Into the Loom
Aeon crossed the threshold, and the world fell away.
There was no sense of solid ground, no floor of carved stone or sky-bound platforms. Instead, the moment he stepped through, he found himself surrounded by a vast, shifting sea of possibilities.
It felt like being drowned in mirrors — but the mirrors did not show his reflection. They showed versions of himself, scattered like constellations across a night sky of flowing memory.
One moment he saw himself as a child, a boy who had never left his family's modest estate, never walked the path of cultivation. Another instant showed a grown man, but bowed in servitude, the Tower never dreamed, the Empire's yoke heavy upon his shoulders.
The illusions swept over him with dizzying force, each one real — so real his heart jolted with the taste of their regrets.
A farmer, never a cultivator, his family safe but his soul restless.
A scholar, honored by the White Palace, yet never risking the forging of the Tower, dying with wisdom left unspoken.
A conqueror, corrupted by ambition, whose Tower became a weapon instead of a trial.
The Loom of Broken Futures gave him no rest.
Every step forward caused another version of himself to appear, solid and speaking. They challenged him, condemned him, pleaded with him.
"Why did you leave us?" cried the farmer-Aeon, holding a child with a hollow look in its eyes.
"Why did you not build more?" accused the warlord-Aeon, wearing a crown of broken iron, hands still bloody.
"Why did you build at all?" asked the scholar-Aeon, voice quaking with grief. "Why did you bind your will to this endless struggle?"
Aeon staggered, his mind swaying under the weight. Each step felt like tearing out a thread of his own soul.
Focus.
He steadied his breath. He had known, rationally, what this floor was designed to do. But even so, the emotional reality of it pressed on him with a force he could barely withstand.
He tried to call out his intention, to stabilize the illusions:
"I am Aeon. I built this place. I stand by my choices."
But the Loom refused to settle.
Instead, the illusions strengthened, multiplying. Now they showed whole worlds changed by his path:
A Tower that crumbled, killing thousands.
A Tower that elevated only a chosen few, dooming the masses to lifelong envy and despair.
A Tower whose floors grew so powerful they attracted the wrath of the Grand Dao itself, collapsing reality.
These possibilities struck harder than any sword.
Aeon's knees buckled.
A voice — calm, cold, and intimately familiar — rang through the illusions.
"Are you proud, Aeon?"
He looked up, startled, and saw… himself. Or rather, the worst of himself, clad in black robes patterned with the Tower's symbols twisted into cruel chains. This version of Aeon's face was lean, almost gaunt, eyes gleaming with an inhuman resolve.
Dark-Aeon stepped forward, contempt in his smile.
"You forced a thousand souls to remember their regrets. Then you broke them on your wheel of meaning. Is that not arrogance? Is that not tyranny?"
Aeon swallowed, unable to look away.
"I did what was needed," he rasped.
"Needed?" sneered Dark-Aeon. "Or wanted? Do you really believe your hands are clean?"
The illusions twisted around him again, showing the faces of every climber who had wept, screamed, or fallen senseless under the Tower's earlier trials.
They judged him with silent agony.
Aeon felt his heart crack.
Is this what I have done?
His resolve trembled. For a moment, he nearly stepped back.
But then —
A small spark inside him.
A memory.
He remembered Vyra, on the Spiral Path, who had changed her regrets and survived. He remembered Sayrin, who had accepted betrayal and walked on.
They had grown stronger.
They had chosen again, beyond regret.
Aeon drew in a shuddering breath.
"I gave them the chance to transcend," he whispered, more to himself than the illusions. "No one forced them."
Dark-Aeon laughed, cruel and resonant.
"Keep telling yourself that."
He lifted a hand, and the Loom responded. The illusions multiplied again, forming an entire army of broken-future Aeons, each one howling their failures, their wrong turns, their unbearable prices.
Aeon looked around, a hundred thousand pairs of accusing eyes staring at him.
This is only the beginning, he thought grimly. If I cannot withstand my own regrets, how can I demand others do so?
With that, he gritted his teeth, rooted his will, and took another step deeper into the fractal storm of the Sixth Floor.
