The Sacred Heart succession grounds plunged into brief chaos, like dust whipped by a sudden wind.

“You—you treacherous, despicable rats!”

Sankaji panted as he bellowed, stubby fat legs shaking from the flight, his face a storm of shock and fury.

“Guards! Protect me! Hurry—ugh!”

He tried to call for help, but who would come now, in a hall where the tide had turned?

After the first ambush, many of the regent’s elite posted in the chapel became blind and couldn’t even stand, like lamps snuffed in a squall. And Skela, the empire’s strongest enforcer, who should have vanished into the chapel, never entered. The near-even match collapsed into a landslide.

Those far from the lightborne spell, still barely able to fight, were crushed by Skela alone. And the field also held the reigning King Samir, Neprah of the Honglan Society, and High Judge Padini—three masters like mountain peaks hemming in the valley. Resistance flickered and died in moments.

As for Sankaji, a lard-brained fool—no one even bothered targeting him, letting him run in circles like a headless chicken. Left foot snagged right, and he went down face-first like a dog nosediving into mud.

“Ow—ow!” His bulk couldn’t rise, so he sprawled there. Then, as if a lifeline flashed, he dug a communication Magic Crystal Stone from his pocket. Hope flickered in his beady eyes. He yelled into it, “Toka! Where’s your unit? Why aren’t they here yet?”

[crackle—hiss hiss—pop]

The crystal quivered, a sign the link had formed, yet only static like broken lightning bled through.

For a heartbeat, Sankaji thought the voice-transmission array had failed. Then he understood. The crystal was faithfully relaying the environment’s crackling storm.

A second later, Toka’s voice bled out from the crystal.

[W-wait! It’s that one, she… she’s here—ugh AAAAAAA! (kzzzap)]

With that final burst, his scream cut off. The crystal stilled. Its array dimmed, meaning its paired stone was destroyed.

“She??? Who—who is she—”

His words stuck in his throat. A muzzle pressed to the back of his skull, cold as iron under moonlight.

“I suggest you cooperate and speak, Lord Sankaji. Do so, and I may consider a lighter sentence.”

Padini’s voice sounded behind him, flat and cold as glacier stone. Sankaji’s fat trembled. He almost sobbed when he screamed.

“W-what are you doing! Why stab us in the back? We were handing you the Sacred Heart—why strike us anyway?!”

He pleaded in tears, aggrieved like a child, nearly convincing himself. Padini’s tone didn’t waver, ancient ice unmoved.

“If we don’t move first, should we wait for you to turn Skela into a medium?”

That last word made him shudder. The crying stopped.

Seeing that, Padini’s gaze, already winter-cold, sank a few more degrees.

“You think we couldn’t guess you and that old dog Rockridge’s plan?”

Thump.

Thump.

Thump…

The drumbeat heart rolled on, each interval syncing perfectly with a minute hand’s tick, like a temple pendulum finding its rhythm.

Not because it catered to that clock, but because that clock was a poor copy of it.

It beat before the Sumerland Continent was born, the first timekeeper, the baseline for every unit of time.

This was the Sacred Heart. The heart of a god.

Adelaide looked to the pure white point atop the far peak. The pull was holy and lethal, like a siren beyond the snowline. She swallowed.

This was the chapel’s interior, and she stood in the spot meant for Skela.

Yes. Up to now, everything was part of her plan, a chessboard under frost.

From the start, her plan’s core wasn’t to shift the human elite. It was to make Rockridge open the chapel door himself, like prying a locked oyster with a borrowed tide.

Stripping that old dog’s defenses was a bonus. She wanted urgency—the empire’s politics burned hot, and Rockridge, as regent, visibly lacked the people’s heart; his fall was only a matter of time.

Drop a massive external threat now, and he’d feel time whipping him forward. He’d rush to accelerate the array. Meanwhile, she and Mira “happened” to return within imperial borders, like two lanterns drifting back into the harbor at night.

Adelaide was certain Rockridge could monitor whether she remained within the empire. Else he couldn’t have informed the Follower of Pleasure of her departure. She used that: when all seemed lost, the two key media walked back into the net. A dream within arm’s reach.

Thus Rockridge would seize the chance. He’d fuse Skela with the Sacred Heart, try to craft a third medium, then start the array to harvest the empire’s souls, like a reaper counting grain.

He’d never guess it was all to trick him into handing over the chapel key, so he wouldn’t panic and do something to the Heart that no one could undo—a misstep that could crack the sky.

Now, with the door open and the Heart confirmed unharmed, there was no need to keep the play running. The curtain could fall; the stage was hers.

Inside stood not Skela, a potential medium, but Adelaide, who already held a medium’s seat, a star set in its socket.

