Arcasia's Spire, Part 2
“……”
A massive door of jet-black marble, the color of pitch itself, barred our way.
The ancient characters carved into its surface glimmered faintly, then faded, only to flare again in a slow, endless cycle.
I tried to study the letters in detail, but the harder I looked, the more they twisted into something even more incomprehensible.
Arkan, who had been watching, let out a dry laugh and said, “...Those are forbidden words.”
Forbidden words—ancient script bound with a curse that gnawed at the soul.
In other words, the grotesque lettering on the door was a sealing script created to guard the spire.
It wasn’t especially surprising. In a proper great labyrinth, the place itself was usually sealed up in some way.
Arcasia's Spire was probably designed so that no one could enter the interior without reading every last line of the forbidden script.
The problem was that the moment you read it properly, the curse would strike and break your mind...
“Rudine.”
“Yes?”
Of course, that meant nothing to me.
I had brought Rudine along precisely for this reason.
Rudine had already been consumed by the madness of the Heavenly Slaughter Star.
The curse meant to shatter a mind wouldn’t work on someone who was already completely gone.
“Go read it.”
“Yes.”
Rudine, after hearing my instruction, stepped up to the door and slowly began reading the carved characters.
At that instant—
Kugugugugung—!
Every single character carved into the wall began to shine at once.
The radiance they poured out grew steadily brighter.
A suffocating pressure bore down on my entire body.
Then—
Kiiiiiiik!
With a shrill grinding roar, a new passage leading into the spire opened.
As the door slowly swung wide, a chill draft spilled out from within.
“Hiiik...!”
Adina’s ears twitched, and she hurried to hide behind Arkan’s back.
Her trembling violet eyes shone with an eerie brilliance.
Seeing how violently her Spirit Eye was reacting, this spire seemed to be far from ordinary in more ways than one.
“What do you see?”
“...It leads that way.”
She pointed toward the interior of the spire with the tip of her finger.
Looking inside through the entrance, I could see corridors and stairways that blatantly ignored every law of geometry.
Structures that gave the dizzying illusion that up had become down, and the inside had turned inside out.
Corridors that seemed to stretch on forever, like a Möbius strip.
As expected of the final reward being the Space Rune, even the dungeon’s gimmicks were annoyingly faithful to the rune’s name.
The moment I stepped through the entrance, the flow of the air changed.
The atmosphere itself felt alien.
I could tell instinctively that space was warped here in a completely ridiculous way.
Then Rudine’s voice came from behind me.
“Luke.”
“What is it?”
“Didn’t the scripture say the spire’s relic was sealed in the basement?”
“It did.”
“But there aren’t any stairs leading down.”
She was right. In the center of the spire’s interior, the only stairway that existed led upward.
No matter how carefully I searched, it was the same everywhere.
There were no hidden passages, no concealed structures.
Only a bizarre spiral staircase climbing skyward.
Arkan wouldn’t have lied to me, and there was no reason to think the forbidden text’s record was wrong.
Which meant...
“I suppose that’s the rule here.”
“...The rule?”
“Yeah. I told you before, didn’t I? A domain isn’t subject to the world’s order.”
A space that forced its own independent rules onto the world in reverse—that was the essence of a domain.
The scripture had definitely said the relic was in the basement, but in this space, “basement” might not be the basement we knew.
Domains weren’t places where common sense applied.
I wasted no time and headed for the stairs.
“Come on.”
The moment I took my first step, a strange sensation wrapped around my entire body.
Every time we climbed, the space twisted, distorting our sense of direction.
When we reached the first floor after ascending the first spiral staircase, something even stranger happened.
“Rudine, look out!”
Adina’s frantic shout rang out.
I turned around, and a bizarre sight unfolded before me.
The staircase we had just climbed began folding in on itself slowly, like a giant bookshelf being shut.
The problem was that Rudine was standing right in the middle of the part that was folding.
“Rudine!”
I reached out, but it was already too late.
The stairs folded completely, and the floor beneath her feet vanished.
But contrary to what I expected, Rudine didn’t fall.
