Akashic Records.

I had been here before, technically. When I used the Mortis Lucida spell scroll years ago to save Luna, I found myself in this library. Well, "library" was a word too inadequate to describe the infinity of this place, the sheer verticality of knowledge stacked upon knowledge.

Back then, I was a tourist. Now, I was an invader.

Mortis Lucida. Death through enlightenment. It was a spell well beyond the Ninth Circle, even when compressed to single-use scrolls. It defied the standard mana efficiency laws I had just spent hours correcting for Charlotte.

How did it exist? The answer was obvious to me now, viewing the world through the lens of my new Divinity. It was created by the Nightingales. My ancestors hadn't just been strong mages; they had cheated. They used our bloodline limit, the Mythweaver, to write a backdoor into the system. They didn't cast a spell; they wrote a story where the spell existed, and the universe complied.

And now, I could do better.

Standing in the solitude of the Kagu estate's meditation chamber, I didn't chant. I didn't draw runes. I simply reached out with my will, grabbing the raw, unformed mana of the universe, and braided it with The Grey. I used Mythweaver to define the destination not as a place, but as a narrative necessity.

"Divine Edict: Aeterna Lucida," I whispered. Eternal Enlightenment.

I didn't shatter reality; I opened the book.

The world didn't peel away violently. It simply turned the page. The stone walls of the estate, the hum of the shields, the gravity of Earth—they became text on a previous leaf, read and finished. I stepped forward, not through space, but through context.

I was standing on the floor of the infinite.

The Akashic Records stretched before me, around me, above and below me. It was the architecture of existence given form—the smell of old paper and ozone, the endless, spiraling staircases that defied geometry, the shelves that held the weight of every thought ever conceived.

But it was wrong.

Before, the Records had felt like a sanctuary of absolute, sterile order. A place where dust dared not settle because 'dust' was a concept that had to be filed. Now, my perception—sharpened by the Tenth Circle—picked up a tremor. A subtle, pervasive vibration in the floor that shouldn't exist in a place outside of time.

The shelves weren't just leaning; they were screaming.

Viscous, black fluid—not ink, but something far more corrosive—dripped from the spines of books in the far distance. Where it touched the floor, the marble didn't melt; it simply ceased to be, replaced by a garbled static of conflicting textures.

"Welcome back, Arthur."

The voice was strained. I turned.

Akasha stood near a central lectern. She looked just as she had in my memories—golden hair woven from captured starlight, skin possessing the luminescence of newborn galaxies. She wore the robes of a librarian, woven from the fabric of history itself.

But she wasn't smiling. She was holding onto the lectern as if it were the only thing keeping her upright.

"Akasha," I said, my voice low. I didn't bow. I walked toward her, my own Grey Divinity humming in resonance with the wounded library. "You are hurt."

"Hurt? I am the Administrator, Arthur. I am the System," she said, her voice brittle. "I cannot bleed."

"You aren't bleeding blood," I said, stopping a few feet from her. I let The Grey wash over my vision, peeling back the layers of her divine projection to see the structure beneath. "You are being rewritten."

It wasn't a physical wound. Her golden light flickered erratically. A deep, jagged scar ran across her very presence, from her left shoulder down to her hip. But it wasn't a cut. It was a patch of wrongness. It looked like someone had taken a pen and scribbled violently over a sentence, trying to obscure the original meaning with chaotic, nonsensical noise.

She followed my gaze to her shoulder and sighed, the pretense dropping. "She is... persistent."

"The Demon Overlord," I said. "Is she ancient? Primordial? A creature from before the First Light?"

Akasha laughed, a dry, humorless sound. She pushed herself off the lectern, walking toward a shelf that was smoking.

"Do not give her that dignity," Akasha said sharply. "People love to invent grand origins for their destroyers. They want to believe the thing killing them is some ancient, inevitable force of nature. It makes the defeat feel destined."

She pulled a book from the shelf. The cover was charred.

"Tenebria isn't primordial. She isn't the 'void.' She is just... a mistake," Akasha said, her eyes darkening. "An anomaly that refused to be corrected. A runt who looked at the rules of biology and decided she didn't like them, so she broke them until she became strong enough to ignore them entirely."

She turned back to me, her expression fierce. "She is not older than the Records, Arthur. She is just louder."

"She killed the Great Seven Leaders," I said, stepping closer. "She destroyed their worlds. She is coming for Earth. And I need to know how to kill her."

"You killed Alyssara," Akasha noted, glancing at my chest where my Sword Heart pulsed. "A messy business. But you achieved Divine rank. You surpassed the script."

"I had to."

"And now you are here," she said. "Because you realized the physical war is a distraction. You realized that fighting her armies is meaningless if she can simply rewrite the rules of the battlefield."

"Yes," I said. "My power... The Grey... it comes from outside here. It's the only thing that can stop her."

"It is the only thing she cannot rewrite," Akasha corrected. "Because it was never written down. It is the variable she cannot account for."

She walked around me, her gaze critical, analyzing my aura. "You came here looking for a weapon. You want a spell. You want to know how to throw The Grey at her hard enough to make her stop."

"I need to end this," I stated. "So yes, give me a weapon."

Akasha stopped in front of me. She looked up, meeting my eyes. A look of gentle, almost pitying amusement crossed her face, mixed with a hard, teacher-like severity.

"You realize the source, Arthur. But you still fundamentally misunderstand the nature of your enemy."

She reached out, her hand glowing with that same iridescent light, and tapped my chest.

"You treat The Grey like a sword," she said. "You used it to cut Alyssara. You used it to negate Wrath. You assert truth. You deny falsehood. You wield it like a bludgeon to beat reality into submission."

She shook her head slowly.

"But Tenebria doesn't fight with magic. She doesn't fight with authority. She fights with Will."

The library trembled again. A massive chunk of the ceiling in the far distance collapsed into static.

"She defines a reality where you lose, and the universe obeys because she has never, not once in ten thousand years, accepted defeat," Akasha whispered. "You cannot cut a definition, Arthur. You cannot stab a concept."

"Then what do I do?" I demanded.

"You stop trying to be a warrior who rejects the lie," she commanded, the order ringing like a bell in my soul. "And you start learning how a girl born with nothing conquered everything."

Akasha turned back to the lectern. She waved her hand, and the massive book atop it slammed open. The pages weren't paper; they were swirling vortexes of memory.

"To kill the Beast, you must understand the Runt," she said, gesturing to the book. "I cannot teach you this. I am merely the librarian. You must go into the archives. You must witness the history she is trying to erase."

She looked at me, her eyes burning with desperation.

"Dive into the deep past, Arthur. Find the moment she was born. Find the flaw in her perfection. Because if you don't..." She looked at her flickering hand. "There will be no history left to save."

I looked at the swirling vortex in the book. It didn't look like a library archive. It looked like a battlefield.

"Show me," I said.

And I jumped in.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.