Right now, Lucien was in the East Liberator main branch.

He wore a black robe that blocked probing, tracing, and most ordinary forms of spiritual identification. It was the same kind worn by Shadow and the puppets under him.

Lucien found it unexpectedly comfortable. The concealment built into it made the whole thing feel less like clothing and more like permission to exist without being watched.

He had already registered it into his Craft feature.

If he gathered the right materials later, he could reproduce it for his own people.

In the end, Lucien had decided to come with Seraphine.

Part of it was simple curiosity.

He wanted to see the location the system had shown her. He wanted to know what the Primordial Slime had left behind for the Liberators, and why the same message had never reached him.

When he had asked the system directly, its answer had been short and deeply irritating.

[Not applicable.]

Lucien still did not know what, exactly, made him different in this matter.

That only made him more interested.

What sharpened that interest further was what Seran had told him before he came. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Seran and Aurelia had both already passed through their own assigned locations.

They described the experience in the same way.

Life-changing.

And more importantly, they said those places revealed the truth about Liberators.

Lucien did not yet know what kind of truth could make even Seran speak with that much weight behind the words.

But he intended to find out.

Soon.

For now, he was being received by Cassian.

Cassian greeted him warmly, with the easy familiarity of a man treating a favored guest of his leader as someone worth honoring from the first moment. Lucien found the irony almost amusing.

Cassian had forgotten him too.

That much Lucien understood the instant they spoke.

It looked like, in this branch at least, only Seraphine had remembered him.

That had been deliberate. Seran had specifically told her not to let the others recover that truth yet. Lucien was still growing in silence. It would be foolish to let recognition spread farther than necessary when Oblivion’s distortion still lingered and enemies might be watching for unusual movement.

Seraphine had agreed. Well, she was still perfecting a countermeasure against the forgetting.

So now Cassian treated him as a newly important guest, someone the leader valued and therefore someone to be respected.

Lucien did not mind.

They walked and talked as they moved through the deeper halls of the eastern branch.

Cassian spoke first about the campaign in the East.

It had stabilized there too.

The Voidwalkers had disappeared completely. Even the extinction-grade one that had once threatened to become a true regional disaster had never shown itself again.

That should have been good news.

It was, technically.

But neither of them liked the shape of it.

"It ended too cleanly," Cassian said as they turned through a corridor lined with pale lanterns. "We expected at least one final war here. A collapse. A desperate push. Something."

Lucien nodded.

"But instead they just... withdrew."

Cassian glanced at him. "Exactly."

Lucien said nothing for a moment after that.

His thoughts stirred.

While he was building, they might be building too.

If the Evershade Exchange, the Voidwalkers, and the others had only been instruments for a broader design, and if that design truly aimed at driving the world into enough chaos and division to weaken the seals of the other Primordial Incarnations, then there was a terrible possibility he could not dismiss.

Perhaps they had already succeeded at the part that mattered.

That thought sat in him like cold iron.

Cassian noticed the shift in his expression but did not ask.

Eventually, they reached the outer corridor of Seraphine’s laboratory.

Cassian stopped there and gave Lucien a strange look.

"Be careful."

Lucien raised a brow.

Cassian lowered his voice as though the walls themselves might report him.

"Sister Seraphine has been in a terrible mood lately. She’s been muttering about dissection, memory damage, brain refresh, and how intolerable it is to know that something important was lost without being able to grasp the edges of it cleanly."

Lucien laughed.

"That does sound like her."

Cassian crossed his arms. "I’m serious."

"So am I."

That only made Cassian look more suspicious.

Lucien inclined his head slightly. "I’ll survive."

Cassian stared at him for another second, then finally stepped back.

"Good luck."

With that, he left.

Lucien stood alone outside the laboratory.

In truth, Seraphine did not know he was here.

Seran had only let Cassian know he would come.

And now that he stood at the edge of her domain, he realized he was not entirely sure what he wanted to say first.

That was unusual.

Annoying too.

Lucien pushed the door open and entered.

The laboratory was quieter than he expected.

Apparently she had thrown everyone out.

Specimen tubes lined the walls farther in. Each one was holding preserved oddities, partial organisms, and several things Lucien thought were probably better left unnamed unless a proper scientific context demanded otherwise.

