The cave was thick with the smell of roasted meat and the metallic tang of blood. Ryn's condition was deteriorating; every breath he took sounded like a man drowning on dry land. Elara looked at him, her eyes wide with a terror I had never seen in a being two centuries old.
"The soul energy he just burned... it isn't natural," she whispered. "It was a surge so vast it should have cost a hundred years of life. He should be a husk right now. Either someone is feeding him power from the darkness, or Ryn is an immortal heir to a lineage we shouldn't even name."
She gestured to his pale, trembling form. "He used every spark of that energy to reconstruct himself—cores, veins, mana flow. He didn't just heal; he rewrote his own biology."
"But his devil core is still screaming," Seraphine added, her voice cold. "He isn't a devil by birth. Without stabilization, that power will eat him from the inside out."
I looked at the **Diary of the Master's Slave** resting on the stone. "We can't wait. We ask the source."
Caelrion's expression hardened. "Lysandria, stop. That thing is an anchor to something we shouldn't even know exists. If you write in that, you're inviting a monster into this cave."
"If we don't, he dies," I countered. "And if he dies, we're next. We vote. Now."
The group split instantly. Mira, Aeldir, Eron, and Elara raised their hands—four for. Luna, Caelrion, and Seraphine stood firm—three against. The tie-breaker was mine. I chose the book.
"Fine," Caelrion spat, his royal poise fracturing into jagged anger. "If you're so eager to be slaves, do it yourselves. Why even call us a team if you're just going to follow a cursed book?"
Without another word, Caelrion and Luna vanished into the night, their silhouettes swallowed by the tall grass.
"Who will write?" Seraphine asked.
I stepped forward. I didn't use my own voice. I picked up a charred branch and tried to mimic the sharp, jagged pressure of Ryn's handwriting. I needed the connection to mistake my desperation for his. I scrawled: ***"If you won't let me escape, at least tell me how to heal this mess."***
The paper didn't just absorb the ash; it felt like it sucked the warmth from my marrow. The reply didn't crawl—it slashed across the page in a script that looked like dried veins:
> **[You are not him. Do not touch what belongs to me, little bird.]**
>
The diary tore itself from my hands, hovering in the center of the cave. I desperately scrawled one more line, trying to maintain the lie: *"I'm the one dying here. Does it matter who writes?"*
The book hummed, a vibration that made my skull feel like it was cracking.
> **[It matters. Ryn knows his place. You... you are just a curiosity. And curiosity is the first thing that ruins a person's life.]**
>
The air in the cave died. White threads, looking less like silk and more like polished, conceptual nerves, erupted from the pages. My **Cosmic Eyes** saw nothing—these weren't made of mana. They existed outside the laws I knew.
Before I could blink, a thread lashed around my throat, hoisting me toward the ceiling. I clawed at my neck, but my fingers passed through the silk as if it weren't there. Mira and Aeldir lunged to cut me down, but they were jerked upward by their wrists and ankles, held like marionettes in a sick, invisible play.
Ryn was suddenly there. The space between him and the diary simply collapsed. He looked up at us, then at the book, his eyes burning with a rage I had never seen. He grabbed the threads holding Mira and Aeldir with his bare hands. The silk sliced through his palms to the bone, but he didn't let go.
He forced his own blood onto the pages, writing with a mangled finger:
*"They are a fragile species. They can't even beat my past self—what do you think they could possibly bring to you? Leave them out of this!"*
The book pulsed with a sickening, playful light.
> **[Drama. I want a live drama. The drama of healing a reckless, pathetic creature like you—a thing that cannot heal, nor be healed, except by clearing a maze with nothing but its bare hands.]**
>
*"They won't follow your orders!"* Ryn scrawled, his blood matting the paper.
Another string erupted from the center of the diary, piercing clean through Ryn's chest and pinning him against the stone wall. He didn't even gasp. He just kept writing: *"LEAVE. THEM. ALONE."*
The threads around our necks slackened, dropping us to the floor in a heap of gasping lungs. The silk then wrapped around Ryn's neck, slamming his head back against the wall.
> **[You will watch the drama yourself, Ryn. You are forbidden to intervene until the very last moment. You cannot leave them, and you cannot help them. Take him to the center of the maze. No gear. No preparations. Don't you agree that this is much more interesting, Ryn?]**
>
The diary snapped shut and fell into the dust. Ryn slumped against the stone, bleeding like a broken fountain. His skin remained raw and unhealed, his condition pitiable.
I looked at the book, then at Ryn. I didn't know if the thing on the other side was a god, a monster, or something worse. I only knew it treated the strongest person I had ever met like a discarded toy. We stood there, stripped of our pride and our weapons, forced to march into the unknown. We were no longer a team; we were just actors in a "live drama," and the director was a mystery that found our suffering beautiful.
I whispered the spell that appeared on the final page:
*"From the grace of the secretive world and chaos planner, I want the space to hear my command and take me to the place I desire."*
The cave began to dissolve. I stop to at least recover from diary attack