[Stage 6: Mirror of the Soul – Minute 5]
"Five minutes," the Child whispered.
The voice was thin, like the sound of a razor blade sliding across silk. He turned a small, obsidian object over in his palm—a coin of fate, perhaps, or a fragment of a dead star. I looked at him through eyes that were no longer human. They were twin craters of hemorrhaged vessels and raw exhaustion, burning with a fire that consumed my very marrow. My heart beat with a frantic, stuttering rhythm, a drum keeping time for a funeral march that refused to end.
The bucket in my hands had transcended the laws of physics. It no longer possessed mere mass; it had become a gravitational singularity, a ton of molten lead that pulled at my skeletal structure with a localized, malicious intent. My shoulder muscles were no longer tissue; they were frayed cables of white-hot agony, screaming in a frequency only I could hear. Yet, I clung to that bucket with a ferocity that bordered on the erotic. It was my anchor. It was the last piece of "Rai" left in a void designed to erase him.
The Child did not scream this time. He did not threaten to flay my skin or shatter my joints. Instead, he looked at me with a terrifying, clinical pity—a cold, stagnant emotion that felt more lethal than any blade.
"Rai… why do you persist?" he asked. His voice was soft, melodic, and draped in the mourning veils of a cemetery wind. "Why do you stand there, an architect of your own torture? For whom are you suffering?"
I offered no reply. I bit down on my mangled lip, the metallic tang of blood a reminder that I still inhabited a physical form. The Child began to pace around me, his small footsteps leaving no marks on the blinding white floor, though his voice echoed as if the room were a cathedral of marble and bone.
"You fight to emerge. You fight to return to them, do you not? To find Jean? To hunt down Kang? To reclaim a life you think is waiting for you like a patient ghost?" He stopped directly in front of me, a sorrowful, ancient smile curving his small lips. "Do you have any idea, Rai, how much time has hemorrhaged in the world outside while you were slumbering in the Old Man's oasis?"
A tremor rippled through my forearms. Dread, cold and viscous, began to bypass my nerves and settle directly into my bones.
"A month… maybe two," I croaked. The words felt like shards of glass in my throat. I was repeating the Old Man's hollow comfort. "He said… a day here is a month there."
"No." The Child let out a soft, airy laugh, a sound of genuine amusement at my naivety. "The Old Man lied to you with the kindness of a taxidermist. The time in the Valley is not merely slow—it is fractured. It is a broken gears in a cosmic clock." He leaned in until the tip of his nose almost touched mine, his eyes twin voids of absolute zero. "While you were eating his apples and dreaming beneath his trees, years were passing like heartbeats in your reality. It has been fifty years, Rai. Fifty years since you stepped into the dark."
Reality tilted. The blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen. The bucket nearly slipped from my sweat-slicked palms.
"Liar," I hissed, my voice a jagged wreck of its former self. "You are weaving a tapestry of shadows to break my resolve. Fifty years is an impossibility."
"A lie?" The Child snapped his fingers.
Bzzzt.
The air before me ruptured. A massive, translucent screen of shimmering fog materialized, a window into a world that had moved on without me. The image was grainy at first, a static-filled memory of a future I wasn't meant to see, and then it sharpened with a cruel, surgical clarity.
The vision flooded my senses. I saw a city—my city—but it was a stranger to me. The architecture had evolved into something sleek and indifferent. But it was the faces that shattered me.
The Child stepped closer, his innocence a mask for a predator that feasted on souls. "Look closely, Rai. They did not die of grief. They did not wither away in your absence. They did something far more devastating: they lived. Look at Lina."
I saw her. She was older, radiant in a way that spoke of a life filled with sunlight and peace. She was holding the hand of a man I didn't recognize, and two children—living, breathing legacies of a love that had nothing to do with me—played at her feet. She laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated joy. My name was not on her lips. My face was not in her heart. I had been excised from her history like a malignant tumor that had finally been cured.
"And Jean," the Child continued, his voice a soothing venom. "Your brother-in-arms. The one you swore to protect."
The image shifted. I saw Jean. He sat in a study filled with books and the quiet dignity of a man who had seen many winters. He was graying at the temples, his eyes reflecting a contentment that only comes when one has long since made peace with the losses of the past. He didn't look like a man waiting for a ghost. He looked like a man who had forgotten he ever knew one.
"Everyone moved on," the Child whispered. "They married, they birthed, they buried, and they laughed. While you were rotting in this white purgatory, they were building monuments to your absence by simply forgetting you ever existed."
He pointed a small, delicate finger toward the ground beneath us. "Even your home, that sanctuary of memories you hold so dear... it was leveled decades ago. They tore it down, buried its foundations under meters of indifferent soil, and built something new over it. Strangers sleep where you once dreamed. They don't even know your name, Rai. You are fighting for a world that has already deleted your file."
"LIAR!" I screamed.
The sound was a raw, guttural explosion of agony. Tears cascaded down my face, burning like molten silver against my skin. "You are playing with my mind! Jean would never forget! Lina… it's impossible! I can feel them! My heart tells me they are still there, anchored in the same pain I feel!"
"Look at the clock," the Child said, his tone returning to a flat, mechanical indifference.
