Integrated Strategies is a game about exploring randomly generated paths again and again. So rather than a fixed plot, what forms the backbone of the story is the world laid along that path, and the one question that keeps recurring within it.

This time the stage is "Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables." And the question that keeps recurring is this: can a story be rewritten? Can even an already-fixed ending be overturned by imagination?

The Revenants' voices pull the Doctor out of reality. One ritual, one exchange — and an imagining that transcends the earth soon begins.

1. The Storyteller by the Furnace

Sarkaz ancestors don't vanish completely even after death. They become Revenants, dwelling within Kazdel's Soul Furnace, endlessly craving stories.

By their side is a storyteller named Nymph. She tells the ancestors stories — true stories, adapted stories, and even wholly imagined ones.

But what happens when there are no more stories left to tell? The Revenants circle around Nymph, digging up even the thoughts she'd rather avoid and reworking them into new stories.

The Doctor is a guest drawn into that imagining. Walking here is less an act than a thought. When a thought dissolves, ripples spread across the surface, and the story's boundary widens once more.

The Doctor isn't alone. The detective Tin Man, met before at the old castle, shows up here too. He gathers scattered perceptions and weaves them into new stories, and even negotiates on the Doctor's behalf with rampaging Revenants.

The ancestors keep tumbling about, craving ever more thrilling experiences. Even when Tin Man helps trap them inside a story and turn them into beads for the backpack, they're still watching for their next chance at 'free expression.'

2. Kazdel, the Heart

The stage is named Kazdel — the homeland the Sarkaz built at the cost of their lives. What keeps the city moving is the Soul Furnace, beating like a heart.

Throw a bone into the Furnace, and discontent, rage, calm, and shame all burst out at once from the tangled Revenants within. Those emotions become the very power that runs Kazdel.

Through imagination alone, Kazdel is reborn from an empty shell with nothing but a furnace into a thriving city, filled out with details and history that differ, bit by bit, from reality.

So Kazdel's structure defies common sense. Roads stretch out according to intuition, and the scenery shifts to match the subconscious, so people inside the city often lose their way. The city simply watches those bewildered travelers with interest.

3. The Path Down Through Eight Zones

The story continues layer by layer through eight zones — from the Dawn of Soul Fusion, to the Root of Forged Iron, to the Dust-Laden Ruins.

Next comes the Fork of Plausibility. The Doctor crosses boundary after boundary, choosing one Kazdel after another, and every Kazdel accepts him. Ending, unification, stability — here they're all just splits on the way to a new chapter.

Crossing the boundary of the false and the real to reach the resplendent sky, the Doctor collapses before the truth. Its resistance is so overwhelming that fleeing from the truth is the only option left.

And then, the Aranya of Freedom. The precepts have already been passed down, and keeping them, it's said, leads to enlightenment. But can truth really be followed, or sought after at all?

Just as a lotus leaf falling into water does not harm its root and stem, do not cling.

— Voice of Aranya

The last is Eternal Respite. Every story stops here. When the light before you dims and the sound of the Furnace fades, the storyteller falls quietly silent too.

4. The Rule Where Imagination Becomes History

Here, the Doctor's choices become history exactly as they are. Depending on which thought is offered to the story, Kazdel splits into an Age of Hope, an Age of Resentment, or an Age of Wishes.

A scrawl from the Age of Hope reads like this: a Tikaz orphan who lost their parents to a Catastrophe was taken in as family by the neighbor, Uncle Pillain. I am, proudly, a descendant of the Ancients.

The hatred of the Age of Resentment is the exact opposite. My little sister was bitten to death by a vampire, my father was dragged away — so even if there's repentance, it'll only come after the Sarkaz are extinct. Two ages, crossing paths like this on the very same earth.

A Lich mistakes the Sarkaz book of prophecy for her own fortune book. Since it's filled with nothing but the ruin of her homeland and the cruelty of her enemies, she wonders — if she writes in something good, might her misfortune finally end?

……And in the end, we all lived happily. The End!

— The Lich

5. The Characters Wandering Through the Story

Kazdel bustles with all sorts of characters. At Scar's shop, chained above the lava, any mercenary can be hired as long as you have resources — and it later gets reborn as 'Scar International,' led by figures like Clip Cliff.

