Reed let Isaac inside her room. His excitement over potentially getting another clue was momentarily overwhelmed by a feeling of surprise. Half of Reed’s room had been cleaned. It shouldn’t have been that surprising, since cleaning your room was sort of the bare minimum a person should do, but being able to actually see part of the hardwood floor actually threw Isaac for a loop.

She must've noticed him staring. “Got tired of looking at the mess," she admitted. Isaac expected her to light up a cigarette, but she instead just drank water from her canteen and retrieved her sword. One shepard’s tone later, she retrieved the journal page and handed it over. Isaac hadn’t activated the Knyzosis Art - the page currently looked the same as it always did.

Reed took a seat on her bed, rubbing her eyes. Isaac felt a chill run through him - Stockham’s words about a potential traitor came back to him. There was a non-zero possibility he was about to reveal vital information to a turncloak.

Maybe I should just go back to my room and read it alone.

But a line of thinking like that hurt him. Reed had saved him multiple times. She even hid his journal page for him. Isaac wouldn’t get anywhere by dropping his trust in those who had been there for him.

“Don’t think anything’s changed on there, chief,” Reed said with a hint of amusement in her voice. “Unless you just needed a refresher.”

Isaac pointed to his right eye. “I unlocked a perception Art. If my guess is right, there should be hidden writing on here.”

Reed’s ears perked up. “Wow, check out the big brain on Isaac.” She shifted on the bed and spoke in a quiet tone. “Do you want me to leave?”

Isaac answered without any hesitation. “We need to stick together, remember?”

She smiled back at him. “Good. This is my room anyway.”

They both let out little laughs, but the tension in the air could be cut with a knife. There was no going back now. They would be heading deeper into the conspiracy. But they chose this road all the way back in Patuxet. The only thing they could do was soldier on until they reached the conclusion.

After taking a deep breath, Isaac activated the Knyzosis Perception Art. Red lights flickered out of his right eye, intensifying when he looked at the journal page. His jaw slackened - yellow symbols literally flooded out of the journal page. They danced in his vision, spinning and turning, rearranging themselves. Isaac focused himself, recalling his days of training, and the yellow symbols gradually stabilized, calming down until legible writing and sentences appeared, outshining the normal writing already on the page until only the formerly hidden writing remained.

And then Isaac started reading.

PROJECT PATMOS

TO RESTORE MAN TO THE GARDEN AND USHER IN THE WORLD TO COME

50 CHOSEN TO CIRCUIT 8 AND BEYOND

838,860,800 SOULS WITHIN THE TREE

THE HEART

THE MIND

THE SOUL

BEWARE THE MARK OF CAIN

The only other hidden item on the page was a symbol - perhaps this was the Mark of Cain, whatever that may be. It consisted of an octagon with a line running through it, southwest to northeast.

And that was it. That’s all Isaac had to work with it. He rubbed his eye and took a seat next to Reed on the bed. He relayed what he read, not understanding any of it. He almost felt frustrated - despite this new knowledge, it was almost like he was back at square one, since he was hoping the new clue would lead him to a precise location or person.

But he shook his head. At least it worked. And if there’s something I don’t know, at least I can research it.

And fortunately for Isaac, he had a good source of knowledge right next to him. Reed rubbed her chin, then reached below her bed and tossed some empty beers into a trash can. She even slipped off the bed and started cleaning; Isaac thought the response was odd, but then realized she was deep in thought.

After cleaning another part of her room, Reed drank the rest of the water in her canteen. “Alright,” she declared. “I guess it’s time I told you a little more about God and all that stuff. Since I’m a Reed, I was taught a little about the pre-Unleashing world. Unfortunately, despite my countless talents in other fields, I can’t say I’m an expert.” She gave a nonchalant shrug. “Can’t say I really paid attention to my tutors.”

She sat down on the bed again. Her messy hair spilled past her face for a moment; she pushed it away, revealing gray eyes deep in concentration. “Billions of people and thousands of cultures lived before the Unleashing. That meant a lot of religions. And some of those religions believed in a deity named God. He’s omniscient and omnipresent - that means he’s everywhere at once, he knows everything, he controls everything. He’s the Alpha and the Omega. He is All.”

“That’s like the Skyfather then, right?” Isaac asked.

“He is the Skyfather. The loss of knowledge and tradition caused by the Unleashing resulted in our concept of God transitioning into what we call the Skyfather. Same goes for his son - he’s who we call the Skyson now.”

Isaac wasn’t sure what to make of that information. “Is that a bad thing?”

Reed just shrugged. “It’s just how humanity works. We’ve been around for a long time, Isaac. Things naturally shift and take on new names. But we did lose knowledge of some of the old myths and stories.” She rubbed her temples, trying to figure out what to explain next. “To make a long myth short, God said let there be light, and there was light. He created the universe and then created the first man and woman - Adam and Eve. He built a paradise for them called the Garden of Eden. They could live there in peace. But they disobeyed Him, so He cast them out. And now they had to work for a living.”

“To Restore Man to the Garden,” Isaac repeated. “So this Project Patmos wants to return us to that paradise?” His blood ran cold. “The Gardener who appears in humanity’s dreams. The short woman with long brown hair. Is she related to this?”

