The appraisal chamber remained quiet for several seconds after Kael said he had found something he had missed.
Rhea had already learned that statements like that were rarely as harmless as they sounded.
Kael’s standards for what counted as unusual had become increasingly difficult to understand.
A Graveback Ravager had been annoying.
A Stonehide Brute had been in the way.
A mountain had been something he walked through because the safer road pointed in the wrong direction.
If something had managed to surprise him enough to produce genuine interest, Rhea had no desire to imagine what it looked like.
Unfortunately, curiosity won almost immediately.
“How big is it?” Kael’s attention remained divided between the appraisal chamber and the position he currently occupied deep beneath the Hollow Depth.
His Absolute Spatial Sense continued mapping the enormous creature as more of its body pulled free from the surrounding stone.
Entire mineral shelves broke apart.
Crystal deposits that had formed across its exterior shattered and fell into the cavern below.
Kael thought about Rhea’s question.
“Mountain.” Rhea stared at him.
“Mountain-sized?” “Roughly.” Senior Appraiser Velric slowly lowered the measuring instrument in his hand.
Halren said nothing.
Rhea looked toward the pale bone fragment sitting inside the reinforced case.
Less than an hour ago, that fragment had seemed horrifying because it had apparently come from a creature vastly larger than anything normally recorded by hunters.
Now Kael was calmly observing something even larger while sitting in a Guild chamber and drinking tea.
“Master.” “Hmm?” “Could you please start describing things properly before saying words like mountain?” “I described it properly.” Rhea decided not to argue.
Deep inside the Hollow Depth, the creature continued awakening.
Calling it a monster almost felt inaccurate.
Too much of its body had become indistinguishable from the cavern around it.
Thick segmented plates formed ridges that stretched across enormous distances.
Root-like limbs had remained buried inside the surrounding rock long enough for mineral deposits to fuse across them.
Entire columns of stone that Kael remembered from earlier exploration slowly bent as the creature moved, revealing that they had never been columns at all.
They had been joints.
Kael now understood why he had missed it.
Years ago, when he first explored this underground region, his Spatial Sense had been far less extensive.
The creature had been completely motionless.
Its body temperature barely differed from the surrounding stone, and centuries of sediment had covered nearly every exposed surface.
Kael had sensed rock, minerals, dense formations, and underground pressure.
He had simply categorized them as terrain.
Present-day Kael found the mistake mildly amusing.
Back then, he had been able to perceive space.
Now he understood it.
There was a considerable difference.
The creature finally reacted to the disturbance caused by Kael’s descending tunnel.
One enormous limb shifted.
The cavern shook.
Sections of the ceiling fractured, and an avalanche of stone larger than several buildings collapsed toward the position Kael occupied.
The Kael standing beneath it disappeared.
Not by moving.
Not by becoming intangible.
He simply stopped occupying that location.
At the same moment, Kael occupied a different position several hundred meters away, standing on one of the enormous armored ridges extending across the creature’s back.
The falling stone struck empty ground.
The creature moved again.
It still could not sense Kael properly.
Its body reacted to disturbances in the cavern, shifts in pressure, and the destruction of surrounding stone, but Nihyrium gave Kael himself effectively no presence to identify.
To the creature, the attacks and disturbances existed without a meaningful source.
Kael found that useful.
More occupied positions appeared.
Ten.
Twenty.
Fifty.
A hundred.
Each was Kael.
Not copies.
Not independent minds.
Not projections controlled from somewhere else.
One individual occupying many positions simultaneously.
Some stood along the creature’s armored back.
Others appeared on protruding mineral shelves, cavern walls, exposed ridges, and broken sections of stone surrounding it.
Each position shared the same perception and the same awareness.
Back inside Greyhaven, Rhea noticed Kael’s attention sharpen slightly.
“What are you doing?” “Looking at it.” Halren frowned.
“From here?” “No.” Rhea already knew where this conversation was going.
“How many of you are inside the Hollow Depth right now?” Kael considered the exact number.
“Three hundred and twelve.” Rhea became completely still.
Velric looked toward Halren.
Halren looked toward Rhea.
Rhea slowly raised one hand.
“Don’t.” Halren wisely said nothing.
Deep underground, Kael began examining the creature properly.
