Darkness swallowed every sensation whole. Then pain split through his skull, sharp and sudden.
"...Ugh."
His eyelids twitched. Awareness came back slow. His vision stayed blurred when he finally opened his eyes, the world tilting hard before it settled.
One knee pressed into damp earth. His hand shot to his temple.
"...My head." It felt like something had torn his mind loose, then jammed it back together wrong.
He pushed himself up. The second he stood, he froze.
"..."
Not the frozen forest. The snow was gone entirely, and with it the shattered trunks, the battlefield.
Emerald canopy now, gold light breaking through it. A stone path ran ahead, disappearing into the green.
"...Again?" His brow tightened. He turned, checking behind him.
Nothing there either. Whatever had brought him here had already sealed shut behind him.
Just more forest, running out to the horizon. Something heavy settled in his chest. Every instinct in his body screamed the same word.
Leave.
He didn't move. He let out a slow breath instead. "...If I run every time something feels wrong, I never actually learn anything."
His eyes tracked the path ahead. "And I never find Aron."
His skin prickled before he understood why. The Arcana answered on its own, unasked.
Zzzzsup!
[ THREAT DETECTED ]
Location Analysis...
...
...
ERROR
Reality Interference Detected...
████████████████
Attempting Analysis...
...
...
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The screen twisted. Letters warped violently, flickering.
D̸I̸M̷E̷N̴S̵I̴O̵N̷A̷L̸...
I̸N̵T̷E̴R̸F̶E̷R̸E̴N̶C̵E̷...
9̷8̵.̸7̴%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Another line pushed through, then glitched into static.
L̸E̶A̴V̵E̸...
I̷M̴M̴E̵D̴I̴A̶T̸E̶L̸Y̵...
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The whole screen shattered into black noise.
Then nothing.
He crossed his arms. "You're making this sound a lot more serious than it probably is."
No answer. For the first time, the Arcana had gone entirely silent.
His eyes stuck on the number. 98.7%.
His jaw tightened. "...Ninety-eight percent." That couldn't be right.
If interference had already climbed this high, how long had he actually been here?
He'd crossed from the frozen forest into this place with no idea what the gap in between had cost him. Hours, maybe. Days, maybe. No way to check.
He scanned the trees. Sunlight in the same place. The path just as still. Nothing suggested time had moved at all.
"...Unless it doesn't work the same way in this layer."
His expression hardened around that thought. If this place ran on different rules, he had no real number to anchor himself to — and the Arcana wasn't warning him anymore.
It was giving him an order.
Then the number ticked up. 98.8%.
His eyes narrowed. "...Still climbing."
Another flicker. 98.9%.
His fingers curled into a fist. "What the hell is going on here."
He looked toward the far-off shape of something waiting ahead. Whatever this place was, he didn't have the luxury of figuring it out slow.
Need to close this quest. Fast.
Fail it, and the Reoccurrence clause activated. Thirty days from now, this wouldn't just quietly reset — the same unresolved problem would surface again somewhere else, in some other shape, and there was no telling if it'd be worse.
He exhaled through his nose. "...So no time to sit here theorizing."
His eyes settled forward. "Quest first."
"Figure the rest out after."
He shrugged, more to himself than anyone. "I'll manage."
He started walking. The deeper he went, the quieter the forest got — until only his own footsteps remained.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The silence didn't scare him. It felt like peace.
He looked up. "...Sunlight's usually a good sign."
A faint smile. "Maybe my luck finally remembered I exist."
The forest gave him nothing back. Minutes passed. Then the trees ended.
He stepped past the last trunk and stopped dead.
"..."
His eyes went wide.
An entire valley opened up before him, vast beyond anything he'd have imagined — white statues lining a stone avenue toward a staircase climbing to a sanctuary suspended above the valley floor. No names carved into the statues. No inscriptions. Something about them still crawled under his skin anyway. Not because they looked dead.
Because they looked like they could move.
"...Compared to that frozen hell—" A pause. "—this feels like heaven."
Still, that same whisper hadn't stopped.
No blood. No corpses. No monsters anywhere in sight. And still, somewhere down in his gut, that same whisper hadn't stopped.
Leave. Now.
He ignored it and stepped onto the path. Every statue he passed felt like it was watching him go by.
The deeper he went, the more it unsettled him — not one cracked stone, not one leaf out of place, like a photograph nobody was allowed to touch.
He reached the base of the staircase. Hundreds of steps, maybe thousands, climbing white and pristine toward the sanctuary above.
"...Beautiful."
A calm voice answered him from behind.
"Can I help you, young man?"
He spun on instinct, Null Drakular half-materialized in his grip before his mind caught up.
A man stood a few meters off, simple white robes settled against a straight posture, silver hair moving faint in the breeze. He carried no weapon, gave off no hostility. No Grave Resonance answered back, no Aura registered — nothing Zekai had ever learned to read before.
And yet he had no memory of the man arriving. Not that he'd walked up quietly — it felt more like he'd simply always been standing there. Waiting for Zekai to notice.
"..."
"You almost gave me a heart attack."
The man smiled, gentle. "I asked first."
Neither of them said anything for a beat.
Zekai eased back slightly. "...No. Just passing through." A pause. "Once I finish what I came here for, I'll leave."
The smile faded off the man's face. "This sanctuary has no business with humanity." His voice stayed level the whole time. "You should not step beyond this point."
No contempt in the words, no anger — just absolute certainty, like a law of nature stated out loud.
Zekai scratched the back of his neck. "...Yeah. I don't have business here, technically."
He pointed toward the sky past the sanctuary. "My world does, though."
He held up two fingers, tapped them together once. "Our worlds keep colliding."
"People keep dying because of it."
His hand dropped. "So — mind helping me out here?"
Silence stretched between them. The guardian studied him, unhurried.
Finally: "You may not climb these stairs."
His gaze drifted up toward the sanctuary. "These are the Ascension Steps."
"Only those Authority has acknowledged may stand on them."
His eyes came back down to Zekai's face.
"You are merely human."
Zekai let out a slow breath. The number from the Arcana's last warning flashed behind his eyes.
99.1%. Still climbing.
His eyes narrowed. If the interference maxed out before he closed this quest, he had no idea what happened next.
He looked up at the sanctuary. "...So I really don't have time to argue about this."
His grip tightened on the hilt. His eyes locked on the staircase.
Whatever waited at the top, he'd deal with it there.
"Let's get this over with."
✦ End of Chapter 59 — The Sanctuary Beyond Reality ✦