“Where did this key come from? The moment I saw it, I felt ill fortune—like something cursed was clinging to it… no, curses are cuter than this.”

  Roselyn’s voice trembled.

  “It came from a ruin,” the Professor said, his tone edged with fervor. “Afterward, I investigated and confirmed that the site likely belonged to a once-glorious ancient sect—the Null-Spirit Sect!”

  “And I once read a paper studying the Null-Spirit Sect. The researcher argued that the sect originated directly from the Ethereal Realm, and that in the Ethereal Realm there still exists its source! And that source is in Diat!”

  “If I can find the true source in Diat, I can even prove the existence of that unprovable being—Spirit of Null Observance! It would be a discovery that shakes the entire occult world!”

  Beside him, Javon nearly rolled his eyes, but forced himself to endure.

  He watched the Professor’s rapture at last and spoke. “Even if you prove that Obscured Existence is real… what does it matter?”

  “Knowledge! Knowledge and truth are the meaning of everything!” the Professor shouted, waving both hands.

  “Heh.” Langley laughed. “Elvander, you don’t know yet—The Professor is a Transcendent of the Tower Path. He can gain influence by publishing research papers.”

  “If he proves it and publishes, the waves and impact alone would be enough to support his advancement into a Beyond Mortality-grade being…”

  “And the old man’s always had problems upstairs.” Roselyn followed, cold and blunt. “Or rather, Transcendents all do, one way or another. I’ve always thought he has an overdeveloped addiction to knowing—a fanatic appetite for knowledge and truth.”

  “I don’t care about any of that.” Xander the gorilla hammered his chest. He stood two heads taller than Javon, an oppressive presence. “As long as the pay is good enough.”

  “Apologies. I lost my composure,” the Professor said, his voice settling. “A pursuer of knowledge is always like this when he nears truth.”

  “Then… let us begin.”

  He chanted under his breath and tossed the mirror shard into the air.

  Bang! The shard exploded into dust and fell onto the five of them.

  At once, Javon felt an invisible pull latch onto him—dragging him toward some unseen direction.

  It’s a new mystic connection. And it’s already weakening… so this key is one-use.

  “We move.”

  The Professor chose a direction at random and strode off. The other four followed.

  The party vanished into the wetlands.

  A fog rose before Javon’s eyes. When it thinned, a city’s silhouette emerged—ruin upon ruin.

  The Fallen City Diat—arrived.

  What a strange feeling…

  Looking at a landscape that felt faintly familiar, Javon spoke inwardly: A thousand years ago, I walked here as the Spirit of Null Observance. A thousand years later, I have returned in spirit once more.

  The skyscrapers had long since collapsed into wreckage, their surfaces filmed with shadow. The entire city lay wrapped in an eerie palette of black, a pressure that invited despair.

  “Diat…” the Professor murmured, then raised his voice. “The air here is threaded with polluted information at every moment. Elvander—every time I tell you to use a talisman, purge the surroundings once as well!”

  “No problem.”

  Javon made a show of drawing a silver talisman and flicking it skyward.

  A burst of searing radiance exploded and enveloped the five of them.

  Langley finally exhaled, his voice tight with lingering fear. “This place… feels wrong.”

  They were still on the city’s outskirts. The path into Diat proper was clearly long.

  Javon noticed the Professor checking his pocket watch again and again, ordering purification on irregular intervals. Sometimes a single minute passed; sometimes five, even ten.

  So our sense of time has already warped…

  It was the same earlier—one step from the wetlands to Diat. Space-time is chaotic here. No wonder the Ethereal Realm is so dangerous.

  After a moment’s thought, he moved closer, walking alongside the Professor. As they advanced through the city’s corrupted dark, he found an excuse to talk.

  “Professor—are you a pure Tower Transcendent? I rarely meet anyone of your kind.”

  “Yes.” The Professor answered with open sincerity. “I vowed to pursue knowledge and truth and never stop moving.”

  “And I’m still in the Adept stage—what we call the Third Sephiroth.”

  “I’ve always heard that a pure Tower Sage can help others resist mental contamination and influence,” Javon said smoothly. He truly was curious.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Sanity is temporary. Madness is eternal…” The Professor spread his hands. Behind the mask, his face seemed to twist into a helpless smile. “As for reducing madness—any sufficiently old sect can find methods, if its transmission is deep enough. We of the Tower Path can do it from the beginning, that’s all.”

  “And if it could truly be cured, do you think I’d still have an addiction to knowing?”

  “Then how does your school resist madness and contamination?” Javon pressed, steering the conversation into academic ground.

  The Professor brightened at once. “My school believes all things require balance. Even contamination and madness can be subdivided. They, too, can be neutralized by opposing factors…”

  “For example—if your heart is filled with emptiness and void, you must anchor yourself with realism to maintain balance. If a Transcendent is drenched in fear, we must make them feel more hope…”

  “So you introduce one obsession to counter another?” Javon widened his eyes. “Meaning… if someone is a clean freak, you force another obsession on them—say, ‘filth’—to neutralize the mental effect?”

  “And in occult terms, you deliberately impose influence on a Transcendent’s mind—introducing contamination to fight contamination?”

  “Exactly.” The Professor sighed. “Symptoms of fanaticism, obsession—madness itself—come in countless forms, and the severity differs as well. One must analyze the individual precisely to design the most effective intervention.”

  “Even then, you can only maintain a fragile, unstable balance.”

  “Each time a Sephiroth opens, the mind changes violently. You must introduce more variables. And the more variables you add, the easier it is for the entire structure to fail.”

  “Sometimes,” he continued, “I would rather endure the side effects of advancement than intervene deliberately. The madness you introduce on purpose may produce consequences far worse.”

