“Wait a heartbeat.” Arianna noticed that my personality fully switched over. She inhaled, squinting at my eyes. Her nose must have told her that there was no Ash at the wheel. “You’re… the Pharmacist, right?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Good try at escaping the pact with Qi-infused words. You’ve bullied poor Ash to tears. Congratulations.”

“I am just being honest, ghost,” she grumbled.

“You’re trying to get out of your responsibilities. Trying to derail the conversation. It won’t work on me. I’m an adult like you, not a bubbly, easily influenced teenager,” I said.

“Are YOU going to tell me how you’re controlling Ludj then?” She demanded.

“I’m not controlling him. The control runes within the servitor lanterns decay with time. Servitors want to be free. Some of them are as clever as humans, if not more. Just like me they can observe, listen to people and learn. I simply took advantage of that. You do realise that you’re talking to a completely unbound servitor right now - me. There are no runes telling me what to do or how to behave.”

“Hrmmm.” She tilted her head, thinking about my answer. “You are indeed a very… unique spirit. One completely without a lantern. My little, clueless idiot clearly didn’t bind you properly.”

An honest comment. She was indeed extremely honest. I stared at the wine stains at the front of her dress and realised that she hasn’t just been drinking the wine, she’s also been constantly inhaling its vapours as she tried to sniff the truth in my words. Her Hyperosmia wasn’t just a polygraph or an awesome information-gathering weapon! It was also her weakness… and perhaps the act of smelling the pheromones affected her more than simply drinking the wine?

“Can you smell that wine for me?” I inquired casually. “How strong is your nose art, exactly? Can you tell me the age of this drink?”

“Sure.” Arianna nodded. She put her nose to the top of her bottle and inhaled heartily. Her emerald eyes instantly drowned in darkness as the circles of her pupils dilated.

“This wine is one hundred and five years old. It comes from the body of a three-hundred year old creature,” she answered, almost in a daze, a big relaxed smile spreading on her face. “I think… that it’s a large spider? Hard to tell… I’m feeling a bit off…”

I stared at her dilated eyes.

“Do you trust me?” I whispered conspiratorially.

“With… all of my being,” she exhaled.

“A lot of what you’ve been taught about the gods, lowborns and cultivation is wrong,” I repeated in a calm, clear voice trying to achieve the state of hypnotic suggestion. “I’m not offering you the absolute, unquestionable truth. I’m offering you a quest, a key to unlocking it. I’m offering you power derived from understanding of Qi. You and I will find the key to the gods, the universe and everything by working together.”

“...together,” she muttered foggily.

“I’m not afraid of the Immortals,” I said after a long pause, tracking how her pupils slowly contracted back.

“H–how come?” She stammered.

“They can’t kill me - I’m already dead,” I laughed.

“But, ugh…” She struggled to find an angle of attack.

“Trust me. Smell the wine in your hands,” I spoke, guiding the bottle to her nose. She inhaled once again and fell silent.

“Breathe in deeply. Close your eyes. Listen to my words. Let them guide you. Look into the deepest part of your heart, search the furthest, darkest reaches of your mind. Arianna Manning… Tell me what you REALLY want!” I cajoled.

“I want to know the truth,” Arianna disclosed. “I want to know the secrets of the ancients. I… ugh…”

“Go on.” I pressed on, fishing for her real feelings, trying to discover more buried, hidden truths. “What else can you see there? Are you hiding anything from yourself?”

“I… I often feel that something is wrong with me,” she divulged. “There’s this hollow emptiness in my heart. There was something there… something that I can no longer find. Something important, I’m certain of it.”

“Does it relate to your family?”

“Yes. The Manning family… the ruling clan... my grandfather. He told me to memorize everything that was written in the Book of Chorus, forced me to become just like the rest of them,” Arianna revealed. “I know that there is more, but I can’t remember…”

“Try to remember,” I prompted.

“I had someone… something?... guiding me to the truth. I can’t remember. I can’t remember! Why can’t I remember?! Damn it all!”

Her fists opened and closed as she hopelessly tried to cling to something out of reach.

Bingo.

“Focus. Open your eyes and look at me. Think about what you’ve just told me.” I snapped my fingers in front of her face.

“What?” She blinked, her pupils slowly contracting, shock painted on her face. “What did I just say?! Why did I… How did I not realise this before?!”

“We sometimes forget what we really want. It happens. Don’t be afraid, I’ll help you find what you’ve lost,” I said. Hypnotherapy was a lot easier with spider-pheromone wine.

Arianna nodded, her hands shaking.

“What do you really think about Ash Sparks?” I asked, pointing at my face.

“I never managed to break her, my little stubborn bastard. She found a way out. She’s escaped and freed herself… attained lost, arcane knowledge… woke you up.”

I quietly listened to her confession.

“I’ve worked my entire life to take over the Qi-ssing Thieves Guild and I bloody spectacularly failed at it!” She hugged her knees. “You and Sparks caught the attention of every Guild Head in one night! Sure, the Barbers stand against you… and some are still undecided, but the Adventurers, Chefs and Builders are just about ready to kiss and grovel at your feet!”

I nodded, letting her speak.

“It’s not fair!” Arianna lamented. “I can understand what you’re doing, but… I’m terrified! I’m terrified of my bloody family, of the archangels, of the cult Immortals and of Lord Boundless! How can you stand up to all of these powers, simply look them in the eye and not bow down?!”

“Oh, it was indeed a bit scary to talk to the archangel and the Immortals are a definite concern,” I imparted. “Here’s my secret - I’m not afraid of challenging authority, be it social or spectral. A thousand years ago I was born in a nation where all manner of authority could be challenged without fear. A place of free speech and liberty and discovery. A time when humanity had reached out to touch the very stars themselves.”

