If so, would You care to explain what exactly You're after?
Then, abruptly, a beam of light dropped from above — illuminating one of the stone chairs. He walked toward it, and before he got there, a second beam fell, lighting another chair. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth…
One by one, every chair caught its light.
He could tell at a glance: these were the chairs from inside the palace — all twelve, arranged in a circle. And in the centre—
Wait.
As the final beam descended, all twelve chairs stood complete and lit — but the centre wasn't the ancient Scale he'd expected. It was a rapidly spinning black vortex.
After hesitating a moment, Vincent approached slowly. He laid a hand on the nearest chair, and found it wasn't stone at all — it was some indeterminate material, something like jade, smooth under his palm, and warm in a way that made it feel almost alive.
When he pressed his palm flat against it, he felt a faint, pleasant warmth — and his spirituality gave a happy nudge: Sit down.
He didn't overthink it. He dropped into the chair and leaned back — and immediately felt a wave of whole-body relaxation wash through him. Every cell in him seemed to light up at once, like the best hit imaginable.
But now wasn't the time to enjoy it.
He placed both hands on the armrests and first looked around at the remaining eleven chairs, then fixed his gaze on the spinning black vortex at the centre.
"And then what?"
"And then what? And then what? And then what…"
His voice rippled outward, layered and boundless — and it was the first sound he'd heard since entering the dark.
The next instant, the infinite black darkness around him began to churn and roil. Like a black tide, it surged in from every direction toward Vincent.
He threw up a hand on instinct to block it — and watched as the darkness flowed straight through his arm and into his body without resistance. Yet he felt nothing. Not good, not bad. Nothing.
As the darkness poured into him, the things it had swallowed began to re-emerge, one by one — like a tide retreating from a shore.
When the last thread of darkness disappeared, the spinning vortex at the centre gradually slowed, twisted, shifted — and dissolved away to reveal the ancient Scale hidden behind it.
And Vincent found himself back inside the palace of the Nation of Disorder, with twelve fully restored stone chairs around him and nothing else new.
It was then that he realised he'd already advanced. Sequence 5 of the Broker Pathway:
"Dark Box."
The name surprised him a little. Dark Box felt slightly opaque as a title. But once he understood what the Sequence signified, it clicked: it referred to black-box operations. Covert dealings. Backroom manoeuvring.
As a Sequence 5 practitioner, "Dark Box" had a single Beyonder ability, also called "Dark Box," with two forms of execution:
The first could be used in battle or emergencies. It created an invisible, neutral "dark box" environment around a target — and by giving the target something of value, he could force them to comply with a specific request. The target couldn't be harmed, their other states couldn't be altered, and he himself had to appear normal throughout. Any deviation from this was likely to wake the target out of the deal and break the effect.
Success wasn't guaranteed. The more the target had a history of operating in grey areas, the higher the success rate — something the Broker Pathway's "Grey Sense" ability could gauge in advance. Against a Sequence 4 Unshadowed of the Sun Pathway, for example, success was nearly impossible even without divine suppression.
In practice, this form felt like an enhanced version of the "Bribe" ability from the Black Emperor Pathway — where Bribe simply weakened an opponent by giving them something, Dark Box could outright control them.
The second form couldn't be used in combat or emergencies, requiring time to set up properly.
In plain terms: using a semi-enclosed space as the medium, you created a genuine dark box. Inside it, you were one party. Hidden in the shadows and darkness, some mysterious creature or dangerous entity was the other.
By offering something of value, you stated a need. That need could be something concrete — "I want a Sequence 5 Beyonder characteristic of such-and-such pathway" — or something abstract — "I want the difficulty of a certain event at a certain time to decrease."
Either way, the request had to be precise and clear, not vague. The clearer the request, the higher the probability of success. Whether it ultimately succeeded would also depend on the difficulty of the request, the value of what was offered, and whether the other party in the deal was acting in good faith.
Vincent leaned back in his chair and thought:
How do I best put these two forms of Dark Box to work?
Mm, save it for later — I'll figure it out with Bernadette.
He turned his attention to the ancient Scale and channelled spirituality into it.
Golden mist flowed out like thick liquid, flooding the surroundings in gold. A moment later, information poured into his mind:
First, blessing slots. After advancing to Sequence 5, the available blessings became: 2 Ambitionist, 4 Prosecutor, 8 Shadow Merchant, and 16 Broker.
The sheer jump in numbers was staggering. If he could give out all those slots through "cooperative" means, it would surely balance the Scale again.
And at Sequence 4, the numbers would double again… Looking at this trajectory, keeping the Scale fed in future shouldn't be all that hard, as long as he put in the effort.
The problem was that with slots numbering in the hundreds eventually, the "work for me" aspect of blessed employees would become meaningless at that scale — unless he used them to seek out and facilitate new cooperative blessings.
Because at some point, when the Broker slots hit the hundreds, he certainly couldn't go around finding each person individually. Even the "boss" had limits.
He shook his head, and moved on to the second piece of information: regarding the Dark Box ability, he could now build a "dark box" inside the Nation of Disorder, using the Scale as its core, to receive all manner of unknown things from the "outside."
But this dark box couldn't "grant wishes" precisely — he couldn't specify what he wanted from it. Every transaction was a mystery box. However, every transaction would succeed. The value of what was received would be determined by the value he provided.
And the only currency it accepted was the grey crystal from the Scale's left pan. The bigger the piece of crystal, the greater the value of what would come through.
To be continued…
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