The Count's Withering episode began at sundown and lasted until dawn.
Esigie was in the library when it hit. He felt it first as a vibration not in the air, not in the floor, but in the second place. The place where his two souls overlapped. A tremor, deep and massive, like a fault line shifting miles below the surface of the earth. The books on the shelves rattled. The dust motes, which had been drifting lazily in the last slant of daylight, froze suspended, motionless and then fell straight down, as if gravity had hiccupped.
Idemudia looked up from his chair. His watery eyes went wide. "Oh," he said softly. "Oh no. Not again."
The old attendant rose with an urgency that his bones rarely permitted. He moved to the library door, locked it from the inside, and pressed his back against the wood as if bracing against a wind that only he could feel.
"Stay still, child," he said. His voice was shaking. "Don't move. Don't do anything. It will pass. It always passes."
From the main house from the third floor, from the room directly above them a sound emerged that wasn't a sound. It was pressure. A wave of compressed energy that rolled through the compound's walls like thunder moving through stone. Esigie felt it in his teeth, in his sternum, in the base of his spine. It was the same presence he'd felt on his first day at the estate the sleeping giant's passive emanation but magnified a hundredfold. Uncontrolled. A Peak Level 8 aura user's power, normally compressed into a space the size of a man, suddenly expanding outward as the body that contained it failed.
The Withering.
Obanosa's aura was devouring him. And in the spasms of that internal war, his power leaked not as an attack, not as a display, but as an involuntary eruption. The way a wounded animal roars. The way a collapsing building screams.
The compound reacted.
In the barracks, soldiers who had been eating dinner dropped to their knees. Not voluntarily their bodies simply obeyed the pressure, the aura of a being so far above them that proximity alone was a command. Aruan, the only one in the compound who could remain standing in the Count's uncontrolled emanation, rose from his chair and walked quickly, calmly toward the main house.
In the kitchen, Adesua gripped the edge of her stove and bowed her head. She had lived through these episodes before. She knew the drill: stay low, stay quiet, wait for Osaro and the physician to reach the Count and stabilize him. It lasted hours sometimes. She prayed it wouldn't last longer.
In the servants' quarters, children cried. Aighon who had been sitting on his mat waiting for Esigie's return pressed his face into the straw and whimpered, his broad body curled tight, his instincts screaming at him to make himself small. Osawe was against the wall, his face white, his jaw clenched, his calculating mind for once overwhelmed by something that could not be calculated.
In the library, Esigie knelt on the floor where Idemudia had told him to stay still, and something happened.
* * *
It began as a flicker.
A faint, translucent shimmer at the edge of his vision not in the room, but in his mind. As if a screen had been turned on in a dark theater, its light too dim to read but bright enough to register.
Then it sharpened.
Lines of light, forming shapes. Not random structured. Organized. Characters and numbers arranged in a format that was neither the old Edo script he'd learned from the chronicle nor any writing system he'd encountered in the library. It was something else. Something that didn't belong to this world.
It appeared in the space behind his eyes overlaid on his vision like a reflection in glass. Faint, incomplete, stuttering like a signal fighting through interference. But legible. Barely.
And it was in English.
* * *
I stopped breathing.
The world was shaking the Count's episode rolling through the compound in waves of pressure that made my vision blur and my bones ache and in the middle of it, in the space between the shaking, something appeared in my head that I hadn't seen since I died in the rain on a Lagos street.
English. My language. The dead man's language. Letters and numbers and structures that belonged to Earth, to a world I'd left behind in a gutter in Ajegunle.
It was a screen. A display. Translucent, hovering in my mind's eye, flickering in and out like a television with a bad signal. Most of it was static unreadable, corrupted, incomplete. But fragments came through. Fragments I could read.
I read them.
