Gen opened his eyes after what felt like an eternity. He found himself lying on a soft mat in the middle of an open-air pavilion, its pillars vanishing into a sea of white clouds that stretched in every direction, silent and endless.
*Am I dead?* he called out in shock, his voice swallowed by the vast emptiness.
Before he could stand, he noticed the chains. They were made of the same condensed, luminous cloud as the floor, sealing both his ankles with a gentle, unbreakable weight. He frowned deeply, tugging at them. They weren't solid, yet he couldn't break free. They felt less like restraints and more like **manifested conditions**.
It was then that he saw figures appear in the distant cloudbank. The mist parted like a curtain, revealing a graceful bridge of swirling vapor. As the figures approached, the clouds dissipated further, until Gen could faintly make out the impossible, soaring silhouette of a cylindrical building piercing the heavens.
The Tower of Wonder.
He muttered the name in shock.
The Tower Elder remembered taking a leisurely stroll, accompanied by Lorel and Madame Su. After a while, they completed their journey and landed soundlessly on the pavilion. Lorel's smile faltered into something bittersweet when she saw the cloud-chains on Gen's ankles, but she stopped firmly at a distance, not going any closer. All she wanted was to rush to his side, but for his own good—for all their good—she had to stay away.
Gen, seeing the distance she kept, felt a sharp pang of frustration. He scoffed, directing his anger at the Tower Elder. "What do you want, old man?"
Madame Su frowned. "That is not how you should speak to the person who saved you."
"Calm down, woman, I'm talking to *him*," Gen snapped.
Despite his harsh words, both Lorel and Madame Su stayed quiet, observing him not with anger, but with a deep, silent worry.
The Tower Elder, spoke with a voice that held the patience of stone. "The Tower of Wonder marks all those who go through its trial for life. It grants them incredible comprehension of the Wheels of Destiny. However, for those unable to break free of the Tower's mark… they must pay a price for that borrowed understanding."
Lorel bit her lip. "But part of the mark had disappeared. Why is he still going through all of this?"
The old man's gaze was impassive. "If you really care about him, you would do better by staying very far away from him. Once the alter ego takes full hold, the Gen you know will be gone. Replaced by what he was always supposed to become."
Madame Su stepped forward, her voice tight. "Is there nothing we can do? We cannot leave him chained here for life. We have to do something."
The Tower Elder shook his head slowly. "The trial is his to undergo. I cannot change or alter its course. He must face it alone. You may stay in the Tower in the meantime, but avoid any physical contact with him."
Having said his piece, the old man turned to leave.
But Lorel blocked his path, defiance etched in every line of her body. "You were the one who called us to the Tower," she said, her voice trembling with controlled fury. "You said he was important to you. But you will just let him die? What kind of love is that? I don't understand."
The Tower Elder looked at her, a flicker of something like weary annoyance in his ancient eyes. He shook his head and passed by her as if she were mist. "Jiang was my student. But he surpassed me long ago." He paused, his back to them, his final words dropping like stones into a still pond. "Sadly, this boy is not worth my training."
Lorel stumbled back two steps as if struck. *Jiang… had come to the Tower of Wonder in the past? He had been the student of its master?* Before the shock could fully register, the Elder was gone, vanishing into the cloud-sea, leaving Madame Su and Lorel alone with a furious, chained Gen.
Madame Su moved a little closer to the pavilion's edge, looking at him with a grief she rarely showed. "May you find the strength to pass this obstacle, Gen. Otherwise, I would have failed myself as your guardian." Her voice broke. She turned and walked away, following the path the Elder had taken.
Gen stood up, stretching his arms across the width of the pavilion, but a flickering barrier of solid air interrupted him, letting only his forearms pass through. He stretched a pleading hand out toward Madame Su's retreating back. "Madame Su! Help me! It's me, Gen! Your protege!"
She did not look back.
Lorel retreated a few inches from the pavilion's entrance, her heart a battlefield. She forced her voice to be calm. "Gen, calm down. Everything will be fine. I'm here."
Gen's smile brightened, a flash of his old, winning charm. "Right! You're here! Help me get out. Just take my hand, Lorel." He stretched his hand out through the barrier, his face a mask of pitiful hope.
Lorel shook her head, the movement causing a tear to trace her cheek. "I… I can't do that."
Gen's face flickered. His eyes darkened back to that obsidian shade. The hope vanished, replaced by a sneer. "Old bitch," he cursed, his voice dripping with venom. "That's all you know—obeying what you're told. You couldn't live without me, so I didn't even have to ask long before you ran back into my hands. Pathetic. Just wait for me to get out of here."
