The deeper they walked into the subway tunnel, the less it looked like something built by human hands.
The concrete walls dissolved into thousands of irregular, floating mirrors. There was no sound of dripping water or scurrying rats. Instead, there was a heartbeat. But it wasn't a sound—it was a pulse of light.
"Don't look directly at the center," Lu Chen warned, his voice cutting through the unnatural silence.
But human instinct was a fatal flaw. At the very end of the mirrored abyss, something opened.
It wasn't a physical creature. It was a colossal, floating sphere composed of fractured geometric shapes and blinding, nauseating colors that shouldn't exist on the human spectrum. In the center of the sphere was a slit.
A pupil.
The Corrupted Eye of the Cosmos. The source of the Visual Anomaly.
The moment the Eye looked at them, reality screamed.
"Ahhh!" Bai Su, the Fox Medium, shrieked. She had only glanced at it for a fraction of a second, but two streams of dark blood instantly trailed down her flawless cheeks from her eyes. The sheer density of the visual corruption crashed into her mind, nearly tearing her soul apart. She fell to her knees, covering her eyes tightly.
"Shut your eyes!" Kunto roared, throwing his massive arm over his face. The earth-runes on his body flashed frantically, warning him of mortal danger. "Do not look! To see it is to die!"
The situation instantly became a death trap.
How do you fight a monster when merely looking at it melts your sanity? Bai Su's illusions were useless if she couldn't open her eyes to cast them. Kunto's spear was useless if he couldn't see his target.
The two apex predators were instantly neutralized.
"I can't lock onto it!" Bai Su cried out in pain. "Its visual coordinates are shifting a thousand times a second!"
"Physical sight is a lie! Only the threads of fate remain true!"
A cold, resolute voice rang out. Elena, the Tarot Witch, stepped forward.
Her eyes were tightly shut, but her hands moved with absolute precision. She bit her thumb, smearing a drop of her own crimson blood across the back of her Tarot deck. With a swift motion, she drew a single Major Arcana card and slammed it into the air.
[ II - The High Priestess ]
"The stars do not rely on eyes to shine!" Elena chanted in ancient Latin. A veil of soothing, astral blue light enveloped her and Lu Chen.
Through the power of her divination, the blinding chaos of the Corrupted Eye was filtered out. In her mind's eye, she didn't see the blinding light; she saw a single, tangled knot of dark fate hovering in the void.
She had found its true coordinate.
"Calligrapher!" Elena shouted, sweat beading on her forehead as she maintained the astral connection. "Keep your eyes closed! I will be your sight!"
Lu Chen stood perfectly still. He closed his dark eyes.
"Three o'clock! Elevation forty-five degrees! Distance: twelve paces!" Elena called out the coordinates like a military sniper.
"Understood," Lu Chen replied calmly.
He didn't reach for his dark stone inkwell this time. Instead, he pulled out a small porcelain vial. He popped the cork with his thumb.
Inside wasn't black ink. It was Vermilion—a deep, blood-red pigment. In ancient Eastern occultism, black ink was used to write the laws of the living. But red ink? Vermilion was used for execution. It was the color of exorcism, of final judgment.
Lu Chen dipped his purple-hair brush into the crimson vial.
"If the eyes of the universe are sick," Lu Chen murmured, his voice echoing with absolute authority in the mirrored dimension, "then we will gouge them out."
He raised his arm. Guided entirely by Elena's spiritual sight, he slashed the brush through the air.
One stroke. Two strokes. Three strokes. The crimson ink ignited in the darkness, burning with a furious, righteous fire. He wasn't drawing a physical cage. He was imposing a conceptual death sentence on the anomaly itself.
He finished the character with a sharp, downward strike.
『 盲 』 (BLINDNESS)
"Execute," Lu Chen whispered.
The blood-red character 『 盲 』 shot forward like a divine branding iron, flying exactly twelve paces at a forty-five-degree angle, striking dead center into the invisible pupil of the Corrupted Eye.
SKREEEEEEECH!
A sound that defied human comprehension tore through the dimension. The red ink seeped into the fractured geometry of the Eye like burning acid. The blinding, maddening light flickered wildly before turning a dead, pitch black.
The concept of "Sight" had been forcefully overwritten by the law of "Blindness".
Unable to sustain its corrupted existence, the giant Eye imploded. The thousands of irregular mirrors shattered into fine, glittering dust, raining down like snow in the dark tunnel.
The oppressive, sanity-draining aura vanished instantly.
Lu Chen opened his eyes. The subway tunnel was just a dirty, abandoned subway tunnel again.
He calmly wiped the red ink off his brush and tucked it away.
Behind him, Kunto slowly lowered his arm, panting heavily. Bai Su wiped the blood from her face, staring at Lu Chen's back with a mixture of terror and profound awe.
Elena opened her eyes, her legs giving out from exhaustion, but a strong hand caught her before she hit the ground. Lu Chen supported her by the arm.
"Good eyes, Witch," Lu Chen said, offering a faint, rare smile.
Elena caught her breath and smiled back. "Good brush, Calligrapher."
As the dust settled, a small, glowing shard of crystal floated down from where the giant Eye had been. It pulsed with a pure, uncorrupted light.
The Fragment of Sight. The first piece of the broken universe had been reclaimed. Bureau 15's cross-time squad had just won their first impossible war.