Chapter 11: The Leviathan's Oculus

The Starblade drifted through the corpse of a cosmic leviathan, its mammoth ribs curving like cathedral arches over a bazaar of stolen light. Bioluminescent fungi clung to the beast's fossilized organs, casting sickly green hues over market stalls hawking quantum organs, cursed relics, and bottled supernovas. Kara guided the crippled ship toward a pulsing node of energy—the Leviathan's Heart, where Dr. Vex had demanded his favor be repaid.

Li Wei lay motionless in the cargo hold, his body a mosaic of cracks. Starlight bled through his skin where the Seventh Core's energy devoured him. His breath came in ragged bursts, each exhale scattering motes of dying constellations. Kara gripped the controls, her mechanical eye glitching as it processed the leviathan's psychic resonance.

"You cannot outrun your blood," the Prisoner's voice slithered into her mind.

"Shut up," she hissed, slamming her fist against the console. The ship lurched, its landing gear screeching against the leviathan's petrified marrow.

The air stank of ionized decay. Kara dragged Li Wei through the bazaar on a grav-sled, his flickering form drawing stares from the crowd. A vendor with too many eyes offered her a jar of blackhole leeches. Another, his face hidden behind a mask of screaming faces, gestured to a cage of time-displaced phantoms. She ignored them all, following coordinates burned into her neural implant.

Dr. Vex's clinic was a tumorous growth nestled in the leviathan's atrium. Its walls throbbed with veins of liquid data, and the door peeled open like a flower made of scalpels. Inside, the surgeon waited, his four mechanical arms dissecting a glowing orb that screamed in a language Kara's bones understood.

"You're late," Vex said, not looking up. "His core has metastasized. Fascinating."

"Fix him," Kara demanded.

Vex's grin split his face into a glitching rictus. "The favor, Miss Thorn. You'll retrieve what I need from the Heart's core. A trifle, really."

A hologram flickered between them: a shard of prismatic crystal, its edges warping reality. The Leviathan's Oculus—a relic said to hold the memories of dead gods.

"Why?" Kara asked.

"To see what it saw," Vex purred. "Now hurry. Your Sovereign has hours left."

The path to the Heart's core wound through the leviathan's fossilized nervous system. Bioluminescent worms writhed in the walls, their shrieks syncing with the pounding in Kara's skull. Li Wei stirred once, his voice a broken echo.

"Kara… the Eighth Core. It's not just in Veyra. It is her."

She didn't answer. The Oculus's chamber loomed ahead, its entrance guarded by a creature of living calculus—a sentient equation that hissed in binary.

"Error. Unauthorized. Terminate."

Kara's mechanical eye flared. She'd stolen it from an Ascended three years ago, and its Elysium programming still responded to her rage. The eye unleashed an electromagnetic pulse, scrambling the guardian into static.

The Oculus floated at the chamber's center, its light refracting into visions:

A memory not hers: A fleet of silver ships sealing the Prisoner into its black hole prison. A woman with Kara's scar stared back, her hands glowing with familiar golden qi.

A future possible: Li Wei, his body a galaxy of cracks, standing over Veyra's corpse as the Nine Cores merged into a singularity. The Prisoner laughed through his lips.

"No," Kara whispered.

She grabbed the Oculus. Agony seared her nerves—the leviathan's final moments flooded her mind: a swarm of Elysium drones carving into its flesh, Veyra's voice commanding the harvest.

"The beast's heart will power our Ascension."

Li Wei was dying.

Dr. Vex had hooked him to a web of quantum filaments, each thread siphoning entropy from his core. The surgeon hummed as he worked, grafting alien organs to Li Wei's chest.

"The Oculus," Vex demanded.

Kara tossed it to him. "Now fix him."

Vex plunged the crystal into Li Wei's dantian. The Sovereign arched, screaming as the Oculus's memories fused with his own. His cracks flared prismatic, stabilizing—for now.

"What did you do to him?" Kara snarled.

"Bought time," Vex said. "The Oculus is… a compass. It will lead him to the Eighth Core. And you, little jailer, will lead him to ruin."

Veyra's sanctum floated in the corpse of a dead star. She stood before a mirror of liquid void, her hands buried in her own chest. The Eighth Core pulsed there, a black diamond threaded with her veins.

"Soon," she told her reflection—or the thing inside it. The Prisoner's eye stared back, hungry.

Her Ascended guards brought the next sacrifice: a child cultivator from Míng Tiān, his golden core pure and untainted.

"Please," the boy wept.

Veyra smiled. "You'll live forever."

The Starblade launched into the bleeding edge of hyperspace. Li Wei sat in the co-pilot's seat, his new scars glowing faintly. The Oculus's visions haunted him—Kara's face in the memory of the Prisoner's jailers, Veyra's heart beating with stolen power.

"Where now?" Kara asked.

He input coordinates from the Oculus. "Where it all began. The Azure Dragon Sect's ruins."

"And then?"

Li Wei's hybrid core hummed, its voice a harmony of qi and static. "We end this."

Behind them, unnoticed, the Oculus's shard pulsed inside his chest.

"Liar," whispered the Prisoner.