A shallow Decay Domain spread from several occupied positions.
The result was immediate.
Rock and mineral accumulation covering the creature’s outer surface deteriorated rapidly.
Centuries of geological buildup cracked, weathered, and collapsed into dust and fragments.
Then the Decay reached the actual armor beneath.
The effect slowed.
Kael’s interest increased.
The biological plates were extraordinarily dense.
More importantly, when the outermost layer deteriorated, another layer shifted upward from beneath it.
Kael watched the process carefully.
The creature wasn’t regenerating in the conventional sense.
Its entire body had been built through nested structural layers.
Material remained compressed deeper within each armored section, ready to shift outward whenever the exterior was damaged.
It resembled a living fortress designed to continually replace its own walls.
Kael increased the Decay slightly.
Another layer failed.
Another replaced it.
Then another.
Back in the Guild, Kael spoke quietly.
“That’s clever.” Rhea immediately looked at him.
“What is?” “The armor.” “You sound like you’re complimenting it.” “I am.” Rhea sighed.
Velric, despite everything he had already seen that morning, couldn’t suppress his professional curiosity.
“What makes it unusual?” Kael described the layered structure.
Velric’s expression gradually changed from curiosity to disbelief.
“A mountain-sized biological organism with nested replacement armor?” “Yes.” “How many layers?” “Depends on the section.” Kael observed another region.
“Some have hundreds.” Velric stopped writing.
The creature suddenly became more aggressive.
Several massive limbs tore free from the cavern floor.
Entire ridges of stone split apart as it twisted.
One segment struck the cavern wall, producing an impact strong enough to send fractures racing through the surrounding mountain.
Kael’s occupied positions disappeared wherever danger approached.
Others remained.
New ones appeared.
The creature attacked dozens of locations.
None mattered.
It was trying to fight someone who did not possess a required position.
For every Kael it crushed, there was no injured duplicate left behind because nothing had been duplicated.
Kael had simply ceased occupying that location before the attack completed.
He continued observing.
An earlier version of himself would have solved the problem differently.
He remembered that clearly.
Increase Decay.
Strip layers faster than the creature could replace them.
Expand the Domain.
Overwhelm everything.
It would have worked.
Eventually.
It also would have destroyed much of the cavern and wasted tremendous effort.
Kael had spent too many years refining Decay to still fight that way.
“Let’s try something.” Rhea’s face immediately became wary.
“What?” Kael didn’t answer.
His Absolute Spatial Sense moved deeper into the creature.
External armor ceased mattering.
Kael perceived the structures beneath it.
Compressed replacement layers.
Support tissue.
Massive joints.
Organ-equivalents distributed throughout the body.
Channels carrying biological material from deeper reserves toward damaged armor.
He followed those channels.
Thousands converged into larger pathways.
Those converged again.
And again.
Finally, Kael found the structural chain responsible for coordinating the replacement process.
Compared with the entire creature, it was almost insignificant.
Tiny.
Precisely the kind of thing earlier Kael would never have bothered targeting.
Present Kael established Decay Domain around several occupied positions.
He did not decay the armor.
He did not decay the creature’s massive limbs.
He did not decay its entire body.
He decayed the connecting structure.
A tiny section deteriorated.
The effect stopped.
The creature’s replacement mechanism failed.
The next damaged armor layer collapsed.
Nothing moved upward to replace it.
Kael smiled faintly.
“Much better.” The creature reacted violently.
For perhaps the first time in an existence measured by geological time, something had interfered directly with the biological mechanism sustaining its defenses.
Its entire body shifted.
The underground region shook hard enough that even distant caverns began collapsing.
Hundreds of Kael’s occupied positions remained spread across the area.
Decay Domains emerged around them.
Some overlapped.
Some remained separate.
One targeted only the mineral crust.
Another attacked a section of biological armor.
Another deteriorated support tissue around a joint.
Another isolated the connection between a limb and the internal structure controlling it.
The creature wasn’t being destroyed randomly.
It was being dismantled.
Back in Greyhaven, Kael lifted his tea.
Halren stared at him.
“Are you fighting it?” Kael considered the wording.
“Technically.” Rhea’s expression hardened.
“What does technically mean?” “It’s trying to kill me.” Rhea looked at the tea in his hand.
