Black stone. Endless chains. A body on its knees beneath a pale shaft of light.

His face did not change.

Cedric went on, unaware of how close his words had drifted to something Neo had seen himself. "I believe that before the Great Change, even then, there was something maintaining the balance of the world. Perhaps not one god in the simple religious sense. Perhaps not even one being. But something greater than human systems. A structure. An order. A force or collection of forces that kept the world from breaking apart. Then, four hundred years ago, that balance failed all at once."

He leaned forward, elbows over his knees now, his old man’s warmth retreating before the force of the thought itself. "That is the part I keep returning to. The shift was too sudden, too total. Breaches, Soul Beasts, classes, Godscar Ruins, the expansion of the world itself, all of it changed together. That does not feel like natural development. It feels like collapse. Like something that had been holding the weight of the world in place cracked, and once it cracked, older layers of reality bled through everything."

Elara lifted her head this time. "You think the Breaches are fragments of that collapse?"

Cedric nodded slowly. "Or fragments of what was hidden behind it. Training grounds. Divine domains. Sealed battlefields. Prisons made before history as we know it. Perhaps all of them at once. Breaches may not share one single nature. Godscar Ruins certainly do not."

He glanced toward Neo again. "There are records, broken ones, damaged ones, scattered across different ruins and traditions. Mentions of powers higher than humanity. Mentions of wars. Mentions of places where things were bound instead of buried. Chains appear more often than they should in those accounts. If even half of them hold truth, there were entities once that could not be killed easily, only sealed, divided, or forgotten."

Neo felt his stomach tighten at that.

The room had grown quieter without anyone meaning it to. The tea sat on the desk untouched, a faint ribbon of warmth no longer rising from it.

Cedric eased back after a while and gave a small sigh through his nose, as if he had run farther than he intended and only now realized how far he had gone. "Anyway. That is my theory, or part of it. I think something held the balance. I think that thing broke. I think the world we live in now is the result of that break, and the Breaches are one of the scars it left behind."

Neo kept his voice level. "If that’s what you believe, then who made the Breaches?"

Cedric smiled with tired honesty. "That is where research turns into humility. I don’t know."

Neo had almost expected him to pretend otherwise.

Cedric spread one hand slightly. "But I do believe this much. They are not meaningless. They train. They reward power. They punish weakness and hesitation. They feel less like disasters born from chance and more like mechanisms left behind by a world that no longer exists properly."

Elara added, "And if that’s true, then every detailed account matters. Monster types. Structures. Floor changes. Boss behavior. Everything."

Neo let that sit for a moment.

Then he began speaking again.

He told them about the camp, the fear sitting in it from the start, the way the tower drew everyone toward it because there was nowhere else to go. He described the jungle. The first floors. The confidence people picked up once they learned they could farm there. He spoke about the old structures around the tower and the feeling that the whole place had been older than the people trapped inside it by something deeper than age.

Cedric and Elara listened without interrupting much after that.

The more Neo spoke, the more one ugly truth pressed against the back of his mind.

Cedric was closer to something real than he had any right to be.

Not close enough to touch the chained thing beneath the mountain. Not close enough to reach Soul Reaver. But close enough to make Neo uncomfortable with how easily he had dismissed him before stepping into the room.

By the time he paused, the tea had gone half-cold.

Cedric did not rush him. Elara did not push either. They only waited.

Neo lowered his head slightly, not in weakness, but in thought.

Cedric reached for the cup at last and took a small sip of the tea that had already lost most of its heat. He did not seem bothered by that. Men like him probably forgot food and temperature the moment an idea took hold. Elara, on the other hand, had gone even quieter than before. Her fingers were resting against the edge of the tablet now rather than moving over it, not because she had lost focus, but because for the first time since Neo entered the room, she seemed to be thinking about what had just been said rather than simply recording it.

"It would explain a lot," she said at last. "Why so many Breaches feel structured even when they look chaotic. Why some of them react. Why some places seem designed to force a kind of growth rather than simple survival."

Cedric nodded faintly. "Exactly. A broken system is still a system. It does not stop having purpose just because the purpose is buried under ruin."

Neo said nothing.

That line stayed with him longer than he liked.

’He’s too close.’

That decided it for him more than anything else. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

He would tell them about the tower and about the monsters, the floors, the room, the boss, and the pattern. He would tell them enough to be useful.

The rest would stay buried in his chest.

Neo glanced up at Cedric and asked, "Well... can I start already?"

Cedric blinked, as though he had forgotten for a moment that he had not been alone inside his own theory. "Oh, of course, of course. Time slips away from me when I get going."