Gen tore through the ancient forests of the Salvaged Peaks. He was a blur of motion, the gnarled pines and mossy boulders smearing into dark green and grey streaks beside him. His breath was a ragged, angry rhythm in his chest, out of sync with the pounding of his feet.
Lorel followed close on his left. A faint, borrowed golden hue—the strain of **Jingdao** not her own—flickered around her as she moved. She used sharp bursts of **Shidow**, shoving against pockets of dense air to propel herself, her movements less fluid, more desperate pushes to keep pace.
On the opposite flank, Li Zhan moved with a different kind of grace. A dark, human-shaped shadow seemed fused to his back, its legs moving in time with his, lending him a speed that felt weightless and wrong. His eyes, fixed ahead, held a keen, acquisitive light, as if Nix were a rare artifact to be collected.
Duo Yi caught up to Gen easily, pulling level with him on his right. The wind of their passage whipped her hair back, but her glasses, those fine crystals in their wire frame, remained steady on her nose. Her movement was the purest among them—she didn't fight the air; she parted it, the wind itself curling away from her like a respectful servant. Her **Shidow** was not an effort; it was an understanding.
"Gen," she said, her voice cutting through the roar of their passage. It wasn't loud, but it was clear, a statement of fact. "He's heading for the Doom College's sealed ground. The old wards there… they don't ask why you're angry before they bite."
"I don't care," Gen snarled, the words ripped from a raw place inside. "No matter what. I kill him today. Or I'll never be free." He shoved more Qi through his channels, and his golden light flared, burning brighter against the deepening twilight. He pulled ahead a fraction.
Duo Yi's brow furrowed, a small, tight line of frustration and something else. She matched his new speed without seeming to try. In her mind, the calculations ran—the rate of Nix's energy decay, the map of the peaks, the known trigger-points of the College's outer defenses. But layered over the math was a simpler, sharper truth: *He's going to break himself on a wall he refuses to see.* She remembered the feeling of stone fists descending, and the golden light that had interposed itself between her and oblivion. But the debt was absolute.
Behind them, Lorel followed in silence, her eyes shifting between Gen's blazing back, Duo Yi's efficient form, and the predatory glide of Li Zhan. She had no plan, no grand understanding of the terrain. She only knew there was no pulling Gen back from this cliff's edge. They could only follow, and hope to catch him if he fell.
Ahead, Nix ran. He was a scar of grey light skimming the terrain, unable to muster the focus for true flight. Even wounded, his speed was a blasphemy against his injuries, keeping him agonizingly out of reach. He glanced back, his ruined face twisting. *How can they keep up?* The power signatures behind him felt like candle flames to his guttering sun—only one, that furious golden spark, held a flicker of real threat in his diminished state. He needed distance. He needed to stop. The **Tomb of the Fallen God** had hollowed him out. To use it twice, and still end up like this… The insult of it burned hotter than his wounds.
He balled his one working fist. *No matter who you are, you will die screaming.*
The chase became a desperate, silent race against the dying light. They burst from the treeline into a barren, rocky valley just as true night began to bleed across the sky.
There, in the distance, was the Doom College. It was not a welcoming place. It was a fortress of dark stone built into the sheer face of a mountain that looked like it had been cleaved in half by a giant's axe. Towers and arched bridges connected parts of the brutal, intricate structure, all of it glowing with a faint, sinister luminescence under the first stars.
Nix didn't hesitate. He charged straight for it. *A formation guard. No choice.* He summoned a blade of nullification, its light sickly and thin. With a roar of pain and effort, he slashed at the empty air before the college grounds.
The space *rippled*, like a stone thrown into a still pond. Then it *screamed*.
Light, harsh and violent, erupted from the ground. From the shimmering air, an enormous shape resolved—a serpentine dragon woven from ghostly light and savage intent. It coiled around the distant towers, then lunged, its maw of razor-sharp energy teeth wide enough to swallow a house, aiming to grind Nix into dust.
Nix met it with his blade. The clash was a silent, devastating eruption of grey and white light. The dragon's bite caught him, slamming him into the rocky ground with enough force to crack the bedrock. He vanished in a spray of blood and shattered stone.
But as the light cleared, they saw him—bloodied, broken—scrambling through a shimmering, man-sized portal of light that had flickered open where the guardian's attack had struck the formation. He tumbled through, and the light began to snap shut.
