Kael plucked a flower and rolled it between his fingers.
The third layer was a different world from the first two.
This was as far as a rank one could go without further qualification, and it showed in every direction he looked.
There were more buildings here than in the second layer, which gave it less open space, but the prestige of each one compensated for what was lost. In Velthoria, Darian had handed him keys to one of perhaps five apartment buildings of genuine quality in the entire city. Here there were countless of them, each faced in white marble and decorated with gold, standing as though they had always existed and always would.
This was where you ended up if rank one was the ceiling you had given yourself. A comfortable place to stop. A beautiful one, even. So comfortable in fact many decided it was the reasonable one.
Even the roads were different. Smooth in a way that stone alone couldn't account for, laid by some mote Kael didn't recognize. Apparently this was the layer the Royal Noble family had designed directly, and he had no doubt their influence extended into the deeper ones too. At their level, reputation was mostly maintained through raw strength. But Sole was the face they showed outward to the world, and the third layer was the most visible part of that face. Of course they had made it exceptional.
Kael brushed past a few shoulders before finding his way to a refinement shop.
A bell clinked as he stepped inside.
A rank three Luminaire set down a newspaper and glanced at Kael's crest. He smiled and rose.
"Looking for a mote? I'll tell you now, there isn't another shop in the third layer that sells what we do."
Kael gave a friendly nod.
"Just looking around."
"Take your time. I'll be right here." He opened the paper again.
Kael moved along the display cases, studying what was on offer.
He was fairly certain he was the first Luminaire in Sole's history to open a refinement shop in the first layer. There was simply no logical reason to do so. Every Luminaire of means operated in the third layer at minimum, and most saw the first beneath them, meant for mortals.
But that was exactly why it had worked.
Augustus coming to him meant he had finally registered on the map of high society. That had been the entire point. Not the income, not yet, though that would come. The point was visibility. You couldn't climb toward people who didn't know you existed. The shop in the first layer, selling motes at a price that made every refinement Luminaire in the city uncomfortable, had been a flag planted in territory nobody thought worth planting one in.
Augustus was the confirmation that the flag had been seen.
This was only the first step. But it was the step that made every subsequent one possible.
Kael's eyes settled on a green beetle flying mindless circles inside a jar. He picked it up and read the small leather tag fastened to the lid.
Jade Horned mote: 2,000 mindstones.
The successor to the Golden Horned mote he had purchased back in Velthoria. One rank above it at rank three, and priced at eight times as much. Like its predecessor it was a consumable mote, but where the Golden Horned had increased his strength by the equivalent of five wolves, this one offered five mountain bears.
'Four thousand mindstones left for motes if I buy this.'
He considered it in silence.
From his experience the rank two Golden Horned mote had offered more value than almost anything else he had acquired, even accounting for its passive nature. On reflection that was probably precisely why. A consistent passive increase to base strength required nothing from him and cost nothing to maintain.
Kael had no doubt he would pursue refinement to its distant end. But that journey was nothing but endless mountains and storm filled oceans, and refinement alone would not suffice. It was fundamentally too weak as a primary combat capability. His experiences had been skewed, constantly placing him against forces stronger than himself, but the pattern was still clear. Of every fight he had survived, refinement pathway had never been the reason he was still standing afterward.
The question of a secondary pathway remained unresolved.
Focusing on the one he had the most natural talent for was the obvious answer. The difficulty was that there was no reliable way to identify which pathway that was. Except through soul-bound motes. A soul-bound mote served as a clear indicator because you awakened from the pathway you naturally excelled in, and the soul-bound mote took its form from that same pathway.
He thought back to the golden rod.
Whatever pathway had produced that soul-bound mote was the one that compared most naturally to refinement for him. But what was it? It had been, for lack of a better description, vague. Not blade pathway. Not Mind pathway. Not Refinement, not Weaver. Whatever it was, it remained a distant and monolithic mystery he hadn't been able to solve.
Kael placed the jar under his arm and continued browsing.
This was why he had chosen to spend mindstones on himself. Whatever secondary pathway he settled on eventually, building a foundation through consumable motes was never a poor decision regardless.
He stopped at a glass display case.
Different motes of varying rank were pinned to a backing with small needles, arranged like a collection.
'For hobbyists studying mote shapes, probably.'
He was about to move on when he stopped and looked back.
'How have they managed to preserve motes without them shattering completely?'
He couldn't arrive at an answer and moved on.
Flail mote: 1,500 mindstones.
Roughly the opposite of the Datum mote. Where Datum fixed things in place, the Flail mote caused uncontrolled movement. Not inherently bad, not inherently useful either. If someone fired a projectile at him he could activate it on the projectile mid-flight and cause it to veer off course. Situational at best.
He set it back and kept walking.
Twenty more motes passed without catching his attention before something stopped him.
Inside a small glass vise, a golden liquid held its shape as a perfect suspended drop. Simply sitting there as though it had decided to.
He had never seen a mote that wasn't a solid object.
Amber Dew mote: 4,500 mindstones.
He read further.
Rank one.
His eyes widened a fraction.
"Isn't the price on this a little absurd?"
The shopkeeper's eyes moved toward him.
"What are you holding?"
"The Amber Dew mote."
