The pressure in Senshi’s chest was no longer a metaphor. It was a physical, crushing weight, a singularity of grief and power that Maren was pulling from his soul with the invisible, irresistible force of her Draw Faridah. The dense marble of his Collapse had been compressed into a point so small, so dense, that it threatened to collapse his own ribs. The golden light beneath his skin flared white-hot, illuminating the translucent membranes of the chamber, casting long, sharp shadows that danced with the frantic rhythm of the Root’s heartbeat. He could feel the wood around him reacting, the ribbed walls tightening, the golden veins dilating in alarm. The Root sensed the anomaly. It sensed the weapon being forged in its heart.Senshi looked at Maren. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, filled with fifteen years of silent screaming. She was not asking for mercy. She was asking for release. She was asking him to do the one thing he had sworn never to do inside the living wood: to

The ascent to the Sky Platform of Pillar One was a grueling, silent march through the sterile, shadowless halls of the upper-upper tier. The air here was aggressively pure, scrubbed of all scent and humidity, tasting of nothing but ozone and ancient dust. Senshi led the way, his boots clicking softly against the polished white marble, his hands clenched at his sides to keep the dense marble of his Collapse Faridah from reacting to the oppressive ambient Pulse of the fortress. Behind him, Himari supported Maren. The Seventh Heir was barely conscious, her body trembling with the physical shock of being severed from the Root’s vascular system after fifteen years of integration. Her skin was pale, her breathing shallow, but her mismatched eyes remained open, burning with a fierce, exhausted lucidity. Seikage brought up the rear, his shattered shoulder grinding with every step, his face a mask of pale, sweat-slicked determination. He had stopped arguing about things he could not change,

The vision did not fade like a dream upon waking. It shattered, leaving Senshi gasping on the iron grating of the Sky Platform, his lungs burning with the thin, freezing air of the upper atmosphere. The blinding golden light of the memory was replaced by the harsh, shadowless glare of the Pillar One sun, but the afterimage remained burned into his retinas: seven figures turning to wood, one by one, their screams silenced by the calcification of their own throats. The horror of it was not just in the death; it was in the transformation. They had not been consumed as fuel. They had been converted into structure. They had become the very bark that now covered the faces of the Council members standing before him.Maren stood beside him, her hand still resting lightly on his arm, her chest heaving with the effort of the extraction. A single drop of silver fluid tracked from her nose to her chin, glistening in the cold light. Her mismatched eyes were wide, exhausted, but entirely

The silence that followed Kaia’s revelation was not peaceful. It was the heavy, pressurized quiet of a vacuum chamber before the airlock blows. The three Council members stood on the edge of the Sky Platform, their bark-skinned faces frozen in expressions that looked disturbingly like surprise. The amber lenses of their eyes widened, the internal glow intensifying into a blinding white as the Fard’s consciousness processed the impossibility of what had just occurred. A Shedding, a mere echo of memory, had accessed the deepest structural archives of the Pillars. It had read the lies. It had exposed the acceleration. And in doing so, it had shattered the illusion of control that the Council had maintained for centuries.Senshi did not wait for them to recover. He knew that when a god is surprised, it becomes dangerous. When a liar is exposed, it becomes violent. He grabbed Maren’s arm, his grip firm but gentle, and signaled to Himari. The Seventh Heir was still trembling from

The tears that fell from the First Returned’s eyes were not the silver fluid of a Returned, nor the golden sap of a Root. They were human tears, salt and water, born of a profound and shattering realization. They tracked down his pale, translucent cheeks and fell onto the silver-transformed wood of the platform. When they struck the metallic surface, they did not sizzle or evaporate. They simply absorbed, sinking into the silver lattice as if the wood itself was drinking his grief. Oni remained on his knees, his hands pressed flat against the cold, glowing surface, his chest heaving with ragged, uneven breaths. The Unveil Faridah in his eyes was burning with a blinding, white-hot intensity, casting long, sharp shadows across the faces of the group. He was seeing everything. He was seeing the underlying code of reality, stripped of all comforting illusions, all theological myths, and all biological misunderstandings. Senshi knelt beside him, the dense marble of his own Fari