Alex frowned, with the gears in his mind turning.
A wound.
Not a door, not a gate, not a portal. A wound.
He was sure the choice of wording wasn't poetic embellishnt – it was specific, chosen deliberately. He was sure of it. Whoever had written this verse hadn't been speaking taphorically.
If it were a taphor, the System wouldn't have translated it so literally. The System, for all its strange translations and sotis symbolic interpretations, always prioritised functional accuracy.
So if it said wound, it ant wound.
So was he right? What had been wounded?
A realm?
A plane of existence?
Or reality itself?
'Is this what it's referring to? A fracture?'
Alex cluenched his fists, knuckles turning pale beneath his skin.
Reluun, who had gone back to nibbling on his dried fruit, looked up again and raised an eyebrow.
"So what's the verdict, professor brainiac? Any more riddles to fry your neurons?"
Alex didn't respond imdiately.
Instead, he stood up, parchnt still in hand, and began pacing slowly through the archive.
His mind raced as if his thoughts were a whirlpool.
Just like the water rushing into a whirlpool, the closer he got to the answer, the faster and more chaotic his thoughts were.
A wound that could be sealed.
Forget the wound part, it was the sealed aspect that troubled Alex.
If it was sealed, then the likelihood of Alex being able to find his way in was nil.
If it was a place that could seal even gods, then he, a re B tier, was most definitely not going to be able to do anything about it.
'Or wait… What if I already have the key to unsealing it?'
A neuron activation went off in Alex's mind.
He subconsciously looked down at Virtue's Edge.
Mikhail's greatest creation.
His unfinished piece of work.
If anything, this had to be the key.
But, even if he sohow impossibly did manage to unseal it, what about the gods contained inside??
Wouldn't they be unleashed? Possibly kill him just for being there?
Yeah, he didn't like the idea of that.
However, again, the wording was weird, making Alex doubt himself once again.
It said the wound had been sealed… but it didn't say on which side.
It could actually have been Mikhail that had been sealed inside, rather than so 'gods'.
In fact, now that he thought about it this way, Alex felt it more likely.
Mikhail had just up and mysteriously disappeared one day.
Nobody had ever seen or heard from him again.
However, there were so faint whispers of the 'gods' still spreading around here and there, though even they were pushed to obscurity.
But this was all he needed to hear.
The gods were still out there, and Mikhail had been sealed… sowhere.
Even still, Alex was reading a translation by the System. Even though it had been incredibly thorough and never failed him before in this aspect, he wasn't so trusting of it to play by the rules anymore.
The translation could be misleading him in the completely wrong direction for all he knew.
Unfortunately, he just didn't have the ti available to completely learn a new language from scratch – especially one that had been pushed into obscurity, with very few even understanding it anymore.
'Why?'
'Why would Mikhail do this?'
Reluun shifted uneasily as the silence dragged. "You're doing that face again."
Alex stopped pacing. "What face?"
"The one where it looks like your brain is about to catch fire."
The Solari explained, leaning back with his arms behind his head.
"So? What's the deal with the last line?"
Alex sighed a deep and slow exhalation.
"If the poem is literal, then Mikhail's disappearance is likely linked to this case. And it seed… like he was hiding."
Reluun blinked.
"Hiding from what?"
'The Gods, or… the System.' Alex thought internally, but didn't answer aloud.
He'd rather keep Reluun out of matters on a scale like this.
His question remained unanswered, while Alex looked down at the parchnt again.
"I don't know." He lied.
Then, quieter: "But he made sure no one could follow him."
***
Over the next few hours, Alex withdrew himself again, setting the parchnt aside as it had now been fully committed to mory.
Ideally, he'd like to take it with him, but the Solari wouldn't allow the removal of any material from the archive, so that was off the table.
Even though the System had translated the text, he wanted to be doubly sure.
He found and gathered all parchnts written in that sa, aged dialect and started reading them through one by one.
He wanted to be sure before he started following this new lead – he didn't want to be sent on a wild goose chase again for whoever knew how long.
He'd cross reference anything that seed even remotely related to Mikhail.
And as the results filtered in, he felt a chill crawl down his spine.
The term 'Wound' was repeated in other Pre-Primordial Expanse texts too – rarely, but this fresh outlook brought up sothing he had failed to consider.
How did the author behind the parchnt know about Fractures before they even knew about the Primordial Expanse itself?
Alex had already asked Reluun, but he assured him that this piece of parchnt was written before any Solari civilisation had co into contact with the Primordial Expanse, so that ruled out any possibility that the author might have been from an older Solari civilisation that had been in contact.
This only dug the mystery behind its origins even deeper, but there were no further leads to be found in that direction.
More importantly, was that every reference to these 'wounds' was the recurring notion that such wounds were not natural.
They were made.
Torn open.
By force.
However, so more useful information did grace Alex's mind through his cross referencing.
The phrase 'Breaking the circle' from the third line seed to tie directly into this.
In many of the old myth type poems, the circle represented wholeness, reality, the continuity of the world.
To break it was to disrupt the natural order, to 'wound' reality. This solidified the idea of the wound being a fracture in Alex's mind.
And the reaction to such wounding?
The gods scread.
Or, god. Singualar.
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