolen miracles.
Ren appeared in the center of the chamber like an answer a question hadn't deserved.
No flash. No circle. One moment they were alone with their victim.
The next, a human, a handful of devils, and one shaking dhampir stood between them and their prize.
"What—?!" one magician choked, stumbling back. "Teleportation? The wards—"
Marius turned, irritation ready on his tongue.
His gaze reached Ren.
The color drained from his face.
"You…" he whispered. "You're—"
"Yeah," Ren said. "Me."
He let a trickle of Dao seep into the room. Not much. Just enough for their bodies to remember the recordings—Trihexa's chained roars vanishing into nothing, Hell's lords breaking like clay under a red sun, gods dissolving into dust beneath laws they'd never learned.
Several vampires dropped to their knees, hands clawing at their throats. Breaths hitched as the simple idea of "you exist because the world allows it" wobbled under pressure.
Gasper pressed in closer to Ren, fingers digging into his coat.
"Valerie…" he whispered.
Ren's hand squeezed his shoulder once.
He didn't look away from Marius.
"You know," he said mildly, "for someone with front row seats to an Apocalypse getting collared, you made a very brave choice trying to hide from me. Brave or stupid. I'm still deciding."
Marius grit his teeth, trying to cobble his pride back together.
"We are the Tepes faction," he snapped, voice wobbling. "You have no right to interfere in internal—"
Ren raised his hand.
He didn't flare power.
He just pointed.
Calm. Almost lazy.
The Immortal Soul Bone sang.
For a heartbeat, Marius stood naked—not physically, but in soul. Ren unraveled him like a book: every scheme, every order, every time he'd told Valerie to "bear with it" while her mind eroded. Every meeting with Khaos Brigade envoys. Every time he'd laughed about how they'd use the Graal to remove weaknesses, turn both Tepes and Carmilla men into "something better," something monstrous.
Ren caught it all.
Above them, far above stone and soil, the sky over the vampire country rippled.
In Carmilla's courtyard, the stars bent out of the way as moving images blossomed across the heavens.
Valerie chained to a bed, eyes dull as the Graal shone over and over.
Marius boasting as soldiers convulsed under the Graal's light, weaknesses stripping from their bodies.
King Tepes nodding along, treating his daughter's agony as a minor price.
Male vampires clasping Khaos Brigade hands, eyes hungry as they begged to be "enhanced," even if it meant becoming something like an Evil Dragon to shatter the old order.
In Tepes territory, vampires looked up. Some flinched away, shame twisting their faces. Others stared, horror and denial warring in their eyes.
In Carmilla's courtyard, Carmilla's hand slammed down on a stone railing, cracking it. Elmenhilde staggered, one hand over her mouth, eyes huge.
Inside the chamber, Marius lunged forward, face twisted.
"Stop that!" he roared. "You dare—"
Ren's eyes met his.
"Die."
The word was simple.
The effect was not.
Space around Marius crystallized. Every mote of air, every ounce of spiritual power near him locked in place as if dipped in glass. The Graal's light stopped touching him. Time around his body flattened into something thin and brittle.
For one surreal instant, he was a painting of a man mid-shout.
Then Ren pinched his fingers together.
Marius Tepes vanished.
No explosion. No scream. No corpse.
The pattern of his existence was cut out of the world with such precision that nothing around him frayed. One moment, cause and effect included him.
The next, they didn't.
Silence slammed into the chamber.
"Sephiroth Graal!" one of the nobles gasped, scrambling for a spell. "Protect—"
Ren's gaze slid over them.
"Don't worry," he said. "You're all getting the same deal."
Petrifying Immortal Light flared behind his knuckles—not outward in a beam, but inward, into a lattice that spun around his fingers. Needles of that light slipped free, darting through the chamber along trajectories no mortal mind could have tracked.
Each shard found its target.
Vampires and magicians who had knowingly ordered Valerie's torment, who had smiled while she screamed, who had taken promotion and power for it—
Their bodies froze mid-breath. Souls pinned.
For a heartbeat, each of them understood what was happening. Their life stories unfolded, every cruelty, every choice weighed against a standard they'd never heard of.
Then their destinies were erased.
One by one, they went out.
No blood. No ash.
Just the quiet, terrifying absence of people.
When the last thread snapped, Ren lowered his hand.
The chamber, suddenly, was almost empty.
Only the hum of the Graal, the guttering of candles, and Valerie's ragged breathing remained.
Ren exhaled.
Then he moved.
Up close, Valerie's condition was worse than even his Dao-sense had suggested.
Her skin was too pale, not with vampire grace but with the flat pallor of overdrawn life. Her veins glowed faintly with leftover Graal light, each pulse dumping concepts through her nervous system that her mind had never been meant to touch.
The Sephiroth Graal itself floated over her chest, its triple-layered structure up close like a thorn bush of law. Branches of life, death, and soul spiraled together, every use having driven another barb into her. Each barb carried whispers: the dead, the dying, the not-yet-born.
Ren's teeth bared just slightly.
"Idiots," he muttered.
He stepped to the edge of the main circle and placed his palm against the invisible shell of the ritual.
The chamber dimmed.
For a heartbeat, everyone present saw—not understood, but saw—a fragment of his inner Heaven.
Twelve Fate Palaces hung in stacked layers, each one a universe rising and falling. Chaos flowed through them in rivers, refined into neutral energy, then into primal force.
Devils staggered under the weight of it. Gasper's Soul Palace quivered, a tiny world reacting to the brush of something that had already stepped past Ancient Saint and kept walking. To the vampires, it was like staring at an alien heaven.
The ritual shuddered as his Dao wrapped around it.
Ren didn't crush it.
Instead, he reworked it.
Lines of foreign Dao essence bled red, then cooled to gold, then rearranged into new patterns under his touch. The core function—Sephiroth Graal connecting to the world—was not severed, but rerouted.
Instead of forcing Valerie's soul to stand alone between the Graal and reality, he slid something else into that gap.
His Heaven.
A thin layer of neutral chaos slipped between the Graal and the raw principles it touched—a buffer that caught the overwhelming flood, broke it down, and passed it on in gentler streams.
The torrent of information slowed.
Fragments that did reach Valerie were filtered, simplified into manageable impressions instead of tidal waves.
Inside her, he followed the Graal's structure into her soul.
He saw the thorn bush up close, saw how each barb had twisted her mind, how her Anima—the spark of True Self—had curled in on itself under the weight. The Sacred Gear's own auto-protection had become a cage, wrapping tighter and tighter to keep her "safe" until it smothered her.
The Immortal Soul Bone pulsed.
Thorns straightened.
Loops unraveled into clean spirals.
Branches that had stuck like nails into her Anima were redirected, tied into the foundations of something new: a first Soul Palace forming around Valerie's true self. A small world, fragile but real, built not as a battery, but as a home.
He traced each thread of disease in her body—corrosion from overuse, scars burned into brain and soul. Wherever the Graal's power had torn, he wrapped that wound in tiny fragments of Dao essence, turning vicious, self-reinforcing loops into closed circuits that would exhaust themselves harmlessly.
The chamber's circles dimmed as he pulled their teeth, repurposing their structure to feed his changes instead of chewing on Valerie.
Ren stepped inward.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
And Valerie Tepes' inner world opened before him.