Reed raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

Isaac opened his mouth, but no words came out. Didn’t he have dreams about a Garden, too? Two chairs and a slow-moving stream. But then he rubbed the back of his neck; he couldn’t remember the point he was trying to make, nor exactly what he was talking about in the first place. He just ushered Reed to keep going.

“In any case, Adam and Eve initially had two children named Cain and Abel. They both presented gifts to God, but He liked Abel’s gift more. So Cain grew jealous, took his brother to the fields, and killed him. God punished Cain by marking him as a murderer, and then forced him to wander the planet.”

Even for such an old story, Isaac felt sympathy for Abel; a brother shouldn’t strike down another. But another question remained. “Why’d God like Abel’s gift better?”

Reed just shrugged. “Well, it’s a metaphor. If God runs everything, why is there so much unfairness in the world? Because that’s just how life is. The point is that we shouldn’t grow jealous and kill our loved ones over it. And that, even though we shouldn’t, we still do.”

Upon hearing something like that, Isaac could understand, at least a little bit, why somebody would want to return to paradise. “If these stories are from before the Unleashing, how old are they?”

“They’re some of the oldest stories to exist.”

Isaac felt his brain hard at work. “You mean…those Greek monkey-men wrote them?”

“...the who?” Reed just chuckled when Isaac elaborated on his line of thinking. “Isaac, it’s not like they were half-monkey, half-man. It’s more like…you had monkeys, then you had a bunch of proto-men in between, and then you had man. And women. Don’t forget the women.”

“So the Greeks were the first full men…and women?”

More chuckles. “Not quite. The first human city was founded about five thousand years before classical Greece. The first humans themselves lived hundreds of thousands of years before that.”

Once again, Isaac found the wonder of psychic powers dwarfed by the complexity and awe of the world he lived in. If humans had existed for hundreds of thousands of years, then the five hundred years after the Unleashing was just a mere drop in the bucket. Isaac himself existed at the end of an incomprehensibly-long chain of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters that stretched back to the dawn of history. His life felt incredibly small at that moment; yet at the same time, if he had experienced so much in his short life so far, and billions upon billions of people had their own experiences, then humanity must’ve created a very rich tapestry of moments and memories in its history.

“As for the rest of your brother’s notes,” Reed continued. “Not sure who the fifty chosen are, but Circuit 8 has never been achieved. Viola Reed was the strongest cultivator in history, and even she was only Circuit 6C. Not sure what the Tree is either, or why there are nearly a billion souls in it.”

“And the heart, mind, and soul are the three dimensions of cultivation,” Isaac recalled from his lessons. “But how do they fit into all of this?”

“I guess we’ll have to figure all that out,” Reed supposed. “Anyway, can you draw that Mark of Cain for me? Your symbol-describing ability isn’t the strongest.”

Isaac sighed, but she had a point. On a spare piece of paper, he drew the octagon with the diagonal line running through it. When Reed saw it, her eyes widened; it reminded Isaac of when she first saw the atomic symbol after raiding the Melusine.

“This…this is what they’re calling the Mark of Cain?” she mumbled. Her gray eyes were full of confusion. “But this is the symbol for the Sect Hidden in the Mountains.”

“The Sect…that’s the one where Viola Reed, Derek Domino, and Theodore Greylock trained before the War of Arcadian Independence, right?”

“The one and the same.” Reed set the paper down with an uneasy hand. “Is your brother saying the Sect are the ones behind Project Patmos? But they were destroyed. That shouldn’t be possible.”

She stood up and started pacing. Whenever she came to a messy part of the room, she kicked the beer cans away. “The Sect Hidden in the Mountains was founded two hundred years after the Unleashing. Cultivators were seen as lepers then, so the Sect was founded to take them in. They pledged a life of neutrality, away from the affairs of men. They maintained that neutrality until the Arcadian War of Independence. That’s when Viola, Domino, and Theo wanted to take their faction of cultivators down to help the Arcadians.”

“And there was a big battle, right?” Isaac remembered. “That destroyed half the mountain.”

“And half the sect, too.” Reed ended up lighting a cigarette after all. Her hands seemed to tremble as she did so. “The majority of the survivors died during the war. Viola herself died in the Battle of Quinsigamond that won Arcadia’s independence. And then any leftovers ended up joining Theo in his rebellion against the new Arthur Reed government.” She coughed and wiped her mouth. “And then Domino killed Theo and destroyed his movement on Arthur’s orders. By all accounts, there were only a handful of sect members who survived all that. For all intents and purposes, the Sect had been destroyed.”

Reed seemed to be taking all this personally. Isaac didn’t want to push her further, but he had more questions. “If I’m understanding this all correctly…couldn’t it be possible that the survivors ended up joining the Arcadian government? And if so…could they be the ones behind the conspiracy? Couldn’t they be pulling the strings behind all of this?”

His mind kept racing. “Domino’s still alive, isn’t he? They say he’s a hermit now, but maybe-”

“He wouldn’t.” Reed retrieved her sword - the Domino Sword - and held it closely in her hands like a loved one. “There’s not a chance he’s behind this.”

“How do you know?”

Reed looked at her sword, still cradled in her hands, with gentle eyes.

“Because he was my final tutor. He gave me his sword. And he’s the one that helped me run away to the Navy.”