Chapter 228
With every step he took, he felt the echo of his own reflected gaze—shadows of his absolute power now turned back upon him, striking without mercy in cruel honesty.
That even the observer could be observed, and even the judge could find himself seated in the defendant's chair.
Each backward step was an admission of that shift, a retreat not tactical in nature, but existential.
"Responding without the desire to judge."
The event that had just stripped him of legitimacy triggered an ancient reflex within Aldraya.
It was not blazing anger, but an instinctive urge to grasp the only remaining anchor left to him.
Wu, the weapon stained by his own failure, answered the call in silence.
It emerged not from physical space, but from the deepest layer of meaning that had grown turbid, like a shadow dragged out of its own grave.
With a burdened motion, Aldraya swung it.
Not seven distinct forms, but seven slashes born from a single motion, repeated like a mantra growing ever fainter.
Each swing was a final assertion, a last attempt to declare that he was still a medium, still a legitimate conduit of dogma.
The seven lines of force shot forth, layered and chasing one another in a measured rhythm, each carrying remnants of blessing that had not yet fully collapsed.
However, what unfolded before him surpassed the logic of combat.
Ilux did not parry, nor did he evade.
His body, or what remained of it, acted as an absolute receptacle.
He swallowed every slash, storing them within the emptiness he embodied.
There was no collision, no resistance—only total acceptance, more terrifying than rejection.
And then, in the very next second, the seven slashes were returned.
They surged back toward Aldraya, but transformed.
Now they were laden with a foreign substance that possessed no origin, no color, no scent, and no light.
The existence of that substance was so anomalous that the surrounding reality shrank and shuddered subtly as the slashes passed through, as though space-time itself felt revulsion.
The explosion that followed was not an explosion of energy, but an accident of meaning.
When the reflected slashes struck Aldraya, what they carried was his own power—yet returned without authority, without legitimacy, and contaminated by an alienness he could not comprehend.
Wu trembled violently in his grasp, a panic-driven vibration that did not stem from physical impact, but from metaphysical rejection.
Then the weapon slipped from his hand, falling with a dull sound, as if refusing to bear witness to the destruction of its own master.
Aldraya felt layered wounds that did not cancel one another out.
His chest felt hollow and suffocating at once, like dogma hollowed out from within until it rang empty.
The arm that had swung Wu went completely numb, not because it was damaged, but because the "direction" and "purpose" of the swing had been stripped away.
His vision throbbed—not blurred, but painfully clear—as he perceived fine cracks within his own existence.
The rotting flesh still clinging around him, once obediently forming the Overseer Eyes, now curled inward, sealed itself, and dried in places, as though the living tissue chose petrification over continuing to bear commands from a source whose authority had fractured.
His breath hitched, the dogmatic incantations that normally flowed unceasingly became lodged in his throat, and for the first time in his long memory, he felt a pain he could not categorize as a trial of faith.
This was a foreign suffering, one that originated outside his belief system.
With what little strength remained—no longer surplus power granted by dogma, but a desperate, personal will to survive—Aldraya made his final decision in that arena.
The domain he had created and controlled entirely from the beginning, he extinguished at its core.
He did not destroy it through violence, but withdrew it like a weaver pulling threads until the entire fabric collapsed and vanished.
The space around him creaked as layers of illusion and reality folded in rapidly.
All echoes of battle, residual energies, and traces of judgment were severed before they could spread any further, abandoned within the nonexistence he himself created.
Amid the immense instability of that dissolution process, Aldraya forced a teleportation.
Not with his usual elegance, but with a crude thrust, launching himself toward the nearest coordinates he could still recognize—not a safe place, merely a place that "existed."
The transition left a deep tearing sensation that spread from his spine to his skull, like the price paid for fleeing without full permission from the reality he was abandoning.
He landed—or more accurately, collapsed—at the mouth of a damp cave, not far from the now-silent male dormitory of the Star Academy.
The cold stone met his skin with impartial honesty, and the heavy cave air pressed against his lungs with a silence that no longer judged—it simply was.
The first arc, episode nine middle, had ended.
And now, the first arc, episode nine final, had begun.
'Still not yet reaching the final word.'
His breath thundered between the cold stone walls, a chaotic rhythm echoing through the narrow cavern.
Aldraya leaned back, his body slowly sliding down the rough rock surface, as if gravity—long ignored—was now demanding full payment.
Each inhalation felt like drawing in shards of glass, piercing lungs already wrapped in incomprehensible emptiness.
Both of his legs, once pillars supporting his unshakable authority, were now nothing more than two decayed beams trembling uncontrollably.
That tremor did not arise from mere physical exhaustion, but from a shock to the existential foundation that reverberated down to the deepest cells of bone.
With every tremor, remnants of rotting flesh still clinging to his skin detached one by one, falling onto the damp ground with wet, nearly inaudible sounds.
They left behind a grim, organic trail, a path that told of retreat not from a battlefield, but from the throne of reality itself.
'Was I created to serve without feeling?'
Within the damp and suffocating silence of the cave, time flowed differently.
Four seconds were not merely a pause, but a small eternity in which the entire structure of Aldraya's self was ground down by a question born from the裂 in his soul.
The breath he had held in a futile attempt to freeze the shifting reality finally escaped in a long, trembling exhale.
That sound—his own breath—felt foreign to his ears.
Not the breath of the Grand Overseer, but the fragile breath of a lost entity.
From within the emptiness, a murmur of the heart arose.
Not as prayer or contemplation, but as the first earthquake that cracked the monolith of his faith.
He questioned the most fundamental foundation of his entire existence.
Was the essence of the love he had offered for thousands of years a sacred mistake, an unforgivable deviation?
That question was not an arrow, but a slowly dripping poison, dissolving the purity of his devotion into a murky sediment of doubt.
His memories, usually a grand and orderly library filled with doctrine and certainty, now transformed into a labyrinth of shadows.
He saw himself again at the age of four, when his first encounter with Quil-Hasa burned his soul with an undeniable purpose.
The light of the Creator of Time was not warmth, but a purifying conflagration, a total reprogramming of existence.
The love born from that moment was not a gentle emotion, but a metaphysical law of gravity that centered the entire orbit of his life upon a single core.
To be continued…