Alex's step faltered. His chest tightened. For a moment, the vast endless white staircase and the thousand candidates climbing around him all faded into static, and there was only the word hanging in the air between them.“Earth.”His thoughts scattered like startled birds. Past memories stirred memories that weren't quite memories, impressions from a life that felt simultaneously distant and achingly close. A sickbed. A window looking out on a grey sky. The beep of machines and the smell of antiseptic. Faces he couldn't quite remember, voices he couldn't quite hear. His last life. His first life which he could remember. The life before the Roshar kingdom, before the Stargate, before the system and the cultivation and the endless battles. He had been so sick, for so long, that the memories had faded like old photographs left in the sun. But the name remained. Earth. His last life memory of it.“Could it be a parallel world?” His mind raced, grasping for explanations. “The chance of

The next stretch of climbing was the most focused Alex had been since entering the trial. He stopped watching the other candidates. He stopped thinking about Earth and Elena and the fallen nobles and the cosmic politics that swirled through the multiverse. All of that was noise. The only thing that mattered now was the law.“I have to comprehend the essence more deeply,” he told himself, settling onto a step and pressing his palm against the warm stone. “The trial is giving me an opportunity that most cultivators never receive. If I waste it by rushing, I'll regret it for the rest of my life.”He closed his eyes and let the fragments wash over him. Time passed differently inside the trial; he knew that intellectually, though he couldn't feel it directly. Hours might be passing. Days. Weeks. He didn't count them. He simply sat on each step and absorbed, letting the law essence seep into his understanding, deepening the roots that would support his climb.Space law was the first to rev

Alex didn't know how many years had passed.Time had become a foreign concept, a luxury he couldn't afford to measure. The sunless purple sky offered no days to count. The endless white staircase offered no seasons to mark. There was only the next step, the next fragment, the next breath of law essence that seeped into his understanding like water into parched earth. He had stopped counting the steps as anything more than milestones. He had stopped trying to track the passage of hours or weeks or months. His only goal was the law in front of him, the fragment that demanded his complete attention, the truth that waited to be understood.But his body kept its own calendar.His clothes hung in tatters now the once-fine fabric of his Roshar tunic worn thin by the constant pressure that permeated every inch of the trial, frayed at the edges, patched with strips torn from his own cloak. His beard had grown thick and wild, streaked with grey at the temples in a way that would have shocked

James was silent for a long moment. The fire crackled softly in the hearth, casting long shadows across the stone walls. The spiritual lamps hummed their quiet, eternal song, a sound so constant that no one noticed it anymore, except in moments like this, when the silence was heavy enough to make you aware of every small noise.When he finally spoke, his voice was different. It was not the commanding tone of a general issuing orders on a battlefield, nor the measured voice of a patriarch guiding his descendants. It was quieter than that. Wearier. The voice of a man who had carried secrets for so long that they had become part of his bones, part of his breath, part of the way he saw the world."You know that I have lived long enough to understand things that you cannot yet grasp," he began. His pale eyes, usually so sharp and unreadable, were distant now, fixed on something beyond the walls of the war room, something that only he could see."You know that I have fought in wars that r

James looked at Roy, then slowly shook his head. The firelight caught the silver of his hair, the deep lines around his eyes marks not of age, for an Immortal King did not age, but of something heavier. Experience and Loss. The kind of weariness that came from carrying the fate of a family on your shoulders for ten thousand years."At present, given the strength our family has accumulated," he said, "they are not a threat to us. When we fled into the hundred worlds, we were weak. Just a Domain realm warrior. Barely worth their notice except as loose ends to be tied up. Their family had an Immortal King at that time, and we were nothing." He paused, letting the words settle. "But ten thousand years have passed since then. We have grown. Our family now has multiple Immortal Kings. Warriors and resources more than they can imagine. A kingdom that spans territories on Blue Star and throughout the Stargate. We are no longer the desperate refugees who ran for their lives."The Roshar king