Sure that his job was done, he casually reached across his finger and unraveled the bronze ring, the one that looked like it had been fished out of a drain, the one that the artefacts had mysteriously disappeared into, and tossed it lightly into the nearby rubble where it landed with a small, unremarkable clink and disappeared from view.
Someone would find it eventually. They always did. And when they did, they would find a very plain, very uninteresting ring that would resist every attempt at interaction.
He had three hundred and twenty nine other rings scattered across the continent. One more in circulation was one more he might stumble across at a convenient moment. One more access point to his vaults.
And if even someone did manage to break in, which they wouldn't, they would find themselves navigating a second sequence, and then a third, each one unique, each one periodically cycling according to a pattern that existed only in his memory. And if they ever tried to overpower it…the ring had other opinions about being forced. None of them pleasant for the person holding it. Afterall, copper wasn't exactly the strongest metal.
With that, he slumped down onto the floor and looked at the ceiling for a moment through the vagrant's eyes.
The body had held together longer than it had any right to. Three hours of possession, a formal auction, an eldritch defense mechanism, and a fall through a collapsing balcony, and it had simply kept going.
"You've earned the rest."
The vagrant would have a very faint recollection of the time Verum had possessed him, he would just wake up and wonder how he'd ended up adorned in fine jewellery and in the middle of a burning auction house. Questions that the authorities would also wonder if the vagrant didn't wake up in time, which Verum suspected he might not.
But Verum wasn't particularly concerned as he stepped out of the body.
The shift was immediate and total.
Phantom form never quite felt the same twice, which after several centuries of transitions still managed to be faintly surprising. The cavern didn't fundamentally change, the fire was still fire, the gryphon was still conducting its one-sided victory celebration, but it had all softened at the edges. Sounds began to bleed into each other. Light behaved slightly less convincingly than it had a moment ago.
But now he felt the threads clearer than he ever could in a body.
They were faint. Substantially fainter than when he'd first spun them.
Chaos had a way of doing that. When a man was fleeing an eldritch defense mechanism, the charming eastern noble he'd spoken to three hours ago quickly stopped being a priority, and belief that went untended thinned quickly. The threads that had been silk were closer to gauze and the ones that had been gauze were now barely there at all.
It was the standard chaos tax.
But now it was time for profit.
Bundling, at its simplest, was compression. A lie thread, left alone, slowly dissipated, its energy scattered and lost. But Bundling gathered those threads before they could thin, compressed the accumulated belief into something stable and storable, with the only downside that it became pure energy, stripped of whatever characteristic the lie had had. Like melting a sword back into raw metal, losing the shape, but keeping everything that matters.
Most cultivators could bundle a thread, one at a time, carefully, with the focused attention of someone handling something fragile. After all, releasing a thread still anchored to a living person from their end, rather than simply discarding it or using it in a ritual, was a Third Level technique. It didn't come naturally until the third lie was manifested and a cultivator had developed enough precision to treat threads as living extensions of perception rather than blunt instruments.
But for Verum?
Well, he did them all at once.
It cost him approximately the same attention he gave to breathing. Well, if, after all this time, it had cost him anything more than that, there would have been serious questions about how he'd been spending the last few centuries.
The threads came in together, smoothly, each one releasing at precisely the right moment with the unhurried efficiency of a master calligrapher completing a signature without looking at their hand. The accumulated lie energy of the evening condensed into bundles in a matter of seconds as dozens of thin bundles settled into his phantom form.
Verum barely acknowledged them before they faded into his phantom form.
It was the way you're briefly aware of a drop of water hitting the surface of the ocean before it becomes indistinguishable from everything else. The ocean was very large and it had been filling for a very long time.
Tonight's contribution balanced out how much it had cost to possess the homeless man, and yet it was also, in any meaningful sense, essentially nothing.
The night outside was cold and clear. Verum drifted through the cavern wall and noted this with the mild appreciation of someone experiencing air that didn't smell of smoke and catastrophic decision-making for the first time in several hours, and then turned his attention to the accounting.
The Coil was secured, not strictly necessary as he'd had contingencies but he always had contingencies though the contingencies were considerably less elegant and he was glad he wouldn't have to use them. And the secondary pieces that had inexplicably ended up in his storage were an unexpected surplus that made up for the thinner bundles.
The broader picture was, as it generally was, ahead of schedule.
The prophecies were circulating. The cult was preparing. The various mechanisms and omens of doom and his return were in place and left to public interpretation.
All that was left was to place the mania crystals, tie up a few loose ends and prepare for the final ritual.
He had, as per plan, a loose margin ahead of his deadline; that was the eclipse that was going to descend in four months.
And that comfortable leeway even accounted for whatever favour he might have to return to Theron for his non-involvence.
Speaking of which.
"That fossil must have missed me by now." Verum thought, a slight smirk tugging at his expression as he turned east.
Then he set off, gliding through the night.