Aeon took another step forward, and the illusions roared around him. The kaleidoscope of other-Aeons flickered with every motion of his spirit. Memories twisted into nightmares, then reshaped themselves with terrifying ease.
One moment he was surrounded by his ancestors, their faces stone-cold and disappointed. The next, he stood before a howling mob of cultivators accusing him of building a prison, not a trial.
"You are a tyrant!" shouted one.
"You chained us to regret!" screamed another.
"You judged us unworthy!"
The chorus struck at his heart like blades.
Aeon's breath came ragged, and he felt a cold sweat run down his spine. The illusions were relentless, testing every crack, every tiny wound in his Dao Heart.
He forced his mind to calm, breathing deeply.
They are phantoms, he told himself. Phantoms of my fear.
Another step.
The floor beneath him rippled with each motion, as if woven from shifting tides of memory and consequence. He realized then that the Loom was not merely showing what might have been — it was making him live it. Each breath felt heavier, as though the air belonged to a world where he had already failed.
His senses swam, threatening to drown him in infinite regrets.
A memory-shard struck him then with brutal force:
He saw himself atop the Seventh Floor, the Tower shattering beneath his feet, countless souls screaming as the Grand Dao collapsed into chaos. Aeon felt every death, every scream, like barbed wire around his bones.
He fell to his knees, gasping.
I did this.
The illusions tightened, sensing weakness. They pounced.
"You will kill them all!" Dark-Aeon's voice thundered, echoing from everywhere. "You dare believe your will is enough to bear such weight? You are nothing but a child who stumbled into power!"
Aeon's spirit reeled.
His will began to crack.
Then — a thread of calm.
Deep inside, where the spiral of his own cultivation had wound itself tighter than steel, he remembered his first lesson from Grandmother Kirell.
"The Tower is an extension of you," she had told him. "If your heart fails, then so will it. But if your heart holds, then no illusion can break you."
His eyes snapped open, clearing just a fraction.
My heart, he thought. My choices.
He forced his hands to steady. Summoned his core, the anchor of every path he had ever walked.
"I will not deny my failures," he whispered to the illusions, voice trembling but honest. "But I will not let them own me, either."
The Loom seemed to pause.
The illusions shimmered, confused by his sudden certainty.
Aeon stood.
One breath. Two. Three.
"Show me everything," he challenged, eyes fierce. "If I am to stand on the Seventh Floor, I must know every flaw, every sin, every consequence. But I will not bow."
The illusions recoiled — and then attacked in a last desperate wave.
Scenes slammed into him, more brutal than before:
— The Tower abandoned, crumbling to dust.
— His own death in obscurity, meaningless.
— Friends lost because of pride.
— The Grand Dao itself rejecting him, annihilating all who dared defy it.
They tore at his mind with claws of unbearable guilt.
Aeon clenched his jaw so tightly he tasted blood.
He reached out — not to fight the illusions, but to accept them.
Every image, every failure, every moment of grief — he took them in, wrapped them around his heart like a burial shroud, then let them burn in the furnace of his will.
"You are mine," he said, voice a low growl. "Every possibility, every regret. You belong to me. I have chosen."
The illusions screamed in one final chorus — then shattered like glass, exploding into a rain of crystal threads that fell into silence.
Aeon stood alone once more.
His shoulders shook. His eyes burned. But he was still standing.
Around him, the Loom's illusions collapsed, and the floor began to respond. The walls of possibility rippled, receding into clear, gentle patterns of sigils and light.
The true heart of the Sixth Floor revealed itself — a still, infinite white space, marked by seven burning glyphs, each representing a core truth of a cultivator's path:
Choice. Will. Sacrifice. Growth. Love. Suffering. Transcendence.
Aeon stepped forward, the final illusions falling away.
He had passed the Loom.
And behind him, for those who would come next, the illusions began to slowly reweave themselves — waiting to test the next challenger.
Aeon turned to look back just once, then whispered:
"May you learn to survive yourself."
With that, he walked onward, preparing to descend and begin the Seventh.