"Alright." I said as we made it over to where Yvette was poring over the coffin. "How do we do this? I'm not really sure I understand how it even works. Do we just kill them and then the ritual changes? Because that seems...too easy. Not that I'm complaining. But it doesn't really fit with how complicated this whole thing is."

"It doesn't." Agreed Yvette. "Because it's not that easy. Basically, the ritual is laid out in a specific way. As each of the conduits gets activated, it creates a channel that links every single one of the people who have taken part in the ritual. Killing the conduits severs the connections between themselves and the people who partook of the lightblooms, but it doesn't remove them from the actual ritual, they just get passed over."

"So how does killing them in order like this change that?" I asked in confusion.

"It doesn't." Repeated Yvette. "What it CAN do, if properly calculated, is reroute the energy transfer. There are redundancies built into the ritual to prevent things like what we're doing from stopping the harvest, but those same redundancies can be used against the goddess. She made backups within backups, and one of those backups is a contingency for what happens if the mountain gets destroyed before her ascension."

Callie, who had wandered over with Bethany, nodded as she stepped up next to me. "Ah, so we're going to trick the system into tripping that contingency so it defaults her manifestation point back to the central temple?"

The construct nodded. "Precisely. But to do that, we have to make some alterations to this chamber, and to the ritual itself. Minor alterations, because anything major might trigger a failsafe and kill all of us and everything within a hundred miles." We all froze, staring at her, and she blinked. "Did I not mention that could happen?"

"Must've slipped your mind." I said dryly. "So what do we do?"

"Exactly what I tell you to." She said flatly. "The changes need to be made in stages along the path we've calculated, they'll cause small alterations that will cascade further and further as each of the temples is accessed. Of course, this is assuming that the goddess banked the spare stats and Impact from the Ascendants who have already died in case of catastrophic failure, but that seems to be a safe assumption."

With the explanation out of the way, she started dispersing us to various parts of the temple. Looking close it was easy to see small, easily overlooked grooves and carvings on the dark stone, Once she set up the ruby coffin back in its spot, she had them drag the remains of the undead conduit over and dump them inside. Once the coffin was resealed, it started to glow, and Yvette shifted it in a circle.

Like a deadbolt clicking into place, the coffin lit up the symbols on the floor, flooding the room with light. I could see why we needed to do this after we killed them, it looked like the coffin was using the remnant energies of the former conduit to temporarily activate the temple. We could make the changes now, but my understanding of Enchanting told me it wouldn't last long. In the other two temples we couldn't do the same because the energy had probably faded from the corpses already.

"Alright." Said Yvette. "We don't have long to do this. Shane, go and stand over there." She gestured me to a spot about fifty feet from the coffin, adjusting her directions a few times until I was standing exactly where she wanted me. "Now. This is going to be complicated. I want you to put a foot on the L shaped symbol to your right, and the other on the one shaped like a bull's horns."

I did. "Alright, I've got it. Not sure what you want me to do here though. I don't have an enchanting Skill anymore, I merged it into my DS Mastery during my prep for reaching F-rank."

"You won't need it." She said confidently. "This is an active ritual right now. Standing on those points means you're plugged into it, which means you can modify it with your soul like a Skill. Don't do that yet. We need to get the others in position." She started giving instructions to the others, setting them up in various parts of the room. Once they were there, she nodded to Callie first. "Alright. Calliope. I want you to close your eyes, focus on the energy running through you from the runes. Then I want you to flex your soul like you're modifying a Skill, and focus on switching those two symbols."

Callie nodded, closing her eyes, and I felt the strain on her soul as...something happened. Looking down at her feet, I saw two of the glowing symbols flicker and switch places. Yvette nodded. "Excellent. Gabriel, now you. Calliope, reposition yourself over there." She sent her over to another spot, and Gabriel swapped the two runes. She ran us all around in circles, having us stop and switch out runes periodically, and between all of us managed to change about fifty symbols.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I could see what she was doing. She'd said we needed to do this slowly and methodically, and I couldn't think of a more methodical way than this. Sadly, the longer it went on, the dimmer the lights from the runes got. The energy left in the corpse of the undead was fading. Yvette didn't panic, just started talking faster. She had us switch places a dozen times, and was just finalizing the last rune as the glow finally winked out.

My relief was almost palpable as I saw that we'd made it. This temple had been reconfigured slightly, and while on its own that wouldn't do much, fourteen more of these would add up to the trigger we needed to prevent ourselves from being out and out murdered by an evil goddess when she finished resurrecting herself.

