During the First Enlightenment, the precise date unknown, in the territory of modern Euth

  They say he was the star who walked the earth.

  They say he was the first to break the chain and see the world beyond the cave.

  They say he was the greatest sage of them all.

  And they say-

  He was the sinner, the sage, the fool.

  His words were the gnosis, his thoughts only wisdom.

  This was his palace- a circle of great stones, witnesses of death and rebirth, observers of tears and laughter. Now they mark the path of the moon and the sun, pinning the position of the stars. As the moon matched the marking on the great stone in the middle, the ritual began.

  He drew the sigils and symbols on the ground, his obsidian dagger coated in blood as he felt the power emerging from the ritual.

  Realm-art: Palace of Stars

  White pillars rose from the ground as they filled in the empty slots between the great stones, and starlight leaked from beyond as silver threads twitched out of the shining dagger. He stabbed the ritual dagger into the ground, white threads climbing up the blade as he felt it connecting to the greater world beyond the skies.

  This was a knock.

  A knock to disturb the eternal slumber of the aeonian beings.

  …

  Suiming

  He hid in the chamber. Suiming peeked out of the door, and not even a strand of hair was sticking outside his robe’s hood.

  A girl was outside, running on the castle wall as she laughed. Her white, long hair twirled in the air like a bird soaring in the sky. She walked, jumping and twirling, as if performing, her thin, cold dress was her gown, and the night sky was her background. Suiming took off his monocle, and she was still there. He would never mistake that face, even from afar, his companion and dear friend for thousands of years. However, he had rarely seen Nameless so full of life, leaping and dancing. Thinking about that, Suiming believed that the last time he saw Nameless dance was the time Fosfor taught her new steps she had seen in Treisaules.

  “…Chaos is their liking…” Suiming muttered as he reached for his strap. Not looking for any particular item, he brought, but just letting his subconscious choose.

  “Hah, chaos, I know a thing or two about it,” he said as he grabbed the knife. The contour of it felt familiar. From what that thing said to him, Nameless was imprisoned in here…and freeing her? There was too little information for him to decide what to do exactly. Right now, he could only point to the reason for his arrival in this place as either that an Existence sent him here or that Barricade banished him into this strange castle. However, one thing was rather peculiar. Why was Nameless here? Taking into account that the stars in this place were completely strange to him, it was safe to assume that this place was either not the planet he was from or that this place was created by a powerful being.

  He wasn’t sure if Nameless had access to the piece of Unknown Existence here, and there was one way of finding out. Nameless’s source of power granted her one ability that she had no control over. Like the creation of the Moon of Evolution, her wounds heal up incredibly fast…and if she had no access to the piece, he could at least treat the wound with what he had.

  Nameless was still walking on the opposing side of the castle wall, gazing at the stars and looking toward the distant horizon. She seemed so far away, almost unreachable like the moon.

  Suiming slowly walked toward Nameless, putting his feet as light as possible while letting his robe blend him into the night. He clung to the dagger hard. Running his finger across the uneven surface many times until his hand remembered the shape of it. What if she wasn’t real? …How am I supposed to get out of here?

  Seeing that Nameless was strolling toward the veil-covered stand, Suiming lowered his body and hid behind the stand. He pressed his nail against his palm, not daring to look at Nameless. Suiming waited until he heard the sound of the cloth sliding off the stand and a loud gasp.

  He stepped out, finding Nameless staggered, face almost as pale as her hair, amber eyes trembling as she struggled to say anything.

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  Chaos is to their liking…what if I pretend I am the First Mephisto?

  “Do you still think you belong here?” Suiming said in Yellian, trying his best to cut out all the intonation and flatten his tone.

  “Who are you?” she responded.

  “Me? Oh, darling, aren’t you tired from this game of princess and servants?” Suiming answered carelessly, fiddling with the knife in his pocket.

  Now, what would he say?

  “Come on, the survivor of Yel, can you even recall your name?”

  Nameless rarely acted like she didn’t have an answer, but her stuttering, head-scratching, and swaying eye already answered the question for Suiming.

  Wait…does she remember anything? Does that mean her memories are sealed away, too?

  “I a-am-”

  “Y-you are the…” she said, her eyes looking directly at Suiming.