* * *
╔══════════════════════════════════╗
║ [SYS_INIT... PARTIAL] ║
║ ║
║ Name: Esigie ║
║ Age: 6 ║
║ Race: Human ║
║ ║
║ Aura: Veil Basic ║
║ Magic: Unawakened ║
║ ║
║ STR: 4 | AGI: 5 | END: 4 ║
║ PER: 11 | VIT: 5 | INT: ?? ║
║ WIL: ?? | FOC: ?? | CRE: ?? ║
║ ║
║ Soul: [DUAL ANOMALY DETECTED] ║
║ Mana Capacity: [LOCKED] ║
║ Aura Density: 3 ║
║ ║
║ [EXTERNAL SCAN TRIGGERED] ║
║ Source: ██████████ ║
║ Level: [???] ║
║ Threat: [CATASTROPHIC] ║
║ ║
║ [WARNING: System unstable. ║
║ Composite level insufficient. ║
║ Full initialization pending.] ║
╚══════════════════════════════════╝
* * *
The display lasted eleven seconds. I counted. Then it fractured the lines breaking apart, the letters dissolving into static, the static fading to black and it was gone. As if it had never been there.
But it had been there. I had seen it. I had read it.
My stats. My actual stats. Numbers attached to attributes I could feel but had never been able to quantify. Strength: 4. Agility: 5. Endurance: 4. The numbers of a child low, weak, barely above baseline. Perception: 11. That one was different. That one was the dead man's gift twenty-three years of survival instincts compressed into a single metric that towered above the rest.
And the other lines. The ones that made my blood run cold.
Soul: DUAL ANOMALY DETECTED.
The system whatever it was, this impossible English-language interface that had appeared in my head during a dying count's aura spasm knew. It had scanned me and it had seen what no one in this world had seen. Two souls. Two rivers. An anomaly.
And it had scanned the source of the pulse. The Count. And it had returned a reading that consisted of three data points and a warning.
Level: [???]. Threat: CATASTROPHIC.
The system couldn't read him. He was too far above me the gap too vast, the differential too extreme. All it could determine was that whatever was on the third floor of the main house was so far beyond my level that proximity alone constituted a mortal threat.
I already knew that. I'd felt it since my first day. But seeing it quantified seeing the word CATASTROPHIC rendered in green text on a translucent screen in my mind made it real in a way that instinct alone never could.
The system. The Arbiter. I didn't know its name yet. I wouldn't know for years. It was dormant unstable, underpowered, waiting for my composite level to rise high enough to sustain it. What I'd seen was a flicker. A partial initialization triggered by the massive energy spike of the Count's episode, like a dead phone briefly powering on when struck by lightning.
It would go dark again. And it did. For a long time after that night, the screen did not return. The system slept. My level was too low. My body too weak. The bridge between my two souls too fragile to sustain the structure that wanted to form.
But I had seen it. I knew it was there. Waiting.
And I knew something else something that the stat screen, in its eleven seconds of stuttering existence, had confirmed with mathematical precision.
I was weak. Catastrophically, laughably, existentially weak. A Veil Basic aura user with the physical stats of a malnourished child, living in the shadow of a being so powerful that the system couldn't even render his level.
The gap between what I was and what I needed to become was not a gap. It was an ocean. A void. A distance so vast that the word 'far' didn't apply because 'far' implied a destination you could see.
I couldn't see it.
But I knew it was there. The same way Oba Esigie the real Esigie, the Transcendent, the Highest had known that Level 12 was there. Not because he could see it. Because he could feel it.
A door he couldn't open. A light he couldn't reach.
I lay on the library floor with the Count's dying aura pressing down on me like the weight of the world, and I made a promise. Not to God. Not to the universe. To myself. To the dead man from Lagos and the infant soul that shared his body. A promise written in no language, sworn to no one, binding only because I chose to be bound by it.
I will reach it.
Whatever it takes. However long it takes. Through every level, every wall, every impossible gap between what I am and what I need to be.
I will reach it.
The door. The light. The step above.
The Absolute.