The Mirror World

"Are you sure we won't get lost?"

"This place doesn't even have the concept of direction. I don't even know how to divine a route."

"And I can't shake the feeling that this place is dangerous..."

Listening to the uneasy babbling beside him, Cyril shook his head slightly. "With you here, we won't get lost. Have you ever heard of a Seer getting lost?"

"I've never met a Seer other than myself." Owen curled his lip, stood the wooden staff in his hand upright on the ground, then let go.

The staff stood there strangely, without falling or changing in any way.

Owen scratched the back of his head in bewilderment. "Uh... did the Divination Staff Technique stop working?"

"Maybe the next passage is above our heads."

Cyril looked up. A dim, illusory path that seemed unreal appeared before his eyes.

There were many other such dark paths around them, including the one where they stood. They intertwined into a mysterious Web with no visible end, together forming a deep, bizarre world unlike reality.

The Mirror World!

After some rather immature deliberation, Cyril decided to search for the revelation of Fate that Owen had seen.

He thought it was probably a scripted scenario someone had arranged, but the treasure was real, too. Maybe if he earnestly completed the script laid out by whoever was behind it, he'd get paid.

As his thoughts stirred, he heard Owen's hesitant voice. "The next passage is above our heads. How do we get up there?"

"Just walk."

As he spoke, Cyril reached out and pressed his hand against the air before him.

A hazy, insubstantial, deep-blue door abruptly appeared where his palm touched.

Unlike the "doors" he usually opened in walls, the hazy blue door seemed to blend into its surroundings, becoming one with the Mirror World.

It strangely cut off the illusory path ahead of Cyril, yet connected with the passage above their heads.

The Apprentice ability had undergone some changes in the Mirror World, taking on the rudimentary form of a teleportation gate.

Owen stared at the scene, dumbfounded. His unblinking blue eyes seemed to ask: It can do that?

Cyril nodded slightly and explained, "You can do it in the Mirror World."

"Although this place looks real, it isn't a true world. It's more like a collection of doors, made up of countless illusory passages that connect different mirrors and different mysterious realms."

"Since it's essentially a collection of countless 'doors,' an Apprentice can influence their surroundings to a certain extent, connecting doors that weren't connected before or closing doors that have been opened. The latter can't be done directly; it needs outside assistance, which is a hassle."

"But I don't think every Apprentice can do this. Under normal circumstances, an ordinary Apprentice probably can't even enter the Mirror World."

"Oh, right." Owen belatedly realized. "My father didn't leave me any information about the Mirror World, which means Apprentices below Sequence 7 shouldn't be able to enter it at all. How did you manage it?"

Cyril gave a brief explanation. "Because of certain factors I can't discuss, my Door Opening ability underwent some positive changes."

Owen nodded lightly and didn't press him. The two of them walked through the hazy blue door, one after the other.

The next second, they appeared in the illusory passage that had originally been above their heads. Yet from their perspective, they were still moving forward steadily.

Owen looked around in wonder. "Amazing. Can you open a 'door' directly to our destination?"

"No." Cyril shook his head. "It's too far away. I can't manipulate doors beyond what I can see."

"Besides, it's not as safe as you think. Getting lost is only one possible danger. Some doors don't open onto fixed locations. If you connect doors that weren't meant to be connected, you might end up in the Abyss—or even outer space."

Owen glanced back at the blue door that hadn't yet disappeared and suddenly felt a chill of fear.

"Uh... We should just keep walking. I feel like we're not far from our destination."

Cyril nodded lightly. Before he could speak, the surroundings abruptly changed. Green, crimson, and pitch-black colors appeared out of nowhere along the dim, illusory path, rapidly spreading across it. Everything looked like a canvas splashed with paint.

The next second, he saw a darkness unlike the dimness of the Mirror World and felt the damp, faintly warm air around them.

They had left the Mirror World, but it seemed they hadn't quite entered reality!

"How could this..."

"Watch out!"

Cyril cut off Owen's question and grabbed him, throwing them both forward and to the side.

A thin blade of wind silently swept through the spot where they had been standing, leaving a long, narrow trench in the ground.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

The sound of air being torn came in a rapid flurry. Wind blades, denser and more powerful than before, shot out of the darkness.

"Damn!"

A flash of blue light passed, and Cyril dragged Owen away, vanishing from the spot.

The wind blades immediately sliced through the space they had occupied. Several shards of mirror fell to the ground with a clatter.

Cyril had been carrying a mirror with him. Before the wind blades could hit him, he'd escaped into the Mirror World.

At the same time, countless transparent shadows of indescribable shapes and dark, viscous liquid appeared around them out of nowhere. One pale hand after another reached out from the liquid, groping at the air.

In the Mirror World, Cyril watched the outside through shards of broken mirror. Seeing the densely packed transparent shadows and pale hands, he rubbed his elbow without thinking. This scene was enough to trigger a fear of tightly packed things.

The next second, a pure, blazing, brilliant light suddenly descended from above into the space surrounded by countless transparent shadows and pale hands.

The shadows and hands alike grew transparent in the sacred light, so redolent of the Sun, before finally turning to ash and vanishing completely.

With that group of Undead creatures cleared away, Cyril finally saw the man who had attacked them.

He was a tall, adult man with a distinctive broad chin. His brown hair was tied into a bun at the back of his head, like an ancient warrior's. The wind held him aloft, and the currents around him seemed like a loyal army guarding him.

Perhaps noticing Cyril's gaze, he looked over. His dark green eyes were filled with undisguised murderous intent and coldness.

The next second, one enormous humanoid skeleton after another appeared out of nowhere in the open space the Sun's domain had just cleared.

Each stood four or five meters tall, with black flames burning in its eye sockets. Their bones were illusory and indistinct, like a gigantic undead army.

In the pitch-black liquid below, which looked like a water's surface, pale, illusory hands grew again. Like shapes molded from rubber, they stretched longer and longer, waving upward in an attempt to seize the tall figure surrounded by wind.

Before the giant skeletons and pale arms could reach him, Cyril saw the man in their midst spread his arms, as if to embrace the Sun.

But the light he'd been expecting didn't descend. Instead, he froze in place, as though possessed by an evil spirit, unable to control his own body.

Only belatedly did Cyril, spying from the Mirror World, notice a figure suddenly appear in his field of vision.

Because of the lighting and the distance, he couldn't make out much. He could only tell that the figure wasn't very tall and wore a silk top hat and a black suit.

The skeletons and pale hands around him, far taller and more terrifying than he was, seemed inexplicably small and feeble in his presence.

Cyril suddenly lowered his head. He saw the truth of the other man's being, a world belonging to the dead, and a gigantic Feathered Serpent coiled in the sky above that land of death.

Although he couldn't see the man's face, he already knew who he was and what was happening.

He'd stumbled upon Azik Eggers intercepting Qilingus—and had been unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire.

...This was ridiculous. He'd guessed the Crystal Ball's revelation would involve danger, but he hadn't expected the danger to lie not in the treasure itself, but on the way there.

As his thoughts stirred, he saw Qilingus's body in midair rapidly rot—until yellow-green pus oozed out, and chunks of flesh fell away one after another.