He named the ring Mist, for the way Dimension Lost slipped through spatial logic like water through cracks, and it settled on his left hand beside Karma on the right.
He felt them both stir, becoming aware of one another.
The sensation came quick and unsettling, like two very different orchestras suddenly realizing they shared a building and tentatively starting to tune together.
Not now, he told them both.
Later.
There will be time.
Karma sent him a probability weight.
Mist folded and unfolded a small section of local space, once, as if testing that it still could.
“I said later,” he said.
Ingvild is still out there, he thought.
I still don’t know where she is.
He put the thought away and went to find a train back.
Three weeks later, in the Nakiri clan estate in Kyoto, Nakiri Takeru noticed that his sister had started leaving her window open.
It was a small thing.
Momiji had always kept her room shut tight—a habit born from years of building walls between herself and anything that might ask for more than she could give.
But the window had been open for four days now, and he’d walked by twice to see her sitting beside it with a book, not reading, just lingering in the fresh air.
She’d come back different.
He couldn’t quite put it into words until now—not changed, exactly, but settled, like a knot worked loose without coming apart.
Whatever choice she’d made during those weeks alone, it had clearly been the right one for her in a way that three years of clan politics never had.
He didn’t ask about it.
She’d tell him when she wanted to.
He walked past the open window and decided, privately, that he would spend the afternoon doing something other than fielding complaints from the other four clans.
It was, all things considered, an unusually pleasant afternoon.
Week Seven brought Marsilio, and Lucian was faster this time.
He hadn’t planned to accelerate the Marsilio acquisition.
He’d been thinking about Ingvild.
He’d been thinking about Ingvild ever since he got the evil pieces, in that low-key way an unanswered question lingers in the back of your mind—not pressing enough to derail everything else, but always there, a steady weight Karma kept noticing and choosing not to resolve because it still couldn’t pin her down exactly.
She existed in the probability space.
Her thread was active.
But the horizon refused to draw her into view.
Dreamlike Curse, though.
He’d tried the thought experiment three times, and each time it led to the same conclusion: Nereid Kyrie—Ingvild’s dormant Longinus—worked on a frequency tied to tonal resonance and soul vibration.
The mechanics were strange enough that most healers tackled it the wrong way, treating it like an illness instead of a misalignment between a power and its wielder.
What was really needed was something to modulate the frequency, to bring it to rest.
Something that worked in the dreamlike registers of soul-function, where Nereid Kyrie burned bright.
Dreamlike Curse operated perfectly in that space.
It wasn’t a cure—he wasn’t bold enough to call it that before testing it—but it was a key that might fit the lock.
Ingvild was running out of time, and he was done waiting.
When he’d floated the idea past Karma, it spat out a probability weight that basically meant, “Yes, and by the way, you’re late to your own epiphany.”
“I’m here now,” he protested.
The weight twitched like it had just downed an espresso.
He was off.
The thing about Karma was, it didn’t just tell you where someone was—it predicted where they’d be, factoring in probability.
By Week Five, he’d stopped chasing targets at their current spot and instead went straight to where they’d show up in forty-eight hours.
It saved him two travel cycles and spared him the existential drag of trailing someone across three countries when he could just be there, waiting.
He’d laid it out to Karma during one of his east-wing practice sessions, pitching it as a concept he wanted help putting into action.
Karma had sent back a probability weight that he’d interpreted as I’ve been doing this since Week Three.
You only just noticed.
“I appreciate the initiative,” he’d said.
“Next time, tell me.”
The weight had shifted into something that didn’t quite translate into words but somehow felt like it did.
He was learning to handle a Longinus with strong opinions and no inclination to explain itself unless directly questioned.
In its own way, it was perfect training for managing a peerage.
You’re all quietly unhinged and I appreciate it.
What should Lucian do next?
How’s the ride so far?
Drop a thought.
Stones and reviews feed the algorithm beast.
Next chapter soon.