The pure white void began to collapse, like a mirror-world abandoned by the gods, shattering irreversibly into billions of prism shards. Every fracture flowed with silver-blue magical embers, like torn stardust rivers streaking across the void in hauntingly beautiful arcs.
A sudden, searing pain surged through Raine's right arm—an ancient power, long dormant, was being awakened by the shockwaves of the void's destruction. From his elbow, deep blue crystalline veins erupted like a butterfly breaking free of its cocoon—this was no ordinary crystallization, but the celestial resonance of his dragonblood lineage.
Each cluster of crystal grew according to the sacred geometry of the stars: the central spine formed a hexagonal core, while branching dodecahedrons orbited like satellites drawn by gravity. Between the edges flowed starlight, as if fragments of the galaxy had been forged into his mortal flesh.
"Crystalline Firmament!"
Raine's voice echoed in the vacuum in Draconic, his words condensing into visible ripples of silver runes that spread out slowly in the weightless space. The crystal clusters expanded faster than physical laws should allow, and in a thousandth of a second, they wove a perfect icosahedral star-shield around him. Its surface was etched with the Dragonkin's oldest astral glyphs—each time destructive energy from the collapsing realm struck the barrier, the runes pulsed like a living breath, deconstructing the shockwave into countless motes of light, like a miniature supernova blossoming and dissolving.
Yet beneath the shelter of this radiant firmament, Ravenna's body was undergoing a far crueler disintegration.
The outer casing of her mechanical heart peeled back like withered metal petals, exposing a chaotic matrix of reversing gears within. Golden energy fluid burst from ruptured hydraulic valves, forming a weightless nebula of liquid starlight that hovered between them—each droplet refracting the glowing runes etched on Raine's shield.
Countless tendrils of light had taken root in her veins, greedily siphoning her life force.
"Hold on!"
Raine reached out with his left hand to steady her, but the moment his fingers made contact, a surge of emerald crystalization burst forth from his fingertips. Unlike the celestial crystalline structure on his right arm, these green, translucent clusters resembled organic vascular conduits, their surfaces glistening with dew-like energy droplets—like life-fossils from some long-lost magical forest.
"This is... Elven Vital Crystallization?"
Raine's pupils contracted. Snatches of ancient draconic tomes flashed through his mind—"The Emerald Touch," the legendary ultimate healing art of the Elven Court, said to only awaken in those with deep resonance to the primal force of nature.
But he had no time to unravel this revelation.
Ravenna's mechanical heart suddenly let out a shrill, earsplitting whine—so high-pitched it could rupture an ordinary person's eardrum. Her body arched violently, ten fingers digging into the chest-implanted device with desperate force. As her nails split and shattered, beads of blood floated out, suspended in the weightless air like miniature planets. Her pupils contracted into pinpoints, and a gear-shaped concentric ring pattern bloomed across her irises.
"Sev...en...Star...Lock..."
The words scraped from her very soul.
At the core of her mechanical heart, the three-ring glyph began to twist and convulse. The central lightning sigil cracked and broke apart, then reformed—projecting a miniature constellation into the air. Seven luminous nodes, interwoven in the impossible topology of a Klein bottle, twisted endlessly upon themselves. Along each connective line pulsed blood-red arcane runes, alive with forbidden power.
The sound of the space shattering was like a billion panes of glass exploding at once—sharp, endless, and sorrowful—tearing through the silence of the void. Raine and Ravenna, like twin falling stars, were flung into the unfathomable depths of the starsea.
The Crystalline Firmament reacted instinctively, expanding a translucent membrane of energy around them. This veil, light as silk, transformed the deadly cosmic radiation into a soft violet glow, casting a mysterious shimmer in the freezing darkness.
The Starsea—far grander and more perilous than legend foretold.
Floating within were not just luminous celestial bodies, but the wreckage of vast starships—once-mighty vessels that had traversed the multiverse, now corroded and broken, their dragonbone hulls fractured, still faintly etched with dim magical runes. Even more terrifying were the remains of colossal beasts: spines coiled like mountains, skulls the size of moons. Their fossilized bones were inscribed with ancient curse-glyphs, silently recounting a divine war lost to the flow of time.
Through his dragonborn Stellar Sight, Raine peered into the remnants, sensing the energy echoes that still clung to them:
Elven emerald aura, pure and brimming with life;
Draconic golden starlight, radiant and solemn;
Human silver-white arcane residue, delicate and wise...