"He's gone into the Forgotten Realm!" Duo Yi shouted, her usual calm fractured by urgency.
Gen didn't break stride. He saw the closing light. He poured everything into a final burst and shot into it like an arrow. Lorel, with a cry lost to the wind, followed. Li Zhan, a calculating shadow, slipped in after them.
Duo Yi hesitated for only a heartbeat, her eyes taking in the fading glow, the geometry of the unstable portal. Then, with a soft curse that was most un-Scholarly, she dove forward, passing through the luminescent tear just as it sealed behind her with a sound like a sigh.
***
The world dissolved into a nauseating slide of non-colors and distorted pressure. Then it spat them out.
Gen landed in a crouch on solid, yet somehow unsteady, ground. He blinked, his amber eyes burning with unshed tears and a fury that had nowhere to go. He looked around.
This place was wrong.
They stood on a flat island of dark rock, adrift in a void of deepest purple. Not a sky—a void. All around, other fragments of a shattered world hung suspended: the curved wall of a vast temple, a forest of petrified trees growing upside down, a waterfall of glittering sand flowing sideways into nothing. A luminous, mist-like substance that was not water and not cloud drifted in slow, tidal currents around the debris. The light had no source. It simply was, casting long, impossible shadows that pointed in three directions at once.
On the rock beside him, Lorel, Duo Yi, and Li Zhan found their feet. Lorel's hand went to her mouth, her eyes wide with disbelief at the impossible landscape. Duo Yi's first instinct wasn't to scan the chaos; it was to find Gen. Her eyes locked onto him, taking in the rigid line of his back, the white-knuckled grip of his fists. She adjusted her glasses, a nervous habit, as if trying to see him more clearly, to find a crack in the shell of his fury. Li Zhan merely brushed a speck of unseen dust from his sleeve, his expression one of mild interest in the surreal surroundings, not the people in them
Gen spun, his body a coil of tense muscle. Nix was gone.
"What is this place?" His voice was tight, each word a chip of stone.
Duo Yi hesitated, her loyalty to the College's secrets warring with the reality before her.
"Since we're already here," Lorel said softly, "you might as well tell us."
Li Zhan shrugged one shoulder. "The longer we admire the scenery, the stronger our quarry becomes."
"It's a Forgotten Realm," Duo Yi said finally. "One of the sacred ruins. A piece of an older world, sealed away. It requires… a significant key to open." She didn't say *Milky Stones*, but the implication hung in the strange air. The Tower of Wonder, the Jade Needle—such places were powered by wealth beyond measure.
Gen's eyes narrowed. "Like Faceless Ting told us. He thinks he can hide here." The anger hadn't left him; it vibrated in his clenched fists, in the stiff line of his shoulders, in the way he held his body like a weapon about to be drawn.
Lorel nodded, her mind practical even in awe. "But the cost to open it… the Doom College's resources must be…"
"We shouldn't linger," Li Zhan interrupted, his voice a cool murmur. "Every breath we take is a breath he uses to mend."
Duo Yi pointed a finger at the drifting mist near a floating archway. "This place is not empty. It is littered with… leftovers. Intentions that didn't fade. Step wrong, and you wake them up."
"I don't have time to be careful," Gen said, the words flat and final. "I want his head. I'll get it."
He didn't wait for a reply. He pushed off the rock, a surge of **Jingdao** launching him across the gulf of void towards the nearest large fragment, a jagged shard of black mountain. His figure, consumed by purpose, dwindled against the impossible panorama.
The others exchanged a glance—Lorel's worry, Duo Yi's frustrated resolve, Li Zhan's amused patience—and followed.
***
Far away, on a massive, flat piece of stone carved with spiraling channels that looked like ancient, dry riverbeds, Nix sat in a painful lotus position. The stone was an altar, and he was at its center. He was trying to pull the strange, thin energy of this place into his core, to knit his shattered Qi.
In his heart, a cold dread settled alongside the pain. *Escaped into a cage.*
His eyes traced the glowing, sword-like lines etched into the altar around him. They pulsed with a gentle, deadly light. *A trap within a trap. The formation will disintegrate any life that steps onto it without the key.* He was safe here, for now. But he was also pinned.
A vicious smile touched his cracked lips. *Just wait, you little bastards. Just wait until I can move again.*