The shopkeeper laughed.
"Not really. It's from the Luck pathway."
"Luck pathway?"
"Yes. Familiar with it?"
"Not particularly."
The shopkeeper walked over and took the tube, holding it up to the light.
"Among refinement and perhaps weaver pathway, Luck pathway motes are among the rarest things you can stumble upon in the wild. Almost impossible to find naturally."
Kael's mind turned.
"Can it affect refinement success rates?"
"If I knew that I'd consume it myself." He laughed. "But on a more serious note, almost nothing is known about the Luck pathway. There isn't a single recorded case of anyone awakening as it, except for Serene Moon Demon Paragon, as you'd know."
'Serene Moon...'
Kael had been so consumed by his current studies that it actually took a second to place the name.
Serene Moon Demon Paragon. The ninth and last Paragon to ever exist, more than a hundred and fifty million years ago.
Among all the Demon Paragons, he occupied a category of his own. The others had been catastrophic in the way that natural disasters were catastrophic, devastating, incomprehensible in scale, but ultimately finite. Serene Moon Demon Paragon had been something different. Something that didn't have a clear word for it. The closest the historical record came was world ending event, and even that felt like an understatement written by people who had survived and therefore couldn't fully account for what almost hadn't.
He had pushed humanity closer to extinction than anything since the Smolten. Closer, some argued, than the Smolten themselves.
And he had done it not through overwhelming force or a war with clear sides, but through luck. Through the simple and absolute tilting of every probability in existence toward whatever outcome served him. Battles lost before they began. Plans unravelling before they were enacted. The right people dying at the right moments. The wrong people surviving just long enough to cause the maximum damage. Nothing he did looked like an attack. Everything simply went wrong for everyone who opposed him, continuously, without exception, until there was almost no one left to oppose him at all.
At his absolute peak, his luck had become so immense that if an unborn child had the potential to harm him in his weakest state, the mother herself would die to protect Serene Moon Demon Paragon.
He was also the only human in recorded history to awaken as a Luminaire at birth, and create a completely new pathway in that birth. Even the concept of Luck pathway had not existed before him, but had been created with him.
"Some believe that any mote related to the Luck pathway is an inheritance left behind by him, and that no true wild motes from that pathway actually exist. This Amber Dew mote for example is believed to not even be a mote in the conventional sense, but a drop of his blood that has seeped out from wherever his inheritance rests."
The shopkeeper handed the tube back.
"So yes. It isn't overpriced, but whether it's underpriced isn't clear either. It's rank one, that much we can confirm. The effects of consuming it are beyond our current understanding. I consulted several peers when it came in and all of them were perplexed on first sight. After some time studying it we arrived at Luck pathway as the most reasonable conclusion."
"I'll take it."
Kael tightened his grip around the tube.
"Not a bad choice, sir. After all, Serene Moon Demon Paragon is also the only person in history to have refined a Luck pathway mote, this is for sure a bargain."
Luck pathway…
He had not forgotten about it exactly. More like it had been so far beyond anything he could currently reach that thinking about it had felt like a waste of time. But this pathway held the key to the one variable he had never been able to account for. The one that sat underneath every calculation he made and every plan he built, invisible and unmeasurable and always present.
Luck.
Mindstones returned, but the guarantee of an opportunity like this didn't.
Kael pocketed the motes on his way back to the clinic.
—
Luke had mentioned earlier that he and Sylvia were heading to the market, so the clinic stood empty when he stepped inside.
Kael placed both motes on the table and studied them.
When he moved his finger close to the Jade Horned mote the beetle threw itself against the glass with everything it had, as though trying to reach him through it. The Amber Dew on the other hand sat indifferent.
The moment he unscrewed the lid, the Jade Horned beetle crawled out and launched itself onto his palm, immediately beginning to dig with its front legs and work its mandibles against his skin, trying to get under it. The primordial eye however sealed the wound faster than it could create it, hindering it from making any real progress.
"Let me help you, little guy."
Kael closed his fist, creating a wet crunch as the shell collapsed and the beetle burst into jade green sparks. They bloomed outward in every direction before reversing, folding back inward and driving straight into his skin.
Then it was done.
He swept his hand through the air. Nothing visible had changed. But he could feel it. There wasn't a rank three defensive mote in existence he couldn't drive his hand through right now. Even Point Aegis would falter, assuming his hand didn't break first.
He moved to the other mote.
When he brought the tube close to his face to examine it the golden liquid pressed itself against the glass nearest to his primordial eye, clinging there, stretching toward it with something that looked uncomfortably like recognition.
Kael moved it away from his face.
He had spent some time studying it. On the surface it read as rank one. But its behaviour suggested at least the beginnings of instincts beyond survival, which didn't typically appear until considerably higher ranks. He had no way to confirm this however.
He uncorked it and held it above his open mouth. The liquid rolled down the inside of the glass and dropped onto his tongue. Whatever had been holding its shape released the moment it made contact and it spread like any ordinary liquid.
The taste was disturbingly sweet. And underneath that, a metallic taste so potent he might as well have swallowed solid iron.
And just like that, 6,500 mindstones worth of motes consumed. It really was a little troublesome how much easier it was to spend money than to earn it.