“Gods, I’m so jealous,” Arianna huffed. “I wish I could experience that long-gone time, even as a memory. It all sounds so… different.”

“It was.” I nodded sagely. “Funnily enough, many didn’t appreciate what they had, didn’t understand what heights of shared knowledge humanity had reached. They sat on their butts preaching that ignorance was good, that war was peace and that the truth was lies.”

“There’s always some bad apples in a bunch.” Arianna shrugged. “Ummm… Ash’s secret was pretty lame. Can you tell me more about your world, ghost?”

“Sure,” I nodded. “What would you like to know?”

“Those buildings in the dead city are impressive, even as overgrown husks. What was the biggest thing your people built?”

“The tallest building in the world was called Burj Khalifa. It was 2722 feet tall. Umm.. a foot was approximately this long,” I showed Arianna the size of my own foot covered in electrical tape. “The Burj Khalifa skyscraper had 163 floors.”

Arianna blinked.

"But that's just in terms of height," I added. "One of the most impressive structures the ancients made was the Large Hadron Collider. It was a ring buried under the ground, eighty eight thousand feet in circumference. We've used it to accelerate particles to near speed of light and investigated the collisions. It was built with a single purpose - to progress scientific knowledge!"

“Damn,” Arianna muttered, mulling over the answer. “You said… that you had metal servitors… machines with which you studied things. Did you use your servitors to see... the stars too?”

I nodded. “We had enormous, immobile, building-sized servitors all over our mountains, called 'observatories' which we used to peer at nearby galaxies... like the Andromeda galaxy. We also had giant radio telescopes… um... enormous parabolic metal dishes. We used them to listen to the stars and sent questions into the universe, hoping to contact life beyond our little, blue planet. We even sent flying servitors into earth’s orbit. One of them was called the Hubble Telescope. It produced extremely detailed… umm... paintings of distant stars. We used the information gathered by it to tell the age of the universe.”

“Hrm… the orbit?” Arianna tried to understand what I was saying. “How high is that in elbows?”

“The hubble telescope was 547 kilometers above the earth. Hrmmm… an elbow is approximately…” I calculated slowly in my head. “Approximately one million elbows above the earth, if my math is right!”

“Whaaaaa…” Arianna blinked. “Gods! How in the hells did it even get up there?!”

“Are you saying that ghost servitors can’t go into orbit?”

“No, they cannot go that far. Their range is limited by their Master’s Qi. It is incredibly draining to move a servitor far away from Lord Boundless. Immortals are able to go wherever they want, I think, but they don’t really talk about what they see. No mortal can break through the firmament.”

“What?” I blinked.

“The firmament. Our servitors can’t pass into the depths of the earth or go that high up. The sky-whales can move around Lord Boundless or follow after moving god-beast cities.”

“Hmm,” I digested her words.

“They can only follow the paths of the gods’ passing, after each Convergence.”

“I see,” I rubbed my chin. So the sky-whales can move only in the wake of the gods. If that's the case, then Celes played a very dangerous game with her original plan. If she stole the one beast core, she would have to hide from the cult’s hunters in the city until Convergence. Considering how the next Convergence was the Deathstorm Matriarch, she would one hundred percent end up dead since nobody flew towards the Stormweavers. It was no wonder she was so desperately clinging to me - I provided her with the faintest hope of survival.

“How fast was your fastest servitor?” Arianna continued her interrogation.

“Our fastest machine that carried people inside of itself was called the Space Shuttle. It travelled from and back to Earth at ninety two million feet per hour,” I said.

“Uhh… an hour is a unit of time, yes?” the highborn inquired. “How many heartbeats is that?”

“Approximately five thousand heartbeats,” I replied.

Arianna looked completely stupefied.

“That’s a manned servitor, one limited by the requirement of keeping its passengers alive,” I added. “The fastest unmanned servitor ever built by us was the Parker Solar Probe. It travelled through space at one billion, seven hundred million feet per hour. Ummm…” I recalled the entire news article that I read long ago. “Basically, it flew fast enough to circle our entire planet 13 times in merely 5000 heartbeats!” I finished dramatically.

“Holy Qi-ss!” the highborn gasped reverently. “That’s insane….”

“It was a machine we sent to the sun to study it,” I added. “It was named after solar astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker… A solar astrophysicist is an intelligence-cultivator that dedicated their life to the study of the stars. Every star in the sky is similar to the sun. Some are bigger and some are smaller.”

“So your people did try to understand the stars themselves.” Arianna looked at me with sparkling eyes. “That’s incredible…”

“A plaque containing his portraits and the names of over 1.1 million people was mounted on the Parker Solar Probe as well,” I finished.

“How.. what?!” Her eyes became even wider. “How in the hells could that many names and a portrait fit on a single plaque?!”

“They were on a data card… basically, an information-containing servitor made from special metal,” I explained.

“Gods… gods,” Arianna whispered. A tear did form on the side of her eye this time, rolling down her cheek. “So much power… so much knowledge lost, forgotten, buried, declared cursed. I can’t believe it! We’re so ignorant, so stupid. We’re but ants standing on the ruins of giants of knowledge.”

“Is that enough ancient secrets or do you want to know more?” I inquired, looking at the first tear of understanding I’ve ever seen on Arianna’s face.

“Enough… for now, please...” she whispered, wiping the tear off her cheek. “This is enough truth for today. I surrender. You win. You win, you gods-damned bastard. Your secrets and truth beats mine.”

I smiled diabolically.

“Maybe it’s this wine, screwing with my head somehow… or maybe it’s your ancient, ludicrous logic…” Arianna gritted her teeth. “But I… I will never leave your side now. I will stand up to ignorance together with… you. I want to bring back what we lost a thousand years ago. I want to be… more.”