In this world, there existed forces older than kingdoms and deeper than memory.
They were known to mankind as the Pillars of Creation.
Fire.
Water.
Earth.
Air.
At the beginning of recorded history, they were only concepts natural truths that governed the flow of the world. Rivers followed gravity, flames devoured fuel, stone endured, wind moved unseen. Humanity lived beneath these laws, small and unacknowledged.
Then nature turned against the world itself.
Storms no longer ended. Seas swallowed coastlines without retreat. The ground cracked open and refused to heal. The sky fractured into layers that reflected nothing familiar. Civilization teetered on the edge of extinction, not because of war or disease, but because the world had begun to reject its own form.
It was then that something unknown answered.
From the deepest fault lines of reality, pillars rose.
They tore through continents and oceans alike, towering structures that seemed less constructed and more declared. Their surfaces were not stone, nor metal, nor energy but all of them at once. Symbols crawled across their length, shifting endlessly, as though the world itself was trying to remember how it had once been written.
Around these pillars, civilizations appeared.
Not built emerged.
Cities clawed their way out of the earth in spirals of architecture humanity had never known. Cultures rose without ancestry, languages formed without roots, and people who had never existed before stood beneath the pillars as if they had always belonged there.
And with them came understanding.
The pillars were not gifts.
They were challenges.
To touch a Pillar of Creation was to declare defiance not against a god, but against the order of the world itself.
Those who dared would be dragged into a trial.
There were no instructions. No mercy. No fairness.
Only survival.
If one endured, their body would do something unnatural. It would steal a fragment of the pillar's authority a spark of creation and force it into existence within their flesh and soul.
That spark became a core world.
An internal domain where power could be shaped, refined, and eventually ruled.
This was the moment of awakening.
For most, the first pillar was all they would ever survive.
But Conjurers were different.
After awakening, they were drawn to a second pillar—one that did not grant power, but refined it. Passing its trial did not add a new spark. Instead, the pillar reached into the existing core world and carved order into chaos, granting control where there had only been instability.
It was refinement through suffering.
And Kai had walked that path.
He stood at the center of the collapsing mirror palace, blood soaking into his coat, breath uneven.
The Guardian moved.
Veins of water tore free from this Vains, surging forward like living arteries. At the same time, two massive tentacles erupted from fractured walls human flesh stretched and malformed, faces embedded along their length. Too many eyes opened at once. Mouths split where mouths should not exist.
From one, blackened liquid condensed water so corrupted it swallowed light.
From the other, dark ice formed frozen decay that crackled with wrongness.
Corrupted Water.
Corrupted Ice.
They were released together.
The air screamed.
As the veins and condensed energy rushed toward him, the space around Kai heated.
Not with flame.
With pressure.
Energy condensed around his right hand, folding inward again and again until it resembled a miniature sun brilliant at its core, wrapped in violent black distortion. Flares licked outward, warping the air itself.
Kai raised his hand.
His voice was low. Steady. Exhausted.
"Fire Technique: Setting Sun."
The sphere expanded.
Its flares tore through the incoming water veins, vaporizing them into boiling mist. The corrupted condensations were not destroyed they were absorbed, dragged screaming into the expanding core. The sun grew brighter. Heavier. More unstable.
His Eyes of Truth were already active.
Bleeding.
Through the pain, Kai forced his perception outward, seizing the loose energy displaced by the technique. He twisted it not into fire, but into space.
A cube formed around him.
Perfect isolation.
Just as the sun reached critical mass.
It detonated.
The explosion was not loud.
It was final.
Light erased shadow. Heat erased structure. The mirror palace cracked in every direction as the blast expanded outward like a dying star going supernova. Entire sections of the palace fractured and began collapsing upward, pulled toward the mirrored sky that held the flesh ocean in place.
For the palace, the mirror was the sky.
For the world, it was the ground.
Inside his cube, Kai was safe hmm technically.
The isolated space trembled violently as fragments of the palace followed the upward collapse. His cube distorted, dragged along by the shifting layers of reality. He sat down, breathing heavily, watching debris rise past him like falling stars in reverse.
The cube slammed into the cracked ceiling.
The impact split it further.
With a soundless rupture, the cube punched through, ascending beyond the palace entirely.
Kai looked sideways.
A giant flesh-fish floated nearby, half of its body already assimilated into the palace remains. It did not react. Did not turn.
His Eyes of Truth had deactivated his essence was empty.
He didn't dare look again.
He knew what he would see.
Thousands of eyes.
Watching.
As he ascended into the mirror ground, the world twisted around him. Confusion crawled beneath his skin.
He had fallen from the flesh ocean.
Now everything was rising toward it.
Gravity meant nothing here.
Kai shivered.
This trial was getting to him.
From his coat, he pulled out the compressed cube containing the mirror altar. It looked small harmless but only because the space inside had been crushed down to nothing. He stared at it for a long moment before tucking it away.
Then he closed his eyes.
The cube broke through.
Flesh surrounded him.
Kai entered his core world.
An endless expanse of nothingness greeted him, just as it always had. The ground beneath his feet was black fire cool to the touch, burning without heat. At the center stood a statue shaped like himself, glowing faintly, symbols drifting beside it in slow orbit.
At the far edge of this world lay a broken statue.
Its head rested on the ground.
It spoke.
"Hello."
Kai exhaled shakily.
"Can you read my status for me?" he asked.
"Yes."
Outside, the cube drifted into the flesh ocean.
A fragment of the palace followed.
Clinging to it with a single remaining arm was the Guardian.
And within the collapsing remains, the flesh-fish began to move.