They walked down those stairs into the basement of that apartment building, and were met with a bustling establishment - at least considering its diminutive size. A little over a dozen customers at most, with a single waiter plus the owner himself, who stood behind the counter observing the room, chopping meat and attending the grill with the same effortless, yet unparalleled skill as that first time.
He double-took at their entrance, stopped for a moment, and beckoned them over.
“I knew you’d come back, boss. Just hoped it’d be in one piece,” he said with grim levity.
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In the deepest mountains, amidst the towering crown jewel of his achievement, the Divine Emperor strode through his throne room, as he had done an uncounted number of times before. Thousands prayed at his feet, kowtowed at his approach, as was right. Hundreds more thousands did the very same all throughout the capital grounds, and millions all throughout the empire. Even now, sculptors and alchemists toiled their lives away in the palace for naught more than the approval of His Divinity, for the promise of perhaps one day having their life’s work praised by him in passing.
The Divine Emperor took up his eternal seat upon the Jade Throne, a single piece of perfect mutton-fat white that he himself had carved into the shape of the Tree of Immortality with his own bare hands, when he was still a mortal. From a great array behind his seat myriad spider-like puppet-arms extended, all rendered from green jade, each animated by a half-living Mantis Seer interred beneath the throne. Each held a bejewelled mirror, each wrought of silver and treated with Azoth extracted from its operator. Those on the other side always saw his visage subtly colored by the perception of the seer connected to the mirror, but this quirk of the system was one he had given up trying to remove after the second century of his rule.
As his empire grew he needed more mirrors, and more mirrors demanded more Mantis Seers to fuel them - this, among many others, was one reason why he had chosen to spread the God’s Blood Elixir. The name was truthful, it just wasn’t his own blood that was the reason for it - over the centuries, he had come to learn that all those old stories weren’t just stories.
In the far corners of the world, where no man dared to venture, in the deepest caves and most remote jungles, divine carcasses could still be found. Still breathing, still growing like cancers, struggling to eke out the same divinity that had once been inherent to them by bestowing contracts upon their mortal servants.
For as long as he sat upon this throne, the Empire was in his reach, for as long as he sat on this throne he could puppeteer as many visages of himself at once as he could be bothered to.
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Another day surrounded by aether mirrors, conversing with no fewer than a dozen people at once. Another province revolting. Another vassal city razed to send a message. Another family condemned to the chimera farms. Another day of eternity. His form was idle, doing no more than supping of the most divine foods and partaking of elixirs that only reinforced his immortality further, even as he ruled his empire.
This was his life.
He hadn’t slept in a century, not truly. The Emperor went through the rituals of it, laying in the sprawl of his bedchambers for the token four hours, but he was awake all throughout, working all throughout, exchanging the palace of the physical for the palace of the mind.
A court eunuch kowtowed before him, took his attention with the customary hand-sigil of promised ritualistic suicide if what he wished to speak of turned out to be a waste of the Emperor’s time.
“Speak,” the Emperor said.
“I have two… Two pieces of news for you, my divine liege. The ritual of scrying you ordered regarding the creature named Zelsys, well… We lost all three-hundred and seven participants. All their souls spent in peering over the wall,” stuttered out the eunuch. How curious.
“How?” he asked, taking effort to inject false anger into his voice.
“They- They burned away. Spiritual combustion, my liege,” the eunuch stuttered.
Truly, how curious. How promising.
“And you are certain the ritual was carried out properly? That the strain was shared equally?” he asked again. Getting any meaningful information out of a sycophant was like pulling teeth, even if such annoyances were preferable to would-be usurpers. The eunuch just nodded wildly, blubbering affirmations.
The Emperor cut a few of his aether-mirror conversations short, that he might dedicate a larger facet of his mental energy to the matter at hand. He formed his face into the mask of a reassuring smile and said: “Know that you will be rewarded for truthfulness in this matter. Now tell me - what came of the ritual?”
“O-of course, the recording!” the eunuch laughed nervously, pulling a jade talisman with a hole in the center from his robe and invoking it. Iridescent light flowed from his fingers and up the talisman’s flowing patterns, shining forth from the hole to display a projection. A blurred, many-faceted vision of that City, the place now known as Willowdale. Myriad lights shone within it, myriad souls, but there were places even He was blind to in that realm, let alone his seers.
He took a cursory look, committed it to memory, then commanded: “Toggle the divination overlay, then progress the recording until it focuses on Her.”
Reluctantly, the eunuch performed the required sign with his free hand and uttered the trigger phrase under his breath. A latticework of myriad colored paths spread out over the city, quickly growing into a tapestry painting an approximation of the near future, each path connected to at least one soul. Some were clear, others muddled, others stopped at one point and began at another out of nowhere, others yet were just tangled knots - choking were the limitations of scrying even under good circumstances, let alone with a nigh-impenetrable curtain like the Wall in the way and the ambient noise of a city to account for.