The world twisted, folded, and then snapped back into a shape that was fundamentally wrong.

I was in.

The silence of the tower wasn't empty; it was heavy. It pressed against my eardrums, against my skin, against the very concept of my identity. It was a medium, a thick, viscous atmosphere of violet-hued dread that instantly tried to smother the fire of my soul.

I staggered, my spectral hand instinctively going to my chest. The air here tasted like copper, metallic and stale, as if it had been recycled through a billion lungs and stripped of everything vital.

Oppression. That was the word. It wasn't a psychic attack, not yet. It was environmental. The resonance of the essence of this place were attuned to a specific frequency: submission.

I took a breath, but the air didn't want to enter my lungs. I tried to lift a foot, but the floor didn't want to let go. The environment was hostile not because it was burning or freezing, but because it was conceptually rigid. It rejected the variable of 'movement.' It demanded stasis.

This is what hit her, I realized, a cold pit forming in my stomach.

Anna, my fierce little sister, had walked into this unshielded. The moment the door sealed, this ocean of stagnation had crashed down on her Tier 4 spirit. It hadn't needed to fight her. It had just sat on her until her will cracked. She had endured this crushing, silent weight for what felt like weeks, screaming into a void that refused to carry sound. The guilt washed over me again, sharper than before, but I forced it down. I needed that cold clarity. I wasn't here to mourn. I was here to scout the enemy.

Stage 2, I thought, engaging my defenses. That was the biggest difference, her evolution into Tier 5, obtaining a proper Domain, would have made this much easier to endure.

I didn't flare my aura outward. That would be suicide; it would attract every antibody in this colossal organism. Instead, I wrapped my Domain around myself like a second skin. The [Domain of the Ashen Phoenix] became a microscopic layer of absolute truth hovering millimeters above my flesh. Inside that layer, I determined the rules. Inside that layer, I could move. I could breathe. I could exist.

It was a diving bell lowering into the deep dark.

I stood up straight, the conceptual weight sliding off my shielded form. The nausea receded, replaced by a razor-sharp focus. I began to move, stepping carefully across the seamless obsidian floor.

The architecture was… hideous.

Not in construction — it was flawless — but in intent. The black stone of the walls wasn't solid. As I moved deeper into the spiraling corridor, my [Predator's Gaze] picked up subtle, rhythmic shifts in the surface. The walls were breathing. Faint, pulsating veins of deep purple light threaded through the masonry, throbbing with a slow, lethargic tempo.

It felt biological, like the building wasn't housing something; the building was the husk, and I was walking down its throat.

I kept my steps light, my very existence pulled tight against me. I was a ghost in a graveyard, terrified of waking the groundskeeper.

There were no guards. No patrols or any life signatures for that matter. The atmosphere itself was the jailer.

I ascended a long, spiraling ramp that wound its way up the hollow interior of the spire. The vertigo was intense. The geometry here was hostile, twisting in ways that hurt the eyes, angles that seemed acute and obtuse at the same time.

I climbed for what felt like hours in the vision-time, though my rational mind knew it was only minutes. The silence was the worst part. It wasn't peaceful. It was expectant.

Finally, the ramp opened into a vast, vaulted atrium. I stepped out onto a balcony overlooking the chamber, and my breath hitched in my throat. I stopped dead, my hand gripping the cold obsidian railing until the knuckles of my projection turned white.

I had found the population of Va'lour.

The atrium was colossal, a hollowed-out cavern inside the tower that must have spanned miles, defying the external dimensions of the spire. And it was filled.

Thousands… no, millions of people. They weren't piles of bodies. They weren't stacked in graves. They were standing. The floor of the atrium was a sea of motionless forms, arranged in precise, spiraling patterns that led toward the center. I looked down at the nearest ones, just below the balcony.

They were people of all kinds. Tall, slender humanoids with opalescent skin; squat, muscular beings with stone-like plating; creatures that looked remarkably human.

And they were all silently screaming.

Every single face was contorted in a mask of absolute, unadulterated horror. Eyes wide, blood vessels burst, mouths agape in silent howls that would never end.

But they weren't dead.

My [Predator's Gaze], filtered through the lens of the future-vision, washed over the crowd below.

Scanning every person around. They were all completely frozen. Caught in the exact nanosecond of their greatest fear.

I moved down the stairs, unable to stay detached, unable to keep the professional distance of a scout. I walked among them, into the crowd of the damned.

I passed a woman shielding a child. Her arm was raised, muscles taut, veins popping in her neck as she tried to push an invisible weight away. Her eyes were locked on something above her, filled with a despair so deep it felt like radiation. The child buried his face in her hip, his small body rigid, trembling but unable to move.

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I passed a man on his knees, hands clasped in prayer, his face wet with tears that had ceased to flow. The droplets hung on his cheeks, glimmering like diamonds in the violet gloom.

I passed two lovers, their hands joined. They weren't looking at the horror above. They were looking at each other, their expressions a mix of terror and a heartbreaking goodbye that never got to be spoken.

They were warm. I could feel the radiant heat of their bodies through my domain. Their hearts were beating, but impossibly slow — one beat every few minutes, perhaps. A metabolism dragged down to the event horizon of stopping, but never quite allowed to cross it.

"Why?" I whispered, the sound terrifyingly loud in the silence. "Why keep them?"

Then I felt it. The flow.