Lorel felt her heart shatter. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, nails biting into her palms as tears streamed freely down her face. "I can't be certain," she whispered, her voice raw, "if it's really you saying that, or really the alter ego, Gen. But I… I want to think that's not what you think."
Gen scoffed, leaning back and seating himself on the floor in a stiff, meditative position. He looked at her with open contempt. "Cry-baby Lorel. That's all you've ever been good at."
Lorel turned to leave, her tears falling silently to the cloud-floor. But as she prepared to walk away, she froze. She wasn't the girl from the past, running once everything became too hard to bear.
No.
She stilled herself and faced him again.
She sat down in a lotus position directly opposite him, just outside the shimmering barrier. Her tear-filled eyes locked onto his darkened ones. "I will wait here, Gen," she said softly, her voice firm despite the tremor.
Gen's eyes flickered. Just for an instant, his palm twitched toward his face as if to block her gaze. Then he closed his eyes immediately, as if afraid to keep looking at her.
They sat there in silence, a chained boy and a steadfast girl, separated by a hand's breadth of shimmering air and a universe of fractured spirit.
If she had to wait an entire lifetime, so be it. They had promised each other to reach immortality together. Perhaps this, this agonizing vigil in a sea of clouds, was the first, necessary step toward it.
Deep within the heart of the Tower of Wonder, in a chamber that existed between its physical stones and the conceptual space of its trials, the Tower Elder stood before a pool of still, mercury-like liquid. It did not reflect the room. It reflected the sky outside the Tower—a sky still marred by the two remaining Damocles, their ominous light bleeding into the silvered surface.
He was speaking, but there was no one to hear. The words were for the walls that remembered his student, and for the ghost of his own inaction.
"My world view has been affected," he murmured, the ageless timbre of his voice holding a new, unfamiliar weight. "This would perhaps be one of my greatest challenges."
For centuries, his perspective had been that of the **keeper**, the **observer**. The Tower was a crucible, not an army. It tested individuals, not shaped destinies. He had watched Jiang rise, a brilliant flame, and had been proud. He had watched that flame be snuffed out, and a profound, logical nihilism had settled in his ancient bones.
*Why fight for a world that was going to be destroyed anyway?*
So, he had waited. He had withdrawn the Tower from the affairs of men, letting it become a myth, a test for the ambitious few. He had told himself he was preserving the last pure school of the Wheels, unsullied by the coming doom.
But the image in the pool told a different story. It showed not just the Damocles, but the aftermath of the Heaven Gate. It showed the scrolls falling like black snow. It showed the hope in the eyes of children looking at a sky that was killing them.
He turned his head, as if he could see through miles of enchanted stone and cloud to the pavilion where a chained boy and a grieving girl sat in silent combat. To the scattered, battered few who still carried Jiang's legacy like a dying ember.
He had waited all this while for a good reason. Now, he understood he might have waited a little too long.
The passivity he had worn as wisdom now felt like a shroud. He had been a pillar of the Wheels of Destiny, and he had let the foundation crack without lifting a finger, telling himself the earthquake was inevitable.
"As one of the last pillars of the Wheels of Destiny," he said to the silent chamber, the words an oath spoken into the void, "I have to do something."
The resolve did not kindle a fire in his chest. It settled like a mountain deciding to move. It was a tectonic shift of purpose.
This was not just for the world. It was, in a deeply personal sense, for Gen. For the grandson of his spirit, the stubborn, flawed heir to the student he had loved and lost. The boy he had callously deemed "not worth" training, precisely because he saw in him the same desperate, chaotic potential that had once burned in a young Jiang—a potential he had been too weary to fan again.
It was time to act. To challenge a Divine General.
Perhaps in doing so, he could forge what was broken in this new generation. Perhaps he could re-light the faith that was guttering out. Or perhaps it would just cast more fire onto the already burning storm that was consuming their world.
He wasn't sure.
But waiting was not an option anymore. He had been passive, and it had led to this: a world seduced by a convenient corruption, and its last true heirs broken and scattered. He could not be passive any longer.
The Tower Elder, keeper of trials, master who had outlived epochs, looked once more at the Damocles in the mercury pool. Then he turned away, not toward the upper trials, but downward, toward the deepest, most silent vault of the Tower—a place where he had not walked since Jiang had stood before him, ready to change the world.
It was time to prepare for his final test. Not as an examiner, but as a participant.