As much as Theo wanted to lock himself into a room and focus on nothing but soulcrafting, he thought that might be taking exactly the wrong lesson from his revelation. When there was a lecture by the sole Deuxan instructor at the school that Nauda urged everyone to attend, he decided that was the right moment to return. Nauda smiled when he arrived, though he wasn't sure if it was a real smile or not.

"I'm glad to see so many of you here." The instructor entered the room in a shimmering blur that faded as he reached the front. "Many of you are making significant soulcrafting progress, which means you are starting to look upwards towards the clouds. This lesson is about ascension, how it's accomplished, and why you'd be a fool to try now."

That was... somewhat disappointing. Theo's knowledge might not be perfect, but he doubted that it would be corrected by a second tier soulcrafter. He returned to his soulhome to get back to work, keeping only part of his attention on the lecture.

"Here on Tatian, little attention is paid to ranks and tiers... too little, if you ask me! I hold my tongue when it comes to culture, but in terms of soulcrafting, your limits are impossible to ignore. A few of you might even have come up against them if you've built high enough, and discovered that the clouds are truly overhead... and that they push back."

After that, the lecturer continued to talk about safe building heights and techniques, which he already knew. He glanced up briefly to the clouds roiling overhead, but they were irrelevant to him now. Ascending was impossible while he was so unprepared, and he wouldn't even have wanted to without having fully soulcrafted his first floor. No, for the time being, his concerns were on the ground.

With so much physical work done, his problem was now more spiritual: reinterpreting everything he'd crafted in a way that he could really believe on an intuitive level. Everything had been based around controlling the power of light, which was no longer possible. But even if his core plan had failed, in so many years on Earth he'd certainly had time to think about other soulhome concepts.

So instead, he intended to build himself around the concept of gravity. Solarstone was dense and embodied the sun, one of the largest sources of mass relevant to ordinary life. It didn't take much straining to refocus himself toward a fundamental law instead of a simple embodiment of an element.

The implications were vast, however. Gravity was a more precise and clinical concept, poorly suited for the soulhome of a mighty warrior... but that wasn't who he was anymore. Theo took a deep breath and tried to let go of his visions of himself as an invincible soulcrafter striding through the battlefield, shrugging off blows from all sides. His soul was cynical and brittle now... and extremely sharp.

Slowly he felt his soulhome shift on a fundamental level. The light itself dimmed and his solarstone blocks darkened. The grass surrounding his soulhome, once trying to mimic fresh young grass, shifted from yellow to gray. As it shifted, he could feel his soul coming into alignment, his foundation and his soulhome no longer straining against one another.

But he could also feel a deep spiritual exhaustion. Recognizing his limits, Theo faded out, tuning back in to the lecture.

"In Deuxan we would have a slate, but here you must use your imagination." The instructor placed one hand flat, then slid his second over it. "If you do succeed in piercing the clouds and ascending, your soulhome is reinforced, yes, but this is a secondary concern. More importantly, you will have opened up an entire second tier of space in which to build. Double the number of potential chambers, either to reinforce what you already have or to soulcraft new abilities."

"Does each ascension double the size of your soulhome?" a student asked. The instructor shook his head and slipped his lower hand over the top.

"No, each tier is roughly the same size as all the others. But the intensity of your cantae does continue increasing sharply, and more importantly each tier is qualitatively different from the previous. Third tier soulcrafters are called Rulers for a reason: they represent the first peak of attainment. At that stage, a person has rebuilt their soul so much that they are, in a sense, a sublime material themselves. Rulers generate their own cantae at all times, even from their physical body, and thus most realms are ruled by third tier soulcrafters."

Theo frowned, as the last part was untrue as far as he knew. Rulers obtained significant advantages and did represent a peak of a sort, but they were rarely actual monarchs unless the Nine had changed in his absence. It might be true in the backwaters of Tatian, but he would have expected a Deuxan to know better. Usually regions were dominated by those on the fourth tier... but it seemed that the other students were thinking in the opposite direction.

"How are Archcrafters different from all of us?" Famaj asked. The instructor dropped his hands and instead folded them in his sleeves.

"We gain the ability to push further outward, crafting structures away from our core soulhome. The primary use of that is to build a shielding wall, which is why I can appear to be a simple soulcrafter if I choose. But that is a lesson for far later, when you have ascended and begun work as an Archcrafter."

There was silence after that, many of the students apparently awed by the ideas. Theo started to wonder if he was going to need to ask the obvious next question himself when he saw Fiyu shift. She sat near Nauda and poked her in the leg, prompting the other woman to speak. "Even a Ruler is still called a Farmguard here. If they are the third tier of soulcrafter, what is the fourth?"

"Ah yes, the Landguards." Their instructor shook his head in a gesture that might have been dismissal or respect. "In other worlds, they would be referred to as Authorities, and they represent heights of power far beyond simple soulcrafters. The path from Ruler to Authority is difficult... or so I have been told. The truth is that there, I am as ignorant as all of you."

