Still impaled and pretending to be dead, Vis is carried inside Duat’s vast black pyramid while watching through Duodecim’s eyes. The Gleaners descend through a shaft into long triangular tunnels lit by green lines, and Duodecim eventually leaves Vis in a sealed room and withdraws the blade from his chest. Once his Vitaeria stabilize him enough to think, Vis keeps control of Duodecim and begins questioning him with yes-or-no signals.

Vis learns that there is only one route from the pyramid into the city and that other Gleaners will inevitably notice him if he tries to use it openly. Duodecim cannot smuggle him through or eliminate the threat cleanly, but he confirms there is a place where violence would not immediately seem suspicious and where a distraction might clear Vis’s path. After testing alternatives and memorizing the route Duodecim describes, Vis decides that creating a disturbance is his only viable chance to reach Duat without instantly exposing himself to Ka.

Duodecim leads Vis through the silent corridors to a chamber where a prisoner is strapped to a slab while another Gleaner works on him. Duodecim kills that Gleaner before Vis can fully process what is happening. From Duodecim’s answers, Vis understands that the bound man, Ahmose, was meant to become a new Gleaner and that using him as a violent distraction was the easiest plan. Even under intense pressure, Vis refuses to sacrifice Ahmose, orders Duodecim instead to create the distraction himself, to forget the details of Vis’s control, and to make later questioning impossible. Vis then frees Ahmose and tells him to stay close and remain quiet.

Watching briefly through Duodecim again, Vis sees the Gleaner attack one of his own kind and spread the alarm. Trusting the distraction, Vis leads Ahmose through the maze of tunnels, following the memorized path while other Gleaners rush elsewhere. The passages change from reflective black stone to duller, fouler corridors lined with cells or workrooms, confirming the pyramid’s use as a place of imprisonment and transformation. At last Vis and Ahmose emerge onto a high terrace and see Duat spread below them, divided by the Infernis: the dark, mirrored quarter of the iunctii on one side and the brighter, more populous city on the other, all overshadowed by the immense radiant central pyramid.

Their way down is blocked by a gate made of mutalis-coated bars, which Ahmose warns are deadly to touch. As Vis checks on Duodecim one last time, he sees the Gleaner cornered and then deliberately killed, severing the connection and returning the imbued Will to Vis. With Gleaners certain to begin searching, Vis takes the risk anyway, grasps the mutalis gate, endures the disorienting force running through him, and pulls it open. He forces Ahmose through, closes the gate behind them, and the two flee down the stairs into the city of Duat.