All of it—torn apart by an unseen violence, then frozen in this ocean of stars, transformed into eternal tombstones in the void.
At that moment—
Seven beams of light suddenly ignited from the core of Ravenna's mechanical heart, piercing the void like morning stars breaking through the darkness. In an instant, they precisely marked seven distinct locations across the starsea. The "stars" illuminated by those beams slowly revealed their true forms—seven colossal floating sanctuaries, each bearing the elegant silhouette reminiscent of the Moonwell architecture of ancient Silverdew, yet hundreds of times larger, like scattered remnants of a divine realm.
The seven sanctuaries were linked by radiant chains of spirit-light, forming a complex web of runes that tightly bound the swirling mass of darkness at the center—a seething void that devoured all surrounding light.
"The Beidou Prison..."
Raine's throat rumbled with an ancient word in Draconic, his voice deep and reverent.
In response, the crystalline growths on his arm automatically reshaped themselves, constructing a living, pulsing star map in the air before him. It displayed the sanctuaries' precise positions and the luminous energy arteries that flowed between them. Even more astonishingly, as he focused on each sanctuary, a torrent of knowledge surged into his mind, as if the stars themselves were whispering:
Tianshu Sanctuary, cradle of the Eternal Root that sustains the flow of time;
Tianxuan Sanctuary, keeper of the Hourglass of Ages, a magical device that governs the sands of fate;
Tianji Sanctuary, home to the Stellar Forge, where the light of souls is tempered and reforged...
Each name, each function—etched into his consciousness with celestial clarity and depth.
The silence of the starsea was suddenly torn apart by a bolt of black lightning.
It struck from the deepest rift in the void, ripping open the starsea's boundary and exposing a pulsing, viscous wound of shadow. From within that wound, countless distorted human faces began to emerge, each one locked in silent screams. Pain and despair twisted together, forming a nightmarish tapestry of suffering.
"Clever little children..."
Voices poured out from every twisted face at once, their combined speech rippling through the void in alternating waves of silver-white and shadowy violet. The tone was cold, contemptuous—laced with the deceitful cunning that was unmistakably the Dreamweaver's:
"You think you know everything... yet you forget—these memories are part of me as well!"
Hundreds of overlapping vocal strands suddenly fused into a soul-piercing shriek. Raine's crystalline starshield trembled violently, the stellar runes across its surface flickering in chaos as they struggled to fend off the assault on the mental plane.
The Dreamweaver—the hidden puppeteer behind both arcane and mechanical systems—was no mere being. Its influence saturated every rune, every cogwheel, every thread of reality, like an invisible shackle binding all fates that dared resist.
"The Beidou Prison isn't just a forbidden construct..." Raine gritted his teeth, the power of the starvault within his draconic blood boiling through his veins.
"It's the ultimate holy relic the ancient dragons forged to seal the Shadow. If the seven sanctuaries fall, the entire starsea will dissolve into nothingness!"
Ravenna's mechanical heart let out one final thunderous pulse. The seven beams of light wrapped around her like chains, binding her form in celestial geometry. Her voice rang out—an alloy of cold machine resonance and burning mortal resolve:
"Then with our souls... we will reforge the prison!"
Raine's crystalline growth on his right arm surged to full bloom, the starvault shield expanding to its absolute limit. Meanwhile, the emerald crystal embedded in his left hand erupted into a flourishing network of life threads, intertwining with the golden mechanical chains extending from Ravenna's body.
As the space around them began to reverse—twisting inward like the eye of a collapsing star—Ravenna's body suddenly jerked upright in defiance of all biological laws. Her mechanical heart burst with an intensity of gold light never seen before, illuminating her chest so vividly that the skin turned translucent. Beneath it, golden tendrils could be seen sprouting at the boundary between flesh and steel, merging the two opposing materials into one seamless entity.
"Raine, look!" Ravenna's voice carried a faint tremble, barely noticeable beneath her steely tone. She pointed toward the central node of the sanctum—Tianshu, the axis star. There, a colossal tree stretched from heaven to void, bound tightly by countless crystalline chains. A chill ran down Raine's spine—the material of those chains was identical to the star-vein crystal blooming from his right arm, as if forged from the same source.
The attack came without warning.
Black tendrils lashed through the void faster than lightning, leaving only a ghostly blur in their wake. Just as one tendril was about to pierce Raine's throat, Ravenna moved—her speed surpassing the limits of human reflex. She shoved Raine aside, and in that motion, her right hand flared open. The golden branches from her mechanical heart extended with a sudden violence, wrapping her entire arm in a sacred rune-forged gauntlet.
