Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Elemental force rained down upon the palace from above, shaking its walls like a titan trying to crush creation itself. But the palace did not break. It did not even crack. Its surface absorbed everything hurled at it mist, ice, water, wind, erosion all swallowed like meaningless offerings into its mirror existence.
Yet inside, the impact tremors were felt like heartbeats of catastrophe.
Every surface flickered, Corridor rippled and reflection twisted.
The palace remained whole, but it knew pain, and that pain pulsed like a pulse through every chamber.
And in one of those chambers, Kai was drowning beneath pressure.
He lay pinned, body forced into the floor by a weight that was not mere strength, not gravity, not magic it was existence pushing against his right to exist at all. Like the palace itself was testing if his presence was sacrilege.
He lifted his head, or at least tried to, and stared up at the source.
The guardian.
A humanoid statue, massive and silent.
But not stone mirror, living mirror, reflecting everything around it, but distorted, fragmented, as though the reflections were the hidden truths of reality itself.
It reflected Kai, but in that reflection, he was not himself.
He looked older.
Broken.
Cold beyond death.
It reflected the altar, but the reflection showed not water but an ocean of blood.
It reflected the halls behind him but in that reflection there were other beings, walking, whispering, watching, beings that were not truly present.
Reality. Reflection. Illusion. Nightmare.
All layered.
The pressure on him doubled without sound.
Like thought itself had angered the guardian.
The ground beneath Kai was cracking not because the pressure was flattening him,
but because the ground could not withstand the force being exerted onto him.
It was like creation itself chose to break rather than break Kai.
He felt his bones should be shattering.
He felt his muscles should be ripping.
He felt his spine should be folding into dust.
But none of that happened.
He remained intact.
Not unhurt,
but unbroken.
He did not understand it.
Affinity doesn't strengthen the body.
Affinity only allows one to commune more deeply with one's own element.
Then why—why was his flesh refusing to collapse?
Why were his bones not turning to rubble?
Why was the ground breaking but his body was not?
It made no sense.
He was Defiled now. Yes.
But defiled affinity was not physical evolution.
So what had changed?
He tried to think, staring into the guardian's mirrored core. Its center was not a dark or corrupted core. It was not twisted essence or diseased power. It was pure—pure essence overflowing like an untouched spring.
He wondered what its source was,
And that was when the pressure intensified.
It tripled.
Not doubled.
Tripled.
It hit him like a collapsing dimension.
His breath vanished.
His ribs strained.
He tasted iron in his throat.
His vision pulsed red and black.
He could feel the ground beneath him fracturing further, like the palace was being split by tectonic shifts of divine magnitude. Cracks spread in spiderweb patterns, breaking reality's floor like a mirror dropped into eternity.
He wanted to cough blood, to scream and to stop existing.
But he did not break.
And that only infuriated whatever consciousness lurked behind the guardian.
His thoughts tried to scatter but they did not. He remained clear-minded.
Too clear.
His mind was sharp even as his body was pressed into destructive submission. Clarity became a curse.
He had the foolish audacity to think:
I could stay like this for a long time.
And the moment that thought formed,
The pressure surged again.
He mentally cursed himself.
He should not have thought that.
Now the weight was less tolerable.
Now he really did feel the threat of bones cracking, spine snapping, blood bursting from pores.
The palace trembled deeper.
Outside the palace, the flesh ocean began to rupture.
The thousand smaller flesh creatures birthed from the massive flesh fish those small horrors, those hungry aberrations began pouring out of the ground like meat colored locusts of insanity.
The ocean of flesh surged downward, as though reality itself was bleeding into the palace.
Flesh fish fell like rain.
Each one pulsing, writhing, screaming without sound.
And High above the Fleshy Sea
Even the sky convulsed.
The shattered mirror that functioned as a false heaven twisted further, its fragments shifting like broken glass trying to rearrange into a shape that had never existed in the first place.
And then,
Something broke the boundary of reality itself.
A gate formed in the atmosphere of that convulsing mirror sky. A gate that ignored logic, ignored the laws of existence, ignored the ban of the gods.
The decreasing flesh ocean churned beneath it, shrinking, condensing, as though reality was being cut thin like a sheet of skin.
From that gate stepped three figures.
They did not belong here.
The first held a staff, and his presence rippled the air with a calm that contradicted the chaos around him. Blue hair, streaming like the surface of a tranquil sea, and eyes the shade of deep forests. He did not look afraid. He looked… curious.
The other two figures wore cloaks that shrouded their faces entirely. Their forms were hidden, their identities erased.
They did not touch the ocean.
The ocean did not touch them.
Something separated the two.
Something unseen.
Something profound.
As they walked, the flesh ocean curled away as though recoiling from something. The surface parted beneath their feet, yet they floated above, walking on invisible power.
The blue-haired one lifted his gaze, studying the shattered mirror sky, studying the palace suspended above the flesh world.
He spoke not loudly, but his words traveled like they were carried by power itself:
"So… this must be the Water Goddess Realm."
There was no awe in his tone.
Only understanding.
His eyes narrowed at the palace.
"And the Key of Blasphemy lies here… within a divine realm? Curious."
He lowered his gaze, thinking.
"The gods forbade its pursuit. And yet here it rests. How amusing."
Meanwhile.
Far below the ocean, deeper than flesh, deeper than hallucination, deeper than the bottom of things.
A crack had formed.
A fracture at the base of reality where mirror material supported the flesh ocean above.
Through that fracture, thousands of small flesh fish swam. They squirmed, devoured the break, and poured through the gap.
They swam toward the second palace.
Toward Kai.
And the palace gates.
The gates that did not open for reality itself let them in.
They flooded the grand halls.
They flooded the endless corridors.
They flooded the air like carnivorous meaning.
They were coming.
And Kai, pinned beneath divine pressure, drowning in the mirror room, could do nothing.
The guardian did not move.
It only watched and continue to pressure Kai.
The altar did not shift.
It only shimmered.
The ground beneath Kai continued to crack.
The palace above continued to absorb attacks.
The skies continued to convulse.
The ocean continued to decay.
And Kai unable to rise, unable to breathe properly, unable to escape was trapped.
His blood was burning, his veins were trembling and is bones were screaming.
Yet his eyes remained open.
Still clear, aware and defiant.
Even pressed into earth,
even drowning in pressure,
he had not broken.
And that truth,
that impossibility,
that sacrilege,
was the very thing that would decide
whether he lived or died.