Muar’s Elevation to Chosen is the decisive promotion that converts Muar’s local religious devotion and pursuit of Cato’s agents into a mission sanctioned by the highest levels of the System’s divine hierarchy. After failing to contain Raine and Leese and discovering evidence of Cato’s wider influence, Muar is offered direct access to the Deities’ realm and accepts without hesitation. The reward confirms that Cato’s threat has become important enough to reorganize divine power around stopping him.

Causes and Background

Muar’s elevation grows out of his pursuit of Raine and Leese after their escape from his control. While meditating in the vestibule of the Temple, he hoped to attract the attention of active gods, believing that divine intervention might either kill Cato’s agents or expose more of Cato’s capabilities. The escape had occurred while Muar was away gathering reinforcements; even though he had placed protections on the outward portals, the sisters disappeared from the world during his absence. He suspected that the final missing Sydean, Dyen, had been involved, especially because Dyen had effectively vanished and the Tornok Clan had not reported finding him.

The pursuit nevertheless yielded strategically important information. Muar concluded that Raine and Leese had collaborators elsewhere and that Gyvestral was compromised because the sisters had escaped there and found transport away. He also judged the frontier at Azoth to contain lower-rank collaborators whose investigation could not simply be ignored. His campaign therefore shifted from a narrow attempt to recapture two fugitives into an effort to identify the extent of Cato’s infestation across the System. The language of corruption and infestation reveals how Muar interprets Cato’s network: not as an alternative political movement, but as a contamination requiring religious and military eradication.

Muar’s religious formation makes the promotion especially consequential. On Uriva, he had felt alien among its insect-people, yet the Temple of Uriva gave him a recognizable sacred structure honoring both the planet’s god and the divine System. Entering the temple restored his sense of purpose after the terror of the System-less void. He later spent days meditating at the System crystal, seeking a Skill through communion rather than through an ordinary drop, and was rewarded with Divine Insight. That experience taught him to understand advancement as devotional recognition. The later offer of Chosen status is thus not merely a military commission; it is the supreme confirmation of the faith through which Muar has organized his identity.

The Offer and Acceptance

The offer comes from Core Elder Deity Keppel Eln and Core Greater Deity Misse Eln. Keppel addresses him as Crusader Muar and explicitly acknowledges both his efforts and the target of his Crusade. Muar is given the chance to be elevated to one of the Chosen and to work directly with Misse, an opportunity that places him above the local devotional circuit through which he had previously sought assistance.

Muar hardly needs time to decide. He has long suspected that the gods possess an internal hierarchy, with local deities concerned primarily with their own worlds and more visionary powers capable of understanding the scale of Cato’s threat. The timing of the offer, following the sisters’ reappearance, does not trouble him. He understands that the higher gods required proof before committing themselves, and he reads their intervention as evidence that his persistence has finally produced the evidence they needed.

He accepts by kneeling before Misse Eln. The gesture preserves the religious character of the transaction even as its consequences become political and military. Misse commands him to rise and walk with her while they discuss the crises Cato has brought, the worlds that must be considered, and those that might be suborned. The elevation therefore begins with a change in scale: Muar’s work is no longer limited to pursuit and interrogation, but is now connected to the strategic disposition of multiple worlds.

The Transformation of Status

The System immediately formalizes the promotion: Muar is granted Chosen status and may now walk in the realms of the Deities. This is a direct alteration of what he is permitted to perceive and where he is permitted to act. Before the elevation, Muar could enter temples, commune with System crystals, and pursue Cato’s agents through ordinary worlds. After it, he crosses the boundary separating mortal religious service from the actual divine domain.

The transition is represented as a change in perception. Muar’s surroundings resolve from a vague in-between into the true divine world: a massive rolling garden extending toward the horizon, an enormous manor, and hovering Deity Servants carrying food and drink or playing soft, chiming music. The setting makes visible the hierarchy that Muar had inferred. Divine authority is not an abstract theological principle; it occupies a separate realm with its own attendants, comforts, and spatial grandeur. Muar’s pleasure at finally being appreciated completes the emotional logic of the scene. The promotion answers not only his strategic ambition but also his need for recognition from the sacred order he serves.

This elevation also contrasts with Muar’s earlier experience outside the System. The System-less space had seemed to him silent, dead, and without meaning, while the divine realm offers abundance, music, hierarchy, and intelligible purpose. Muar’s movement into the Deities’ realm is consequently framed as a return to reality rather than an escape from it. His faith interprets System order as truth, and the promotion rewards him by granting entry into the order’s most hidden center.

Consequences for the Crusade

Misse immediately links Muar’s new status to the practical work of contesting Cato. She identifies the worlds affected by Cato’s crisis as matters for discussion and implies that some worlds can be suborned. Muar is no longer simply a hunter acting with limited local authority; he becomes a participant in a coordinated divine response capable of evaluating worlds, alliances, and political loyalties.

The promotion also confirms the seriousness of Cato’s expansion. Cato’s forces had already established bases across multiple moons of Uriva, where Initik found caverns filled with machinery, plant-filled air domes, biological production systems, and Cato-beasts. When Initik seized control, the technology failed catastrophically: machinery stopped, structures melted, fires began, and some systems exploded. Even orbital weapons were rendered inert. The episode demonstrated both the reach of Cato’s presence and the incompatibility between his technology and the System. Muar’s elevation follows within the same strategic atmosphere, in which Cato is understood as an enemy capable of spreading through worlds by means the divine authorities do not fully comprehend.

The higher hierarchy’s response is not confined to Muar. Elsewhere, Core Elders discuss limiting Cato’s Copper creatures by imposing a minimum portal threshold and propose using World Deity Eis, patron of other Ahrusk beings, to gather intelligence. Their willingness to consult wider networks shows that Muar’s elevation belongs to a systemic mobilization. At the same time, the divine authorities’ treatment of populations as sources of intelligence or as compromised territories mirrors the impersonal logic Muar believes he is defending.

Narrative Significance

Muar’s elevation makes the religious conflict around Cato explicit. Cato insists that his grievance is with the System rather than its people and argues that the System assigns quests, imports outworlders, imposes essence costs, and tries to kill the inhabitants it governs. He presents the conflict as a forced game and himself as the figure who will overturn its board. Muar, by contrast, experiences the System as the source of purpose and truth. His elevation gives institutional form to that opposing interpretation: the System’s defenders answer Cato’s rebellion by drawing him deeper into the sacred hierarchy.

The promotion also creates an ethical and political complication. Cato acknowledges that humans and other people may stand between him and the destruction of the System. Although he wants to preserve as many lives and things as possible, he admits that he may have to fight those who take up weapons against him. He consequently becomes a king-maker, forced to decide who should receive access to powerful technologies after the existing hierarchy is removed. Muar’s elevation is the inverse possibility: a devoted and capable individual is given greater authority by the very order Cato seeks to abolish.

The event’s long-term irony lies in the fact that Cato’s offers to Initik and Mii-Es become another weapon in the same contest. Mii-Es privately admits that Cato has offered a way to restore her race, while Initik reveals that Cato has made him an offer as well; neither has disclosed the terms of the other’s bargain. Against this background, Muar’s reward is a public and orthodox form of allegiance, while Cato’s method works through alternative futures and private negotiations. Muar’s ascent therefore strengthens the divine campaign in the short term, but it also exposes the rigidity of the system he serves: recognition arrives only after the threat has become undeniable, and the response is to expand the hierarchy rather than question the order that produced the crisis.