Chapter 217
His mouth trembled, forming words of pleading, warning, and a heart's cry begging his teacher to stop, to consider the consequences of this madness, to remember who she was and what she was doing to the student she had once taught.
Yet those words became nothing more than soundless breath vapor before Aldraya's absolute will.
Every plea ended only in perfect indifference, an impenetrable cold wall.
The process unfolded at a steady and unavoidable pace.
Ilux's elemental power began to flow outward through the dim band of light, like a river diverted from its source.
Approximately twenty-two percent of his total essence had already been drained, leaving behind a deepening sensation of emptiness, cold, and fragility within him.
'There is no step backward, no detour.
If I fall now, I will never rise again.'
Sssssh!!
'If this truly is my life and death, then I beg.
Not to win, not to kill her.
But for one more chance to pull her back.'
Shooooooh!!
'If You require a reason to emerge, then take my life as the wager.'
Tsuuuuf!
Krrrrk!!
"That reason is sufficient. Life and death are legitimate doors."
Fhoooooohhh!!
'Not light, nor energy.
It appeared like a conclusion forcibly imposed upon reality.'
On the brink of total emptiness, when twenty-two percent of his essence had been siphoned away and the remainder of his elemental power thrashed like fish in a net, Ilux reached a clear and heart-rending realization.
This was his moment of life and death.
Defeat here did not mean injury or captivity, but total erasure of will, power, and perhaps even his very existence before the entity that had once been his teacher.
He bitterly understood that there would be no second chance, no mercy, and no retreat from the abyss of absorption gnawing at his soul.
In that quietest form of despair, his deepest survival instinct veered toward something even he himself feared, pleading with something foreign that had long remained silent and buried within him—a vague presence he had once sensed but always suppressed.
That plea, born from acceptance of death, found an echo.
From the deepest darkness of his consciousness, a voice that was not a voice whispered assent, an affirmation that felt both like a decree of fate and an act of liberation.
Then, before Ilux's reason could process it, a brutal internal transformation occurred.
From every pore, from every wounded cell of his body, a bright yellowish radiance burst forth, unbound by the physical laws of the world.
That light was not ordinary electromagnetic radiation.
It was a manifested layer of concept, sheets of luminous meaning, a radiance that coiled without emanating from any source.
The light simply "was" around Ilux's form, like the idea of light that had suddenly acquired shape.
Its paradoxical presence was so jarring that even Aldraya's distorted domain reacted.
The illusory space jolted, trembled, and stuttered for a brief moment, as though its fragile reality had miscalculated Ilux's existence and was now forced into a painful recalibration.
Next, an even more mysterious phenomenon revealed itself.
Behind Ilux, wrapped in conceptual light, a silhouette appeared.
It was not a physical apparition, but an "echo" of something distant and ancient.
The human-sized silhouette was formed of fractured, shimmering golden lines, resembling a sketch of a being drawn from the universe's own memory.
This form did not fully possess Ilux's body, but overlapped with it, existing in a fragile and unsynchronized coexistence.
At times the silhouette moved slightly faster or slower than Ilux himself, creating the impression of a shadow lagging behind or advancing ahead, a temporal misalignment that made it even more elusive.
The most striking change occurred in Ilux's eyes.
They did not merely glow or change color.
His irises were now double-layered, two concentric circles overlapping with intricate patterns in constant motion.
Within them, fine lines representing the five primordial elements rotated and interacted slowly.
Flowing water, dancing fire, swirling wind, steadfast earth, and ether that bound them all were reflected in luminous patterns within his eyes.
His gaze was no longer that of a human, or even of an elemental warrior, but a window that observed reality through an entirely new and alien perception.
Ilux was still there, but now accompanied by a light, an echo, and a pair of eyes that held a cosmos within them.
"So that is it?"
The transformation within Ilux reached its paradoxical completion.
He stood with terrifying calm, his posture—once filled with tension and vigilance—now shifting into authoritative composure, like a crown prince who had just realized the vast and sovereign destiny of his kingdom.
His new eyes, layered with elemental patterns, looked directly toward Aldraya in the sky, a gaze no longer containing doubt or panic, but an acknowledgment of a profound reality.
He blinked once, a simple motion that felt like the final punctuation of a long chapter, or the beginning of an entirely new one.
That blink occurred precisely after Aldraya, her voice emerging from the depths of her fractured consciousness, uttered a murmur that was both a whisper and a declaration.
Then, silence fell between them.
A silence so dense and charged that even the air within the anomalous domain seemed to freeze.
No words left either of their lips.
No hurried offensive or defensive movement followed.
There was only an intense exchange of gazes, a silent dialogue unfolding in the space between souls.
Ilux stood below, wrapped in swirling yellowish conceptual light that slithered across his body like dancing eels of radiance.
Aldraya hovered above, surrounded by an aura of darkness and writhing rotting flesh.
Those two opposing poles of existence measured one another, recognizing the radical changes that had taken place within each other in a silence laden with meaning.
The silence endured for two minutes that felt like two centuries.
At last, Ilux chose to act.
He drew a deep breath through his mouth, an action that appeared ordinary yet immediately revealed its extraordinary nature.
That exhalation was not merely air.
It transformed into a gale whose speed increased exponentially with every passing moment.
This was not a worldly wind.
Each particle carried the majesty of its source, and its surging waves wreaked havoc upon the structure of space-time beyond.
Past, present, and future around the flow of that wind blended, distorted, and collapsed into chaos, as though time itself could not endure the purity and power of the breath.
Sensing the metaphysical attack that directly threatened the core of her domain's reality, Aldraya reacted with a speed befitting her post-human nature.
Her left hand lifted to the side, level with her shoulder, palm facing the oncoming divine wind.
From the rotting flesh that shrouded her arm and body, the black, viscous material responded to her will.
At a speed that defied ordinary material laws, the flesh hardened, assembled itself, and condensed into a massive shield that manifested solely on her left side.
The shield appeared both organic and inorganic, its surface pulsing with dark power as it struggled to resist and neutralize the temporal chaos carried by the wind.
However, Aldraya did not stop at defense.
To be continued…