Eathan ran.
Feet slamming pavent slick with spiritual condensation, he bolted through the chaos like the laws of physics were against him. The world behind him ruptured—clouds flaring red, glyphs cracking across the skyline like broken jade, operatives screaming over comms.
The Taowu followed.
Not ng Yao. Not Chewie. Not even Willow, who had just scread sothing profane while hurling a burning qi spear into its shoulder.
Just him.
Its gaze was locked, primal and deliberate, molten eyes trailing his every heartbeat like it knew—no, sensed—whatever secret was tucked inside him.
It knew.
[Calamity Radar] scread red across his interface, flickering like a cracked alarm light. Behind him, ng Yao's desperate voice shouted over comms, "Ergency Request—imdiate reinforcents! Code Black, repeat, Code Black!"
The Taowu's claws razed pavent like butter, each swipe reshaping terrain with ruthless artistry.
"Taowu?" Finn wheezed, rolling onto the ground as he glimpsed the updated holopad. "One of the Four Perils? How in the world is it here?!"
Eathan, however, heard nothing. Blocking out every windfall, every footstep, he just ran like his life depended on it.
The sa low, gurgling snarl sounded from behind, just far enough that he couldn't look back. Close enough to make sure he wouldn't stop running.
Out of all the near-death experiences I've had this month…
The Succubus-Fey. The Cryolorn. The cursed elevator. That one ti he ate street noodles left out overnight.
This is definitely the worst one.
The street curved around the base of Jing'an Temple, sanctified earth buckling like a writhing serpent. Every leap Eathan took across cracked stone felt borrowed—[HP] pulsing dangerously low, barcode scanner flailing by his belt.
And then—
Everything changed.
A pulse rippled outward, too slow to be wind, too heavy to be sound.
Eathan skidded to a stop mid-sprint. His [Calamity Radar] surged crimson, then glitched. All around him, the battlefield warped—not visibly, not yet. But the air had changed. Dense and slow like syrup, tinged with an invisible hum.
Then, the others started to falter.
Tanke, mid-roll, suddenly lurched to the side and vomited. His eyes were dilated and wild.
ng Yao—sharp, always unshakable ng Yao—stumbled back with a small, shuddering gasp. Her mouth moved, as if whispering soone's na, and her hand shook as she reached for a blade that wasn't there.
Xenis dropped his tablet. "Override—override accepted—override acc—" His voice short-circuited into murmurs, then silence, constricted pupils locked on so invisible point beyond the rift.
Even Chewie froze.
The eleven-year-old stood motionless, brows furrowed, lips parted in confusion—as though listening for soone who wasn't answering.
"Hey—" Eathan wheezed, but the word didn't finish.
His HUD stuttered, colours bleeding from the corners of his screen, and his legs locked. It was as if the world turned a page.
Silence was the first thing he noticed.
Not silence, as in the absence of noise, but the kind of silence that pressed against your lungs, burying you in cotton and grief.
Eathan didn't know when he had closed his eyes, but when he reopened them, the battlefield was gone. No S-class rift. No debris. No flashing glyphs or yelling squadmates.
Just fog, and the faint crunch of damp soil beneath his feet.
Faintly, he thought that this must have been another one of the psychological attacks from the perilous beast, yet the thought dissolved like a wispy cloud before he could fully grasp on, forcing him to focus on this new reality.
He looked down. His boots had shrunk, and so did his hands, fingers trembling. It took Eathan a second to realize that he was small again.
The sa size he'd been then.
It was dusk, or maybe dawn. The sky was grey, that indistinct shade between sleep and mory.
In front of him, two simple tombstones stood crooked against the world. The earth beneath them was freshly turned, muddied. Scattered over the mound like shattered porcelain were the broken remains of an urn.
A whisper of ash drifted as Eathan stepped forward. He recognized this place instantly.
Not because he'd visited it since—but because he'd never left it.
Not really.
He had lived here, in the cracked space between mory and mourning, a thousand tis in dreams. However, this was still different. This wasn't dream-washed or simplified by childhood confusion.
This was exact.
Down to the rain-stained corner of his old jacket, the wet sock in his left shoe, the way the grievers in black whispered behind him, each of them a blur of faces he never wanted to know.
Ethan turned—or tried to. The whispers around him didn't stop. They grew louder, though he still couldn't make out a word.
