"Are you coming?" El asked, shifting his gaze toward Elias.
Elias returned the look with a confused expression. With clear perplexity, he replied, "You mean to the Grey Castle?"
"What else would I mean?"
Elias fell silent for a moment. He turned his head toward Ciel and tilted it slightly, silently asking for approval.
The Mysterious One smiled faintly and nodded.
Seeing this, Elias gave a small shrug. "Sure. Why not?"
"Good," El replied.
"Since we have won this war, surely we have also conquered the White Castle. Let us unite the Black Castle and the White Castle into the Void Castle," Leon said.
"Yes. I agree," El answered. "But that is for Ciel to handle, not for us. We have somewhere to go."
The Mysterious One nodded once more.
At that moment, El activated the Mark of Creation.
A glowing sigil immediately appeared on the back of his hand, radiating with a quiet but unmistakable power. He raised his hand so that everyone present could clearly see the mark.
Then he slowly turned his hand, revealing his palm. He extended it upward as though making a silent declaration.
In the next instant, an iron rod of flaming silver materialised in his grasp.
Fire coursed along its surface, yet the flames did not consume the metal. The rod remained perfectly intact, its colour unchanged despite the burning light that surrounded it.
Attached to the rod was a black flag, foggy in appearance and slightly warped, as though the fabric itself was touched by distortion. It swayed gently in the pale breeze beneath the moonlight.
Without hesitation, El drove the butt of the rod into the sand, planting it firmly into the ground.
The moonlight fell upon the flag, piercing through the dark fabric and making it glow with an eerie brilliance.
Then El spoke in a declaring tone.
"This is no longer the desolate desert."
"This place shall be called the Valley of Flesh."
He created another rod, far larger and wider than the first.
This one was completely dark, its colour so deep that it seemed to embody the very concept of darkness itself. Light that touched its surface was slowly drawn inward and devoured as the seconds passed. From the rod flowed streams of silver smoke that moved like liquid mist, warping and circling around it until the metal was almost concealed within a dense, shifting fog.
El lifted his hand and moved it gently through the air.
At once, a purple void flag formed before him.
The flag was thinner than the first but much longer, its surface stretched smoothly across the pole. Three symbols were etched clearly into the fabric.
The first symbol depicted a black void castle shrouded in purple mist. At the highest tower of the castle, a small flag stood firmly raised.
The second symbol was a burning circle that spun violently. Within that blazing ring stood the castle itself.
The third symbol showed a short, ragged sword, its fractured pieces already breaking apart as though it were collapsing into ruin.
All three symbols were carved deeply into the surface of the flag.
El grasped the pole and raised the flag high above him. His voice rang out across the battlefield in a powerful declaration.
"We have conquered the White Castle. We are victorious. Our castles shall unite. They shall merge and become one."
"Not the Grey Castle. Not the Brown Castle."
"The Void Castle."
El drove the butt of the flagpole into the sand. Then he spat onto the ground around it. A moment later, he ripped the pole free from the sand and hurled it upward into the air.
Suddenly, as the decree was spoken and the true authority of El's voice condensed into words, the air grew heavier. The cold breeze that had drifted across the battlefield moments before turned sharp and biting, its chill sinking deep into the bones of those present. The atmosphere became strangely thin as the oxygen seemed to disperse. Even drawing a simple breath became difficult, as though the world itself had momentarily forgotten how to sustain life.
A vast pressure settled over the land.
Then the flag burst apart.
At first it shattered into a million fragments. In the next instant those fragments multiplied, breaking again and again until they had become countless pieces, far beyond measure. The scattered fragments did not fall. Instead, they spread across the sky like drifting embers, moving outward before slowly beginning to draw back together.
The pieces gathered.
They joined and fused, weaving themselves into a new form that towered beyond the scale of anything earthly.
Before them rose a castle.
Yet it was not truly a castle in the ordinary sense. Its existence felt detached from the world beneath it, as though it floated beyond the boundaries of time, space, and the laws that governed reality itself. Its towers stretched upward into a sky that seemed older than the heavens above. Its foundations did not rest upon the earth but upon something deeper and more distant, something that belonged to another layer of existence entirely.
This was the Void Castle.
It was a realm of vast valleys where silence ruled above all things. The land carried echoes of forgotten cries, the lingering voices of the dead that had long since faded from the living world. The light within this realm was strange and dim, a brilliant yet eerie glow that seemed like the final remnants of fallen stars.
Here, the Astral Sea reached its end.
Its distant tides whispered at the edges of the realm, touching the boundaries of the castle before dissolving into nothingness. The Void Castle stood at that final threshold, where the known worlds faded away, and the deeper unknown began.
It was a place unmoored from time, space, and the very laws of reality.