The section of stairs beneath her feet folded up and became the ceiling, and Rudine simply stood there, stuck to it.
“...Huh?”
All of us tilted our heads back and stared up at Rudine hanging from the ceiling.
To her, it probably looked as though the ceiling was the floor.
Even her hair and the hems of her clothes were hanging down toward the ceiling.
But to us, she looked as though she were standing upside down.
“Ha, that’s funny.”
Arkan laughed with obvious amusement, then suddenly took a step toward the wall. And yet her foot didn’t slide off.
She just walked along the wall as if it were flat ground.
We were all in the same place, but for each of us, the surface that counted as “floor” was different.
For Adina and me, it was the surface beneath our feet. For Rudine, it was the ceiling. For Arkan, it was the wall.
...This was ridiculous.
Every space was entangled with every other space.
There was no distinction between up and down, or inside and outside.
It was as if someone had deliberately torn space apart and sewn it back together.
This wasn’t merely a place that ignored geometry.
It was more like several separate spaces had been stitched together, each surface obeying a different set of laws.
I called out to Adina immediately.
“Adina, the trace?”
“...Up there.”
“Lead the way. I’ll follow.”
“Hic! Damn it... why do I... Hic! have to come to a place like this...?”
Rudine from the ceiling, Arkan from the wall, and Adina and I from the floor.
Each of us moved along our own surface as we headed upward.
After climbing for a long while, we reached the seventh floor, where an even stranger sight awaited us.
Dozens of corridors appeared before us.
They all looked exactly the same, and there was no way to tell which one was real.
“...That one.”
Without hesitation, Adina pointed to one of the dozens.
As though acknowledging that she had chosen correctly, the corridor emitted a black light and opened, and we moved forward at once.
Each time we passed through a corridor, a ringing filled my ears, and the sensation of space tearing washed over my whole body.
It felt as though we were walking along the border between reality and unreality.
How long had we been walking like that?
Kugugugung—
The moment we passed the end of the corridor, my steps stopped of their own accord.
Even Arkan, following behind, went wide-eyed and drew in a sharp breath.
What lay before us was... a space beyond comprehension.
An endless spiral abyss.
And yet that was strange in itself. If you looked up, it seemed to connect downward; if you looked down, it seemed to connect upward, a dizzying illusion that defied every sense.
It looked as though everything was converging into a single point while expanding infinitely at the same time.
Wait... was there something like this in the original story?
All at once, a line from my memory flashed through my mind like lightning.
The place where the world’s rules converged.
The place where the boundary between reality and fiction collapsed.
A paradox in which every space in existence stretched on forever, yet ultimately converged on a single point.
“The Abyss...”
I muttered the word without meaning to.
As though all the space within the spire was converging here, the warped structures extended without end, tracing out a spiral.
The bottom of the world, and the abyss that all existence would ultimately reach.
The “basement” written in the scripture had meant the Abyss.
And there, at last, we found it.
A stone structure that resembled an altar.
Upon it rested a single ancient book, shining brilliantly all by itself.
“...The scripture.”
The Space Rune.
I’d finally found it.
“……”
When Arkan emerged from the corridor, she was so stunned she could hardly believe what she was seeing.
From the moment she had entered the spire, and from the instant she had passed through those corridors, everything she had experienced had been nothing but chaos and the unknown.
And now, in this moment, even she could not suppress her shock.
“...Crazy.”
The Abyss.
An ancient, primordial Domain from the age before memory, where space itself had evolved into something aberrant.
It was the edge of this world—or perhaps something even deeper than that... a place that touched the Outer Sea.
And right before her eyes, the scripture they had searched for at last lay there.
Arkan’s golden pupils slit thinly.
The moment her Insight, which pierced the origin of all things, tried to analyze the scripture with merciless precision—
“Ghk—!”
Arkan instinctively clutched her head and stopped.
Some part of her instincts screamed at her that this was not something she had any right to pry into.
She had lived for centuries and seen countless things, but she had never once felt danger this primal.
“Hah... hah...”
That thing was, quite literally, inhuman.
The moment she realized it, every hair on her body stood on end, and she felt herself trembling uncontrollably.
