The Echo Hall of the Nocturne.
As Eiden stepped inside, heavy air pressed against his lungs—thick with the stench of sealing ritual ingredients, industrial oil, and something unmistakably mystical. It was the kind of place where power had been forced, bound, and preserved far past its natural lifespan.
Along the walls, countless materials for node advancement and fragment containment were stored in reinforced cases and sealed racks. Cerlon followed close behind, his boots echoing softly against the stone floor.
A dark-blue-haired man with a chubby face looked up from behind the counter and smirked.
"So this is the new lunatic on your team?"
Cerlon ignored him and tossed a stack of documents onto the table—the authorization for accessing a minor path.
The man pushed his glasses up and skimmed through the papers. His eyebrows slowly rose.
"This might be the worst one I've seen in a while, eh?"
He turned away and retrieved a sealed glass tube. Inside floated a circular mass composed of interlocking fragments, uneven and jagged, roughly the size of an adult man's clenched fist. Despite its broken appearance, it pulsed faintly, as if still alive.
His raspy voice lowered, carrying an unsettling weight.
"These are the remains of the previous strider."
His gaze locked onto Eiden's.
Eiden didn't react. He took the tube and raised it to eye level. The fragments rotated slowly within the glass, grinding softly against one another.
"…Cycle of Rebirth," he murmured.
"Oh—where are my manners?" The man straightened and placed his right palm over his left chest.
"Octavio Hugg. Caretaker of the Echo Hall of Nocturne, Hegrum City—"
"Shut up and do your job," Cerlon cut in coldly. "Since when does a barbaric charlatan like you care about manners?"
Eiden's facial muscles twitched.
These two definitely have personal grudges.
Octavio clenched his fist, then forced a smile and smoothly changed the subject.
"At least introduce me to the young man."
Cerlon tilted his head slightly toward Eiden.
Eiden bowed, pressing his hat against his chest.
"Eiden Aeverstriff. New member of Nocturne's Eighth Team. Broken Mirror—Soul Signum."
Octavio's eyes gleamed as they met.
"So," he said, voice light but sharp, "what fragment are you planning to choose?" His gaze lingered. "Choosing a minor path already marks someone as a madman. But someone from the infamous Team Eight—a squad known entirely for lunatics—doing so?" His lips curled. "The outcome is irresistible."
Cerlon sighed deeply.
"This fuc—ing charlatan," he muttered under his breath.
Octavio opened his mouth, clearly about to test one of his crude hypotheses—
Knowing what Octavio was trying to say, Cerlon muttered, "I will tear this fat man apart if he tries to do something funny" as he released a gaze filled with killing intent."
Despite having goosebumps, Octavio paused a moment before he tried to speak again.
—but Eiden cut him off.
"'Memory of the Thousand Faces' for the path," he said evenly. He paused.
"'Mirror World Traveler' for the Signum. I'll also absorb the remains."
The temperature dropped.
Cerlon's brown eyes flared blood-red as his hand clamped onto Eiden's shoulder. Veins bulged along his temple.
"There's a difference between bravery and insanity," he said. "Even two personal-memory fragments can tear a soul apart."
A black wolf emerged from his shadow, its form heavy with killing intent.
His voice turned glacial, reverberating through the air.
"I'm not in the mood to kill another abomination today."
Octavio, instead of retreating, stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"That's… actually a very clever idea."
He paused, eyes widening slightly.
"Both Travelers and Thousand Faces are personal fragments, not collective memories. That means higher stability, less distortion, and a single point of view to anchor yourself." His tone shifted—measured, academic. "Which means, if he maintains focus, he could absorb three fragments on his first node."
His voice echoed faintly in the hall.
"This young man is a genius."
He waved them off and turned away.
"Our business is done. I'll return to my work."
The door slammed shut.
Eiden blinked once.
"…What a madman."
Crossing his arms, Cerlon scoffed.
"That barbarian acts like he's an authority on pathway theory. All theory. He just pushes recruits to see if his theory is right."
He stared at the door, frowning.
"I guess this time he's planning another stupid experiment." The corner of his lips curled. "I wonder what kind of mutated abomination it'll produce," before he grabs the pommel of his sword, "Maybe the fragment will make such a good weapon."
Eiden raised an eyebrow slightly. No wonder they called this team filled with madmen.
Sighed as he stretched his back while muttering, "There goes my good first social impression," as he imagined it flew away to the sky.
Their footsteps echoed down the stone corridor.
"Training ground," Cerlon said. "Plenty of space to absorb power—and test it."
The roofless field lay at the center of HQ, paved with cracked stone bricks. High walls surrounded it, with a second-floor gallery overlooking the arena.
Connor stood beside Eiden, arms crossed, watching closely. Cerlon remained a few steps back—relaxed, but alert.
Inside Eiden's mind, the instant he accepted the Thousand Faces, the fragment shattered.
