Mortis Lucida.
The world shattered like glass around me.
One moment I was facing Cardinal Akasha, my daughter's life hanging in the balance, my heart burning with desperate fury. The next, reality simply... ceased. Not darkness, not light, but something beyond the concept of either. I felt myself dissolving, my consciousness expanding beyond the confines of flesh and bone into something vast and incomprehensible.
'Mortis Lucida,' I realized with crystalline clarity. 'Enlightenment through death of the self.'
The sensation was indescribable—like being torn apart and rebuilt simultaneously, every atom of my being unraveled and rewoven into patterns that mortal minds weren't meant to perceive. I was dying and being reborn in the same instant, my limited human perspective burning away to reveal truths that existed beyond the veil of ordinary reality.
And then, suddenly, I was standing.
