Coming across the remnants of a cave that was once home to a powerful hydra and now effectively wiped off the map was certainly not what Cirrus had been expecting to see so early in the morning. It was completely incinerated, and the cave must’ve had at least a half-mile radius. The rocks were all crumbled into bits on top of each other, and the hydra’s form had been entirely turned to ash upon further inspection of what was left over. There were a few scales that looked to have been spared here and there, but the moment Cirrus had his guard try to pick one up, it crumbled to dust in his hands.

“Well… that miracle worker certainly killed the damn thing, I guess,” the gruff man spat, standing up with the ash in his palm, lifting it towards Cirrus' amber eyes for him to get a closer look. Jayce was a sturdy man with a fairly muscular build, his skin a dark olive with messy, unkempt waves of short brown hair atop his head. He was average height and was covered in scars, his most visible one being a large gash on his left cheek, which made him look rather intimidating to most people. And his earthy tones were only intensified by his eyes, which were a vibrant shade of nature's green you wouldn't expect from such a rough person.

And Cirrus slowly moved one hand to his eyepatch, his eye already starting to tingle underneath as he began using the special concept of the all-knowing eye. He removed the cover and stared intently at the ash piled up in Jayce’s hand, its status and cause of death all filtering into his mind like clockwork, no speck of knowledge left unturned where he looked. “...it was blasted to death in a heated energy wave that only lasted two seconds,” he remarked simply, his three companions all turning to give him incredulous stares while Jayce could do nothing but gape.

“You’re kidding! I felt that shockwave from miles away, and you’re telling me the blast itself was only two seconds long?!” the man gave an irritable snap, clearly finding that knowledge to be hard to believe, before a small, petite woman tapped his shoulder and garnered his attention. She had short bobbed hair that was as soft and white as snow along with skin so pale it barely held any shred of color, her eyes so blue they resembled winter's frozen ice when it melts. People who saw her would compare her to snow itself, and she smiled kindly at her companion while she raised a mischievous finger towards his face.

“I don’t think it’s too hard to believe. Consider everything else we’ve heard about this miracle man. Surely he's done more impressive things than this, right? No reason to get so worked up,” Eve supplied sensibly, Jayce glaring at her with a subtle growl building in his throat before he was interrupted yet again, this time by a tall, muscular woman who was much larger than him, with skin the color of charcoal and thick, coarse burgundy hair that flowed stiffly down her sides. Her eyes were the color of moss, and she was by far the one who intimidated people the most out of their small group of four... even more than Cirrus, despite him being the crown prince of one of the most powerful planetary nations.

But she was very methodical and far more composed than people assumed at first glance, the strong woman nodding with crossed arms as she began reciting all the information they'd gathered to get to where they were now. “That’s right. We know that this miracle worker has immense power, and according to our sources, this isn’t the first time he’s blown something up to this degree. After all, we know that he got rid of an entire section of an ocean in one world and relocated it and then completely reshaped the terrain... we know that he’s defeated the Queen of the Dragons, one of the strongest figureheads of our time... and we know that he tends to follow rumors and likes to help people whenever he hears about something amiss. It’s only natural his concepts will be strong. We already knew this.”

It was silent for a moment as Jayce brewed with this information, Achitha and Eve smiling at each other while Cirrus began to ponder. The mission he’d been given by his grandmother was simple… find this elusive miracle worker and recruit him into the Central Domain Alliance that his mother, the Queen, led. Reality was breaking, no one knew why, and they needed all of the strength they could acquire in order to protect themselves and find a way to mend the cracks of space and time itself. His grandmother, who had developed a strong concept of prophecy ever since she was a young girl, had given him the mission of finding this powerful, miraculous man, and she had described it as his most important mission yet.

Pessimistic people like Jayce hadn't believed this rumored miracle worker existed until his grandmother explicitly confirmed it. Optimistic people like Eve were excited by the new possibilities that could come about with such a discovery. More realistic people like Achitha, who led with evidence and proven facts, found it hard to believe someone could wield so many different concepts the way this rumored miracle worker was said to. The most concepts a single person had ever harnessed all at once was six, and anything more than that was too much for a person’s brain to comprehend. It was unheard of for someone to so effortlessly accomplish anything more. Cirrus had tried bringing this point up to his grandmother, inquiring about how such a thing was possible, and yet…

“Isn’t that sense of him making the impossible possible exactly why we need him on our side?” the mysterious woman had smiled, reaching out to lay three fingers atop the black patch covering the left half of his face as she pressed herself against his all-knowing eye.

She was a small, small woman... in fact, she barely even reached his waist, and he always had to kneel down to be on her level... but she was also incredibly, incredibly wise. She had short, thin black hair and smooth, warm brown skin the same color as his, though for some reason, he had never once seen her eyes. They were always hidden behind a large blindfold the color of sparkling green moss, and no one knew why she never took it off, not even her own daughter.

“You’ve always been a capable boy, my dear, so I know you will take this quest seriously and execute it well,” she smiled at him, her wisdom and many centuries of living coming through in the octaves of her voice, almost seeming far older than what she was. “But, keep in mind… on this journey, you will meet someone important who you must recruit at all costs. The fate of the world may depend on this one.”