'Duck Lord,' a duck who considers himself the master of a commercial empire, stirs up the auction house and gets into a pride-fueled bidding war with the Doctor over an Originium pyramid.

There's even a tourist spot labeled 'the Lost City of Kazdel' over the fallen city. A mud-caked Sarkaz swindler sells rocks as royal treasure, and teases the Doctor by demanding three 'Crunches' as the price of admission.

There's the Burden Beast 'Carrot,' who drops a notebook stamped by the Snowy Mountain Post Office, and even the arthropod cousin 'Slugkaz,' who supposedly lives in waste inside a pipe. Each carries a small vignette of its own as they wander through this story.

Then there's a Cyclops who tears through a rift, and she's dead serious. She asks the Doctor to hand over the 'key that changes the future,' saying she means to erase from time the miserable future she has foreseen.

At a gallery, a painter draws and sells portraits of an old sovereign, and if the Doctor listens to the backstory of a 'Lost Treasure,' he becomes its new owner. This is how Kazdel runs — on the buying and selling of stories.

Among them, the 'Garden of the Departed' stands apart. It's a memorial park the two Doombringers built at the heart of Kazdel to honor friends who have passed on.

Guard captain Ascalon, the medical expert Touch who passed away from overwork, the merchant Fitzroy who moved Columbia through commerce, and the chronicler Erikson who lived out his full years — each has a monument standing quietly in a row.

And one monument carved with ten rings. The name engraved there is Amiya. Before the Doctor knows it, those ten rings are somehow already on his fingers.

For some reason, those rings don't seem to belong only to the Amiya standing before him. They're the Doombringer's, they're Rhodes Island's, and they're also that Cautus's, the one the Doctor knows.

6. The Ordeal of the Last Bloodline

The stories also retrace, here and there, the path the Sarkaz have walked. When only the last bloodline of the Doombringer clan remained, a black procession writhed across the land in search of a way to survive.

Following the sound of a Banshee's flute deep underground, a Lich offering up her own lifebox to let the tribe pass, or settling in Sami by following a Cyclops — whichever path is chosen, the dream of founding Kazdel still remains far off.

Later, the Sarkaz get hold of Nasti's designs and take to the sky entirely. On the night Kazdel first rises, the engineers burn their blueprints, sneering that reconciliation with other races will never come.

And then the War for the Homeland. When General Pillain draws in the Coalition of Four Nations, the new Doombringers and the Six Heroes drive back the invaders, and Theresis beheads the general herself. It's a history all too familiar to the Doctor — one already woven into his own story.

7. The First Hunter, the First King

At the very bottom of the story lies a primordial scene. An exiled hunter, dying in the Silver Mountains, sees a crimson pattern surface on a black box.

A pure white light rises up behind his head. The moment the pitch-black hunter first awakens, order arises and a paradise is founded. On the spot where he received his revelation, a sacred horn is later enshrined.

But the Doctor senses that the horn isn't the Sarkaz's own. It was the first Doombringer, called 'the Exile,' who exchanged the relic for him — and the hunter later dons a crown, becoming king of all life and souls.

In another primordial scene, a black beast and a golden being meet for the first time. As the years pass, the two races stop distinguishing themselves from one another, and it becomes common knowledge that everyone survives only by cooperating.

Tikaz hears a wish that the being before him not go hungry, and gives up its food. Sadly, later people would remember only that Tikaz grants wishes, and would pray to it endlessly — until it destroyed both Tikaz and themselves in the end.

How could the Sarkaz be Sankta? This question sinks to the bottom with its answer deferred, only to later shake one entire ending to its core.

8. An Ending Split Six Ways

Depending on how far the story is pushed and what ends up in hand, the Fables offer different endings — five completions, and one collapse.

Either way, the Doctor runs into trouble on the last page. The more perfectly he revives the imagined Kazdel, the more he becomes, to the two Doombringers, an anomaly absent from the record of 'civilization's continuity.' And they are duty-bound to eliminate that anomaly.

The End? — An unfinished story gets cut short by Fremont, the Lich's Master. Known as 'the answer to every thought,' he'd rather the Doctor lay bricks for the present than soothe the dead.

No matter how perfect the imagined Kazdel is, it's ultimately a fabricated story, he says. So the story should stop here, and the Doctor should return to the real earth and build a real city.