He walked deeper through the stillness, passing shelves of labeled extracts, suspended organs, bone lattices, law-marked diagrams, and half-finished notes pinned into orderly madness.

Then he saw the office door.

It was slightly open.

Lucien stopped and looked through the gap.

There she was.

Seraphine sat behind her desk in a loose lab coat. Her hair was unkempt enough to show she had either forgotten to fix it or had given up caring halfway through the attempt.

She looked dazed, tired, and entirely consumed by whatever had trapped her attention.

A pen tapped lightly against the desk.

Scratch. Tap. Scratch.

She was writing.

Lucien swallowed once before he could stop himself.

He was still uncertain what exactly he felt about her.

But he liked being around her.

She was straightforward in a way he found refreshing. Mature enough to be dangerous, but so utterly passionate about her obsessions that at times she became almost childlike in focus.

That contrast made her more human, not less. And for some reason, Lucien found that deeply pleasant.

He finally knocked.

The sound snapped her out of her daze.

Her head lifted sharply.

Immediately, irritation crossed her face.

"Didn’t I say I wanted to be alone for now?"

Lucien’s amusement rose at once.

Then he answered.

"I heard you were looking for me."

The effect was immediate.

Seraphine froze when she heard the familiar voice.

Then she vanished from her chair and reappeared at the office door so fast that the door itself slammed wide open from the force of it.

Now they stood face to face.

For one strange, weightless second, the world seemed to pause around them.

Lucien lifted a hand and drew back the hood of the robe.

Then he smiled.

"Hi."

Seraphine stared at him with an expression too complicated to name cleanly.

Shock. Relief. Disbelief. Anger at being made to feel relief. Joy. The violent need to verify reality.

Her hands reached for his arms before either of them said anything else. She gripped him like she needed to confirm he was solid.

Then she shook him.

Lucien blinked in genuine surprise.

"You’re real," she said. "Luc, why are you here?"

The irritated scientist from earlier had vanished completely.

In her place stood someone openly, unguardedly happy.

Lucien, for some reason, chose flatness as his shield.

"What else? I came to see you."

That was apparently the wrong thing to say.

Or the right one.

Seraphine let go of him at once and turned her back like someone who had suddenly remembered that reactions were things one could be judged for.

Lucien, trying not to smile too much, followed her into the office.

Then he saw the notebook.

And before he could get a proper look, Seraphine moved again.

Fast.

Too fast.

She darted in front of the desk to block his view.

Unfortunately for her, Lucien had already seen enough.

Notes.

Drawings.

Theories.

There were sketches of the soul, mind, body. Structural overlap diagrams. Memory-binding theories. Identity retention pathways. Contamination models. Recovery possibilities.

She had been writing one question through a dozen different systems:

How do you make people remember what the world has forgotten?

Lucien did not need anyone to explain what he was looking at.

She had been thinking about him.

And more than that, she had been trying to solve him.

That warmth returned immediately, this time deeper and much harder to hide from himself.

Seraphine, meanwhile, had achieved the rare expression of a brilliant woman realizing she had been caught doing something embarrassingly sincere.

Lucien laughed.

Not loudly.

Just enough to make her scowl at him.

"What is there to hide?" he asked. "Tell me, Sister Sera. Have you really been thinking about me this much?"

She straightened at once.

"Who is thinking about you?" she said. "Do not flatter yourself. You are not important enough for that."

Lucien nodded thoughtfully. "Then I suppose the notes wrote themselves."

Seraphine’s eyes narrowed.

Lucien continued with entirely deliberate calm, "And perhaps the ring on your hand is also a separate scientific phenomenon."

That got her.

The ring was the one Lucien had given her before he left for the West, and it contained a number of helpful drops.

Seraphine used to hate wearing rings while working. She always said they were annoying, distracting, and one more thing to catch on gloves or tools.

And yet now, the ring Lucien had given her rested quietly on her ring finger.

Seraphine coughed and immediately hid the hand behind her back.

Then she looked at him as if he were the problem with the age, not merely a man standing in her office smiling too knowingly.

Lucien almost teased her further, but stopped himself when he saw the scowl settling on her face.

He raised both hands in surrender.

"All right," he said. "I’ll stop."

Seraphine gave him a long suspicious look, clearly unconvinced that he had any such intention in his heart.

Lucien decided that was fair.

Then he let the teasing fall away and finally told her why he had come.