I breathed in deep through my nose…

  And let it out. “Alright,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Explain.”

  Aurelius folded his hand in his lap, his tea long since finished and the cup resting on one of the chair’s arms. “This is…something the Church gleaned, after long, long years of communing with the System, in our unique way. You’ve likely heard the explanation that Preceptors have a deeper understanding and relationship with the System before, yes? And this is how we are capable of restorations such as limb regeneration?”

  “Yes, I have. Which is something Zheng Wei pioneered. Go on,” I said, leadingly.

  “During his experiments, it was Zheng Wei who first suspected that there was an issue,” Aurelius said with a sigh. “He only had an inkling, of course. After his passing and his subsequent naming of me as his successor, it was my life’s work to follow upon the questions my old friend had raised. I investigated, of course. What most do not realize is that Primector is not just a title. It is the final link in the class chain that begins with Preceptor. The final evolution. With it, I was able to link many things together, including our existences as Precursors. This…Alveron. I have never met him, but you say he told you about lessening appearances of our kind?”

  “Yes…?”

  “He was correct,” The Primector continued. “Precurors used to be much more common, in the time before the coming of the ‘gods’. And then, tellingly, we started to slow in our appearances. It was incremental over time, of course. The Church’s records say it was a few years at first, and then decades, then centuries. Until we have arrived at you, Nathan. It has been five hundred years since a new Precursor has arrived on Vereden, an increase of two centuries between mine and Zheng Wei’s. And then, we come to the realization of the Great Tarus’s daughter, something I already knew, and was frankly intending to inform you of. We are assassins, meant to retrieve the raw spark of false Divinity that the gods somehow stole from the System. Some form of…alternative power, unique to the Gyre.” Aurelius took a deep breath, then. “And finally, there is the final point of data. Something that both the Church and all relevant authorities upon this world have worked tirelessly to suppress.”

  “It’s getting harder to Awaken people.”

  My lips parted as I started to understand exactly where he was going with this.

  And I really didn’t like it.

  “The Church keeps very particular records on this,” Aurelius said soberly. “While nearly everyone can theoretically Awaken another to the power of the System, the task almost always falls to the Church. It’s…cultural, to the people of Vereden, as much as it is practical. Because of our relationship to the System, Preceptors have an easier time, as well as a reduced cost to do so. The problem is, we have a long historical record of descriptions for increased costs in Awakening fresh sixteen year olds. The burden has only grown stronger with the passing of ages, and if it is greater on us?” He shook his head. “There is a reason the cultural habit formed the way it did, and it is not because the peasantry wishes to be reliant on the Church for Awakenings.”

  Oh. That sounded…dire.

  “I remember…” He continued, sounding far away in the depths of memory. “When I first arrived upon Vereden, I awoke on the shores of a small Rorician fishing village. One of the fishermen took me to the local Wyrdwoman, a unique form of healer among the Roricians. She was of middling power, barely past her first breakpoint, and yet struggled to awaken me. The woman cursed at me because of the difficulty in comparison to her usual Awakenings. Like most, I was told this is because it is more difficult to Awaken those who are past the age of sixteen. I put it out of my mind until centuries later, I began to suspect differently. Tell me, Nathan, what was your own Awakening like?”

  I snapped out of the near spell the old man’s tale had put me under. “Ah…Grey did it,” I nearly stammered. “About a week after I got here. It was…pretty violent, actually. I think…even though he was under a Slave Bond and without his Status, he was leaning on his Mantle to do it. The world darkened from it, and the amount of Mana he poured into the Awakening was enough that I felt the weight in the air. It caused a breeze, too. And then he touched me, and it hurt so much…” I shook my head. “I passed out.”

  “Violent indeed,” Aurelius said in a subdued tone. “I suspect, Nathan, there are only a handful of people on Vereden who had the strength to Awaken you. I could, but you were very far from Roricia, deep within the Principality as you apparently were. You were quite lucky to stumble onto Headmaster Greycton.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, I was real lucky to be enslaved within the first twenty-four hours of getting here.”

  Aurelius smiled wanly at me. “But for the theoretical Precursor who comes after you?” He shook his head. “I doubt there will be anyone strong enough left who can manage such a feat, and I will be long gone by that time. After all, if the pattern holds, it shall be seven hundred years until the next Precursor arrives. And that’s only if the System is capable of delivering another once more.”

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  I leaned forward and clasped my own hands together tightly in front of me. Partly, I think, to quell their shaking at the implications that were now settling on my shoulders. “Alright,” I said, breathing carefully. “Let’s…combine that. One, the Netherim separatist group stole something from the System to ascend to false divinity. Two, the appearance of Precursors slowed down after they did so. Three, it’s…getting harder to Awaken people as time goes on, and we might not even be able to do that for future Precursors.” My breath stuttered for a moment. “Which…all points to a specific conclusion.”

  “Whatever the gods stole from the System,” Aurelius said heavily. “Wounded it.”