The moment you think the ancestors are sealed away, they may instead slip out through the Doctor's own story. Watching a pale-faced Fremont and an Ermengarde wiping sweat again and again, you can't help but feel uneasy about whether this ending is really the end.

Twin Crown — The former Doombringer dies, and the black crown passes to Theresa and Theresis. But the crown splits in two, floating above both their heads side by side.

Thanks to the twin kings, the land regains its peace, and wounds carried through two centuries finally heal. It is an age for humankind, and a dreamed-of homeland the Sarkaz are willing to share. The Doctor's bold hypothesis and imagination gave rise, in the end, to this very ending.

City of Angels — an ending guarded by the Holy Guard's Grand Knight, Buldrokasti. Here, the question that had sunk to the bottom finally bears fruit.

The Sarkaz are Sankta.

— A Strange Tale

Beside Kazdel's Furnace lies an old guardian gun. There's a sense that if this gun fires, heaven and earth will turn upside down. The instant the trigger is pulled, the once-hazy sense of connection sharpens, and a pure white, sacred city unfolds before your eyes.

The Doctor is drawn so deeply into this strange tale that neither the Revenants' rage nor the intervention of the Lich's Master can pull him back out. When the gunshot finally rings out, the two words 'Sarkaz' and 'Sankta' vanish at once, and only the single, bright and sacred word 'Tikaz' spreads across the whole world.

The Wisdom of Kashnyana — an ending opened by Kolam, an incarnation of the Mahasattva. He is a Sarkaz who journeyed east, attained enlightenment, and became one of the Anasa.

Kolam shares countless stories with the Doctor. Today they enlightened one another, but tomorrow, he says, they will all enter 'Kachidiya' together — the Anasa's homeland, the Dharma-abiding realm.

The crystal shines, yet the water lies still. Karma has connected, the Dharma is fulfilled, and the gate to Kachidiya has opened.

— The Path to Kachidiya

A Perfect Day — an ending where Amiya stands at the core's final movement. The Revenants believe the Doombringer destroyed everything, but this story imagines a different answer.

A blind craving for an ending summons a being called 'Finality.' It emerges from the void wearing the guise of 'Amiya.' Despair, salvation, and stillness make up, respectively, its beginning, its turning point, and its end.

When every act of medicine, amid catastrophe and war, becomes an accomplice to hatred, Amiya seals suffering people one by one inside a 'cocoon.' She stops their time entirely, so that Originium can no longer take their lives either.

And Amiya alone remains within time, setting off to find an antidote that can cure the root of every illness. Until then, only absolute solitude and an endless, unending journey await her.

If time is long enough, and if Amiya truly finds an answer that can save everything — then every living soul caught in stillness will someday be saved.

Whether it has ended or not, the suffering of every story will end on this day.

— A Perfect Day

9. Missing — A Story That Collapses

There are also stories that never reach completion. Grab only a thread and chase the ending blindly, and all that's left is contradiction that doesn't add up.

By the time that's realized, it's already too late. The ground beneath Nymph's feet turns to chaos, and the threads holding the story together snap one by one. The very impatience for an ending is what breaks the skeleton that had been holding the story up.

"All suffering has vanished." It sounds kind at first, but it isn't salvation. Companions give no answer, the road ahead is nothing but emptiness, and even meaning itself is lost to me.

Only you remain. The story has collapsed. Thought. The three phrases cut off one after another, and the imagined earth scatters without a trace, leaving no ending behind at all.

Epilogue — Once More, From the Start

Out in the reality beyond the story, those who inherited the two Doombringers' dream are still building Kazdel. The Lich's Master, Fremont, and Ermengarde watch over the Doctor's imaginings from that bridge.

Sometimes a single 'Gate' opens and carries the Doctor to 'Rhodesdel,' a shelter for the Infected. There, Theresa and Kal'tsit, whom he meets, tell him that the connections between stories run far tighter than he thought.

Beyond the Gate, in Rhodesdel, Kal'tsit says this: if you want to, coming back here again won't be hard at all. Between one story and another, there's always a door left open for returning.

When the Revenants' voices call the Doctor once more, the fable by the Furnace begins again from the start — imagination becoming history, and that history becoming, once again, someone's story.

Can a story really be rewritten? Even after six branching endings and one collapse, Kazdel still waits for the last story yet untold — for that Eternal Respite, when the sound of the Furnace fades and the storyteller falls silent.