The ground shook violently. Outside the vault, the ritual was reaching its climax—the First Seal was about to collapse. Shaw felt the energy of the Origin in the air twist like a wounded animal, and his very core pulsed in response, like a secondary heart beating in sync with the world.
He looked at the silver mask in his hands—the last artifact of the First Inventor. Cold and featureless, it reflected his distorted face like a frozen lake.
Shaw hesitated for a second before putting it on. He didn't trust gifts from strangers, much less from historical figures who were supposed to be dead. But time was running out.
The mask clung to his face like a second skin.
And the world fell apart.
Shaw was no longer in the vault. He wasn't anywhere. He floated in a void between dimensions, surrounded by strands of energy stretching infinitely in all directions—some bright and intact, others corroded, some already broken. The First Seal wasn't a physical barrier. It was a knot in this web, a point where countless realities intersected.
And it was unraveling, with small cracks/gaps everywhere—it was these small fractures that had allowed some of the lesser predators to slip through. A question arose in Shaw's mind: 'Rose said earlier that the Seal also protected the predators from humans, so why are they entering this world/dimension?'
In the distance, monstrous shapes writhed, trapped on the other side—amber-eyed Predators, some the size of cities, others as small as insects, all waiting. Some seemed fearful, apprehensive, while others were ravenous.
But they weren't what held Shaw's interest.
It was another being.
At the center of the web, where all the strands converged, something far greater stirred. Not a creature, not a god—but a pattern, a consciousness made of pure logic, watching him through the veil.
The First Inventor wasn't dead.
He had become the Seal.
Shaw felt the answer before he heard the question.
The "First Inventor" had never existed. It was just a disguise, a persona created by what now held the Seal. Something that had infiltrated humanity, learned from it, and then—when it realized its homeworld was being consumed by the Battlefield—decided to use the Inventors to create a countermeasure against assimilation, even if only a temporary one. First, it conducted an experiment in the Inventors' world (using a cataclysm of its own making to manipulate them into beginning the trial, based on nothing but hypotheses and theories) before attempting to implement it in its homeworld. But something went wrong, leading to its fusion with the Seal.
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The Ritual Completes
Back in the tunnel, the vault door exploded into shrapnel. Fanatics fell to their knees, bleeding from their ears—cracks began forming in the air as the lesser practitioners were dragged somewhere.
Shaw emerged from the shadows, the mask still fused to his face. He no longer needed Molecular Manipulation to move unseen.
Because now, he wasn't entirely there.
Shaw ignored the fallen fanatics. His attention was fixed on the fissures in the air—and the void beyond them. He raised the key, now fused to his hand, flesh and metal indistinguishable.
— 'I won't reinforce the Seal,' he mentally declared to himself. "I'll redesign it."
And then, he pulled.
The pain was beyond anything Shaw had ever experienced. It was as if every cell in his body were being unraveled and rewritten, his Origin core expanding to contain something far greater.
But he endured.
Because now, he saw the path.
The First Seal wouldn't be repaired. It wouldn't be broken.
It would be moved.
Inside him.
Some might call it foolish—after all, the First Inventor was fused with the Seal, but he was imprisoned, unable to exert any external or internal influence over the Seal itself.
The world screamed. The tunnel walls dissolved into mist, the fanatics vanished like dreams at dawn, and for an instant, Shaw saw everything—the underground city, the Battlefield, even the void beyond—as lines on a map, waiting to be folded.
And then, silence.
When Shaw opened his eyes, he was back on the infinite plateau—but now, the frozen stars were fixed in recognizable patterns. Constellations he'd never seen but knew the meaning of.
Rose stood before him, her mask now removed, revealing a face that was part human, mixed with something far older.
— "Congratulations," she smiled, sharp teeth glinting.
Shaw looked at his hands. The key and the mask had disappeared, but he could feel them—as part of him.
The First Seal was inside him. An entire dimension was inside him.
And that meant, for the first time since he'd awakened in that forest…
He had finally taken the first step toward his goal.