CHAPTER 39 — Missing
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Consciousness returned to Kael like a blade drawn slowly across his mind.
Pain came first—deep, smothered pain that sat beneath the skin and inside the bones, as if his body had been crushed and reassembled without care. Breath followed, shallow and uneven. The air smelled of dry grass, leather, and old wood.
Not silver. Not dust. Not the suffocating pressure of ancient law.
When his eyes finally opened, the world above him was an unfamiliar canvas stretched over a wooden frame, fluttering faintly with the wind. He was alive. That realization grounded him just long enough for memory to crash down like a collapsing mountain.
The altar. The silver tide. Ren.
Kael tried to sit up. His body refused, his nerves firing in a jagged protest.
"Don't," a woman's voice said firmly. "You'll tear what little's holding you together."
He turned his head with effort. A middle-aged woman knelt beside him, her hands rough, stained with medicinal paste. Behind her, he saw them—the wreckage of his team.
Kane—bandaged from chest to shoulder, breathing like a broken bellows.
Rovan—face pale, one arm bound tightly to his side.
Serik—awake, silent, eyes unfocused as if still trapped inside a formation that no longer existed.
Ren. Where is Ren?
Kael swallowed, his throat dry. "There was… a fifth."
The woman hesitated. Just for a moment. "We found four people," she said carefully. "Unconscious. Half-dead. Lying at the foot of the mountain valley."
Her words were calm. Professional. Wrong.
"A boy," Kael pressed, his voice hoarse. "Dark hair. Younger than us."
She shook her head. "No one else."
The silence that followed was heavier than any pressure inside the ruin. Serik slowly turned his head, his voice a ghost of its former self. "That's not possible."
"We searched," the woman said, her eyes softening with pity. "The guards did. Twice. The valley, the ravines, the cliffs. No blood. No signs of battle. No tracks leading away. There was no one else there, Master Cultivator."
Kane clenched his fist weakly. "He was there at the end. He dragged us."
Kael didn't speak. His mind replayed the final moments with merciless clarity—Ren standing when no one else could, broken and bleeding, eyes weeping red, yet still moving. Still fighting.
They checked their storage rings once strength returned enough to reach inside. The items were there.
Kane's Glacial Fang.
Rovan's Gale-Sever.
Serik's Star-Map Monolith.
Kael's Violet Nova Essence.
The rings were warm. Recently active. None of them could explain how an absent man had delivered them there.
Proof. Undeniable proof that the Inner Sanctum had been real. That the trials had been real. That Ren had been real.
A Month of Silence
Their injuries refused to heal quickly, as if the ruin's judgment lingered in their marrow. Qi circulation remained unstable. Meridians screamed when pushed too hard. Even Kael's Core burned unevenly, his flames stuttering like they were afraid to rise.
A month passed in the isolated mountain valley where the merchant caravan had made camp. In the month of recovery, the camp was too quiet. Without Ren's steady, cold presence, the group felt unanchored. It was as if Ren had been the gravitational center of their team, and now that he was gone, they were all drifting apart in the dark.
They ate in silence, not because they had nothing to say, but because the only person worth talking about was the one the world insisted didn't exist.
Days blurred into one another, marked only by pain, recovery, and the unspoken absence that sat between them like a physical weight.
When they could finally stand without shaking, Kael made the decision. He rented a low-tier, high-altitude flying beast—barely suitable for combat, but enough to cross terrain quickly—and led the others back toward the canyon valley.
The place where everything had changed.
They didn't recognize it. The oppressive darkness was gone. The crawling shadows were gone. The sense of being watched—gone. No shadow stalkers lurked among the stone. No distorted silence pressed against their ears. Wind moved freely through the valley, carrying nothing but the ordinary scent of rock and sparse vegetation.
It was… normal. Like it had always been that way.
Kael guided the beast lower, his heart pounding. "This isn't right."
They followed memory instead of sight—turn by turn, descent by descent—until they reached the place where the boundary of the ruin should have been. There was nothing but a sheer mountain cliff.
No distortion. No pressure. No threshold.
Serik pressed his palm against the cold granite, his expression tightening. "No spatial residue. No sealed layer. Nothing."
Kane stared at the cliff, his jaw clenched. "Then where did we go? Where did he go?"
No one answered.
It wasn't that Ren was gone — it was that whatever boundary they crossed had only opened one way.
They returned to Frostmere carrying silence with them. The city had moved on, its people preoccupied with the mundane business of living.
When Kael asked about the canyon valley, civilians spoke easily, almost casually.
"The chaos was terrifying," one merchant said. "The Arbiters' presence shook the land itself."
"But it ended," another added, bowing slightly toward the city center. "The Obsidian Vale's Sovereigns entered the fray. After that, everything stopped. They cleansed the rot. Yet no one could agree on what the rot had been."
When people ventured out again, they found the canyon valley calm. Ordinary. Unchanged by anything except memory.
"No one knows what caused it," an old man shrugged. "The great chaos must have triggered a seal. It just… became normal again."
A convenient explanation. One that explained nothing.
Back at the Stonewake Pavilion, night settled over the city. Lanterns flickered below, indifferent to the weight sitting in Kael's chest. He looked at the scars on his hands—scars earned in a place that no longer existed, alongside a boy who remained somewhere the world could no longer reach.
Ren had completed all three trials. Kael remembered it clearly. He remembered the blood-soaked resolve of a boy who refused to break even when his own body was failing. Ren was the reason they were alive. Ren was the reason they held the treasures of a god.
Kael closed his eyes, leaning against the cold stone of the balcony.
"He didn't die," he said quietly to the empty night.
There was no proof. Only conviction. Only the burning heat of the Nova Essence against his heart.
So he waited. Because people like Ren did not end quietly. They disappeared into the white noise of history, into the cracks between worlds.
And then—one day—they returned.
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Chapter End