There’s no point in lamenting what I have done to myself. I had heard the stories, how the first-gen samplers would leave you a half-crippled amnesiac if you were lucky or a dribbling lobotomite if you weren’t.

I’ll have to find somewhere to hide and heal. Make sure I don’t forget who I was. Hope whoever I become doesn’t fuck things up.

I suppose he was right.

In the end, the great work will have to complete itself.

Why, of all things, would such an utterly unrelated writing stir her to tears? It was like this strange instinctive reaction, as if some far-recessed part of her felt such unimaginable sorrow that it managed to manifest on her waking self. Zelsys didn’t feel in any sort of crying mood, and yet there it was, a tear out of nowhere, gone as quickly as it had come forth. She blinked a few times and wiped it clean, then re-read everything she had translated to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

The pieces slowly slid into place, and a curious realization took root as she thought about her own origin, on what she was, on what her creators had probably expected of her, or what they might have attempted to push her into had any of them been present at her waking. Her own self, a Captain’s Cleaver, that so-called Gaunt-cannon born from Ikesia’s struggle to combat enemy cultivators, and the Azoth Stones of a Wendigo and a Necrobeast.

Yes, perhaps it was fitting to say that everything she was had been born from Ikesia’s struggle in the face of overwhelming odds, of its rage against those who would see it destroyed, its cities burned, its people raped and enslaved.

Her own plans for the future, her friends and her love, it had all grown from the bloodsoaked soil of an old battlefield.

She owed everything to this country’s, this people’s, this very land’s stubbornness.

It would only be fitting if she were among the first sparks to rekindle Ikesia’s resistance.

Really, the least she could do was help pull the common man from the mire of slow decline. Sure, a farmer with a gun could defend himself, but a farmer who knew how to grow beyond his mundane limits, how to organize, how to undermine his occupiers - that could change things on a scale that one person could never achieve, no matter how capable in sheer violence she or anyone else became.

Zelsys laughed at herself.

She wasn’t that selfless.

This was all just a way to sate her ego, she did all this because it felt right.

That’s what she told herself.

That’s what she told herself, having lost an arm in defense of a city she had lived in for a few days, not having so much as thought of her payment once throughout the ordeal.

That’s what she told herself, having decided to oppose a living god and his empire on the excuse of a petty grievance.

In the end, the reality of her own motivations didn’t matter to her. Zelsys believed in her own justice, in the path she had decided to walk, and she would walk it whether it were paved with flowers or corpses. This day, it was the former.

The next page fit neither the size of the book nor the page number. Its paper was yellowed and creased to the point it was a miracle it still held together, and it described some methods for converting Nigredo to Viriditas, even with handwritten notes in the margins that seemed related to applying this knowledge in the Exclusion Zone. Archaic spellings aside, it concisely broke down and explained the entire essentia transmutation process. She took the page and tried matching it with the other books on the desk, which paid off quite quickly since there was only one book that looked aged enough to fit. Some sort of alchemist’s textbook, the foreword was even handwritten and signed by the author.

There… Didn’t really seem to be anything interesting to her in this tome. At least, not at this moment. Paging through it only made clear why it was as worn as it was, the book was written almost like a series of transcribed and cleaned up lectures rather than a fully sanitized scholarly text. Before she finally put it down, she curiously followed the tome’s silk bookmark, finding herself led to a page that depicted something… Familiar.

An image of four concentric circles identical to those she had seen in the King’s Oracle chamber, another of constellations that at least partially matched those she had seen down there. The two others on the page didn’t invoke any visual memory, but looking them over did connect - damaged though they were. A vertical slice of a head with a noodly mess for a brain and a cracked egg in the center - a clear reference to the truth of cultivation that had been revealed to her in the dungeon. The other was a partial depiction of a hand oozing black sludge without any description. Perhaps a visual representation of the supposed impurities that one was to shed in transitioning from First Circle to Second Circle?

If the impurities from a so-called “Lesser” Azoth even after it had been purified were enough to form a head-sized ball, one might wonder how much such sludge one might shed in… Whatever the process achieved. Perhaps some sort of enlightenment? What would one even shed to make the jump? Would the expelled impurities literally contain the coalesced personal flaws and traumas that had once barred the person from ascending to the next circle?

The bookish philosophy of it was all too heady for her liking. Zelsys knew who she was, she knew herself to be egotistical, that she liked fighting a little too much, yet what she thought might be perceived as “unenlightened traits” or simple “flaws” hadn’t stopped her from simply being Second Circle, if the King’s Oracle or the Sister were to be believed. Perhaps it was merely being honest with oneself that permitted one to reach this first step of enlightenment, merely acknowledging one’s own self without ignoring the aspects that might be thought of as undesirable.