When the tendril was mere inches from her palm, the branches erupted in length, sketching a spell diagram in the void—precise to the scale of atoms. The magic circle shimmered with divine complexity.
"Grasp of the True God!"
Her cry echoed through the vacuum like a decree from an ancient god. The moment the magic circle made contact with the black tendril, a radiant metallic sheen surged from the point of impact. In an instant, the writhing darkness was overwritten—its very substance restructured: intricate gears began to interlock, gleaming pistons pumped in perfect rhythm, and coiled springs emitted sharp, deliberate clicks. The transformation was impossibly fast, as though a legion of invisible master artisans had orchestrated this divine engineering feat in a single heartbeat.
The Dreamweaver shrieked—a sound that could shatter stardust and bones alike—as the mechanized section of its tendrils began to collapse, breaking apart into a swarm of precise components that hovered and spun freely in the void. Each gear emitted its own miniature gravitational pulse, creating a constellation of functional beauty.
Even more astonishing, Ravenna's formerly human arm now shimmered with mystic inscriptions—no longer the radiant gold of her mechanical core, but a deep, silvery-blue star map. The markings pulsed softly in rhythm with her breathing, as if resonating with a distant constellation across the cosmos, mirroring the celestial script that glowed across Raine's own body.
"Are you alright?" Raine caught her trembling shoulders, panic breaking through his battle calm. Her skin was still warm and supple—but now radiated an unnatural heat, like a living forge burning beneath her flesh.
Ravenna managed a faint smile, her voice ragged but defiant:
"It's working… the seal's adapting… but I don't know how long I can hold this form."
The space around them flickered. The transformed tendrils dissolved into stardust, but the darkness behind them had begun to stir again.
The Dreamweaver was not finished.
But neither were they.
Ravenna's lips had lost all color. She suddenly coughed violently—not blood, but a cloud of fine metallic particles burst from her mouth. These particles shimmered in the starlight, autonomously forming tiny, intricate arcane sigils in the air before vanishing into the ether like sparks from a dying forge.
"It's… rewriting my body…" Her voice was so faint it barely registered, the steady rhythm of her mechanical heart now sputtering in erratic bursts. Each beat sounded like a clockwork device straining past its limits—rushed, ragged, and on the verge of collapse.
Raine clenched his jaw and triggered an ancient instinct embedded deep within his bloodline:
"Starpath Tracer."
Instantly, the crystalline structures on his right arm stirred to life. With graceful precision, the twelve-sided dodecahedral cluster unfolded like a fan, each facet gleaming with flowing starlight. The internal magic surged into motion, converging into a single luminous vector—a glowing arrow made of pure stellar code.
It pointed unwaveringly toward one of the seven celestial sanctuaries: Yaoguang, the dimmest node among the "Beidou Prison Array." Unlike the others, its atmosphere pulsed with a soft, verdant light, resonating with the same energy signature as the Star Dew Rose embroidered on Yana's robes—a familial magic, intimate and unmistakable.
Then—the veil of space tore open.
As if some unseen titan's hand had ripped through reality itself, the void split, and a portion of the Dreamweaver's true form emerged.
It was not a creature, nor a machine—but a nightmare engine, a fusion of sorcery, synthetic anatomy, and something far older. Its surface was a churning mass of organic fiber interlaced with fractal machinery, constantly shifting between flesh and alloy, between design and chaos.
Eyes—too many to count, all mismatched in size and shape—blinked open across its mass.
And each one was already looking at them.
It was a sight beyond comprehension.
Sairen—the elven boy who had once stood among the Gatekeepers—now hung suspended, his limbs pierced and bound by black chains that pulsed with dark energy. His skin was a deathly pale, the hue of a prisoner long forsaken by sunlight, webbed with glowing cracks that made him resemble a shattered porcelain sculpture clumsily mended.
His third eye, etched with faded elven runes, still bore a faint glow—just enough to reveal the same script as Yana's, unmistakably her hand.
But what stilled Raine's breath was the single tear rolling down Sairen's cheek.
That silver-blue droplet, drifting weightlessly in the vacuum, expanded into a cascading series of images—silent, spectral fragments of buried truth:
A young Yana and Sairen, hand-in-hand, burying the seed of a Primeval Life God beneath the roots of the Mother Tree.
An older Yana, weeping, locking a frenzied Sairen in a seal while whispering a prayer.