Theo suspected that was not strictly true, though he agreed that it was beyond all of them for the foreseeable future. It was true that there was a chasm between Authorities and those below, but it wasn't the peak. Soulcrafters in the tier beyond that were known as Strongholds, the highest stage he'd reached in his previous life.

Except it wasn't his previous life, just his past. Theo set his teeth and resolved to accept all of his history, including all his time on Earth.

In any case, even back then, he had met opponents who outclassed him, and not just the demon at the end. The sixth tier was named Dominion, and they did represent the highest strength he knew of... but he suspected that it wasn't the limit. If he was honest with himself, in his past he had been self-centered and short-sighted, so he could only just now intuit the movements of greater powers yet.

All of that lay so far ahead of him that it didn't bear thinking about. Instead, Theo returned to his soulhome as the questions devolved to youthful enthusiasm, asking starry-eyed questions about the strengths of Rulers and Landguards. He knew those all too well, and they weren't sufficient.

Theo had nearly completed the shift of his soulhome, but there was still so much work to do. He walked inward and stared at the blasted chamber, which had still resisted every effort to change it. Conceptually, he had decided to embrace it: a blackened shell ruined by his past decisions was a perfect metaphor for his soul. That didn't mean that he could actually use it effectively.

Maybe one day he would find a plant that could grow in the dark soil, but everything he had tried on Tatian had instantly felt wrong. It was the same lesson he'd misapplied when he tried to start the reaction: his central chamber wouldn't be a place of gentle growth, it needed to be a cold principle. If it couldn't be the blazing of the sun, it needed to be something more fundamental.

His conclusion, coming to him in a burst of insight while speaking with Nanjuma, had been to embody the principle of mass... but that was easier said than done. In an ideal world, he'd create a singularity, but he doubted that he would find any sublime materials representing abstract scientific concepts. That was likely far beyond his capacity at the first tier anyway.

What he did have was an Archcrafter-tier sublime material called a bogstone. Not visually impressive, just a dark sphere sitting in the center of the chamber, and swampy wetlands were not exactly as conceptually impressive as the sun itself. But the sublime material had a very useful property: the stone absorbed anything, sucking whatever it touched into itself. Though it wasn't truly the same principle as gravity, he thought it might be as close as he could get, from the resources he had available.

Unfortunately, he wasn't quite capable of using it. Even without generating any cantae, its mere presence put stress on his entire soulhome. Only the blackened walls of the central chamber resisted the effect, apparently impervious, but the force made the other stones tremble whenever he tried to use it. When he'd built a temporary roof over the central chamber, it had been blasted straight off. If he could repeat the process that had turned the center to glass, that might reinforce the whole building, but he lacked the resources.

No solution came to him, so Theo set about the simpler work of soulcrafting one of his outer chambers. Without a core chamber embodying gravity, he couldn't develop any techniques that he hoped would be the heart of his strength, but he could still improve himself in simple ways.

He knew that he would never be a physical powerhouse, at least not compared to others of his tier, but he couldn't afford to neglect his body. As he crafted simple furnishings from hearthtree wood, Theo continued listening in as someone finally asked a good question.

"What about demons?" It was a short Fithan woman he hadn't noticed before. Her question quieted the room, but she pressed onward. "When the demons sacrifice themselves to summon a second stage demon, is it their equivalent of an Archcrafter?"

"That's incorrect, but you've asked an important question." The instructor leaned back against the wall of the room, his gaze wandering out one of the windows. "The language for demons varies, but never let yourself be deceived into thinking they are the same. Teaching you about demons would be a class unto itself, so just remember this: the steps between demonic stages are vaster than those for any of the mortal races. If you think that their sacrifices will make your battle easier by reducing the number of opponents, stop at once. What they summon will be much worse."

It abruptly occurred to Theo that the system seemed to be net positive, as if in violation of conservation of energy. The thought was absurd, of course, since that law seemed less absolute in the Nine, and in any case he could easily explain it as absorbing power from another source. Yet even if it was wrong, the thought remained stuck in his head.

Previously, he'd never given much thought to how deeply unnatural the demons were. They didn't eat, didn't breed, didn't grow. Nothing about their nature made sense as normal living creatures, and their instinct to sacrifice themselves was bizarre, even by the standards of the Nine. In the past he'd assumed they were some kind of soulcrafting experiment gone horribly wrong, but how could soulcrafting produce something like that?

As he soulcrafted, Theo turned the problems over in his mind. He would find no answers via pure thought, but at least this time he could look. Perhaps he could learn the truth if he spoke to the philosophers of Arbai, or learned from the strange beings of Siata, or searched the divine archives of Noven. This time, he couldn't ignore those deeper issues, not with the memories of that demon in the pale realm still haunting him.

In his hands, the hearthtree wood had somehow become dark and jagged. Perhaps exactly as it should be.