The trip north felt less like a journey and more like the world getting peeled away. Iris did not walk. One moment they were in the green hills near the capital, the next the air was colder, the trees were thinner, and the color was bleeding out of the land. She moved in a way that hurt Kaito's eyes to follow—a shimmer, a blur of red hair, and the ground beneath them had changed. Two days of this flickering travel, and the last signs of life fell behind.
They stood on the final ridge. Below them, the world ended.
It was called the Blightscar. The name was too small for it. It was not a scar. It was a mouth. A huge, ragged tear in the flesh of the continent, so wide he could not see the other side. The ground inside was not dirt or rock. It was a black, glassy substance that reflected the sickly sky in oily rainbows. No plants. No streams. No birds in the air. The silence was the worst part. It was not the quiet of a empty room. It was the silence of a breath being held. A deep, waiting silence that pressed against his ears.
Iris stood beside him, but she felt far away. All her bouncing energy was gone. She was still, her hands clenched at her sides. Her sunset eyes were wide, fixed on the void below.
"This is it," she said. Her voice was a flat whisper, stripped of all its music. "The heart of it. The first place that got sick. It has been growing for a hundred years." She pointed a finger, straight out, towards the distant, shimmering center of the vast black basin. "The bad feeling… the wrongness… it is strongest there. That is where you have to go."
She turned to him. She reached into a pouch and pulled out the crystal orb the quartermaster had given him. She shoved it into his hand. Her fingers were cold. "If you find the forge. If you find the one making the corruption. Break this. I will come." She swallowed. "Or… if you need to get out. Break it. It will make a door for one second."
She did not say he might not be able to break it. She did not say the door might not open here. But he heard the words she didn't say.
She looked at him, and for the first time, she looked young. Not childish. Young, and scared. Not for herself. For him.
"Good luck, Kaito," she said. Then her form wavered, like a mirage. A last flash of red hair against the dead gray sky, and she was gone. The ridge was empty.
He was alone with the silence and the scar.
He started walking down the slope. The good earth, with its grass and stones, ended in a sharp line. One step he was on normal ground. The next, his boot crunched on the black, glassy surface of the Blightscar.
The change was instant.
The air turned thick. It was hard to breathe, not because there was no air, but because the air felt heavy, like water. It pushed on his skin. It buzzed in his teeth. And it was cold. A deep, bone-cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
He walked forward. His footsteps made no sound on the hard black ground. The only noise was the low hum in the air, a note so deep he felt it in his stomach.
With every step, the feeling got worse. He knew this feeling. It was the "bad taste" he had felt in the Murkwood, at the black pool, in the canyon with the mutated travelers. But this was not a splash of that taste. This was the ocean. This was where the taste was born. It was old. It was angry. It was sad. It was a sickness that had been festering in the dark for a very, very long time.
The landscape did not change. It was flat, black, and empty for miles. The only feature was the shimmer on the horizon, right where Iris had pointed. The center.
He walked for an hour. The silence played tricks on him. He thought he heard whispers, but when he stopped, there was only the hum. Shapes seemed to move at the edge of his vision, but when he looked, there was nothing.
The Blightscar was not trying to hide from him. It was trying to know him.
The thick, cold air began to curl around him. Thin tendrils of something like mist, but darker, reached out from the ground. They did not attack. They brushed against his legs, his arms, his face. They were probing. Testing. They were made of the same sick energy that filled this place, and they wanted to understand what he was made of.
He did not stop them. He let the corruption touch him.
The moment it made contact, it recoiled.
The tendrils snapped back like whipped ropes. The hum in the air skipped a beat. For a second, the pressure lessened.
The Blightscar's power had felt him. And it was confused. It swirled around him in a nervous, chaotic dance. It recognized something in him. His power—the boundless, adaptive truth of what he was—was like a key that almost fit a lock. The corruption here was a dark, twisted copy of that key. It was made from a similar metal, but it had been broken and bent by hate and grief.
This place was not a fortress. It was not a monster's den.
It was a memory.
A memory of a terrible pain, a loss so huge and violent that it had not just happened here—it had burned itself into the land. The pain had festered. It had drawn in wild magic and poisoned it. Over a century, this memory of pain had become a factory for more pain. It made the corruption because that was all it knew how to do.
And in the middle of this memory, at the point of the worst pain, something was waiting. He could feel it now. A point of cold, focused awareness in the heart of the formless sadness. It had felt his power too. It knew he was not another piece of the corruption. It knew he was different.
It knew he was here.
Kaito adjusted his grip on the Leviathan Staff. The bone felt warm in his hand, a steady presence against the cold wrongness. He was not hunting a monster anymore. He was not even hunting the forger of weapons.
He was walking into the world's oldest, deepest wound. He was walking into a scream that had been echoing for a hundred years. And he was the only one who could hear it clearly. He did not know if he could heal it. But he knew, with a cold certainty, that the thing in the center—the thing born from this wound—was waiting to see if he would try.