The chains around Kai's wrists did not feel like metal they felt like something alive, coiling through his nerves, gnawing through marrow, crawling between the smallest fractures of bone. The pain arrived in waves, each one sharp enough to carve screams into his throat, but he swallowed them as though he had known agony all his life.
The Wrist of Vigil settled like a second heartbeat.
It pulsed.
It breathed.
It whispered.
Power poured through him, not gentle, not nourishing, but ravenous like the cosmos trying to devour his skeleton through the pores of his flesh. It moved through him like fire molting into ink, burning and drowning him at the same time. His flesh trembled, his bones rang, his blood roared.
He inhaled and the air reeked of cold iron and shadow.
Then the voices came.
They didn't speak in words.
They spoke in shuddering sensations, like knives dragged across the surface of a soul. There were countless voices, stacked upon each other, impossible to separate, impossible to understand.
But there was one voice that breached the static.
A voice so deep that it felt like reality was being pried open.
THE ABYSSAL OF THE ENDLESS BEING OF FEAR
Kai's neck jerked upward; his breath hitched. His vision blurred as black swallowed the irises of his eyes entirely. His gaze was no longer seeing the palace he was seeing the voice. Seeing it as though it was carved into existence itself.
Then the whisper sharpened into articulation:
Before light.
Before breath, and the first god dared to dream, there was trembling.
From that trembling, a shape stirred.
From that shiver, a presence formed.
The First Emotion. Eldest of the Endless.
The universe opened its eyes and the first thing it knew was fear.
And then the voice spoke not to creation, but to Kai alone:
"You have bonded with the Wrist of Vigil child of the Endless Being of Fear."
As the declaration echoed through his bones, his body seized again. His spine bowed; his chest arched. The black around his eyes burned away slowly, retreating like a tide of ink.
And then.
The palace trembled.
Five faces of the flesh fish broke fully through the mirror ground outside, monstrous heads peering at the palace gate. Five mouths opened, each vomiting a colorless essence that crystallized into elemental force:
One exhaled water.
One exhaled ice.
One exhaled mist.
One exhaled wind.
One exhaled eriosion.
The elements struck the palace walls with explosive force yet the palace did not shatter.
It drank their attacks.
It absorbed the destruction like nourishment.
But inside, the grand hall shook as though the entire Mirror World was groaning under the weight of invasion.
Kai knelt, breath ragged. Sweat poured from his skin, but it wasn't just sweat it was something darker, something eerie, something viscous. Black filaments slid from his pores like the remnants of a nightmare forced into flesh.
He blinked once and suddenly consciousness inverted.
He wasn't falling.
He wasn't rising.
He was dragged into himself.
Into his core world.
But it had changed.
There was no longer a burning sea of black flame.
There was no longer an abyss of writhing nothingness.
Now there was only a vast dark ocean, an endless sea of silence thick enough to smother thought. Waves moved but did not splash; ripples existed but made no sound. The darkness was alive, watching.
Far above the sea, the sky was not sky at all.
It was an expanse of void in which two eyes floated vast, crimson, merciless.
They weren't merely watching they were judging.
Kai felt smaller than dust.
And then his gaze shifted downward.
The statue that had once resembled him was gone and there was only one the broken, head embedded in the ground moved. Not physically. But its presence seeped into the space, dripping like dark water between realities.
Its voice scratched across the world like cracked stone:
"Your affinity has evolved.
You are now a Defiled."
Kai's throat tightened. His gaze lingered on the floating symbols etched at the core's center symbols he could not decipher.
The statue rasped:
"Would you like me to read your status?"
Kai nodded because to speak felt too heavy.
Then the voice carved the truth into the air:
Name: Kai Valeria
Stage: Conjurer
Element: Fire
Blood Lineage:
— Crimson Eyes of Truth
— Wrist Of Dread
— Wrist Of Vigil
(Would you like me to read the details?)
Affinity Rank: Defiled
Curse: Echo of Truth
(Would you like me to read the meaning?)
The words echoed like chains falling into eternity.
But before he could respond the sea quaked.
A sound like worlds collapsing boomed.
The palace was under siege.
Kai's consciousness surged upward, abandoning the core world and snapping back into flesh and breath. His body screamed in protest, but he forced air into his lungs.
There was no time.
He had to find the shards of blasphemy not because he cared, but because failure meant obliteration.
The palace continued to absorb the beast's bombardments, but the vibrations shuddered through the floors. The air felt thin. The walls oozed sound.
Kai stood and looked at the glowing relic he had retrieved the small spherical object radiating strange energy. He tucked it into his pocket.
Then he moved, his steps heavy but relentless.
Every canvas that lined the palace walls was not just art it was history, a tapestry of horrors and legacies painted in mirror-like pigment. Each surface reflected him, but not as he was as he could become.
Some reflections showed him monstrous.
Others showed him divine.
A few showed him dead.
He did not stop.
He approached the far door. A door unlike the others.
Its surface glowed, not with light, but with meaning.
He could feel it calling.
He dragged one breath into his lungs.
Then he pushed the door open.
Immediately, force exploded outward.
It was not wind.
Not pressure.
Not weight.
It was will.
The room beyond was vast and circular, the air thick as coagulated blood. In the center was an altar not stone, not metal, not crystal. It was made of water, but the water was solid, shaped, still, yet shimmering with ripples that did not move.
Like a frozen mirror lake, carved into a throne.
The moment Kai crossed the threshold, the altar's presence crashed down onto him.
The pressure hit like an unseen hammer.
His knees buckled.
His ribs collapsed inward.
He hit the floor hard.
He tried to rise, but the force multiplied again, pushing him deeper.
The air tasted like copper and broken glass.
Then he felt the presence.
It was towering.
Ancient.
Patient.
A guardian.
His eyes lifted.
The guardian was shaped like a humanoid statue, but its body was not stone.
It was mirror, living mirror, reflecting the room, reflecting Kai, reflecting the altar, reflecting the world behind worlds.
Its reflection did not match reality.
It looked down upon Kai like a judge accepting a sinner's confession.
And as its gaze fell upon him, the pressure doubled again,
forcing him into the cold floor.
Black veins crawled under his skin.
His wrists pulsed with the chains of Vigil and Dread.
And Kai realized.
He was being tested.
Not for strength.
Not for worth.
Not for survival.
He was being tested
to see if the world would accept his existence.
The guardian did not move.
It did not speak.
It simply pressed existence against him like gravity multiplied through divinity.
Kai's vision darkened at the edges.
His breath felt like knives.
He did not know if the beast outside would break in next breath or next century. He did not know if the Endless were watching. He did not know if he would stand again.
But he pushed against the pressure anyway.
Because surrender meant death and survival was the only blasphemous prayer he had.