The voice kept echoing inside his skull.
—Use it.
His eyes stayed locked on the box.
Why does everything keep pointing at this card.
The voice. The screen. Even the torn rules. Every thread in this place led back to the same answer.
Use the card.
Why.
For once, he didn't have a smart answer for himself. The voice went quiet. The card didn't. His gaze dropped to the open box, and one card in particular held his eyes.
The Fool.
Newer than the rest of the deck—cleaner edges, less wear, like it had been slipped in long after everything else.
If this ruin held any answers, this was the only thread he had. That was enough. Curiosity had always been his worst habit—once something snagged his attention, he couldn't leave it alone, even when leaving it alone was clearly the smarter move.
He reached for it.
"...Let's see."
He didn't need to believe the rules. He just needed to test them. He bit down on his thumb.
Aron flinched. "Mr. Zekai, what are you doing?!" A bead of blood welled up. "No—blood, don't—"
Zekai ignored him. No point explaining a system Aron couldn't even see.
He held his thumb over The Fool. One drop fell.
Plop.
Nothing. The hall stayed dead silent.
One second. Two. Three.
His face flattened. "...Seriously?" A dry, humorless scoff. He flicked the card away without thinking twice.
Except it never left.
The card stopped in midair—frozen, motionless, hanging where his fingers had let go.
Then space folded.
It was back in his palm. No arc. No fall. No return trip. It hadn't traveled from the air into his hand.
It had simply always been there.
He stared at it. The gap between 'here' and 'there' had been erased completely.
"...What." His mind replayed the throw. He'd felt it leave his fingers.
No. His eyes narrowed. It never left.
The thought made no sense, and the card sitting in his palm made even less. Like the world had skipped the part between an action and its result—outcome first, cause dragged in after the fact.
He turned toward Aron. "Hey." His voice had gone quiet. "Did you see that?"
Aron blinked. "See what?"
"The card. It stopped in midair."
"...No." Aron's confusion deepened. "It's been in your hand this whole time."
Zekai said nothing.
The line between his reality and Aron's was starting to warp.
What is he talking about. I just threw it.
He needed a second test. He threw the card again.
Snap.
Instant return. No arc. No distance. No transition at all.
"...Cards don't do that." His fingers closed hard around the gold border.
Then hands grabbed his shoulders. "Mr. Zekai?!"
He blinked. "What—"
"You've just been standing there!" Aron's voice cracked. "You haven't moved—your eyes were closed, you were talking to yourself!"
"...Eyes closed?"
"Yes! What happened to you?!"
He tried to answer. His body wouldn't cooperate. His whole sense of the room tilted sideways.
The throne hall didn't vanish physically—something inside his own head had.
He tried to drop the card. His fingers didn't open. He pulled harder. Nothing.
It wasn't stuck to his skin. It was part of it now.
Heat surged under the card—not pain, more like blood rushing back into a limb that had gone dead too long.
His breath broke. "Hey—" His voice shook. "No. No, no—"
He grabbed his own wrist and clawed at his fingers. "Get off. Let go!"
Then—
Thump.
The Fool pulsed.
He froze.
Thump.
Not his heartbeat. The card, pulsing on its own, dark bleeding out from beneath the illustration.
Deep red. Not dripping—moving, deliberate, crawling past the edges of the card and into open air like it had somewhere to be.
"What the—"
The liquid split into hundreds of thin veins, spreading up the walls, across the ceiling, down every pillar in the hall—crimson lines branching through ancient stone like something alive was growing beneath the surface, searching, unfinished, hungry for a direction.
The temperature collapsed. His breath fogged in front of him.
"That's not real." He spun toward Aron. "Aron!"
Nothing.
Aron had stopped completely—fingers still frozen against Zekai's shoulder, chest motionless, the fear on his face locked mid-expression. Even the dust hanging in the air had stopped falling.
"Aron?" No answer. Zekai stepped forward—or tried to. His body still didn't feel fully attached to the room around him.
"Hey." He reached out. "Wake up."
Nothing.
Then the crimson screen came—not appearing this time. Burning straight across his vision, the whole world dimming around its edges.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[EVENT TRIGGERED — IRREVERSIBLE]
[CONDITION: SATISFIED]
[THE FOOL HAS ANSWERED]
[THE FIRST DOOR OPENS]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The choice had already been made without him.
His pupils shrank. "Irreversible..." His eyes caught on the last line. "The First Door—"
His voice dropped to almost nothing. "...This place was waiting for permission."
The weight of it settled into his chest like a stone.
Not random. Never random. It had been waiting this whole time—for him, for the card, for the exact second he chose to use it.
He looked down. The Fool was gone. His palm, empty.
The air wasn't.
It had turned heavy. Sealed. The throne hall felt severed from the rest of reality, like an invisible wall had dropped shut around him alone.
His hands started shaking. He noticed immediately, and that scared him worse than anything on the screen.
"Calm down." His own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Then something moved behind him.
Not human.
He didn't hear footsteps. Didn't feel the air shift. Didn't sense anything approaching at all.
A pair of ice-black hands closed over his eyes from the dark before he could even begin to turn.
His whole body seized.
"WHO THE—"
His heart slammed against his ribs. The darkness behind those hands wasn't ordinary darkness. It didn't end.
Then reality tore open—not around him. Inside him.
Images ripped through his mind in a flood, violent and endless. Not memories. Not imagination.
Fragments of a truth that had been waiting for him this whole time.
He tried to scream. Nothing left his throat. The hands stayed locked over his eyes.
The world dissolved.
Somewhere in the dark, a figure lifted its head.
The sealed door cracked open.
And Zekai saw exactly what was standing on the other side.
Then everything went black.
✦ End of Chapter 6 — The First Door ✦