This wasn’t ordinary fear. It was a reflexive rejection born from life itself.
And behind the scripture...
There was a massive black sphere suspended in the air.
Crackle—
A tiny crack appeared on the sphere’s surface.
The crack widened, spreading until it ran across the entire round shell.
And then.
Cracka-CRASH—!
The sphere shattered into pieces.
At the same time, a serpent appeared, biting its own tail.
It split in two, then four, then eight... multiplying without end as it devoured itself.
The endless cycle of self-consumption traced ever-larger circles, filling the void.
Within that cycle of ceaseless growth and destruction, it began to warp.
Countless eyes flashed between the serpent’s scales, and at its center a grotesque pattern, like an inverted Tree of Life, writhed with violent motion.
An existence that seemed to embody the image of the Klippot itself, a being that took chaos and gave it form.
An alien presence from the Outer Sea, asleep at the bottom of the world.
A being in which primordial chaos had been realized. An absolute existence for whom even the laws of the world were meaningless.
“Outer God...”
The Outer God, Ouroboros.
More precisely, a fragment of it.
Dangerous.
For the first time, she felt genuine danger.
This was a monster even a great lord like herself could not easily deal with.
“Sixth Lord, we need to pull back.”
She opened her mouth, but—
Step. Step.
Luke Richter was already walking forward, unhurried.
He moved toward the altar with the scripture on it as casually as if he were taking a stroll.
“Stop! That thing...”
But his pace never faltered.
Standing before the altar, Luke slowly lifted the scripture.
At that moment—
“I absorb karma.”
He muttered something under his breath, and then—
[ O pilgrim burdened with great karma, state the purpose for visiting this holy ground. ]
A grotesque voice beyond description sliced through her eardrums and hammered directly against her brain.
“It forces an offering.”
[ What is the sacrifice? ]
“A monster from Ephrasia.”
[ State the price of the offering. ]
“I demand the authority of the domain.”
The instant those last words were spoken, the Ring of Ephrasia on Luke’s finger turned to ash and scattered into the air.
Before long, everything around them was dyed in black.
Countless stars densely woven across the void began to move as though they possessed wills of their own, taking the shape of a tree.
Kiiiiiiik—!
The scripture blazed with light, and the rune’s insignia was etched beneath Luke’s left eye.
This is...
Arkan couldn’t close her mouth.
A tremendous torrent of golden light surged out of the scripture and was absorbed into his body.
It was as though the fundamental laws of the world were taking root inside a human flesh-and-blood body.
Then he murmured something else.
“Domain.”
Blue light rose from the tattoo beneath Luke’s left eye. The surrounding space began to twist.
Reality cracked open as though a mirror had shattered, and through the gap, landscapes from another dimension flickered into view.
The fissure spread, devouring reality.
Centered on Luke, the Abyssal space began to transform into another dimension.
The endless abyss changed into a field of pure white.
“Initiation.”
Even the tattoo beneath his right eye ignited with blue light.
The two lights resonated with each other and drew a gigantic, bizarrely shaped mainspring in the air.
KUUUUUNG!
With a thunderous roar, the hands of the mainspring began to run backward.
Time flowed in reverse and swallowed the space around them.
Ouroboros’s endless multiplication rewound, returning to its point of origin.
“Void.”
Luke extended his hand.
A golden haze burst from his fingertips, wrapped around the mainspring, and the surrounding space began to fold.
“Severance.”
In that instant, a gigantic crack was drawn across the white domain.
It was not merely a line, but an absolute rupture that split space-time itself in two.
It was like a colossal blade cleaving the world in half.
Kiiiiiiik—!!
The line of the fissure pierced through Ouroboros’s form, and the wound slowly began to open.
What lay beyond it was absolute emptiness.
True nothingness—without time, without space, without existence.
“What in the—”
The fissure kept widening, stretching all the way to the edge of the Abyss.
The domain itself split cleanly in two, completely separating Ouroboros’s body—
KWAAAAA—!!
And through the enormous Rift opening that cut the black abyss apart,
the cross-section of the world revealed itself.