If she claimed the Sacred Heart, she’d keep the empire’s total media below three. Rockridge’s grand start would become a joke, a firework in rain.

As for that old dog with dual polarity aptitude and a contrarian stance—heh. After two life-and-death fights abroad, Adelaide wasn’t who she used to be. She didn’t even need to move. Mira alone could beat him, like a wave rolling over a sandcastle.

Her bigger problem wasn’t Rockridge. It was the Heart on the peak, a lighthouse calling ships to wreck.

Yes. Between her and the Heart yawned a distance beyond measure, a canyon carved in light.

The moment she entered, she sensed it: the interior wasn’t the simple hall the outside suggested. The crystal casket holding the Heart looked only dozens of meters from the door, a mirage between pillars.

Of course not. For the empire’s holiest relic, you don’t just walk up and take it. Rivers have rapids; mountains have cliffs.

What sprawled before her was a maze of light.

Though woven from light, it was more complex than a sunless dungeon. Refracted gleams dazzled. In that flood, everything homogenized—walls with walls, walls with floor, walls with everything—boundaries erased in a sea of mirrors.

Fitting for a vault holding part of a god’s body. It wasn’t mere space magic. It recalled the “Truth” Mathis once used to trap her—too much information as pure noise, drowning the mind in tides of light and shadow.

A man-made wonder worthy of awe; yet a question rose like mist in Adelaide’s mind. Why did the builders set such tangled mechanisms, give the key to ministers instead of the king, and borrow the Heart’s divine authority to forge a maze no mortal could cross?

Was it just a trial for those who sought the Heart? Or, like the Minotaur’s tale, did Daedalus build the maze not to keep outsiders out, but to keep what lay within from spilling out, like a storm locked in a bottle—

The thought flashed. She shook it off like dust on a sleeve.

The Sacred Heart was the Sarman Empire’s founding core, and her strongest bargaining chip, a comet in her palm. She would use it once Rockridge’s farce ended.

No matter what, she had to claim this key piece.

With that resolve, she challenged the maze, trying to reach the far peak, step by step, like climbing through fog.

It wasn’t a puzzle you solve by hugging the left wall; the maze flowed like a river and changed its banks.

After looping back a dozen times, her brows knotted like hooked wings. Patience frayed. Her slender fingers drew a line of blood in the air, sketching the blood-seeking array, glyphs blooming like crimson vines.

She’d brute-force it by flooding it with mana, a tide sweeping deadwood.

Yet as array and chant finished, and a sacrificial bead welled from her cut fingertip, a strange sensation speared her mind, cold as a nail through ice.

It was like a wail of the dead. Not the usual lament of revenants; this voice was pure, like her own thoughts echoing up from the heart of a well. Yet she knew it wasn’t hers. It belonged neither to this life nor to Jiaqi.

A vision flashed.

She saw the dragon, scales like stormclouds. She saw a quiet sunset over a small fishing village, smoke threading into amber sky. She saw “herself” carve a wish into crystal before the road, letters shining like frost.

—This time, she would never again be—

—the failure.

“Urk…!”

The vision snapped off. Vertigo hammered her, like a boat hit by a rogue wave. Nausea surged up her throat. She caught the wall to stand, palms sweating ice.

Worse than the retching was the tearing in her mind, a rift like river ice splitting under spring thaw.

Why?

Since Mathis showed her the truth of souls, she’d accepted her state. She no longer looped the question of who she was. She hadn’t felt this split in a long time.

But it returned now, in a way she hadn’t foreseen, like a shadow walking back at noon.

No. Wrong. Something’s off—

Adelaide clutched her chest, breath ragged, a dark omen battering her heart like crows beating wings.

Meanwhile, the eternal heartbeat turned to a whisper at her ear. Soft, irresistible, it called, a breeze through reeds.

[Come… back to me…]

Her pupils blew wide. Instinct made her step back, as if from a cliff edge.

No—wrong. She needed to calm down, to freeze the water before it boiled.

Right. Leave for a bit, wait till this feeling fades, then—

Her mind scrambled. The alarm in her heart turned her around, but her feet refused the right path, as if the floor were a current.

At some point, space and time in the chapel flipped. The near door receded to a horizon, a moon slipping away. The nearly unbreakable maze almost turned into a straight road.

Adelaide, woozy, slid her hand along a wall and drifted forward. She didn’t even keep the edges. She somehow arrived at the core, like a sleepwalker reaching the altar.

When she realized, the Heart’s pulse was a bell, tolling through bone.

She lifted her face. A plain stone dais stood ahead, spare as a monk’s table. Upon it, the Sacred Heart. And… an old acquaintance.

“My, isn’t this my dear comrade in ‘low’ water magic aptitude?”