And then—footsteps.
Soft but distinct, cutting through the heavy air like a blade through cloth. The crowd behind him parted automatically, reverently, making a narrow path.
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Taeril White erged from the fog.
He was unchanged. Tall, pale, white hair cascading down his back like a banner of winter. In his arms was an immaculate bouquet of white chrysanthemums, illuminary against the monochro world.
But different from his usual dream, the man wasn't alone.
Two more figures followed behind. One was a woman covered entirely in cracked, drying clay, her eyes like riverbeds during drought. The other—a vague shimr, a spirit with no fixed shape, its form pulsing between child and beast.
They didn't speak, but their gazes landed squarely on him. Sothing inside Eathan shrivelled, and he turned his face away.
Don't look at .
"Found you."
Taeril stepped closer, each footfall landing with impossible softness, yet sounding like thunder. He bent at one knee and placed the chrysanthemum bouquet at the base of the gravestones.
Then, he extended a hand to Eathan, palm upward.
"I am here to take you ho."
It was the line. The one Eathan rembered. The one that marked everything before and after.
His salvation.
Eathan's heart surged. His hands reached out, trembling—
Then, he heard it.
A hum, gentle and threadbare. It wasn't from Taeril nor any figure nearby; it was from sowhere deeper inside. The sound stretched across the void like a hairline fracture through porcelain, and the mont it passed, the illusion ruptured.
The world shattered, and Taeril was gone. So were the mourners, the clay-covered woman, the floating spirit, and even the tombstones blurred at the edges, all lting into the fog like ash.
Before he knew it, the colourless sky above him wasn't just gray—it was hollow.
Eathan just stood there, motionless.
Alone.
A child again, buried not with cries but silence. Around him, the shards of his parents' urn—once jagged and ceramic—began to transmute, one by one, into glass. The transformation was slow, cruelly deliberate. And in each translucent piece, a reflection stared back.
It was him.
Dozens of Eathans stared out—each with different expressions. One with tears crusted to his cheeks. One scread until his voice was gone; one was blank-eyed, frozen, as though his soul had long dispersed into the Realm of the Passing.
Amidst all the Eathans, one moved.
The largest shard before him rippled faintly, as if stirred by breath. In that glimr, a figure stepped closer from within. Another him, but older. Quieter.
Gold-eyed.
The reflection's eyes glowed with the weight of divine ancestry. They looked right at him, and Eathan was forced to stare back. He watched as "his" lips slowly moved, forming themselves into two simple words:
"I'm sorry."
A voice—his voice—echoed it aloud. It was a low and regretful tone.
"I'm sorry."
[Humanity] has decreased by 5%! (81% → 76%)
80% Threshold Breach: Physical Resonance Triggered
Pain ca next.
An internal cracking, like sothing deep inside Eathan's chest had buckled. Pain blossod across his back like sothing ancient had been pried. His vision flared—fractal glyphs spinning behind his eyes.
His knees hit the ground again, and this ti, it took everything Eathan had not to scream.
[HP] has decreased by 18%! (47% → 29%)
In every mirrored shard now, the sa version of him stared back. Horns beginning to form in outline—faint, luminous, curling upward from his temples in slow, aching arcs. Not physical yet, but almost.
He reached up with shaking fingers, brushing the skin above his forehead.
Nothing.
Yet the weight of it was suffocating, like divinity pressing through the keyhole of a mortal soul.
Another single tear slipped down Eathan's face before he realized it was even there. He wiped at it, only to sar streaks of luminescent gold across his cheek. In the reflection, the golden-eyed version of himself opened his mouth again, lips forming the words with more tenderness than he expected.
"I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," Eathan echoed, the words leaving his lips without his permission.
I'm sorry.
He whispered it again and again.
***
Outside of all illusions, the battlefield stood in unnatural silence.
The sky was no longer a sky.
It had beco a battlefield canvas, painted in the hues of apocalyptic dread—burnt smog, slashes of scarlet lightning, and broken anchors across the Shanghai skyline like wounded arteries.
It was as if soone had pressed pause on reality itself.
Spiritual ley lines quaked. Temple bells rang without wind. Talismans dangled midair, their glow extinguished.
Team Z didn't move.
Xenis stood frozen, arms half-raised, eyes locked on sothing that wasn't there. Wenrui sat slumped beside a scorched car, muttering technical jargon like a child reciting a prayer.
"Server not found… checksum loop… I—should've saved them..."
Tanke was curled in a fetal position beneath a fallen sign, sobbing with hands pressed against his head. Even ng Yao stood transfixed under so unspoken horror, her hand twitching just shy of drawing her sword.
It wasn't fear of the beast that froze them; it was what the beast showed them.
The Taowu—duo-horned, spiky fur over obsidian, rippling with molten muscle and smog—stood at the center of it all. It watched on, feeding on nightmares.
Their nightmares.
Then, sothing snapped.
A spiritual whip cracked through the silence.
Chewie blinked once. Her pupils narrowed to slits.
The ground beneath her fractured in a perfect radius, crimson qi erupting all around like battlefield banners. Dust lifted off the concrete, spiralling into the air around her ankles, sucked up by an aura now swelling fast, thick, and ancient.
The air itself recoiled.
From her small fra rose an unmistakable power—primordial, martial, and utterly undeterred by the illusion eating through the others.
The aura of Chi You, the fallen king of chaos and unholy war.
Ribbons of crimson qi burst outward, swirling like battlefield banners caught in a rising wind. Spectral weapons blinked into brief existence behind her—battle swords, spears, war seals—flickering in and out like shadows forgotten by ti.
The concrete cracked again, this ti as her sneakers dug in. Slowly, she raised one hand to the sky. Her voice, when it ca, was in a controlled calm.
"Back off, mutt."
The Taowu flinched.
With crimson eyes blazing, Chewie charged.
Her movents were feral, an amalgam of honed instinct and inherited bloodlust. The Taowu snarled and lunged to et her, jaws gaping open with a vortex of smog. The two collided midair with a thunderous boom that cracked the skyscrapers around them. Glaive t claw; smoke t steel.
Chewie didn't even flinch.
The battle whipped through the city—up, over, and through temples and rooftops. She leapt from statues of Bodhisattvas, ricocheted off maroon pillars, and tore through spiritual wards like they were paper charms in a hurricane.
The Taowu fought back just as brutally, whipping a tendril of noxious energy through a traffic tunnel, turning the steel to rust mid-swing. It reared toward Eathan again—always toward there, as if drawn to him.
Drawn to the thing inside him.
And then—a blur.
A streak of azure split the battle. One shadow zipped between them, faster than perception itself:
Quine Long.
The Azure Dragon dropped from the heavens like a divine judgnt stylized in high fashion. Hair and coat flowing behind him like ink on water, he paused midair, eyes scanning the mortal forms frozen in terror below.
Then, a sigh escaped his lips. "So troubleso."
With a single gesture, the dragon wove a web of glyphs in midair. Threads of jade qi expanded rapidly, forming a translucent barrier do that enveloped the unconscious mortals scattered through the plaza. The boundary glead quietly—delicate yet firm.
He glanced upward toward the Taowu, whose eyes narrowed furiously upon seeing the barrier.
"Now," he sighed, "for the next inconvenience."
The Taowu lunged instinctively, but the Azure Dragon twisted midair, flicked a finger, and vanished.
The next second, the corrupted beast was slamd through two apartnt towers in a burst of shattered concrete.
Chewie, mid-glaive swing, staggered to a halt, her crimson pupils contracting. "What the—?"
Quine landed lightly on a fractured lamppost and dusted invisible motes off his sleeves. He barely spared the others a glance before his jade-glossed eyes found the one curled on the cracked temple courtyard like a discarded doll:
Eathan, with one tear tracked down his cheek.
In the illusion, the poor guy was still murmuring apologies.
The dragon's gaze narrowed. In one smooth motion, he dropped onto the ground. He strode over, each step slow and almost tenderly. And then—
His palm whipped through the air.
Slap.
The sound rang out like a detonating talisman.
Eathan's body skidded across the temple stones, crashing into a heap by the foot of a lion statue. The world shifted sideways in his vision. His cheek burned.
Chewie blinked—hard.
War-mode flickered off.
"Huh." She muttered, voice caught halfway between bloodlust and confusion. "Did he just do that?"
"…I think he did," muttered Xenis weakly from behind a collapsed ward line.
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