“What trickery is this?” Sirid whispered, his gauntleted hand still tight on the blade.
He opened the book. The text shimmered, not with ink, but with lines of living light—scenes from a thousand of his previous loops. He saw himself slaughtering the same guards, breaking the same seals, absorbing the same dark QIP into his blade. Over and over. A prison of progress.
Then he turned to page 15.
He read on. Page 15 described a ritual. Not of combat, but of release . To shatter the Infinity Blade not on an enemy’s neck, but on the ground. To refuse to absorb the QIP. To let the last Deathless live.
For a long moment, the only sound was the distant chime of the respawn timer, ready to yank him back to the beginning. “What trickery is this
Sirid looked at the Infinity Blade. It hummed with the stored souls of a thousand past Sirids, each one convinced he was the original, each one feeding the endless war.
He did not die. He simply… stopped being the protagonist. He saw himself slaughtering the same guards, breaking
“If I do this,” Sirid said, “what happens to me?”