The domain core in front of Vritra hummed with the deep and steady energy of the 4th Order, its presence substantial and clean, the foundation of everything the Graveyard was and would be.

He had everything he needed.

The gene potions from the Wooden Poisoned Realm were in his inventory, four tiers worth, waiting for the 4th Origin to make them absorbable.

The Nest creature was generating, seven days to completion, aligned with the evolution’s expected duration.

He thought about the last fourteen days and the fourteen before those and everything that had accumulated across all of them, the gene material and the domain evolutions and the people who had grown stronger in his absence and the conversations that had settled things that had been unsettled.

He thought about the lost elven kingdom and the less than two weeks and everything that needed to be ready before it opened.

He thought about his mother being held somewhere by his father, who was his father in the biological sense and nothing else.

He thought about Freya and her father and the competition and the ruins with their thin dimensional barriers and what both of them stood to gain if the conditions in that place were what Freya believed they could be.

He pushed the core room door closed behind him and stood in front of the domain core.

[Would you like to initiate the evolution to 4th Origin?]

He took a breath.

"Yes."

The energy that came out of the core was not the gradual release of something warming up but the immediate and total kind, consuming the available space completely in the space of a single breath, and it was darker than anything that had come out of the core before, the 4th Order energy expressing itself in the evolution in a way that was categorically different from the 3rd Order version.

It did not feel like falling asleep the way the 3rd Origin evolution had.

It felt like being consumed.

The darkness took him before he had finished processing that it was taking him, and then it was not darkness exactly but something that had darkness in it the way deep water had pressure, the density of it surrounding him completely and the sense of the outside world ceasing to be available.

[Initiating evolution to 4th Origin.]

The last thing he registered before the evolution took over completely was the deep and steady pulse of the domain core around him, the 4th Order Graveyard doing what it was designed to do, providing the foundation for what was going to happen to him over the next several days.

Then the evolution began in earnest and the core room and the domain and everything outside them ceased to exist for Neil Yates for a long time.

The domain around the core building changed immediately.

Not gradually, not with the slow pulse of the previous evolutions, but with the immediate and total expression of something that had been building long enough to accumulate into something that needed to be released all at once.

Bob noticed it first, which was how it went in the Graveyard because Bob was almost always near an exterior surface when things happened.

The black rock walls developed a faint secondary characteristic, not a visible change exactly but a quality that someone with sufficient perception could register, the energy of them deepening past what the 4th Order construction produced into something that was coming from inside the building where the evolution was occurring.

"The lord started." Bob said, to no one in particular and to Rob specifically.

Rob looked at the core building from his position near the workshop section and was quiet for a moment.

"Deep one." He said. "Going to take time."

Ileana came out of the healing hut where she had been working and looked at the core building with the expression she had when she was reading the energy of a situation rather than the surface of it.

The air around the core building was doing something.

Not visible to everyone, but visible to someone at 4th Origin Mythic Class, the energy coming off the building carrying the quality of a transformation in progress that was going to be significant when it completed.

She stood and looked at it for a moment.

Then she went back to what she had been doing, because standing and looking at it was not going to change its timeline and there was work to do in the domain.

Jane came out of the main building and looked at the core building and looked at Ileana and understood immediately what was happening.

She stood near Ileana for a moment.

"How long." She said.

"As long as it takes." Ileana said, which was the honest answer.

Jane nodded and went to find something useful to do.

The days passed.

The domain continued to function and upgrade and develop in the way it had been developing since Neil had left for the Wooden Poisoned Realm, the momentum of it carrying forward under Ileana’s management and Bob and Rob’s industry and Leon’s security and Nemo’s oversight.

The barracks continued their upgrade cycle.

The new buildings Bob and Rob had been working on progressed toward completion.

The Nest’s timer counted down.

Leon ran the perimeter rotations with the thoroughness he brought to all security functions and reported daily on the settlement’s external activity, the pattern of attacks that Randy had mentioned still present but manageable within the domain’s current defensive capacity.

Rin worked on the things she had been assigned to work on and sat beside Leon at dinner with the configuration that had become habitual and was moving toward something neither of them had yet formally acknowledged.

Magnar, fully recovered from the hunting trip and thoroughly satisfied with his 4th Origin form, occupied his preferred positions in the domain with the comfortable authority of a familiar who knew exactly where he stood in the hierarchy of things.

Days two and three passed without the core building doing anything dramatic.

On the fourth day the temperature around the core building changed, not to an extreme but to something that people in the nearby areas noticed and gave a slightly wider berth.

On the fifth day the energy coming off the building was something that even the people in the domain without elevated perception could feel in the way you felt a sound in your chest before you properly heard it, a vibration that was below the register of normal sensation but was undeniably present.

On the sixth day the space above the core building did something that was difficult to describe accurately and that everyone in the domain saw and chose not to stand directly under, the air itself behaving differently in that column, the light moving through it at slightly the wrong angles.

On the seventh day the evolution completed.

The core building went from the vibrating and charged state it had been building toward for six days into a single moment of complete stillness, an absolute silence that lasted approximately three seconds, and then the energy released.

Not upward in a pillar the way the 3rd Origin evolution had released, but outward from the building in a wave that moved through the domain and continued past the domain walls and spread through the surrounding settlement in the particular way that 4th Origin domain evolution energy spread, touching everything within a significant radius with the quality of something that had arrived at its tier.

Every person in the Graveyard felt it.

Ileana was closest, near the core building, and what she felt was the full version of it, the wave passing through her with the particular quality of a 4th Origin phantom’s energy at the peak of its tier, and she was still for a moment after it passed, absorbing what it meant about what was inside that building.

Bob made a sound that was not a word.

Rob made no sound but his expression did something it did not often do.

Leon’s perimeter assessment completely interrupted itself for approximately five seconds, which had never happened before.

Magnar sat up from his resting position with both amber eyes fully open and both of them pointed at the core building with the focused and total attention of a familiar whose connection to his lord had just told him something significant.

His tail began to move with a slow and deliberate energy.

Inside the core building the door was still.

Everyone in the domain, in the various positions they had been in when the wave passed, looked at the core building door.

It stayed still.

Nothing happened for a long time.

Then the door opened.

Neil walked out.

He looked different and the same simultaneously, the same face and the same height and the same dark eyes, but the energy coming off him was not the energy of the person who had walked in seven days ago.

It was heavier in a specific way.

Not larger exactly, but denser, the quality of something that had been compressed into a smaller space and was now considerably more of what it was as a result.

The air around him moved in the way that air moved around people at the top of a tier, not dramatically but consistently, as if the atmosphere itself was making small adjustments in response to his presence.

It was not a visual thing exactly, more of a quality, the way gravity was not visible but was always present and always felt.

His eyes moved through the domain with the particular quality of someone taking in a familiar space and reading everything in it simultaneously, and the read had a depth to it that the previous version had not quite had.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading...