The war finally took something from him that even the Immortal Anchor had not yet dared to steal.
His eyes.
It did not happen in a grand duel or a clean ambush. It happened the way the worst things in war always happened.
Vastarael had survived ten years because he had become brutally competent. The restrictions on him remained but he was still an Aeterium. That meant his body and soul were harder to ruin than most. He had learned the Plenituse Technique until it became instinct. He had become skilled with weapons despite not being able to summon Calimostria. The war forced him to make use of whatever the battlefield gave him.
His prosthetic arms were so convincing that even men who fought beside him for years could not always tell where flesh ended and crafted replacement began. He did not die easily. Soul-piercing weapons that would have ended lesser immortals only scraped against the near-impenetrable density of his soul and failed to do the job properly.
That made him valuable but also made him a target.
The army general who came for him was not some random brute throwing bodies into the meat grinder. He was someone who could look at a battlefield and find the one thread holding a corner of it together. He found Vastarael in the chaos of an engagement and moved with the cold certainty of a man who had identified the threat.
The first strike was not a blade. It was a Tether.
Something thin and vicious snapped across Vastarael's face and then sank into his senses like a hook. His sight warped instantly. He tried to compensate with the Mystic Eyes of Awareness but even that power was being compromised by whatever the general had used. Vastarael's head jerked back in reflex and in that exact instant the general was already in front of him.
The dagger followed.
It was a Divine Weapon. The blade did not pierce his throat. It went straight for his eyes.
Blindness was different from pain. Pain could be endured but blindness could not. All the instincts he had forged over ten years were suddenly cut down to nothing but sound, pressure and the violent, useless pounding of his own pulse. He stumbled, holding his own face with warm blood running over his fingers.
For the first time in a very long while, Vastarael was afraid.
He had memorized the battlefield by necessity long before this. Photographic memory had stopped being a gift and become survival so even blinded, he forced his body to move using that memorized map of trenches, ridges, wreckage and corpse-strewn dips in the earth.
He crawled. He dragged himself through mud and ash while boots stepped around him and weapons screamed overhead. More than once he was stepped on. More than once he nearly blacked out from the pressure of a boot crushing his ribs or a heel grinding across his shoulder. He kept moving anyway. A blind immortal on an active battlefield was not a soldier anymore.
By the time the battle ended, he had buried himself in a broken trench cavity under shattered metal and dead stone, bleeding and blind. When they found him, the healers were already too late.
The damage was not ordinary. The dagger had been built for this. It was designed to destroy Mystic Eyes, not just the flesh around them. Body Reconstruction would have been the obvious answer if he had possessed it, but he did not. Even if he had, the weapon had been made to defile the very organ of perception. The healers tried and failed. Over and over again, they failed.
By morning, the judgment had already been made. He was to be executed.
They left him alive only because the execution was scheduled for the following dawn and in the world of immortal war, mercy was often just administrative delay.
That night, Vastarael did not sleep.
He sat in the dark with blood dried around his eyes and listened to the battlefield breathe around him. He remembered every step of the ground around him and every direction that had once led to safety and now led nowhere. Then he began to laugh.
He stood up using the memory of the earth beneath him. On one hand was a cracked spear shaft for balance. He turned his ruined face towards the black sky.
"Thyrexxa, is this it? Is this the Time Trial you wanted me to endure?"
No answer came. Of course it did not. He laughed louder this time.
"I lost my sense of touch on my arms and I lost my eyes permanently. Is that supposed to mean something? Is this your great design? Who am I kidding. I'm asking a higher being for help. Pathetic, isn't it? But you would never help me. You never do. You have done this before, so I'll do this the hard way."
That was the moment he stopped speaking like a man seeking mercy. He drew a sword from his hilt. He placed the edge against his neck. His breathing was steady now,
"I can't see," he told the Primal Force of Time. "I cannot fight like this. Unlock one capability. You are a Primal Force. You run on balance and you know that. You can't expect me to fight in this condition. It wouldn't align with balance. I can't advance ranks to get stronger so do it."
