Chapter 2368: Connection

The water was so clear that Sylas could see the bottom long before he reached it, pale stone spreading beneath the oasis while strands of luminous vegetation swayed through silent, soft currents.

What caught his attention wasn’t the landscape, however, but the cocoon resting at the center of the basin, wrapped in translucent material that shimmered with the same pinks, blues, and violets that colored the Mesmeryx. Inside it was another Nosphaleen.

She was naked as well, her body wrapped tightly enough that the contours beneath the cocoon were impossible to miss, but Sylas’ attention passed over all of that without pause.

His eyes narrowed as the Runes within them began rotating. The woman sleeping here wasn’t a false body, and the Nosphaleen sitting above wasn’t an illusion either. Somehow, both were equally real.

Sylas moved closer and immediately noticed another detail. The sleeping Nosphaleen possessed the same extension from the base of her spine. The tether belonging to the woman above connected directly into the cocoon, but this second spine didn’t return upward toward her other body, instead continuing downward through the water and piercing directly into the bedrock beneath them.

That meant the first connection wasn’t the end of whatever she had constructed here, and Sylas needed to know where this second one led.

His Will followed it through the stone.

For the first several layers, there was nothing particularly strange. The tether passed through bedrock, Runes, and the deeper foundation of the planet without losing coherence.

Then his senses stretched farther, crossing boundaries they shouldn’t have needed to cross, and Sylas’ expression finally shifted as the connection continued beyond the Beast Heaven itself.

’All the way to the Mortal Plane?’

Sylas almost doubted what his own senses were telling him, but his new eyes left very little room for uncertainty. The tether passed down through the layers separating Planes and continued toward the Mortal Plane, linking Nosphaleen to an existence far beneath where she physically sat now. There was no mistaking what he was seeing.

The question was why.

His gaze flickered upward toward the Nosphaleen sitting on the Demi-God Plane, and now that Sylas knew what to look for, something about her aura immediately felt wrong. Her presence fit into the surrounding Heaven almost perfectly, obscured beneath layers of Mesmeryx Will and the strange structure of the oasis, but underneath all of that she wasn’t radiating the aura of a Demi-God at all.

She was still a Mortal.

Sylas turned back toward the cocoon, and the answer became obvious the moment he examined it properly. Demi-God Aura was accumulating inside the sleeping body, gathering in steady layers without being allowed to flow back toward the Nosphaleen sitting above, which meant every trace of power this Plane should have forced upon her was being diverted downward into the cocoon instead.

Nosphaleen was preserving her Mortal status.

She had physically reached the Demi-God Plane, yet through this structure she was refusing the advancement that should have followed. The tether into the Mortal Plane maintained whatever foundation allowed that status to persist, while the cocoon absorbed the Demi-God Aura she accumulated merely by existing here, leaving Sylas with an increasingly clear understanding of how the mechanism worked while its purpose remained completely unresolved.

Why would she go this far to remain a Mortal?

Sylas looked at the sleeping Nosphaleen for several seconds longer before pushing off the bedrock and rising toward the surface. Water folded around him without resistance, and by the time he stepped onto the lotus platform again, there wasn’t so much as a drop clinging to his clothes.

Nosphaleen had already turned toward him.

Sylas walked directly in front of her and lowered himself into a squat, bringing his eyes level with hers while she remained seated on the lotus. Neither spoke at first, and Sylas simply studied her face with the same cold focus he had used on the cocoon beneath them, searching through the details that had once been familiar enough to him that he barely needed to think about them.

Her clear blue eyes hadn’t changed in any obvious way, but the moment Sylas looked deeper, that impression disappeared. Behind the surface of her gaze, buried beneath the layers of Mesmeryx Will and whatever else had wrapped itself around her existence, black feathers were falling through a darkness that seemed impossibly distant. Broad wings shifted behind them, the unmistakable silhouette of a Crow flapping somewhere beyond her pupils.

Sylas’ gaze cooled because this wasn’t the Nosphaleen he remembered, even though the body was hers, the Will was hers, and the strange duality between the woman above and the cocoon below remained genuinely part of her existence. Something had still twisted the way those pieces fit together, leaving traces of another influence buried deeply enough that even his new eyes had needed time to expose it.

Nosphaleen finally broke the silence.

"Why did you come?"

Sylas didn’t answer because the question was obvious enough that he refused to waste words on it, and the remaining edge of his patience had already been worn thin long before he entered the cave. He simply continued staring at her, waiting for the real reason behind her silence, because whatever explanation she thought she could hide behind that question wasn’t what he had come here to hear.

Nosphaleen seemed to understand what he was waiting for.

Her expression remained controlled, but something in her eyes softened as the faint sharpness in her voice receded.

"You will die."

It could be said that the person who believed in Sylas the most in the world was a fierce competition between Nosphaleen and Cassarae. But it could also be said that Nosphaleen had believed in Sylas for longer, at least if the last handful of years were the only time frame to go by.

Cassarae had to rebuild her trust in him, but Nosphaleen had always had it.

So what did it mean for her to suddenly say something like this?