The deep rumble of reconstruction echoed through the silence as footsteps closed the distance.
Zekai and Sebastian walked side by side, deep beneath the foundations of BSA Headquarters.
The passage stretched on ahead of them, twisting through long zigzagging corridors that seemed to sink lower with every turn.
The deeper they went, the more Zekai's patience wore thin.
"Mr. Sebastian." A pause. "How much farther is this?"
"And what exactly am I supposed to do once we get there?"
Sebastian answered with nothing but a faint smile.
"Almost there."
He glanced sideways at him. "After this... you'll finally start seeing the truth."
The truth, Zekai thought. After everything I've already survived, what's left for this world to show me?
Neither of them said anything else. The corridor swallowed their footsteps whole.
A few minutes in, Zekai reached into the paper bag Sebastian had handed him earlier and pulled out a rice ball. He tore the wrapper off and bit into it immediately.
Chomp.
Another bite. Then another. Half of it was gone inside a few seconds.
Sebastian glanced over. Zekai kept eating.
Chomp. Chomp.
Not savoring it — eating like someone who hadn't had a proper meal in days.
Sebastian watched him for a moment. "...Still hungry?"
Zekai swallowed the last bite, and for the first time since they'd left the upper levels, he actually looked satisfied. "No. I'm good."
A quiet breath escaped him. "Feels good to actually feel alive again."
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. "...That hungry, huh."
Zekai looked down at the empty wrapper. "Apparently."
A faint smile. "Say the word if you want another."
"I'm fine." He folded the wrapper neatly and tucked it away. "Let's keep moving."
Neither of them mentioned it again. But for the first time since he'd woken up inside this building, Zekai felt a little more like a person and a little less like a suspect.
A few more minutes of walking brought them to a stop.
The corridor opened into a wide, ordinary-looking chamber — rows of monitors, humming control consoles, uniformed BSA officers manning their stations, tracking streams of purple data crawling across the screens. It looked like any other operations room in the building.
Then Zekai's eyes lifted past them.
At the center of the far wall stood a colossal door — big enough to swallow a military aircraft without the wings brushing the edges. Pitch black. Seamless. The surface didn't catch the light at all, as though whatever had made it had never touched a human forge.
Nothing about the room around it looked old enough to belong beside it.
His mouth fell open slightly. "...What is this place?"
Sebastian said nothing.
One operator pressed a hand to the comm panel.
"Command. Requesting authorization to access the gate."
A brief pause. Then a level voice answered.
"Authorization confirmed. Proceed."
The operators activated the system. A deep mechanical groan shook the chamber — and instead of the massive gate opening, a smaller, human-sized door embedded at its center slid aside instead.
Behind it, a staircase descended into dark.
Sebastian looked at him. "Come on. Let's go."
"...Huh?"
Zekai took a step back. "No."
Sebastian sighed, grabbed his wrist without another word, and said, "Stop making this harder than it needs to be."
Before Zekai could protest, he was already being pulled down the stairs.
The moment the inner door opened, white light burst outward and swallowed the passage whole. No warmth in it at all. Hollow, like it belonged to somewhere that had never known a sun.
"What the—?!"
Sebastian gave him one last shove.
"No—!"
He stumbled forward, foot catching on nothing, balance tipping—
And instead of hitting cold metal, he froze.
Grass. Soft, green, stretching out beneath his boots.
No birds. No insects. Not even wind moving through it. Just stillness so complete it felt wrong.
His breath caught. "...What." His eyes widened slowly.
We were underground. How is there grass down here.
He lifted his head, confused — and then his whole body went still.
Far off in the distance, a colossal blue eye hung suspended in the sky.
The eye didn't read as something hanging in open air — it read as the sky itself, watching.
Its size swallowed the horizon whole, replacing it entirely. Around it, countless smaller eyes drifted through the empty air, each one glowing a different color.
It never moved. Never blinked. It just stayed there, motionless, unchanging — like it had been watching this dead world for thousands of years without ever once looking away.
Heavy chains descended from nowhere, binding the immense iris as though sealing something that should never have existed.
Not one link trembled. They sat perfectly still, like time itself had forgotten to move them.
Below it, the ground was littered with abandoned weapons. Ancient swords. Broken spears. Cracked shields. Weapons of unfamiliar design, unlike anything ever forged by human hands.
Broadswords stood driven into the dirt, left standing at the end of some war nobody remembered fighting.
Centuries should have eaten through the steel by now. Nothing had.