  If you keep doing this, you’ll collapse sooner or later, Javon thought, then said aloud, “If a Transcendent turns cold, you inject ‘passion’ contamination to restore balance. But where do you find that ‘passion’?”

  “Books are thought made solid,” the Professor replied. “Art is the crystallization of the soul. And certain precious Ethereal Realm texts contain specific kinds of contamination.”

  “Our school has long worked to collect the relevant data. We hope to build a grand library—containing every esoteric transmission and every great work—so we can classify contamination precisely: level, bias, severity, and so on…”

  “Balance—what a perfect word. All things are held in balance.” His tone grew reverent. “And the ultimate expression of balance lies in dual-path Transcendents—those Obscured Existences who hold different domains and elements at once!”

  “You mean… cultivating multiple elements is also for balance?” Javon looked genuinely surprised.

  “Of course.” The Professor spoke with conviction. “Mortis—silence, cold, death—does it not oppose Sanguis—life and propagation? If those two can be balanced, perhaps they can mend each other’s flaws and erase madness, allowing one to climb farther along the Sephiroth.”

  “Perhaps the next Obscured Existence will be born from those who cultivate both paths. For the same reason, our school is also optimistic about the ‘Balancer’ route—Forged Light and Umbral together.”

  So that’s how it developed…

  Javon felt as though he had seized the thread of a millennium of occult theory: Using conflict and restraint between aspects to bypass contamination and madness. There are plenty of clever people among Transcendents.

  “But as far as I know…” he said, deliberately, “The Mother of Nature arose from Chrysalis and Sanguis.”

  As expected, the Professor’s step faltered. Then he said, “The Mother of Nature may be a god born directly alongside the Ethereal Realm—she cannot be encompassed by earlier theories.”

  “Besides, in the current occult world, there isn’t even a single World-Sanctioned Immortal. We can’t confirm whether the doctrine is correct.”

  “But judging from the fact that many Velthyr embody multiple aspects—and from the fact that The Mother of Nature’s state is… not ideal, which serves as supporting evidence—I believe the balance doctrine is likely accurate…”

  I accept your method, but not your taxonomy, Javon thought. You don’t understand what these aspects truly signify—the deeper symbols and secrets behind them.

  If one follows your route to the end, it may become a pitfall.

  Still… it might also succeed. Mystery’s greatest meaning is turning the impossible into possible.

  The Professor concluded, “And of course—if we knew more occult truth, more secrets of the Velthyr, perhaps our climb along the Sephiroth would become easier.”

  “That is why I came here. In legend, the Spirit of Null Observance once favored Diat—true god of reason, keeper of redemption and free will.”

  “Perhaps a Transcendent sheltered by the Spirit of Null Observance can climb farther than the rest.”

  “Mm.” The Professor suddenly glanced at his pocket watch. His expression changed. “You need to use a talisman.”

  Javon flicked one out by habit, purging the area.

  This time, something was wrong.

  Under the white radiance, three shallow “shadows” appeared on a broken wall.

  They were ink-black. Then they melted—into slick, nauseating black sludge that spread across the ground. From it, three humanoid shapes began to rise.

  One was a black gorilla with two heads and four arms.

  Another was Langley—his mouth split wide enough to swallow half his face.

  The third had bulging eyes and grotesquely swollen ears, features warped into a monstrous shape. It should have been Roselyn, but Javon could not reconstruct her original beauty from that twisted mask.

  All three were coated in something like shadow. Their eyes were the deepest black—and each turned toward its counterpart.

  “As expected of the Fallen City!” the Professor shouted. “The city sensed the negative emotions in your hearts. These are your dark personas given form, and they carry extremely potent contamination!”

  “Elvander—use purification!”

  In the Professor’s mind, this was unsurprising: he had prepared protections with an arcane artifact, and Elvander walked the Forged Light Path, the counter to Umbral, so he wouldn’t be struck.

  “Light.”

  A revolver appeared in Javon’s hand. He fired in rapid succession, radiant bullets tearing into the three warped figures, splashing great sheets of black blood.

  “Xander—yours is born of a hunger for power. Langley—greed. Roselyn—obsession with beauty.”

  “Meditate. Control your minds. Don’t let the city sense those emotions again—otherwise your incarnations will grow monstrously strong, and we won’t be able to destroy them!”

  “Damn it!” Roselyn snarled, flame spilling from her hands. Her expression sharpened into something feral.

  “Power…?” The gorilla’s eyes went briefly blank—then steadied. “That isn’t me…”

  Perhaps because of his animal morphing, which strengthened his defenses against outside contamination, his condition was far better than Langley’s.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  Javon swapped ammunition and fired three more shots. With the Professor’s coordination, he struck the shadow-gorilla and Langley cleanly in the head.

  Pop!

  Their bodies burst apart, splattering outward like spilled ink.

  “Die!”

  Roselyn screamed and hurled fire at her own fallen self.

  The flames roared.

  In the next instant, the fire died—and several more Roselyns, as if warped out of a funhouse mirror, stepped into the world together.

  “Roselyn—those are your corrupted offshoots. Don’t attack them yourself.”

  The Professor moved to Roselyn’s side. A strange light shimmered in his eyes.

  “Her fixation on beauty is too strong. It just so happens that I have a mysterious oil painting—The Putrid Fly. It can warp a Transcendent’s sense of aesthetics. I’ll try to ‘neutralize’ Roselyn.”

  “You destroy the offshoots while I do it.”

  As he spoke, he drew a painting from within his coat.

  Javon only glanced once—long enough to see maggots, flies, rotting flesh… all composing a twisted human figure with an uncanny, perverse beauty, already trying to distort thought itself.

  He turned away at once, not daring to look again.

  If you “treat” her like this, when Roselyn recovers, won’t her aesthetics be ruined—seeing ugliness as beauty from then on?