[Extra Skill: Incomplete Trinity Harmony has evolved → Trinity Harmony]
[You have gained deeper resonance with mana.]
When he reopened his eyes, Ashen noticed the difference at once.
The familiar illusion of omnipresence washed over him like a tide, and he took a while to rein it in. He focused inwardly, especially on the way mana moved inside him, and how it seemed to transmit every iota of information back to his brain.
…A brain that tricked itself into believing that this so-called knowledge was all that the world had to offer.
'...Of course not.'
When his senses finally landed on his smiling mother and failed to break through her body, the illusion shattered, and Ashen was able to regain his composure.
"How is it, dear? Nothing wrong, I presume?" Anastasia asked curiously when she felt his mana scan over her body.
Ashen smiled in satisfaction. "Yes, mother, it's even better than I expected. This is perfect, thank you."
"It's my duty as your mom to take care of you. You don't have to thank me, son. You just have to enjoy my care."
Anastasia waved off his thanks with a grin, but then she tilted her head. "And why would you think of it as better than expected? I followed all the steps you provided to the letter. It should be 'as expected' instead, no?"
He shook his head. "The plan I conceived was based on ideal scenarios without taking into account the side effects on my brain." Ashen swirled his index finger beside his head. "In short, in some parts, I would never stay sane if I touched them."
Then, he looked at her in admiration. "But you connected everything perfectly, and you also did it painlessly. That's why you exceeded my expectations, Mom."
"Well, that's of course. My son can only get the best!" Anastasia looked at him with an expression as if she wondered why he would think otherwise in the first place.
"As for pain, I would never make you go through something that horrific." She sighed with a mock-aghast look, then smiled. "So I could only make you sleep for a bit. Sorry about that."
"Heh, it was a good nap. Don't worry, mother. You're the best."
◉◉◉
The warriors were making their preparations for yet another expedition, and Ashen, who was supposed to tag along, was on the farm instead.
It couldn't be helped.
The last time he spent more than a day away from his carefully cultivated plants, two of the three died. He could only admit that the event had given him some kind of trauma.
And the reason for their death was due to a symptom he had long since discovered: the more developed and mana-rich they became, the more the instability and fragility of the manaweave intensified.
Thankfully, all of that was now behind Ashen. With the sapling's last evolution, courtesy of Late Bloomer, it had become a fully grown tree of mighty beauty.
Of course, the real benefit here wasn't how pretty the colors it boasted were, or how brightly it illuminated the surroundings, but the shedding of its persistent fragility in favor of enduring robustness.
This was why Ashen dared to leave for more than a day, with the only measure of protection being the immature care of his ever-growing, lovely little sister, Lapis Hunt.
So, with a light check-up and plenty of servings of his gentle mana, Ashen left for his father's quarters with a gait that carried satisfaction.
◉
"You're finally here." Adam's demeanor was unusually stern. "Did you prepare yourself well?"
Ashen looked at him deeply and then realized that it was that.
Adam always became colder whenever an expedition approached, as if he were trying to freeze his own emotions and become a purely logical monster.
Shrugging, Ashen answered, "As you can see, my sisters have decked me to the teeth. I mean, look at this armor…" Ashen lifted both of his hands, showing a glimpse of the chainmail beneath his composite armor.
"And don't even get me started on how many charms are tucked under here." He tapped his waist twice and shook his head in fond exasperation. "If anything, I'm overgeared for this."
A smile cracked through the father's cold facade at the sight of his son's nonchalant demeanor despite the dangers he was about to face.
"There's no such thing as being overgeared or overprepared against those things. And preparation also includes goodbyes. Did you see your mother and sister at least?"
"Sure did." Ashen nodded. "Having to dodge that brat was a pain, though. If he finds out you allowed me to join you while he stayed here, he'll throw another tantrum."
"It can't be helped." Adam shook his head. "Cain is still too weak and immature. A couple more years should do the trick."
"I hope so."
"The same goes for you. Don't step over the line, and don't try to be brave. Just follow quietly and use your eyes to witness everything." Adam's voice hardened again. "That alone would be plenty of experience for you. The rest can wait for the future. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Dad. Loud and clear."
"Good son. Now go and join the rest of your brothers."
◉◉◉
Ashen had been excited, and he was not ashamed to admit it, though he would perhaps have been embarrassed had anyone looked closely at his face.
For fifteen years he had lived beneath the earth, and for fifteen years the sun had been nothing more to him than a nostalgic word, a thing only he and Lapis spoke of with familiarity, as one speaks of bread or water.
Now he was going to see it with his own eyes. The mere thought made his heart beat in a strange, uneven way.
The expedition numbered more than a hundred warriors, and they wound their way through the tunnels in a long, silent column, climbing steadily through passages so intricate that Ashen soon gave up trying to remember the turns.
Every so often they would pass through another layer of concealment, another purifying ward, another barrier raised to seal the settlement off from whatever waited above. He could only guess at the labor all of this had cost, the years, the lives perhaps, and he found himself thinking of it with a kind of reverence. And with each ward they crossed, his excitement swelled a little more, until it was almost childish.
But it was not alone. Something had crept in beside it, quietly at first, so that he did not notice the exact moment it arrived.
Dread.
He felt it midway through. With every step upward, an invisible oppression settled more firmly onto his shoulders, as if the air itself had grown heavier and wanted to press him back into the earth.
At first he told himself he was imagining it. Then it became uncomfortable, and he could no longer pretend. Then it became overbearing, and by the time they neared the final ward, it felt as though an entire mountain had been laid across his back, and he was walking beneath it out of sheer stubbornness.
'What the hell is this…?'
He could feel the mana around them now, though calling it mana seemed almost an insult to the word.
