Damien let out a slow breath.

The excitement arrived at some point in that exhale—not sudden, not explosive, but real. The quiet, deep kind that had no performance in it. The kind that came from alignment between what you wanted and what was in front of you.

He had wanted to find something that could help him against the demons.

What was sealed here had apparently been used against the demons before, by someone, to results significant enough that the demon race had spent centuries making sure it never happened again.

He was going to unseal it.

That was already decided.

He stood.

Looked at the record fragment one more time.

Then frowned.

Not at the content he had already read—at the content he hadn’t been paying attention to, the secondary information that had been sitting in his system’s catalogue while he processed the two major revelations and had not yet been examined.

He went back through it.

Read the secondary sections.

His frown deepened.

The record had given him the what and the minimum grade of the thing sealed here. It had confirmed it was a creature. It had told him the demon race feared it specifically because of what it had done to them.

What it had not given him was a location.

He read through it again.

More carefully.

Checked his system’s translation.

Checked it again.

No location. No directional reference. No coordinates encoded in the script, no landmark described, no distance from any fixed point he could use as a starting reference. The record was detailed about the Thing of Ruin itself and completely, entirely silent about where within the Forest of Twin Disasters it was actually sealed.

He stood in the chamber with the fragment in his hand and arrived at this conclusion with a delay that said something about how much the earlier information had occupied his attention.

"How the hell am I supposed to find it?"

The words came out with the particular quality that exhaustion added to frustration—not angry, not panicked, just the blunt expression of a man who had fought his way through an entire forest’s worth of demons and was now being told by the record he had fought to retrieve that the destination was not included.

Fenrir looked at him from the chamber entrance.

Cerbe’s middle head tilted slightly.

Luton pulsed once.

None of them had an answer.

Damien exhaled.

Went back to the record.

Because the record had given him everything else—had been careful and detailed and specific about the things it contained—and the absence of a location in everything he had read so far suggested that the location wasn’t absent from the record but was encoded differently. Written in a form he hadn’t yet processed correctly, or placed in a section he had moved past too quickly in his focus on the primary content.

He read it again.

Slower.

All of it.

And there, near the end of what the system had extracted—in a section that was formatted differently from the rest, the script slightly larger, the line spacing wider in the way that demonic records sometimes indicated procedural content rather than informational—was what he had missed.

Not a location.

Instructions.

He read them carefully.

The Ascension Land—the seal containing the Thing of Ruin—was not opened through finding a single point. It was structured differently from that. Seven locations existed within the forest.

Each one held an altar—small, the record described it, easy to overlook, built into the environment rather than placed obviously within it. These altars were the mechanism. The seal was distributed across all seven of them, each altar holding a portion of the whole, and the whole could not be released until each portion had been addressed.

The process was specific.

At each altar, blood had to be spilled—the blood of the challenger, the one seeking to register themselves as worthy of what the Ascension Land contained. That was the registration. The acknowledgment that a specific individual had presented themselves and intended to claim the prize.

But registration alone was not enough.

After the blood, proof.

The altar required the blood of enemies slain within a radius of it—demons or mana beasts, the record did not distinguish—spilled in sufficient quantity and quality to cause the altar to glow. The glow was the signal. The partial unsealing of that altar’s portion of the greater seal. When all seven glowed, the full seal would release and the Thing of Ruin would be accessible.

One after another.

Seven altars.

Seven registrations.

Seven proofs of slaughter.

Damien read it twice.

Then looked up from the fragment at nothing in particular, the chamber walls giving him nothing back.

He thought about what he had just done.

About the three strongholds. About the demons in the forest—the captains, the vice captains, the foot soldiers, the trackers, the aerial scouts—all of it. About the mana beast groups that had crossed his path throughout the journey here.

About the scope of the killing he had already done within this forest.

He thought about the locations.

The record had given those—had been specific about them, the seven altar sites distributed across the forest in a pattern that suggested they had been placed with the forest’s geography in mind rather than arbitrarily. Spaced. Positioned at significant points within the terrain.

He cross-referenced them with the places he had already been.

And stopped.

He had been to three of them.

Not knowing. Not looking for altars. Just moving through the forest on his own path, dealing with what was in his path, continuing toward what he was looking for.

The second base was one of the altar locations.

The third stronghold—this base, the one he was standing in the lowest chamber of right now—was another.

A third location corresponded to a section of forest he had moved through early in his time here, before the strongholds, before the organized demon response—a stretch of terrain he had crossed without stopping because nothing there had required stopping.

Three of the seven.

He had already been there.

He looked at the fragment.

Then at the floor of the chamber.

Then at the walls.

The record had described the altars as easy to overlook—built into the environment, not placed obviously. He had been in this chamber for ten minutes and had not seen anything that matched that description. But the chamber was dim and the rune’s destruction had rearranged what had been on the floor.

He moved without speed but rather, with a purpose. Starting at the outer wall and working inward, his eyes reading the surface of the chamber rather than looking through it.

The stone that Cerbe’s Hellfire had not touched. The undamaged sections of floor near the walls where the rune had been thinnest.

Fenrir moved to the opposite wall and started the same process from that end without being asked.

Three minutes.

Then Fenrir’s nose dropped toward a section of floor in the far corner—not a dramatic indication, just the slight lowering that meant it had found something worth looking at more closely.

Damien crossed to it.

In the corner, partially obscured by a section of root that had grown through the wall and spread along the floor, was the altar.

Small.

The record had not exaggerated. It was barely larger than his palm—a flat, slightly raised surface of material that was distinct from the chamber floor around it, carved with script so fine it was nearly invisible until you were looking directly at it. It had been here the whole time. He had walked past it twice during his search of the chamber.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he drew the short blade he kept at his side—not a weapon, not primarily, more a tool—and cut across his palm without ceremony.

A clean line.

Blood welled immediately, dark in the dim light of the chamber.

He pressed his palm flat against the altar’s surface.

The blood spread across the carved script.

For a moment, nothing.

Then the altar glowed.

Not faintly. Not the tentative pulse of something beginning a process. Immediately and fully—a warm, steady light that filled the corner of the chamber and pushed the shadows back from the altar’s surface, the script it was carved with suddenly legible in the illumination of its own activation.

Damien pulled his hand back.

Looked at the glow.

Then around the chamber.

At the walls that were still carrying the ambient demonic corruption of the stronghold—or had been. He realized, looking at them now, that something had changed.

The quality of it was different. Less saturated. As if the stronghold’s particular signature had been diluted by something else entering the space.

The altar’s activation.