He pressed the blade deeper.
The edge bit into his throat and hot blood ran down his hand. For one suspended instant he stood there on the battlefield, half-blind, half-broken, daring the realm itself to decide whether it wanted his death or his survival.
Finally, it answered. It gave him Sapphire Materialization. At once, his eyes ignited with agony.
The pain was so sudden and so intense that his knees nearly gave out. It felt as if something inside his skull had been torn open and filled with molten crystal. He dropped the sword and clutched his face, screaming into the night as the old destroyed Mystic Eyes dissolved and something new began to form in their place. The scream went on and on. It was a violent birth forced through ruin. Every nerve around his eye sockets burned. Every vein behind his eyes throbbed. Every shred of leftover damage from the dagger was being torn apart and remade through a power that demanded perfection as its price.
He screamed until his voice broke. He screamed until he could taste the inside of his own throat. He screamed through the whole night while the new eyes crystallized in him, layer by layer, form by form, until the pain finally faded.
By dawn, he could see again. The Mystic Eyes of Crystallization had awakened.
Mystic Eyes were rare. Mystic Eyes that evolved were rarer still. They were not static gifts. They got stronger under pressure, transformed by use, pain and survival. Narisva Starisnova's eyes had evolved from the Mystic Eyes of Space to the Mystic Eyes of the Event Horizon because the nature of her power had been pushed far enough to transcend its original shape.
Vastarael's were no different in principle, only far more brutal in origin. The continuous strain of his former sight, the forced adaptation of his awareness and the second capability he had unlocked under the knife's edge all fed into the same conclusion. His power had been cornered, starved and driven past its limit. When he finally opened his eyes at sunrise, the world no longer looked merely visible.
As though everything in existence had acquired edges he could recognize, break, or preserve.
And that was the first time in ten years that the war looked back at him and understood that it had failed to finish the job.
------
The next morning, Vastarael did not walk to the execution platform as the others expected. He did not beg. He did not collapse. He did not offer them the satisfaction of seeing a broken soldier dragged into public death.
He was already dead to them. That was the flaw in their certainty.
He learned something important over ten years of war: people stopped looking too closely once they decided you were disposable. Disposability made enemies lazy. It made them careless. It made them believe that a useless immortal could not possibly still be dangerous. So, Vastarael used that laziness like a weapon.
Sapphire Materialization did the rest.
It was not hard for him to forge the shape he needed. Time in Regnum Musicae improved his mastery over Sapphire Materialization by a very wide margin. He did not need a perfect corpse. He needed a convincing one.
A sapphire skeleton came first. It was precise down to the smallest joint. As for the flesh, he just skinned corpses around him.
Corpses were not a problem for him. He had spent enough time in the Fallen Bridge skinning animals for his men that the act itself held no horror anymore. War had stripped the meaning from flesh long ago. Skin was just material. Blood was just paint if he needed it to be. He worked quickly, using thin sapphire needles through the false body so the skin clung where it needed to cling and sagged where it needed to sag. An hour was enough for him to finish it.
He took the blood of the fallen and his own and spread it carefully across the body and the earth around it. He did not overdo it. Then, he drove his sword into the makeshift corpse at the angle of a self-inflicted strike, made the posture look desperate and left the body. The message was simple. The blind soldier had lost his mind, chosen the blade and finished himself before the execution could.
No one was going to investigate a useless soldier too carefully anyway. A dead body was a relief to a war machine. It meant one less mouth to feed and one less failure to account for.
That was the beautiful cruelty of it. He could vanish because the army wanted him gone almost as much as he did. However, faking his death did not mean the battlefield released him.
The Primal Force of Time still had him in its grip and that was the part Vastarael had been waiting for. He had not yet escaped the war. He had only escaped the narrative of being a soldier in someone else's line. The realm accepted neither cheating nor simplicity. It responded the way a living law always did when someone found a crack in it.
A hologram message appeared in the air before him.