It was denser, heavier, twisted in the same way Narkals's mana was twisted, and it seemed to seep into everything it touched, into the stone, into the air, into him. The excitement he had carried all the way up the tunnels was gone, and he could not even remember the moment he had lost it.
And just when the pressure reached its peak, they emerged onto the surface.
Ashen raised his eyes, and the first thing that greeted him was not the blue sky he had imagined a thousand times in the dark. It was black. A vast, unbroken blackness stretched above him from one end of the world to the other, and within it hung a moon blacker still, its edges traced by a thin crimson ring, as though someone had drawn a circle of blood around it with deliberate care.
For a long moment he simply stood there, and his mind refused to take in what his eyes were telling it.
'That can't be the moon.'
He was certain of it.
'The more likely answer would be…'
A spell.
A vast and terrible spell, for nothing natural could radiate such malice, such naked killing intent, as if the thing were looking down at the earth and hating it. And the mana pouring from it was so immense, so absurd, that he could feel it even from here, like heat from a furnace felt across a room.
'How much mana is that… to be felt even from this far away…?'
But he was not given time to stand and brood over it. The hundred warriors had barely glanced at the sky. They did not pause, did not murmur, did not so much as slow their pace.
They simply ran forward, as men run across ground they have crossed a hundred times before, and Ashen, blinking stupidly, had no choice but to follow.
It was only then, running among them, that he began to understand what kind of world he had stepped into.
There were no plains, no forests, no rivers catching the light, for there was no light for them to catch.
There was barely even a horizon. The land lay blackened and barren in every direction, gouged by craters so wide that whole buildings could have vanished into them without a trace.
Ash drifted through the air like a slow, endless snowfall. Rubble covered the ground, and everywhere he looked he found the remains of something that had once been a civilization: the stump of a wall, the outline of a road swallowed by the earth, the broken bones of structures whose purpose no one now remembered.
In some places it looked as though an entire city had been erased by a single blow. In others, nothing had been erased at all; things had simply died, and been left where they fell.
There was no movement anywhere. From birds to insects, nothing that crawled or flew or sang.
Now and then they passed a tree, if it could still be called one, twisted and leafless and standing in such an attitude that it resembled a corpse more than a living thing.
And over all of it, the black sky hung motionless, while crimson clouds drifted slowly across it, washing the ruined land in a dull red glow before passing on and leaving it in darkness again.
Ashen had known the surface was dangerous. Of course he had known. He had heard the stories since childhood, how humanity had been driven to the very edge of extinction, how the world above had become a battlefield where countless races and monsters tore at one another without end.
He had listened to all of it and nodded and believed it, and yet he understood now that he had not believed it at all, not truly, not in the way one believes a thing one has touched. To hear of despair is one thing. To breathe it is another.
He had never lived any of it, and he knew precisely why. Adam had seen to that. His father's competence, so complete and so quiet that Ashen had grown up not having to bear any of it, had stood between their family and the worst of this era like a wall.
Now, at last, he was getting his first taste of why they called it the Reign of Terror.
And the longer they traveled, the clearer it became that the corruption in the air was simply too much.
Thanks to Trinity Harmony, he could sense it naturally, but sensing it and enduring it turned out to be two entirely different matters. Every breath carried traces of it. Every gust of wind brought a fresh wave of that twisted mana against his skin.
He had to hold his Trinity Harmony in constant focus merely to filter it out, and at first he thought, with a certain foolish pride, that it was easy. Then an hour passed, and then two, and then five, and by the time they stopped for their first rest, his head was throbbing so badly he could hardly think.
'This is ridiculous…'
He had expected enemies, ambushes, some sort of battlefield he could at least understand. What he had not expected, what no one had thought to tell him, was that simply existing out here would demand a ceaseless effort, as if the world itself were an enemy that never slept.
Over the following day he grew more skilled at cleansing the corruption before it could reach him, and he was glad of it, but skill did nothing to lessen the exhaustion of holding that concentration hour after hour.
His thoughts felt thin and stretched, like a cord pulled too tight, and a faint dizziness never quite left him. And beneath all of it lay a realization that made his expression grow darker with every mile: this was only the environment.
Indeed… This was merely the air.
'Are we supposed to fight while constantly warding off the corruption? What madness…'
He glanced at his brothers. None of them seemed troubled in the least. Each had his own means of protecting himself, whether equipment or mana manipulation or simply the hardened habit of years, and they marched on as calmly as men walking to market.
Adam, at the head of the column, looked as he always looked: composed, unhurried, and entirely at ease.
Ashen sighed. Perhaps this was simply normal to them. Perhaps he was the only one among them who found it insane, and the thought, absurdly, made him feel more alone than the wasteland itself.
They went on. One day, and then another.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, something began to feel wrong to him, though for a long while he could not say what it was.
After two more days of marching, Ashen finally understood the root cause of this feeling, and he could not hold the question arising from it.
"Father…"
Adam looked back.
"How does the cycle of the sun and moon work here? When will the sky change colors?"
Adam stared at him, and it was not confusion in his face, nor disbelief, but something stranger, the look of a man who has just heard his son speak fluently in a language that does not exist.
"Sun?"
Ashen nodded.
"And moon?"
"Yes…"
Adam frowned. "Are you talking about the corruption circle? And what's this about changing colors?"
Ashen said nothing. He felt the blood leave his face, and slowly, almost against his will, his eyes lifted toward the sky, toward the crimson ring that had followed them for days without moving even an inch.
'Wait…'
His heart began to pound.
'Don't tell me…'
Adam was still watching him strangely.
"The sky has always been one color."
Ashen swallowed. "And that is?"
Adam answered without the slightest hesitation.
"Black."