Yan Zhi stopped walking.
What loomed before him was no gate.
No grand arch of stone.
No vortex of energy.
It was a tear in existence.
A crack in reality itself, bleeding pure darkness like a wound that refused to close. It wasn't a door. It wasn't a path. It was simply… a scar.
He stared at it for a long time.
All the layers before—whispers, false faces, and spilled blood—had led him here. Yet the longer he looked, the stronger the sensation that he was not approaching it… but that the scar was swallowing him whole.
Silence.
Not the silence of peace, but the kind that crushed every trace of sound. Even his footsteps left no echo.
He tried to speak—if only to hear his own voice—but his lips refused to move. His throat was dry as ash.
Only one whisper came, not from outside, but from within his chest:
"Enter. You're already half mine."
His fists clenched, yet his fingers felt cold, brittle, like they no longer belonged to him.
Retreat was impossible.
Every path back had already been devoured by the previous layers.
So he stepped forward.
One step… then another… until his body slipped into the crack.
Cold engulfed him, deeper than frost—piercing marrow, stripping memory layer by layer.
For a heartbeat, he felt erased.
And then—another world unfolded.
A starless sky.
Ground that pulsed like a living heart, rejecting his presence with every beat.
And in the distance, motionless silhouettes, standing as if they had been waiting for him all along.
Yan Zhi froze.
He had crossed into the Core of the Veil—and for the first time, he felt as though he wasn't entering a new world.
He was being consumed by something older, darker, and infinitely more patient than himself.
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