It was pale, translucent and utterly without emotion, suspended above the broken earth like a decree from an indifferent god. Vastarael lifted his new sight toward it and smiled coldly.
"Of course you noticed."
The hologram did not answer, but the message was clear enough.
[You have broken the role assigned to you. If you can no longer remain a soldier under your old identity, then balance demands another position. You have five minutes to find a new function that kept you inside the Time Trial. All your capabilities will be unlocked at this time period.]
That was how the realm thought. That was also why he was dangerous to it. He glanced at the message and let out a low, humorless laugh.
"So that's your answer. Just a different cage."
The hologram flickered once, as if acknowledging the accusation without caring.
The first thing he did was retrieve Calimostria.
The blade emerged as if it had been waiting for him all along. Then came his Divine Artifacts, each drawn into Fool's Copy, the storage-and-mimic artifact that now opened like a miracle in his hands. He had never appreciated the utility of that artifact properly before but now he did. It was not simply a copy mechanism. It could expand and contract, acting as an inventory.
Then he used Body Reconstruction.
The transformation was immediate and very efficient. Old damage vanished. Scar tissue dissolved. Misshapen joints corrected themselves. Wounds sealed. The ruin the war had written onto him over ten years began to erase itself and with it the battlefield's claim on his body weakened by the second.
Then, he changed his gender.
If he was building a new self, then he would do it properly. A new role required a new body, or at least one that the enemy would not immediately associate with the soldier they thought had died. He understood masks too well to leave that opportunity unused.
Then came the Nepenthes Runes.
He did not bother with the whole body. That would be a waste. He was not planning to remain a front-line combatant under this new identity, at least not openly. He was taking on another role, one that demanded mystical precision more than brute force. So he strengthened only what mattered most: the prosthetic arms.
The runes were Physical, increasing strength, speed and agility. He used stamina on his entire body though. Stamina ass the one thing he lacked so he spent a minute using a lot of Stamina Runes on himself. He was glad he experienced the training in Regnum Musicae otherwise he would have died by now.
The five-minute window burned across his awareness. He could feel the end of it now so he moved faster. He had everything he needed to survive now and he had acquired it by understanding the rules better than the realm expected him to. The Primal Force of Time believed in balance and Vastarael had just forced it to recognize a deeper imbalance: a crippled immortal had just broken narrative certainty through intelligence alone.
He looked down at his newly altered body, at the Divine Weapon staff at his side, the artifacts inside Fool's Copy and at the sapphire pulse in his hands.
He laughed softly.
"Now this," she said, in a newly feminine voice, "is more like it."
The timer's final second arrived. The pressure struck down around him and the world tried to clamp his power shut again but this time the change was different. He was no longer the same broken soldier it had caged. He had reclaimed enough of himself to resist in a new shape.
When the five minutes ended, he was back within the limits of a First Enlightenment Divine but not the same one the battlefield had spent ten years trying to destroy. He had Soul Energy again. Sapphire Materialization remained in his grasp. The Mystic Eyes of Crystallization were active behind his new sight. Calimostria was at his side. His Divine Artifacts were secured. The runes on his arms held. His body was healed. His identity was rewritten.
And he was a woman now.
"So, now I really get to endure in this battle for who knows how long."
She was still not at full strength. She could not regenerate endlessly. She could not rely on the old comforts of absolute power. But she had what mattered most now: a working functional body, a lethal intellect and Sapphire Materialization as a Pinnacle Tether she could actually wield well.
"Now then, shall we go and introduce ourselves to those commanders who used to order me?"
The last thing he took out of his soul was the one person who was going to be his companion for the entire time. She looked at him and sighed.
"Master, you really do suffer a lot. If it wasn't stuck and restricted by the Primal Force of Time, I would have helped. I apologize."
"Trust me Biolumine, compared to the torture I experienced sixty years in my past life, this was almost close to it. With you around, even though you're now a Divine Rank Creature instead of God Ranked, you'll do just fine."
"I appreciate it, Master."