Three days had passed since the moment I appeared on that battlefield. Honestly, I no longer knew whether I was still alive or just drifting in some limbo between consciousness and collapse.
Time seemed to move indistinctly, dragging on while the piercing ringing in my ears refused to stop a constant, suffocating whistle that accompanied the metallic taste of blood in my throat. Every second was a torment of pain and numbness, and I could no longer tell where my body ended and my suffering began.
The sword had fused with my hand. The torn, peeled skin left my grip covered in a crust of dried blood, gluing the metal to the flesh. Every attempt to let go only brought more pain, as if the blade had become a living or dead — extension of myself.
My right eye saw nothing but throbbing shadows; the left burned at every flash of light. My armor, once gleaming, was reduced to dented scraps, caked with mud, blood, and ash. My left arm had been severed two days ago, and my balance swayed dangerously, forcing me to stumble like a drunk on the edge of collapse.
The feeling of glory and ecstasy that had overtaken us when Itzamna and Xolotl appeared... didn't last long. Very little, in fact.
At first, it seemed as though salvation itself had descended from the heavens the chants, the light, the divine power tearing through the air. But what came after went far beyond any notion of hope.
These wounds, this ruin I was in, didn't come from the giants we fought on the ground. No — they were only fragments, echoes, distant consequences of the true war raging above our heads.
In the skies, the two archmages, Itzamna and Xolotl, fought against a horde of thirty colossal two-headed giants, each radiating a force that warped the air itself. At their front stood the leader an even greater monster, clad in crimson armor that shimmered like molten metal.
The remnants of that celestial battle swept across the land below with apocalyptic force. Entire portions of the earth simply ceased to exist. Giants were vaporized like dry leaves in fire. Elves and orcs allies and enemies alike vanished in blinding flashes that erased their existence entirely — no screams, no bodies, no trace.
All that remained was a distorted silence between the thunders of the firmament. And me, still standing, trying to understand why the hell I was still breathing.
The dimensional rift, vast as an entire city, finally began to calm its frenzy. What once vomited corrupted giants from another world now quieted, like a cosmic wound on the verge of healing. The base of the mountain, once suspended in a vortex of energy, was now closer than ever to slowly touching the ground. And at the center of that colossal mass, something shimmered — a golden stain, like a blazing gem embedded in ancient stone.
Then I realized — it wasn't a gem. It was a door.
An immense oval structure, marked by an intricate engraving that at first glance seemed simple... but staring at it for even a few seconds made the mind begin to crumble. It was like looking at an ordinary equation, only to realize that every answer disintegrated the moment you tried to solve it. Everything seemed to make sense — until reasoning itself dissolved into absolute void.
That door was exactly that.
A truth so pure and complex that the body revolted against it.
Each time my eyes traced that golden outline, my stomach twisted, my blood froze, and the urge to faint to simply stop existing consumed me. It was as if the universe, in its cruelest form, reminded me how miserable it was to try to comprehend the unattainable.
Then, a yellow bolt tore across the sky.
It wasn't light it was pure annihilation.
A flash so intense it pierced the atmosphere and became blinding white. Every warrior elf and orc alike raised their arms to shield their eyes, but it was useless. The sound that followed... wasn't thunder. It was burning flesh.
The air filled with an acidic, nauseating stench.
Huge fragments began to fall from the sky chunks of flesh, legs of giants more than three meters long, each marked with purple ulcers that bubbled and seethed like living wounds.
When the flash finally faded, a terrified silence blanketed the battlefield.
The giants staggered, stumbling like shattered marionettes, and then began to dissolve flesh, bone, skin all melting into a pulsating purple pool that devoured the ground beneath it.
The dimensional rift was finally closing.
But it was already too late.
The closing came swiftly, and what remained of the portal sliced through the mountaintop like a divine blade.
The colossal peak that had risen from the rift lost its balance and began to collapse.
From nearly two thousand meters high, an entire mountain fell upon the world.
"Hmph..." I muttered, sarcasm bleeding through the despair. "Another meteor. But this time, I'm definitely going to die."
Every survivor looked up and what they saw was the herald of the end.
A mass of stone and gold descending like a moon about to kiss the earth. Panic spread. Screams, chaos, weapons abandoned.
And then, amid the turmoil, two voices echoed across the battlefield.
They were distant, yet so vivid they seemed to whisper directly into our ears.
"Your home... or your people?"
A flash rippled across the horizon.
A golden light enveloped the orcs and one by one, they began to vanish, plucked from the battlefield as if invisible hands had erased them from existence.