“AND YOU’RE DRINKING TEA?” Kael glanced down at the cup.
“This position isn’t fighting.” Halren slowly leaned back in his chair.
Velric had stopped pretending that anything happening today fit within normal logic.
Deep underground, one of the creature’s enormous limbs collapsed.
Then another.
Kael disabled the connections controlling them rather than destroying the limbs themselves.
The creature attempted to twist its central body.
More structural links deteriorated.
Its movement slowed.
Then stopped almost completely.
Kael could have continued.
He didn’t.
Killing it was no longer necessary.
The biology had become interesting enough to examine later.
With the creature immobilized, Kael extended his Spatial Sense deeper into its central mass.
That was when he noticed something else.
Something that didn’t belong.
His attention sharpened.
Buried inside layers of tissue, surrounded by structures that had grown around it over an unknown period, was a geometric object.
Perfectly smooth.
Perfectly regular.
Black.
Not dark gray.
Not reflective obsidian.
Black in a way that seemed almost detached from the surrounding material.
The object possessed twelve flat faces.
A dodecahedron.
Roughly the size of Kael’s hand.
He examined it through Spatial Sense.
There were no visible seams.
No recognizable internal layers.
No cavities.
No biological attachment.
No obvious moving components.
Kael established a narrow Decay Domain around it.
Nothing happened.
He increased the depth slightly.
Still nothing.
That was new.
Back in Greyhaven, Kael stopped drinking tea.
Rhea noticed immediately.
Until now, even the mountain-sized creature had produced only mild curiosity.
Now his expression had genuinely changed.
“What?” “Found something.” Halren became tense.
“Something inside the creature?” “Yes.” Rhea asked the question she was beginning to regret before even finishing it.
“More dangerous than the creature?” Kael considered.
“More interesting.” Rhea stared at him.
“That answer is worse.” Deep underground, Kael carefully deteriorated the tissue surrounding the object without affecting the object itself.
Layers separated.
Structural material collapsed away until one of Kael’s occupied positions could reach forward and lift the black dodecahedron free.
It felt solid.
That alone wasn’t unusual.
What happened at the point of contact was.
Kael’s body possessed effectively zero conventional presence through Nihyrium.
Normal matter could physically interact with him because he allowed those interactions to occur through his occupied structure, yet the underlying relationship remained abnormal.
The black object reacted differently.
Not visibly.
No light appeared.
No vibration.
No energy burst.
Kael simply perceived the contact through Spatial Sense and noticed that the object’s internal boundary changed.
For the first time, something wasn’t merely touching his hand.
It was responding to the contradiction of his hand being physically present while possessing no ordinary presence.
Kael turned the object over.
The response followed the contact point.
Interesting.
Back in Greyhaven, his faint smile returned.
Rhea saw it.
“Master.” “Hmm?” “Please don’t say it.” Kael looked at her.
“Say what?” “You know exactly what.” Kael looked amused.
Rhea pointed at him.
“Don’t.” Deep beneath the Hollow Depth, the black dodecahedron remained completely unaffected by Decay while resting against Kael’s palm.
Kael examined it again.
Then spoke.
“Interesting.” Rhea lowered her forehead onto the table.
Halren looked toward her.
“Does he do this often?” Rhea didn’t lift her head.
“More than I would like.” Kael continued examining the object while his other positions maintained control over the immobilized creature.
He had no intention of destroying something unusual simply because it had attacked him, and the black object had already become considerably more interesting than the creature that contained it.
Velric finally asked, “Can you bring it here?” “Eventually.” “Eventually?” “The position holding it is still in the Hollow Depth.” Rhea lifted her head slightly.
“You’re not going to walk back through another mountain just to bring that thing here, are you?” Kael looked toward her.
“Depends what’s in the way.” Rhea returned her forehead to the table.
She already knew exactly what that meant.
Somewhere beneath the Hollow Depth, Kael stood beside a living creature large enough to be mistaken for part of a mountain while holding an object untouched by his Decay Domain.
In Greyhaven, another Kael calmly finished his tea.
For everyone else inside the appraisal chamber, those were two different scenes separated by an enormous distance.
For Kael, there was no meaningful separation at all.
There was only one him.
One awareness.
Many places.
And something new had finally managed to catch all of his attention.