And still, despite all of it, the land stayed green. Lush. Peaceful in a way that felt entirely unnatural.
Sebastian walked up beside him, a lit cigarette between two fingers. He took a slow drag and exhaled into the endless sky.
"Welcome...to Null Reality."
Zekai frowned. "...Another dimension?"
Sebastian shook his head. "No. Not one of them."
"This is the place that sits between all of them."
The field stretched out to every horizon without a mountain, a tree, or a single structure breaking the line. Only that chained eye watching over a world nobody had lived in for longer than anyone could measure.
Neither of them spoke. The stillness pressed down on both of them like weight.
Even Sebastian stayed quiet, letting the landscape do the talking.
Zekai turned in a slow circle. Green in every direction. Endless. Empty.
He frowned again. "...Where's the sun?"
Sebastian looked up. "...Nobody's ever found one."
It didn't feel like standing inside another world. It felt like standing inside a memory the world had tried to forget it ever had.
Zekai stood frozen, eyes tracing the impossible landscape, unable to process any of it.
What is this. How does something like this even exist.
Thoughts collided in his head faster than he could sort them.
"It feels like an entirely different world," he finally managed.
Sebastian let out a quiet laugh, drawing another pull off his cigarette. "Told you already. There's a lot in this world that goes past what you can imagine."
"But this—" Zekai struggled for the words.
Sebastian nodded, already understanding. "I know. We reacted the exact same way the first time we stood here."
His eyes drifted up to the sapphire eye overhead.
"This place is the remnant of a civilization wiped out by something catastrophic."
"Long before the Bureau existed, humanity found this door already standing here. Nobody built it. So they built the Bureau around it instead."
At that moment black butterflies appeared out of nowhere — dozens of them, circling the two of them in total silence.
A chill crawled down Zekai's spine.
Sebastian never took his eyes off the massive blue eye above them.
"Our universe isn't just one world. Dimensions branch off it — and every one of those holds realms of its own."
He paused, gaze sweeping the endless field.
"Null Reality sits underneath all of it. Not a dimension. Not a realm. Just the space between."
Zekai looked around again. Nothing here felt fake. If anything, it felt more real than the world he'd left behind an hour ago.
Sebastian lifted a single finger. "When the boundaries between dimensions begin to weaken, reality starts to tear."
"We call those tears Reality Fractures."
"Fractures are invisible to ordinary perception — only Grave Resonance can sense them."
"Some things out there already belong to our world. Others slip in the second a boundary weakens enough to let them."
Zekai's brow tightened. "Then why do we see them at all? Is our reality broken?"
Sebastian took another slow pull off the cigarette. "That's the question we've never been able to answer."
"Whether Null Reality was part of God's design, or something even God never intended to exist..."
"No one's ever found out."
His words faded into the wind. The last of the cigarette burned down to ash and scattered.
A gust swept across the endless field, scattering the black butterflies before they slowly drifted back to circle the motionless eye above.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
Zekai couldn't tear his eyes off the impossible sky as pieces started clicking together in his head.
The monsters. The dimensions. The Grave Energy. The Bureau itself.
Everything Sebastian had just told him snapped into place, one piece at a time.
Years of unanswered questions. Every impossible thing he'd survived.
None of it was isolated anymore. All of it belonged to the same broken reality.
Every answer solved one mystery and cracked open another underneath it.
One thing still refused to fit.
Buried somewhere in the back of his mind, a question he couldn't quite make himself ask out loud.
The black stone cube.
Since the moment it entered his life, it had dragged him through things that broke every rule Sebastian had just laid out for him.
By his own experience, it was the cube that had pulled him into the Graveyard Dimension in the first place.
But Sebastian's explanation painted an entirely different picture. Dimensions, Fractures, Null Reality — none of it accounted for what the cube had actually done.
The two truths didn't align.
One of them couldn't be the whole truth.
Or maybe both were true, and something else sat underneath both of them.
If Sebastian's account was accurate, the cube existed completely outside the framework he'd just described.
Which meant one thing.
The cube doesn't follow this world's rules at all.
Zekai lowered his eyes.
There's something else. Something they're still not telling me.
Whatever that cube actually is, its true purpose still hasn't revealed itself.
He understood the shape of Null Reality now. One question still wouldn't leave him alone.
"Why bring me here."
"What does any of this have to do with me?"
Sebastian laughed, quiet.
"No matter where we go — you never stop asking the questions that actually matter."
A faint smile crossed his face.
"What else."
"This...is your final test."
✦ End of Chapter 46 - Welcome to Null Reality ✦