“You mean besides the miracle worker?” Cirrus asked curiously, obediently closing his eyes under his elder’s touch despite the way his eye burned and welled with tears underneath the black padded cloth, overwhelmed by feeling the hand of someone so ancient who held so many countless memories he was not yet able to comprehend.

But his grandmother just smiled, her face still as young as could be in a world where everyone was immortal and no one longer aged. “I’ll let you decide that for yourself.”

“How will I know it’s this person you’re speaking of when I meet them?”

“Oh, hah… you’ll know!” his grandmother laughed ruefully, almost sounding mocking as she moved her hand from his covered eye to lay on his silky black hair, gently stroking the top of his head while being careful not to mess up his neat, long braid. But all of a sudden, her hand stopped, and she leaned under him to catch a good look at that single visible bright amber eye of his that contained all of his humanity. “You’ll know, because he won’t respect you at all. You will have to work hard to catch that one, and you’ll know exactly what I mean once you meet him. Good luck to you, Cirrus.”

She’d looked so sinister staring at him like that through her blindfold, speaking words of advice that sounded more akin to warnings... though Ruba had always been mysterious, even among her family. It did make him somewhat nervous to venture further, knowing he might be meeting two incredibly powerful people on this journey who he needed to recruit, one of which would hold no respect for him. But honestly, when he thought about it... why would that be? Cirrus liked to think of himself as a responsible and respectable person, by all counts. He had a bit of a tendency to people-please, and his older sibling always called him a goody-two-shoes, but those weren’t exactly negative traits, were they? It just meant he followed the rules and was helpful! He did his job! Those were all good things, weren’t they? It's not like he'd committed any crimes or had done anything to hurt another person so long as that person wasn’t already a condemned criminal, so it didn’t make sense for anyone on a good path to hold him any animosity…

Ah, but there was no point in dwelling on it now. He'd just figure it out as he went. Ruba had said that he would know when he met them, so it wouldn't help to think about it so hard too soon. He was able to find a little comfort in that, at least, before he turned to Achitha, his right-hand and second in command when it came to developing plans and strategies and leading his troops when he could not, and who was always someone he could rely on. “Where do you think we should head next? We know that this miracle worker often follows rumors and seeks out places that are in trouble, so have any rumors stood out to you so far? I heard there were multiple towns dealing with plague just a few leagues over, so maybe we should go and check that out.”

“Uh, Cirrus! We can’t let you get so close to the sick! It’d be horrible if you caught a stupid plague too!” Jayce immediately countered without hesitation, only for Eve to openly laugh while giving him a firm and ruthless slap on the back.

“Why do you think I’m here, huh?” she snickered, ignoring the way Jayce was glaring at her as she pointed her thumb into her chest. “I have a very polished healing concept, you know. If our lovely prince gets sick, I’ll be here to heal him. You can count on me!”

“Like I’d count on you for anything,” Jayce griped, only for Eve to reach up and smack the back of his head, Cirrus watching them with a fond smile.

“Well,” he interrupted calmly, his companions pausing in their petty squabbling to face him, immediately receptive to his call. “Ruba said to follow the trail of rumors, and that it would lead us right to him. So unless there are any other rumors floating about, I don’t think there’s anywhere else to go,” he smiled, Achitha nodding her agreement with crossed arms.

“That’s right. I did a bit of scouting for rumors as well, and this new plague is being viewed as a pretty big deal on this planet. But I can give us all immunity to any illness, so there’s no reason we should let that hinder us,” she affirmed, Jayce looking slightly defeated between them, as if resigning himself to his fate.

And Cirrus thought his best friend was being rather silly, so he turned to smile at his personal guard and the man he’d been raised with since they were little kids and offered with a voice thickly sweet, “I think you’re more worried about yourself than me, Jayce. Are you scared of getting sick, by any chance?”

“Uh… no, I’ll be fine,” his guard retorted stubbornly, avoiding eye contact with his master in a show of mock defiance while Eve continued to laugh at him and gave his shoulder another harsh shove, which only made Jayce turn to growl at her.

“Well, that settles that, then,” Cirrus announced, his voice taking on a more commanding tone as he looked over the remnants of the fallen cave for a final time. When he’d scanned over it with his left eye before, the one that had been infused with his concept, it looked like someone had died in the center of the hydra's lair only seconds after the monster must’ve been killed as well, and yet that same body had been removed and completely disappeared without a trace a few hours afterwards. It felt odd, and he wanted to know more about this puzzling phenomenon, but he couldn’t find any other clues. There was a trail of footprints that had been covered up, so he couldn’t see what their former sizes or shapes had been, and instead only knew that the dirt on top of them had been moved. But when he followed where the trail led, all he came across was a former campsite that looked to have been abandoned days ago and a fallen tree that appeared to have been struck with lightning of some kind.

Though gathering that much information with his eye always gave him a headache, Cirrus quickly moving his eyepatch back around his face to block out all of the knowledge that came obnoxiously flooding towards him from wherever his eye glanced. He was in his early five hundreds, and yet he still hadn’t mastered that special concept as much as he would’ve liked. Ruba had prophesied he’d be one of the few to wield six concepts by the time he was at his peak, and while Cirrus did look forward to that, he knew he still had a long way to go. He was deemed to be the future leader of the Central Domain Alliance because of how much weight his prophecy had given him, the chosen one who’d been foretold to stop the coming apocalypse and save all of reality from shattering. Although if he were truly honest…