The fact that Yvette could do this at all was...staggering. The Enchantments on this building were sprawling and extremely complex, trying to rewrite them even minimally just by switching runes would be like trying to change the image on a scan box by switching a few pixels. Even with the cascading nature of the changes (runes weren't pictures and had a ton of interactions that could cause untold ripples) it was amazing.

But then, that was probably why Yvette even existed. If you want something to calculate and alter a massive Enchantment by inches, a golem would be a good start. They were basically magic robots. Yvette had involved Benny and the others too, but more and I thought that had just been to make them feel involved. Yvette was a tool that was custom built by the tower master for this exact purpose.

"That was...anticlimactic." Said Bethy cheerfully. "I was expecting a big boom or a whoosh! Some crazy diagram of magical symbols appearing above us and rearranging itself. Switching a few symbols and then watching the lights go out is a bit of a let down."

"What you are describing would have killed all of us." Yvette said helpfully. "We didn't want the system to notice the changes we made. I told you earlier, Suvaya built in multiple levels of redundancy. Triggering the failsafe measures would have resulted in our horrifying and rather painful deaths."

"You're not a comforting person." Callie said conversationally. "In case you weren't aware."

"I am not a person at all." Replied the golem. "I am a construct. Interaction is a secondary concern. I don't mean to be insensitive, but my first priority is the dissasembly of the ritual and the prevention of the collapse of this subspace."

I shook my head. "That doesn't seem right. You seem like a person. You might be a golem, but racial traits are a thing. I guess you were made instead of born, but I wouldn't say you aren't a PERSON. You don't need to be human to be a person. Bethy isn't."

The cheerful Vampire nodded. "He's right. I've never been human. What about after we stop Suvaya. You aren't just going to shut down are you?"

Yvette paused. "Not to my knowledge. I was made to hold the key and aid in the destruction of the ritual and the prevention of Suvaya's ascension. Once that is done...I suppose I'm not sure what I'll do. Perhaps return to the tower? Keep watch over it."

"That sounds like a shitty life." I said bluntly. "I mean, if you want to be alone in a tower for eternity you do you, but if you're just doing it because you don't have any other options it seems like a waste. The tower master was a genius. You're the most complex golem I've ever seen, pretty much a literal work of art in terms of engineering. If nothing else, I refuse to believe anyone put that much work into making a person only for you to serve a single purpose."

Gabriel nodded. "She made you in her image. Did she not? Perhaps you were a way for her to live on after this all ended. A legacy she left behind. If anything, you could probably consider her your mother in most ways. Parents don't want their children to suffer or waste away. They want them to live a full and exciting life. You could leave this place after we destroy the ritual. It'll most likely end the distortions, right. Maybe you can find her family."

I winced at that parent comment, it hit a bit close to home with all the shit about my mom lately. But he was right. "If you don't want to do that, you can still try to live your own life. Make friends. Find your own family. The point is, there's no reason to just hang it up and bow out of life because you accomplished your goal."

She looked...pensive. Yvette wasn't an emotive person. She made Celine look effusive. But despite that remoteness, it was easy to see what we'd said had at least given her food for thought. In the end, that was all we really could do. It was her life, that was the point we were making to start with. It wasn't like we could force her to live it.

"Anyway." I said, clapping my hands. "We should head back to base camp. We need to find out our next target. Knowing them they probably sent a few of the other teams out for the next conduit once more of them checked in. Which is good, because we have zero chance of clearing them all out if we do them personally and one at a time."

Yvette nodded. "An accurate statement. I suspect we will need much larger groups for some of the more powerful conduits. As this one demonstrated, superior or even equivalent force of arms isn't always enough to offset certain advantages. I was pinned down in this case, and the hounds were able to attack the rest of you at your leisure. If you had been less able, this could have ended very differently."

That was the nicest way anyone had ever overlooked my near death, which I was grateful for. I still felt sore, but she was right, we'd gotten lucky, but some of those fucking conduits were former S-rankers. With everyone's agreement we headed outside, taking off for the mountain, though our pace wasn't exactly top speed given my own recovery.

One down fourteen to go. This had been rough, but the fun was just getting started. Gabriel had made a good point earlier though. When the ritual was defused, did that mean this place would become open to the outside world? Without the Dew I wasn't sure how they would integrate with the wider universe, though I doubted so many people with heightened Impact would be ignored at least. A problem for later, for now, we had to make sure everyone survived.