Carl enters Club Vanquisher to find a healer for his worsening SlugPox and asks Mordecai for intel on the sponsored goddess Eileithyia (Huanxin Jinx). At the members-only entrance, Potsy, a hostile Ares cleric who worships Hellik, tries to block Carl for lacking an access ring. Carl’s disease erupts grotesquely in front of the guard, forcing the situation until an Emberus cleric intervenes.

Pater Coal, a high cleric of Emberus, escorts Carl inside, warning that Carl has only limited, single-destination access and must be supervised. As they hurry upstairs, Pater Coal insists on a detour to the Emberus shrine before the healer, slipping Carl through a portal into the Emberus High Temple of the Ending Sun, a fiery, roofless sanctuary protected from outside surveillance.

In the temple, Pater Coal suppresses Carl’s SlugPox and performs a “sacrament” by washing and massaging Carl’s feet in boiling water. While doing so, he delivers Emberus’s quest information: there are no solid leads on who killed Geyrun beyond Orthrus’s unreliable memories from the Nothing; Hellik remains the top suspect; and Emberus fears something is wrong with Apito because a memorial crystal exists for her even though she lives. Pater Coal says Carl must investigate how a memorial crystal can exist without a god’s death, but also hints that the memorial crystal is required to pursue two key paths—Katia’s crossbow’s origins and Princess Donut’s oak bracelet’s origins—before abruptly crossing a boundary by putting Carl’s toe in his mouth, prompting Carl to end the ritual.

Carl returns to the feed, unnerved that parts of the exchange seem staged for viewers and suspecting Pater Coal may be tied to the AI’s narrative machinery. Emberus grants Carl a temporary floor boon, The Martyr’s Path, which marks Carl’s outdoor steps on the map and can release flame from those steps if Carl nears death (or automatically on death), along with +10% Strength.

Afterward, Carl gets cured by the healer for 10,000 gold, but is then banned from Club Vanquisher for three days after a mantaur accuses him of breaking a rule. Back in the saferoom with Princess Donut, Mordecai, Katia, and Bautista, Carl recounts events while selectively omitting details about Donut’s oak bracelet. The room’s tension is high—Katia now worships Eileithyia—and Katia prepares to tell Donut a frightening story, promising they will fight to prevent a bad ending.