I looked down at the floor. The polished obsidian beneath the victims' feet was etched with complex runic channels, microscopic lines that connected every single person standing in this room.

Faint, wispy trails of white light — a strange form of Essence — were leaking from them.

It wasn't a fast drain. It wasn't a slaughter. It was a siphon, feeding on their horror.

The light drifted upward, pulled from their frozen bodies, carrying with it the specific resonant frequency of their terror. This wasn't just eating their Essence. It was harvesting their experience. The system was holding them in their worst nightmare, preserving that spike of adrenaline and fear, and feeding on the output.

They were batteries. Living, suffering batteries, kept in a permanent state of trauma to power… what?

I felt a wave of nausea so violent I almost severed the vision right there. This was an abomination on a scale that made Thalanil's cruelty look like a child's tantrum. This was industrialized suffering.

This was what Anna had felt. The connection to this web. The demand to stand still and be drained.

My rage flared, hot and sudden, threatening to crack my stealth. I wanted to burn it. I wanted to unleash the Ashen Phoenix and turn this entire tower into slag, to free these people from this living hell.

But I didn't. I had to find out more.

I forced my feet to move, weaving through the forest of frozen agony. I followed the spiral. I followed the flow of the white soul-light and reached the center.

The space opened up into a massive, circular clearing in the crowd.

And there, floating suspended above a pit of swirling, violet mist, was the center piece.

It was… indescribable.

It didn't look like a machine, and it didn't look like a monster. It looked like an exposed organ of a god. A massive, pulsating complex of dark, wet bio-matter and cold, intricate clockwork. Cables thick as tree trunks, slick with fluids, trailed down from it, plunging into the abyss below, rooting it to the heart of the planet.

The mechanism shifted constantly. Gears made of bone clicked and whirred silently. Membrane sacks inflated and deflated with a wet, rhythmic sound.

It was huge, easily the size of the Cradle's main fortress. And all around it, hundreds of thousands of the thin white threads of soul-light converged, feeding into it.

As I watched, transfixed by the horror of it, the machine pulsed. A wave of violet energy washed out from it, passing over the millions of victims. Their silent screams seemed to intensify for a microsecond, their frozen bodies shuddering as if shocked, producing a fresh burst of essence which the machine greedily sucked in.

I stood there, a speck of dust before this monument to entropy. I needed to know more. I needed to know if this thing was conscious. If it could be reasoned with, or only killed.

Cautiously, I raised my head. I focused my [Predator's Gaze] not on the machine, but on the space around it, trying to read the ambient mana signature.

What are you?

The moment my intent touched the air near the machine, the whirring stopped.

The gears of bone locked into place. The wet, pumping membranes froze.

The sudden cessation of the rhythmic sound hit me like a physical blow. The silence in the chamber shifted. It was no longer indifferent, it was attentive.

Slowly, the central mass of the machine rotated.

There were no eyes. No face. Just a smooth, glistening surface of violet-black chitin.

But I felt it look at me.

It didn't scan the room. It didn't search the millions of bodies. It didn't look around. It looked down, not at my projection standing on the floor, but at the causal link of my skill. It looked past the vision, and its gaze drilled straight into my real mind, sitting miles away.

My Internalized Domain trembled. It didn't break, but it groaned under the weight of an attention that felt as heavy as a moon.

I couldn't move. In the vision, I was paralyzed, my nose uncontrollably bleeding.

The entity didn't speak. It didn't roar. It simply acknowledged an irregularity in its garden.

A window appeared in my vision. It was ragged, the edges tearing into my peripheral sight like burned parchment. The text within was a deep, weeping purple.

A Conqueror hath come.

The machine-thing began to glow. The violet light intensified, building up a charge that promised absolute obliteration.

I tried to sever the Glimpse, but I couldn't. It felt as if the connection was held open from the other side, gripping me.

Another text formed, dripping into existence.

But a Ghost shan't Witness a Throne.

The text paused, shimmering with a malice that felt ancient and cold.

You live, Unconquered, for now.

The world shattered.

The vision didn't just end; it was violently ripped away. I felt a sensation like a hook tearing out of my brain. A pulse of violet force traveled backward along the path of my sight, screaming down the timeline.

I woke up in the real world with a scream stuck in my throat.

My eyes flew open, not to the violet horror, but to the earthen ceiling of the root-cave.

"Master!" Rexxar's voice boomed, fear laced in his tone.

I convulsed, arching my back as a shockwave of pure headache split my skull. I scrambled backward, gasping for air, my hands clawing at the dirt, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

Blood was dripping freely from my nose. My ears were ringing with a high-pitched, dissonant whine.

"Eren!" Anna was there, her hands on my face, her eyes wide with panic. "Eren, what happened? You were floating… you started bleeding!"

I couldn't speak for a moment. I just heaved, staring at the entrance of the cave, terrified that the violet light would come pouring in after me.

"It saw me," I wheezed, clutching Anna's wrist, my voice trembling. "It knew I wasn't there."

I looked at Arthur, whose face was grave, sensing the residual energy bleeding off me.

"The people," I whispered, the horror of the gallery crashing down on me. "They're all still there, Anna. Millions of them. It didn't kill them, whatever that thing was."

I looked into her eyes, understanding finally the depth of the hell she had escaped.

"It's keeping them alive, in a constant state of agonized suffering."

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