The world within the Mirror was a shifting, chaotic landscape. One moment, Yuzar stood in a blazing desert, beset by fire elementals. The next, he was in a frozen tundra, with ice wraiths shrieking towards him.
The other aspirants fought with brilliant displays of magic. They summoned elementals, cast barriers of light, and hurled bolts of lightning.
Yuzar did none of that.
He moved. He was a phantom of condensed shadow, his Void-Forged body allowing him to move with impossible speed and strength. When a torrent of water threatened to crush him, he didn't block it; he stepped through it, the water seeming to part in fear of the void he carried. When earthen spikes shot from the ground, he didn't jump; he simply stamped his foot, and the spikes shattered into dust, their magical structure annihilated by the anti-magic radiating from him.
He didn't have magic. He was the end of it.
He sought out other aspirants not as challenges, but as resources. They were merely token dispensers. A wind blade user would unleash his technique, only for Yuzar to appear behind him, the magical attack dissipating harmlessly against his back before a precise strike to the neck rendered the boy unconscious. Tokens acquired.
A duo tried to ambush him—a pyromancer and a cryomancer. They launched a combined attack, a helix of fire and ice designed to entrap and shatter. Yuzar stood still. He raised a hand, not in defense, but in invitation.
Second Stage: Void Maw.
A tiny, almost invisible singularity, a pinprick of absolute nothingness, opened in his palm. The magnificent helix of opposing magics was sucked into it without a sound, consumed utterly. The two aspirants stared, their minds refusing to process what they had seen. Yuzar was upon them in the next instant, a whirlwind of motion, and their tokens were his.
He was not fighting. He was harvesting.
High above the trial grounds, in a secluded observation chamber veiled in scrying spells, two women watched.
Seraphina, the Headmistress, leaned forward, her perfect brow furrowed. Her divine sense had been casually scanning the hundreds of participants, but it kept snagging on one. A blank spot. A hole in the fabric of magic that was the trial. She couldn't sense him at all, only the absence he left in his wake.
"Who is that boy?" she murmured, a strange, unfamiliar tug in her chest—a feeling she hadn't experienced since the day she... No. She buried the thought. It was impossible.
Beside her, Selene, the Moonfall Clan heir, shivered. She had been invited to observe as a guest of honor. "He's terrifying. He doesn't use any magic. He just... negates it. It's like he's a walking void."
She didn't know why, but the sight of that cold, efficient, and brutally powerful young man filled her with a profound sense of dread and an inexplicable, aching sadness.
Down below, Yuzar stood over the fiftieth aspirant he had defeated. The trial was over. He had not merely qualified; he had accumulated more tokens than any other participant by an order of magnitude.
He stood alone in the center of the now-calm arena as the Mirror of Conquest spat the other survivors out. They looked at him with a mixture of awe, fear, and hatred.
An academy elder approached, his face pale. "A-as-pirant Yuzar. You have placed first. You may choose your dormitory and—"
Yuzar interrupted him, his voice still that chilling monotone. "I require a private training ground. Isolated. Warded."
The elder stammered, "Y-yes, of course. For the top scorer..."
Yuzar gave a curt nod and walked away, not towards the cheering crowds or the other elite students, but towards the solitude he craved. The path was clear. He had entered the lion's den not as a lamb, but as a predator they could not yet comprehend.
His mother had felt his presence. His former love had felt a tremor of the past. The game had truly begun. And Yuzar, the Void Walker, had taken the first move.