A full decade had passed since his rebirth.
Today, Silas could feel the blood thrumming behind his ears.
Sitting cross-legged on his woven mat, he ran through the theoretical architecture he had spent centuries designing, a blueprint woven from his own epiphanies and the stolen lore of foreign paths he had memorized in the Grand Library.
For once, Silas felt a strange twinge of appreciation for the lunatic wizards who had kept him captive.
Only fanatics bent on dissecting the roots of reality could have gathered such an absurd treasury of cosmic truth.
A Path.
Mortals tossed the word around without understanding its crushing weight.
Every sentient creature possessed the potential to cultivate, but across the vast expanse of the cosmos, only six disciplines reigned as Heavenly Paths:
CULTIVATION, PATH OF CULTIVATORS
MAGIC, PATH OF WIZARDS
BLOODLINE, PATH OF MONSTERS
ABYSS, PATH OF DEMONS
BODY, PATH OF KNIGHTS
FAITH, PATH OF GODS
Every inhabited realm, from the lowliest Lesser World to the supreme Heavenly Worlds, had clawed its way up from a Barren World.
Anyone with talent could step onto a road, and every developed civilization lived under the shadow of a Path Ancestor.
But that was where the common manuals stopped telling the truth.
Silas had never swallowed the holy myths.
A path was not a cosmic law woven into reality; it was simply a trail beaten into the dirt by whichever mortal crossed the summit first.
Those revered ancestors had started as ordinary mortals.
They invented a technique, butchered their rivals, climbed the corpses, and seized the peak.
And there lay the secret hidden from ordinary disciples: why did only six Heavenly Paths exist?
Once an individual claimed the mantle of Path Ancestor, their dominance over every subsequent practitioner of that discipline was absolute.
No matter how brilliant a disciple was, they could never stand as an equal to the founder while that ancestor still drew breath.
Slaying a Path Ancestor was only possible in fragile Lesser Worlds where the founder’s root was weak, and even that required borrowing the power of cosmic titans from higher ranks than your ancestor, a trade no common cultivator could ever afford.
More importantly, those six ancestors had not created their systems out of thin air.
Their paths rested on millions of years of mortal struggle, shaped across ages of trial before the breakthrough.
They were simply the lucky ones who crossed the finish line first.
And once perched at the pinnacle, what God would allow an upstart to build a rival ladder?
That was why Heavenly Worlds were plentiful, while Heavenly Paths remained locked at six.
The existing sovereigns slaughtered any new discipline before it could grow teeth.
Silas closed his eyes.
He had no desire to walk down a corridor built by someone else, forever bowing to a master in the clouds.
He would be the Ancestor.
It was the only route to genuine liberty.
No kneeling.
No masters.
No more centuries under the whip.
During his million years in the Grand Library, Silas had kept his sanity by grinding books into theory.
The endless routine had been torture, and holding vast knowledge without the strength to use it was its own hell.
Inventing hypothetical path systems had been his only shield against madness.
He had drafted dozens of paths on parchment, but nearly all suffered from fatal flaws or ended up as weak imitations of the Six Heavenly Paths.
Over the centuries, he watched other slaves and scribes snap and die.
The cause was always identical: they caught a glimpse of the boundless cosmos through the library’s texts, realized their own insignificance, and broke under the despair of unending bondage.
They rotted away without ever asking the question that had gnawed at Silas’s mind: What actually makes a man free?
For a hundred years, that question had kept him awake.
Who is free?
Was the Librarian free?
At first, the answer seemed obvious.
The old man was just another prisoner, chained to his desk by his own fanaticism and greed.
Yet after a century of quiet watching, Silas realized something different.
The slaves and the Librarian walked the same flagstones and ate the same rations.
The slaves went mad, while the Librarian worked with quiet, unshakable focus.
He was at peace.
Why would a man find contentment inside an eternal cage?
The answer had been staring Silas in the face: Will.
Will drew the line between a slave and a master.
Silas opened his eyes, the dark irises steady and cold.
Without Will, everything in the universe was dead weight.
Will was the source of life and direction.
He would build his foundation on this single pillar.
Other paths manipulated souls or stoked emotions, but not one took raw, sovereign Will as its sole cornerstone.
He named it the Mentalist Path.
The entry requirement was pure in its simplicity: a seeker had to awaken their Will by refining their brain tissue until it evaporated into Will Fog.
To take this step, raw biological talent meant nothing.
All a practitioner needed was ambient spiritual energy and an unbending Will.
It could not be a borrowed belief or a temporary passion; it had to be a personal conviction held until the grave.
A practitioner had to force their flesh and brain to obey their Will, rather than letting their Will be dragged around by physical instincts.
Silas had waited ten long years for this day.
His mortal brain had finally matured enough to take the strain.
The time had come.
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