The vault had wind artifacts, earth, psychic, shadow—a thorough cross-section of elemental schools, well-stocked and organized by attribute. The further Luke moved through the aisles, the more clearly a particular absence took shape.

Not a single ice artifact anywhere.

He stopped. For a corporation renowned across the world specifically for its ice-attribute awakeners, that gap wasn't an oversight. He turned to the secretary. "Where are the ice artifacts?"

Something shifted in her expression—a quiet, private satisfaction, the kind that suggested she'd been waiting for the question. "Right this way."

She led him past the main display aisles toward a reinforced door at the back of the vault. The air changed before he could see anything—a slow, deliberate cold spreading through the passage as they drew close, the recognizable fluctuation of concentrated ice power bleeding into the surrounding atmosphere.

Inside the alcove, a single display case held three items behind sealed glass.

"Our finest alchemists made these personally," the secretary said, with understated but unmistakable pride. "You won't find any of them on the open market. Fewer limitations, milder side effects, far greater raw output than standard gear. They sit very close to the high-rank threshold."

Luke stepped up to the glass and read.

[Silver-Frost Aegis Pendant]
Attribute: Ice / Defense
Use: Instantly generates a compressed, diamond-hard ice shield around the user when activated. Capable of blocking mid-to-high-tier physical strikes and elemental attacks.
Duration: Holds until shattered by sufficient force, or until the user withdraws soul power.
Limitation: Highly vulnerable to pure fire-attribute attacks, which accelerate barrier degradation at double speed.
Side Effect: Temporarily drops the user's core body temperature. Skin runs cold; breath becomes visible.

[Glacial-Thread Bracer]
Attribute: Ice / Crowd Control
Use: Projects invisible threads of freezing energy that latch onto a target's limbs, slowing movement, seizing joints, and spreading frostbite across the affected area.
Duration: Effect holds for up to fifteen minutes, depending on the target's physical resistance.
Limitation: Short-range. The target must be within thirty feet for the threads to properly connect.
Side Effect: The arm wearing the bracer goes numb and tingles for several minutes after use.

[Ever-Cold Mind Crystal]
Attribute: Ice / Support
Use: Worn at the forehead or neck, it forcibly cools the user's mind—granting absolute clarity under pressure, preventing panic in near-death combat, and slightly amplifying the raw output of the user's ice abilities.
Duration: Can be maintained passively for up to twenty-four hours without significant energy drain.
Limitation: Functions only for pure ice-attribute users. Anyone else receives nothing from it.
Side Effect: Extended use suppresses emotional response. The user will struggle to feel anger, joy, or empathy until the crystal is removed.

All three were genuinely impressive. Any one of them would give an ice user a meaningful edge in a sudden fight.

But his attention had already moved.

At the far end of the alcove sat a final case, set slightly apart from the others. The item inside was a ring. At first glance it appeared to be fashioned from some kind of transparent material—but that description missed what the ring actually was. The band itself was understated. What stopped him was the interior: a depth of colour that had no business existing inside something so small. Not the pale blue of shallow water or the bright teal of clear coastal shallows, but the particular dark, pressurised quality of ocean at its deepest point, where light gave up and something else took over entirely. Whatever had been fixed inside the band wasn't liquid—it didn't move, didn't shift—but it gave the overwhelming impression of something that was only waiting.

He looked at the plaque.

Where each of the three artifacts had earned a full specification sheet, this one carried a single line.

[3rd Ring of the Deep Sea — Possesses the power to suppress soul power to a certain extent.]

The secretary had already moved to his shoulder, reading the question in his stillness. "That piece was recovered from an ancient ruin. Our appraisers spent considerable time studying it, but the soul suppression was the only function they could identify. Whatever it originally did, that information didn't survive."

Luke said nothing.

Not because of the ring's appearance. Not because of what little the plaque described. He was standing very still because he was looking at a name he recognised from somewhere entirely different—from a world he'd read about, not lived in—and his thoughts had already skipped ahead to what finding it here, now, this early, actually meant.

The novel had described the 6th Ring of the Deep Sea. Not this one. But they were part of a set. And the set had an owner.

He took a controlled breath and kept his expression neutral.

Training inside Silver Moon's facilities was possible—but only within strict limits. Ice manipulation he could practice openly; that was expected, perhaps even monitored to track his development. Everything else was a different matter entirely. His second awakening, his three remaining abilities, anything that suggested he already knew about the ice seal placed on him—if the corporation discovered any of it, his position here would collapse. They would have surveillance planted in his rooms before the end of the first week. An organisation this meticulous did not leave assets this expensive unwatched.

What he needed was somewhere outside their reach entirely, and someone he could afford to be honest with.

One person existed who fit both requirements.

Her name was Petra Kross. She had been alive for thirty thousand years—a survivor of the 7th Trial and Tribulation, last living remnant of the Arcana civilization. That human society had stood at roughly ten times the power of the current one; the bloodline extraction methods, awakening frameworks, and evolutionary inheritance structures that modern power users depended on had all originated with them. The civilization itself had fallen ten thousand years ago. Petra had outlasted it by twenty thousand years before departing the world at the end of the 6th Trial, through means neither the novel nor Emily's System had ever fully clarified.

But the System had known about her. In the story's original course, it had sent Emily to train under her—and the reason that training had been possible, the reason it had been safe, was that Petra's presence in this world was not her true body. She had sent an incarnation back: a deliberately constructed avatar, returned for some specific purpose connected to the final trial. Her main body remained alive somewhere in the far distances of the universe, fully separate. The incarnation was designed so that nothing it experienced—no knowledge, no memory, no secret ever disclosed to it—transferred back to her. Once its purpose was complete, it would simply cease. Petra had built that privacy into the construction deliberately. It was fundamental to who she was.

That separation was everything Luke needed. He could train his other three abilities under her guidance without any risk of the information surfacing—not through the corporation, not through the System, not through Petra herself. He could show her the full scope of what he was capable of. For the first time since his second awakening, he could stop performing a limited version of himself.

The mechanism for reaching her was the rings.

When Petra had left the world, she'd kept three of her nine Deep Sea Rings behind. Her incarnation was actively searching for them—but it was confined to a specific location and had no way to go looking. The arrangement worked in reverse: bring a ring to her, and she would offer her knowledge and guidance in return. The activation was simple enough. Blood on the ring, her name spoken aloud, and it would transfer whoever held it directly to where she waited.

In the original story's course, it had taken Emily a long time to find two of the rings. She had intended to use one herself and give the other to Luke—but their relationship had been fractured and interrupted by too many incidents for that exchange to ever happen cleanly. He had always been meant to find a ring. He had simply never found one.

And now one was sitting directly in front of him, recovered from an ancient ruin by people who had no idea what they actually had, catalogued as a minor curiosity and placed at the back of a vault no one had pointed him toward until he asked the right question.

He hadn't planned for this. He'd known the approximate locations of the other two rings from the novel and had intended to pursue one once he was more established. Finding one here compressed that timeline by months—and reduced his exposure to Emily's System considerably. Every search he didn't have to make was a risk he didn't have to take.

He turned away from the first three artifacts without looking at them again.

The choice was already made.