But for the elves, there was no salvation.
An immense magical structure a cylinder of translucent energy rose around the Colossal Tree.
It was their choice.
Their home.
And then came the sound.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!"
The impact was so brutal that the ground split into oceans of fire. The foreign mountain struck the earth, triggering earthquakes and making continents tremble for days.
A massive cloud of dust spread across thousands upon thousands of kilometers like a funereal veil.
That day, a new mountain was born and the elves nearly ceased to exist.
**
The end came so quickly that my perception couldn't keep up. One moment I was there — surrounded by screams, dust, and the roar of collapse and in the next, the world was gone. When I regained consciousness, I was floating in the white sea of the Celestial Pagoda.
This time, however, something was different.
My mind felt heavy, as if each thought were an anchor sinking into memories of pain and despair. My body, though nonexistent in that ethereal plane, still trembled. Every particle of my essence vibrated with the memory of war the smell of burnt blood, the screams of death, the dry snap of bones breaking.
But what hurt the most was my shattered, distorted mind — broken beyond repair.
Then, slowly, something began to change.
A gentle energy dense and ancient seeped into me, filling every fragment of my being. I felt it move through the ruins of my consciousness, rebuilding what had been destroyed.
Little by little, the pain gave way to clarity.
My soul energy, once turbulent and unstable, now pulsed with a deeper, steadier force.
My mind... was refining itself.
It was as if suffering had become a forge and each trauma, a hammer shaping my essence.
To suffer was the price. To grow was the inevitable result.
And then, my body began to take form again.
First came the translucent outline of my hands. Then the familiar texture of skin. My horns curved into shape with elegant precision, followed by the weight of my hair cascading down my shoulders. My eyes reignited like embers and, finally, even my clothes the same as always materialized from the energy that surrounded me.
I was back.
Whole... but somehow different.
I began reviewing everything I had just lived through, trying to draw lessons from that strange chapter.
"I went through visible transformations."
The first transformation was silent, yet absolute: my logical thinking had refined itself to an almost frightening degree. The war I witnessed that incomprehensible chaos of forces, choices, and destruction had taught me how to think in the midst of the impossible.
Every decision, every instant of survival demanded a clarity that went beyond mere intellect. Now, thoughts flowed in sharper lines, like interwoven circuits. I could perceive correlations, patterns, and even anticipate outcomes with a lucidity that used to escape me. It was as if my mind had been reorganized according to the precise laws of what my perception could grasp.
The second gain was energetic perception. From the moment I awakened, I sensed the world around me pulsing in a symphony that had once been silent to me.
The natural energy the mana that permeated everything was no longer a subtle breeze like in Atlas, but an ocean in constant boiling motion. Every particle vibrated in a thousand different tones, and I could feel it alive, aware, reacting to my presence. The density of that energy was so immense, so pure, it seemed to contain the history of creation itself. It was as though this energy was wilder, more primal, revealing itself without restraint to be felt by the awakened. I estimated that cultivation speed in such an era would be thirty to fifty times faster than in the present age.
Lastly, the very essence of my soul had changed. Once it had been a shifting white void now it was a stable, incandescent forge. Pain, loss, and collapse had not merely broken me they had purified me. I had achieved a resonance, or rather, a harmony with soul energy. And that was the greatest potential I had unlocked within this pagoda, especially since the Phantom Moon technique relied entirely on that special energy.
Yet more doubts pulsed like thorns buried deep in my flesh: had that really happened in Atlas? Everything felt so vivid, so real, that calling it an illusion would be madness. The weight of the sword, the scent of blood, the roars of orcs, the chants of elves — none of it felt dreamlike.
If it was an ancestral memory, whose was it? And if it was a real event, why isn't there a single mention of it in any known record?
"Or maybe there is, but I don't have access to it... I'll have to research that."
Who were Xolotl and Itzamna? No tome, not even the forbidden texts of Selene, speaks of elven and orcish archmages who fought side by side. The alliance of those two races alone contradicts the entire history of hatred and division we know. So where are they now? Dead? Or trapped within some unreachable plane, echoes of a forgotten era?
And that mountain... what happened to it? Could it still rest somewhere in the world, hidden beneath the earth, corrupting everything around it? Does the golden door — that living entity that made my body bleed just by looking at it still exist?
And if the rift has closed, who's to say it can't open again?
The phenomenon was too vast, too precise, to be accidental. Could it be cyclical?
A prelude to something greater, something about to return?
That trial had carved into my mind mysteries and doubts so deep that I had no idea where to even begin searching for their answers.