Overflowing memories flooded his mind, crashed into each corner of his brain.
A sailor screaming into a merciless storm, as if he were just a small grain of sand beneath the colossal wave, the mast snapping as waves swallowed the deck.
A lumberjack swinging his axe to sky piercing tree for years without rest, muscles tearing, breath burning. Yet, it only left an insignificant scratch on the overbearing tree.
A sculptor carving a dragon from a mountain, fingers bleeding raw, yet never stopping, as each stroke brings the lifeless mountain into a gallant dragon.
The identities overlapped—pressed together, refusing to separate.
The pressure dragged at his consciousness. A single moment stretched into eternity. His body sank into a dark ocean as thousands of faces rose beneath him, biting, clawing, dragging him downward.
Outside, Connor's expression tightened.
"…That pressure isn't normal."
Eiden swam upward.
Each stroke tore regrets from him. Wailing souls echoed as he left them behind. His arms shook violently, yet kept moving—until his fingers brushed light.
His body was enveloped by the warm light.
The weight vanished, so did the regrets and resentment. His mind cleared—empty, intact, reforged.
A wave of energy burst outward.
Cerlon stepped back.
"…He absorbed it."
Before Connor could speak, the second fragment reacted.
The Mirror World Traveler began to dissolve.
Eiden awoke beneath an endless horizon of mirrors. No sky. No ground. Only reflections stretch infinitely.
A childlike figure of glass waved at him.
He moved.
Each step cracked beneath his feet, turning the seamless mirror into a sharp and cracked one. The cracking glass sound traveled through the vast horizon. The child ran into a mirror. Eiden followed without hesitation.
Worlds flashed past—frozen darkness, before the next mirror filled with violently vivid colors, further the next mirror filled with burning red horizons, then he fell to the next mirror, only vast emptiness swallowing all sound exist. He chased the child until it stopped at a cliff.
It jumped.
"He's not resisting," Connor said.
Eiden ran.
Blood soaked his feet, red footprints staining the glass. His knees shook as mirror shards sliced into him mid-fall.
When he reached the child, he didn't hesitate.
He embraced it—shielding the fragile form from the shards.
The world shattered as both of them continued to glide together with the collapsed world.
As everything fell apart, Eiden caught the boy's subtle smile before it dissolved into countless fragments. Glass butterflies scattered into the void, carrying the last traces of regret with them.
He fell into nothingness.
Not far away, a white door stood before him, radiating light. He stepped toward it, one step at a time, his body torn in every possible way, blood spilling freely. He coughed and collapsed to his knees, bright red blood pouring from his mouth.
He crawled forward. Each pull left a crimson red trail behind as his limbs began to fall apart. The door stood right in front of him.
Yet he did not enter.
Instead, he crawled past it—toward an endless abyss beneath a dim twilight horizon—and fell.
With every moment of descent, his body rebuilt itself. The mangled arms, the twisted legs, the blood-soaked figure restoring again and again as if untouched. A single pale-white star appeared above him, faint but steady.
Cerlon's eyes narrowed. "…A star already?"
Reality shattered, then collapsed inward.
Eiden returned to the real world. A faint star hovered behind him, bound to a broken mirror symbol that rotated silently.
The pressure vanished.
Eiden's eyes opened with a sharp crack. Endless reflections overlapped within them, thousands of faces resting silently behind his gaze.
Connor exhaled slowly. "…He made it."
Eiden rose from his cross-legged position.
"This," he said calmly, voice steady despite everything, "is the true essence of the eternal cycle called rebirth."
As he grasped the concepts carried by the fragments he had absorbed, Eiden carefully retraced the entire process within his mind.
Mirror World Traveler was the story of a man who crossed endless mirror worlds in pursuit of a figure he once glimpsed. What began as simple curiosity twisted into obsession. That obsession led him to the cliff, where the boy, terrified, fled and fell, ending both their lives in tragedy.
Yet Eiden had not inherited the obsession. He had contained it.
He changed the chase into an understanding, turning fixation into acceptance—a beautiful misunderstanding rather than a fatal pursuit.
Thousand Faces, on the other hand, was a single soul forced to bear countless identities. Each role he played left a mark, until the boundaries between masks and self dissolved. In the end, he forgot who he truly was and vanished into an ocean of endless "selves."
We wore masks, though we had faces.
Yet those masks drown us in the liminal abyss between self and our masks.
To escape that abyss was not to reject the masks—but to understand them.
A mask was a tool.
The self was the vessel.
The stories left behind were not lives to relive, but memories to be stored—raw material to shape identity without being consumed by it.
Rebirth was not an ending.
It was continuity after death—the soul forming a new shell, beginning again within an endless cycle,
Eiden let out a self-deprecating laugh, tinged with faint regret.
"What kind of terrifying path did I just get myself into?"