  “And it’s been limping along ever since,” I continued in a whisper. “Slowly bleeding out over time. Precursors…we’re an immune response, aren’t we? That’s why the System drops us here. That’s why it’s so desperate for us to kill the gods. It wants its Divinity back.”

  “We…believe it’s dying,” Aurelius nodded slowly. “The strength that the System grants was, perhaps…predicated upon whatever it is the gods stole from it. And without it…” He shook his head.

  “Surely…surely it’s not the end of the world, if we can’t Awaken new people?” I pointed out desperately. “People still existed before the System arrived…right?”

  Aurelius grimaced, which didn’t fill me with confidence. “To a degree. Before the System empowered all to defend themselves, it was the false gods who shielded the people of not only Vereden, but the other planets as well. And before that…we have only scattered records. But the picture they paint was somewhat dire. Besieged as they were by Monsterkind, the early sapient races were not able to come together to the extent of modern day. Nations did not exist, not even city-states. Instead, people were only able to cling together in small tribes, typically bound together under the protection of primitive Magi, Cultivators, and Primalists. Mind, Body, and Soul warriors. The Spirits did not care either, if they even existed in that bygone era. The fact is, Nathan, without the constant churn of new Classers to hold back the tide, then society as we know it…will collapse. Not quickly. Certainly not. But it would be a slow, grinding execution, as inevitable losses accumulate.”

  I looked back down at my hands. “How long do we have?”

  “Not as long as I wished. It’s accelerated recently,” Aurelius said, causing my head to whip back up in alarm. I was greeted with a grim nod. “Last year, there was a period of time where it was noticed that, from one day to the next, the cost to Awaken someone jumped a perceptible amount. This was alarming to many of the under Preceptors, who are not aware of this information, and so it made its way to my desk.”

  “Let me guess,” I said dully. “It was somewhere around last Spring.”

  In other words, around the time I arrived in Vereden.

  “Yes,” Aurelius said with another sigh.

  There sure was a lot of that going around. Not that I could blame him.

  This was…

  “As it is, at the current rate of degradation, we believe that it will only be another three centuries until your average Preceptor is no longer able to Awaken a fresh sixteen-year-old.”

  I nearly choked on my own tongue at that as I jumped to my feet. “Three centuries?! What the hell, you had me thinking the System was going to fucking die next week!”

  I couldn’t even describe the wave of relief and indignation that rolled over me then. For a moment, I’d thought Aveline would never be able to properly Awaken, and be forced to live out the rest of her life without strength of her own.

  But Aurelius still had a serious look on his face as he stared up at me. “Recall, Nathan, what I said about the next Precursor. They will likely not arrive anytime within the next seven centuries. By that time, the degradation will have advanced to the point that I’m unsure if a Primector who has reached Paragon status would be able to Awaken a Precursor. And we have no such candidate for Paragonhood. I am not even a Paragon, being only in my level six-hundreds. There is nobody in my clergy who has the strength or will at this point who can advance to that level in a mere three centuries. Perhaps if we had a full millennium, and we dedicated all of the resources of the Church to uplifting them, but what would be the point? What this means is that we need a plan of action to either slow, halt, or even hopefully reverse the degradation within the next three hundred years. Because if you don’t, then there will never be another opportunity. The System will be too weakened to send us another Precursor.”

  I slowly sat back down in my chair as I realized the point he was making. “And you think I’m our last hope. You think that by killing the gods, and returning their stolen Divinity, we can heal the System.”

  Aurelius stood up from his chair then and slowly walked over to me. What he did next was something that I was…ashamed and surprised in equal measure, that he felt he had to do.

  He knelt down onto both of his knees, clasped both of my hands in his ancient ones, and met my eyes with a pleading gaze. I couldn’t look away even if I tried.

  “You are our only hope, Nathaniel,” Aurelius outright begged me. “Though I was not born on Vereden, I have lived and loved upon these shores for long enough that I ache at the thought of them being decimated. We have tried to research ways to curb this apocalypse. Alternative methods with which to Awaken younglings, the destruction of Aether in an area to prevent Monster spawn, and…to my shame…one brave man even consented to being…sacrificed to the System, to see if it would empower it. That did not work, and so we come to the original method with which to save the Gyre. Precursors. Only by returning that which was stolen can we be sure that the people of Herztal, all of the people of Vereden, will live long enough to love as well. This falls to you, Nathan.”

  Somehow, I managed to break his gaze to stare down at our clasped hands. I…don’t know how long I sat there, staring unseeingly at them, but eventually…eventually I found the words.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll…do it.”

  “I’ll kill the gods.”

  Aurelius bent his forehead down to rest on our hands and wept.

  In soul deep relief.

  overarching plot of Sins of the Forefathers. Something that has been lampshaded for literal years now, from like chapter 5. That’s when Nate’s Awakening happened, after all.

  Sin of Sins.

  everyone.