  “You are The First Mephisto-”

  Suiming trembled; the robe felt heavy again, heavier than his guilt of intending to hurt Nameless. He swallowed as he jerked his arm, pulling off the robe, feeling the heaviness flying away. He noticed the blood had soaked through the robe and stained his clothes, but despite it, it should have dried a long time ago; it was still soaking deeper.

  “Well done. Now wake the hell up,” he said as he pushed the knife into Nameless.

  “Before I go, do you think the future has a place for you?” Suiming whispered. As he pushed the knife deeper, he noticed a mistake. He had shoved the knife in the wrong spot, and it now penetrated Nameless’ chest instead of her abdomen.

  With a tear rolling off his cheek, he let go of the knife. Their greeting started with a stab in the chest…and it felt just like that day, thousands of years ago. Suiming’s heart was racing fast. What had he done? The red flowed out, painting her white dress in a foul crimson. A gasp exited her mouth as she fell to the ground. There was something for Suiming to do…pressure the wound, stabilize the knife, reposition her body to slow the blood flow… Then find a place where Suiming would have access to all the needed tools and materials for a ritual.

  As Suiming took the black robe and put it between his hand and Nameless’s wound, applying pressure to the site, expecting the sticky warmth of blood, he fell on the ground instead.

  Bubbles.

  Golden bubbles reflected his face, his tear-covered violet eyes, his keyhole-shaped irises, the bruise on his face, and the trails left by his teardrops. Nameless was gone; only the emptiness remained. Suiming had guessed right; he had freed the prisoner of this castle and ended the facade of peace and mundanity.

  The bubbles rose to the sky, joining the stars to embroider the sky. Countless lights shone up there, but none shed light on Suiming.

  “Sui…Ming…Sui for broken, Ming for light…Is my world up there, hanging in the sky?”

  More bubbles surrounded him. Bricks, dust, walls, and nails, broken down into crystalline golden beads, slowly leaving him like the old times, and people he once befriended, sunrises he once saw, and shooting stars he once wished upon.

  Suiming stood up, slowly, as he felt the pain coming back from the wound in his abdomen. He turned around, seeing that the castle walls had all steamed away into those golden drops. Everything was leaving the bounds of the earth and emerging toward the sky.

  Suiming stood there, looking at the ground he stood on, fading away as he reached for the monocle. There was still enough time scraped off Parsley’s summon that could sustain one last time stop.

  He fell, just like when he fell down the mansion after dueling Guiyan. The bubbles brushed him, so many of them that he felt like he was drowning.

  “…Would you stop for me?” he murmured.

  Right as he was about to freeze time, a great shadow cast over him.

  The bubbles, joined into a lump of gold, had trembled. Like a field of blooming dandelions disturbed by the wind. They covered the stars, replacing the boundless sky, and became the only thing in Suiming’s sight. He didn’t activate the monocle’s power; he couldn’t do it. As he slowly drowned in the depths of the golden beads, he heard a crack. He felt the phantom pain in his abdomen intensifying, just like the time when his gut wrenched in the Realm of Gaps.

  Suiming tried to distract himself from the pain as he searched for a way to stop himself from falling down. He turned in the waterfall of the bubbles, each of which showed a world different than the world he knew. Suiming saw scenes of moving cities that strode in the smog, scenes of a world unscathed by industrial advancement, where giant fungi grew, and he saw a world covered in the same golden ocean.

  Many worlds were flushed away in this surge of bubbles, each of them so different, so vast, and so endless. Yet many of them were empty; only debris of stars remained. He searched in the waterfall of beads, searching for the world where the Codex forged by an Existence ruled over the innocent, where the gentle and lovely light shone from a tree and the world he loved. He saw countless worlds passing him like shooting stars, some of them dead-empty, some of them just cosmic ruins of a once-blooming universe.

  “When Yel sent its probe into the vast universe before it left our solar system, it took a picture of our world…a dust in the eternal dead void…”

  Suiming let his body sink. His hand was flushed and beaten by the marble as he relaxed his body. He curled his legs as he buried his face between his knees, feeling the pain from his wounds as his body was hit again and again by the endless beads.

  As he fell into the endless trench that seemed to go on forever, Suiming felt a presence. Immense pressure came onto him as he was stunned in place, unable to move his body against the absolute authority of that being. It came from the lump of bubbles above; he could see it without facing it, like the scene was forcefully injected into his mind’s eye.

  And the sky opened its eye.