“Do the rest of you accept my terms?”
Silas let his gaze drag across the circle of heads of state.
None of them moved to object.
In a universe where frail things were swallowed whole, who among them would turn down longevity and power?
Besides, the fresh dead bodies on the lawn offered its own quiet warning.
Defiance meant dying on the grass next to the Indian minister.
“Good,” Silas said.
“Swear the Oath of Servitude in the name of the True Universe.”
A beat of hesitation rippled through the circle, brief as a skipped pulse, before they began reciting the archaic syllables he laid out for them.
The moment the words cleared their lips, something heavy settled into the marrow of their spirits.
It left no mark on the flesh, yet each ruler felt the cosmic latch click into place beneath their ribs.
If they broke faith, their souls would splinter like dry pine.
“Now,” Silas continued, “I will give you the method for brain refinement.”
A collective exhale passed through the yard, followed quickly by a sharp, feverish tension.
Silas spoke the fundamental of technique aloud, matching each line to the physiological guide.
He paced his words carefully, outlining how to pull environmental spiritual energy into the body and dissolve physical grey matter into Will Fog.
The core mechanics were straightforward enough, but the margin for error was razor thin.
One slip in neural channeling, and the brain would tear itself apart from internal hemorrhaging.
The leaders locked onto every syllable, memorizing every word with desperate concentration.
When Silas finished, he gave a slight flick of his fingers.
“Begin.”
Silas sank into his seat and glanced toward the back window of the house.
Clara and Alice were inside the living room; they have left the window after shocking strike of world leaders.
He let out a quiet breath.
He was glad they stayed inside once the initial shock passed, since trying to explain a circle of world leaders meditating under soul bindings was a conversation he had no desire to rush.
“Rework your minds,” Silas said, looking back at the yard.
“Once your foundations take root, we have nine years and eleven months to get this world ready to rise.”
His voice dropped, shedding whatever warmth remained.
“Keep this in your heads. You are no longer peers at a negotiating table. You are rivals fighting for seven thrones.”
The leaders closed their eyes.
The quiet between them turned cold with calculation.
Silas shut his own eyes, turning his perception inward to gauge his bond with the ground beneath them.
The resonance between his soul and the planetary mantle grew heavier by the hour.
Right now, his awareness blanketed the Indian subcontinent, though his active grip on the planet was still taking shape.
But this kind of growth never moved in straight, predictable steps.
It multiplied upon itself.
Give it seven days, and his sensory web would wrap around the entire sphere.
An hour crept by in silence.
The sharpest minds among them, Roan, George, Victoria, and Qi Feng, caught the theoretical rhythm early.
They drew the thin ambient energy through their skulls, breaking down biological tissue until their craniums held churning pools of grey fog.
When the first hour passed, that vanguard completed their transformation, their skulls filled with nascent mist.
The ones lagging behind were held back by weaker internal convictions, though Silas paid them little mind.
His own consciousness suddenly caught fire.
The second those mortal leaders took their first real steps along the Mentalist Path; a violent surge of clarity ripped through Silas.
His comprehension widened, and his pulse with the earth tightened by several degrees.
Such was the unbending right of a Path Ancestor.
No disciple could ever cut down or outstrip the one who carved the road.
Every single person who stepped onto Silas’s path fed their breakthroughs, their insights, and their cultivation straight back into his foundation.
Their progress pushed him higher by default.
Even so, Silas kept his guard up.
He had not forgotten how grueling it was to decipher his own first ability, the conditional gift that unmasked his ultimate adversary, the universe itself.
Without the centuries he had spent digging through private wizard treatises in the Grand Library, he never would have puzzled it out.
The second ability promised to be far worse.
He would have to guess the shape of his third ability just to make sense of the second.
One step at a time, he reminded himself.
Within a week, his grip on the planet would harden enough to pull on stone and soil with raw thought.
Soon after, Earth would birth a nascent World Spirit, an embryonic planetary will.
When that happened, this world would stop being an inert clump of rock and basalt.
It would wake up as a thinking partner tied directly to Silas’s soul.
Only the Mentalist Path carried such authority, the power to stir waking intent within dead matter.
Forging a Life Will Weapon was a different matter entirely.
That process demanded a permanent slice of a cultivator’s core essence and could only happen once in a lifetime.
Awakening mundane objects, however, relied on steeping them in Will Fog until their latent properties surfaced.
The two outcomes had little in common.
An ordinary object awakened this way never belonged entirely to its creator.
It developed a flat, mechanical awareness without a true soul.
Because of that limitation, it could never push past Rank Three or develop genuine sapience; it was just a self-mending tool that drank ambient energy to keep from breaking.
A Life Will Weapon recognized no such ceiling.
Bound to its master’s soul, it climbed through every rank alongside them, sharing their authority, their growth, and their final fate.
Silas opened his eyes and looked upon the circle of leaders whose minds now churned with mist.
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