And finally, Sairen on the edge of full corruption, injecting something into a mechanical core—a desperate final act.
Raine's blood roared in his ears.
"No… This wasn't an accident," he muttered, eyes wide.
"You two planned this—together…"
At that moment, Yana's figure appeared atop the dimly glowing Yaoguang Node. She raised her hand and released a spell of vibrant green light. A bridge of luminous leaves extended outward, unfurling gently beneath Raine and Ravenna's feet.
"Sairen was my finest student," Yana said, her voice both mournful and resolute, "and the first to see the Dreamweaver's true nature. He volunteered— not as a victim, but as part of the cage meant to bind it."
A scream tore through the void.
Not just a sound—but a soul's collapse. The remnant of Sairen's consciousness—still clinging within the Dreamweaver—let out a guttural, wrenching cry. The black chains began to shatter, their fracturing like the cracking of a planet's crust. Sairen's body convulsed, warping into unnatural shapes as black phantoms leaked from the cracks beneath his skin.
But even then—his elven eye remained clear, fixed not on Raine, but on Yana,Pleading. Remembering. Forgiving.
Raine stepped onto the bridge of green light—and it was like stepping onto a cloud. Each leaf-shaped plank sank ever so slightly underfoot, exuding a gentle warmth. Healing magic rippled through the air, and almost instantly, Raine noticed Ravenna's color returning—her breathing steadier, the spiraling of her mechanical heart slowing.
They weren't just walking forward.
They were walking back—to the origin of everything.
"Hold on tight!" Raine wrapped his arms around Ravenna's waist. The girl's body felt astonishingly light, as if her bones had been reconstructed by some unknown force. Starlike sparkles flickered through her hair, and as the bridge sped up, they transformed into a dazzling trail of flowing light.
Sairen's transformation was nearly complete. Now, he looked more like a monstrous creature forged from a swirling black nebula, his only remaining elven features the two sharp ears on his forehead. As the bridge began to disintegrate, forming a barrier between them, the expression in Sairen's eyes was no longer anger—it was one of resignation.
"He… didn't want this," Ravenna whispered softly, with a sigh.
Suddenly, her mechanical heart projected a memory Raine had never seen before: young Sairen kneeling before the Mother Tree, tears streaming down his face as he cradled a glowing seed. Sleeping inside that seed was unmistakably the form of an infant — a radiant orb of light.
The true nature of the "Yaoguang" node came into focus—not a temple, but the entire village of Yinlu, covered completely in magical runes. Near the Moonwell, Yana's apparition looked far older than in Raine's memories. Half of her face was marred by creeping black shadows, yet her remaining smile was even more tender.
"Mom?" Raine's voice trembled. The floating crystal dust in the void clung to his lashes, refracting a spectrum of colors.
Yana's spirit reached out a hand, but only grasped cold emptiness. "The core seal lies…" Her gaze shifted to Ravenna, and she suddenly shuddered. "Your heart… how has it come to be like this?"
Ravenna lowered her gaze to her exposed mechanical heart. At its core, besides the three magical runes, a tiny outline of an infant had now become clearly visible—the very same form from the glowing orb in the vision.
Sairen's final strike came suddenly and unexpectedly. He tore out his third eye—the elven eye—and as it streaked across the black nebula, it left behind a trail like the Milky Way.
"This is... the true core!" His voice regained clarity for a moment, then was swallowed by darkness.
Yana's apparition caught the crystalline eye, and as the crystal orb was pressed into Ravenna's mechanical heart, the intricate gears and ancient magic resonated instantly. The entire star sea trembled, and the beams of light from the seven temples pierced the void, intertwining into a colossal triple-ring magic array, enveloping the three in dazzling starlight.
"I'm sorry..." Yana's fading apparition dissolved into countless points of light, merging into the magic array. As she fell, Raine caught her final lip movement—it seemed to say, "Take care of her."
A sudden weightlessness overwhelmed them. The fall felt like passing through a kaleidoscope. Instinctively, Raine held Ravenna tighter, feeling two distinctly different heartbeats within her—one mechanical and precise, the other warm and alive. Under the magic array's influence, the rhythms gradually synchronized, each pulse sending tremors through both of them until, at last, they merged into a strange but harmonious resonance.
A blinding golden light burst forth and then faded. When Raine opened his eyes again, he found himself lying on damp soil by a lakeshore. The girl in his arms breathed steadily; where once her mechanical heart had been embedded, now there was only a rose-shaped scar, glowing faintly like a pearl beneath the moonlight.