[04:00]
"Four minutes separate you from a void. Even if you succeed, even if you push through that door, you will emerge as a relic. An anomaly. You will be a man without a country, a ghost in a world of strangers. No one will recognize you. No one will want you." He extended his hand, his palm open and inviting. "Drop the bucket, Rai. Let it go. Rest. Death in this place is a mercy I rarely grant. I will let you join them in an eternal, painless dream. You can have the lie back."
"No…"
I drove my teeth into my lower lip with a savagery that bypassed pain. I needed the shock. I needed the visceral reality of my own destruction to wake me from the hypnotic pull of his words. The skin tore, and the hot, metallic copper of my own life-force flooded my mouth, grounding me in the present agony.
I lifted my head. My eyes were no longer weeping; they were twin furnaces of incandescent rage and absolute, terrifying certainty.
"Even if they have forgotten me… even if they have built a thousand lives over my grave… even if a millennium has turned my world to ash and stardust…"
I took a step toward the Child, my voice emerging like lava bubbling from the crust of a dying planet.
"I will emerge. I will not go back to beg for their love or to haunt their houses. I will emerge to prove that my suffering was not a hollow echo! I will emerge to immortalize their memory in a world that dares to forget them! Even if the entire world has become a silent, forgotten graveyard… I will be its sole guardian! I will be the survivor who carries the flame of truth through this godless dark!"
The Child's composure shattered. His final card—the card of despair—had been burned to ash.
[03:00]
"WHY WON'T YOU BREAK?!" he bellowed.
His voice was no longer that of a child. It was a multi-layered cacophony of a thousand monsters, vibrating through the very atoms of the room. "DIE! JUST DIE!"
The environment began to warp. The ceiling descended with the weight of a falling mountain, threatening to grind me into the floor. The ground itself erupted into jagged, crystalline spikes that tore through the soles of my feet. The gravity intensified tenfold, a crushing pressure that made my bones pop and groan like the timbers of a sinking ship. My knees buckled, the patellas screaming under the strain. But I remained. I was a nail driven into the coffin of the universe, refusing to be pulled out. The bucket was no longer an object I held; it was fused to my will.
[02:00]
"I WILL PULVERIZE YOU!"
He unleashed a tide of nightmares. Spectral dragons of cold flame, demons wearing the faces of my mother and my friends, shadows that tore at my illusory flesh. I squeezed my eyes shut, my mind a fortress of a single word: Illusion. Illusion. Illusion. I did not move. I did not falter.
[00:30]
Thirty seconds. The Child had lost all semblance of reason. He collapsed onto the floor, screaming and pounding his small fists against the white void like a spoiled brat denied his favorite toy. Black, oily tears streamed from his eyes, staining his porcelain skin.
"DROP THE BUCKET! SHAKE! FALL! FAIL!"
[00:10]
Ten seconds. Suddenly, the chaos ceased. The screaming stopped. The monsters evaporated into the ether. The ceiling retreated to its impossible heights. The Child stood before me, heaving for breath, his hair a wild thicket, his eyes burning with an eternal, undying malice. He gave me one final look—not of victory, but of a promise of future suffering.
"Do not think you have won, Rai," he whispered, the sound resonating in my skull like the tolling of a lead bell. "This is merely the overture. You have not defeated hell; you have only unlocked the gate. What awaits you on the other side… is far worse than death."
[00:00]
CHIME.
Time expired.
In a single, violent instant, reality detonated. The Child vanished. The white room dissolved into nothingness. The bucket disappeared from my hands, and with it, the crushing weight that had defined my existence for what felt like an eternity. I collapsed to my knees in the sudden vacuum, my hands still locked in the phantom shape of the handle, my muscles twitching with the ghost of a thousand pains.
I raised my head. Before me, a door appeared. It was not wood, nor iron, nor bone. It was a portal of pure, incandescent white light—solidified radiance. No carvings, no blood, no numbers. Just light in the shape of an exit.
I crawled toward it. I had no strength left for the dignity of walking. I dragged my shattered frame inch by inch. I reached the threshold and pushed against it with my ruined shoulder. I fell through.
There was no corridor. There was no valley. There was only the Absence.
An absolute, primordial darkness. A black so deep it felt heavy, older than the stars and more profound than the night. There was no floor beneath me, no sky above. I was suspended in a limitless, silent void. There was no heat, no matter, no sound.
Is it over? I thought, the words a silent ripple in the dark. Am I dead?
Suddenly, the vacuum shivered. It wasn't a physical vibration—it was a tremor in the very fabric of "Being." It was as if the universe itself had caught its breath in terror.
A voice spoke.
It was deep, calm, and possessed a weight that the human mind was never designed to process. It did not come from a specific direction; it emanated from every point in the void simultaneously. It came from within my chest, from the pores of my skin, and from the spaces between atoms.
"Congratulations, Rai."
My heart stopped for a fractional second, paralyzed by the sheer authority of the sound. Then it began to hammer against my ribs with a violence that surpassed the trial of the bucket. This voice… it wasn't human. It wasn't demonic. It wasn't mechanical. It was the sound of Absolute Sovereignty.
"Who… who is there?" I asked, my voice trembling as I tried to find purchase in the zero-gravity of the void.
The voice replied, and every syllable felt like a galaxy being formed and destroyed, pressing against my soul with the weight of a thousand suns.
"I am the Entity, Ray. I am the Lord of All."