But at some point, the rhythm was lost. Someone fell a step behind.
"Plaft... Plaft"
The cadence wavered. Slowly, more and more footsteps slipped out of sync with the march. What was once order became dissonance.
"Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft..."
Eyes fixed on the horizon, I noticed nothing strange. I just walked, like everyone else, toward the goal that seemed closer and closer. No problems, no fights—perhaps the simplest trial of the Celestial Pagoda.
But if someone from outside were watching us, they would have seen something grotesque: seventeen bodies moving in different directions, like dizzy ants that had lost their way back to the nest.
"Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft..."
The march became an unending noise—muffled, irregular—like the beat of a broken machine.
And then the weight began to crawl over me.
My eyelids grew heavy, as if liquid iron had filled them. A wall collapsed upon my shoulders. Something viscous, insidious, and vile slithered through my veins—not blood, but a presence.
I tried to force my eyes forward, to focus on the goal.
But… what goal?
"Where was I even walking to?"
"Why should I keep walking?"
"Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft..."
The voices around me became a disjointed chorus of hollow questions, repeated from different mouths.
A murmur of surrender.
A murmur of violence.
A murmur of passion.
A murmur of vengeance.
And then I saw them.
My parents.
My real parents, from Earth—the ones I hadn't seen in nearly four years. Their faces, which I couldn't even recall in dreams, now appeared vividly before me.
They were smiling, arms open wide.
"Your nightmare is finally over, my dear," my mother's sweet voice pierced through me, and a tear slid down my cheek.
I didn't realize it was blood.
"We finally found the cure for your illness, my son," my father's firm voice rang in my heart like a bell, and my legs almost gave out.
How long I had waited for those words. How long I had endured unjust pain, suffocated hope, and the crushing weight of expectation.
Finally—finally—there was a way out.
The golden glow in my eyes began to fade. Gray crept in, devouring my iris, each passing second erasing a little more of me.
Another tear rolled down.
My hand rose, trembling, almost reaching for them. But before touching, I rubbed my eyes, wiping the warm liquid from my face.
I looked at my wet palm.
My brow furrowed.
"Red?... Tears are red?"
Even my thoughts began to freeze, falling into a void of ice.
"Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft... Plaft..."
The sound of footsteps was no longer a march.
It was a spell—an aimless dragging.
The entire world had become nothing but that noise—directionless, futureless.
My parents started calling to me more urgently. Their voices, once gentle and loving, now carried a desperate edge that tore at my chest.
"Come, son… quickly!"
"There's not much time!"
They extended their arms, taking a step toward me. And the closer they seemed, the more distorted the warmth of their smiles became. I wanted to run to them too, to lose myself in that long-dreamed embrace. But… why did that desperation feel so wrong?
My breath faltered. My heartbeat thundered inside my skull, drowning out even the footsteps. Something wasn't right.
I looked again at my still-damp hand. The red stain spread through the lines of life and fate, dripping between my fingers.
"Red tears?"
A chill ran down my spine. The distant sound of footsteps went on—steady, relentless—as if mocking my hesitation.
"Plaft… Plaft… Plaft…"
My parents called again, more anxious this time, as though they would vanish if I didn't reach them soon.
And I… I hesitated.
Then two hisses sliced through the fog of my mind.
The first was ancient. A roar that shouldn't exist, echoing through eras, spaces, and boundaries—bursting from the most protected, unreachable place within me: my own inner world.
A phoenix of lightning rose inside me, its scream resounding like a cataclysmic thunderstorm. Two fey blue eyes blazed from within, staring at me. Eyes that carried no arrogance, no divinity—only fear.
Fear of losing me forever.
My chest tightened. That agonizing pain tore me apart more than any wound ever could. And in that bond, that inexplicable ache, my eyes finally opened.
Opened to what was truly happening in the real world.
The second hiss came the next instant—and it nearly became the last sound I ever heard.
An arrow whizzed past just a centimeter from my head, its tip soaked in red prana. It missed by sheer accident and exploded behind me like a missile.
It was like a bucket of ice water thrown over me.
Like a cataract ripped from my eyes in one motion.
And I saw.
Absolute chaos.
In truth, I hadn't taken a single step.
I'd been standing still for a long time.
In the distance, only three competitors remained conscious—Waan, Weel, and Eva Cuprium, the strange woman with green scales on her face and twisted green horns. They fought desperately for their lives against all the others who had succumbed to madness.
Bodies in frenzy, empty eyes, weapons clashing, spells firing in every direction—a massacre about to erupt among the empire's chosen.
The scene was unreal.
Twelve competitors moved like marionettes, their bodies perfectly synchronized—each step, each gesture, each attack aimed at the same three targets: Waan, Weel, and Eva. And every second seemed to stretch longer, as if time itself conspired against them.
Waan and Weel were almost immortal within that chaos.
A white aura enveloped them, solid and incorruptible, like spiritual armor. Magic, attacks, spells—everything unraveled before reaching them, as if nullified by some unseen force.
Their movements were fluid, almost choreographed—a dance of dodges, leaps, and counterstrikes. Yet even so, the pressure was overwhelming. Each step they took, every move they made, the puppet-like fighters adapted, surrounding them tighter and tighter, pushing them to their limit.
Eva Cuprium was something entirely different.
A red mist surrounded her—tangible, almost alive—corroding everything nearby. The very prana of her enemies drained away the instant it neared her. Spells that passed through her mist withered, shrank, and vanished before reaching their target. Enchanted weapons turned useless, fragile. Every step she took left a trail of decayed energy, as if reality itself bowed to her command.
I had no time to hesitate.
"Shit!" — the word escaped before I could think.
Blue lightning coursed across my skin. A tingling surge exploded through my body, and my speed spiked to something almost monstrous. Each step I took in the shallow water echoed like a muffled thunderclap, tiny sparks crackling around me, lighting fragments of the blackened void.
And then I entered the battle.
The first thing I did was save Waan from being impaled by Leon's spear.
Flanking him were Darius, throwing punches that shattered everything ahead, Tadeus spewing flames from his mouth, and Leon—who moved in a way that defied reality itself.
Every step he took seemed to break the laws of the world: silent, irregular, impossible to anticipate. A dissonant motion in an already chaotic scene.
Leon's spear was about to pierce Waan's back when he suddenly felt gravity crash down on him. I manipulated the field around us, projecting a force that pressed heavily on the puppet-like fighters' bodies. I closed the distance and stood before Leon. My hand struck his chest, and the impact burst out like a shockwave, sending Leon flying backward—like a leaf caught in the wind.
The movements of Darius and Tadeus slowed down, as if their very essence were being compressed. Waan seized the opening. Her white aura erupted as if alive, stretching into two massive arms of pure energy that punched Darius and Tadeus away, flinging them out of the battlefield.
Waan looked at me, startled, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.
"You're awake?"
"Yeah… What's going on?"
"Some kind of mass mind control. Very powerful."
The words hung in the air, heavy with danger. I glanced at the puppet-like competitors, still advancing in their disjointed yet synchronized movements, their empty eyes reflecting an intent that wasn't their own. I could feel the chill of mental magic spreading through the air—an invisible pressure that made my instincts throb in alarm.
I was speechless.
Honestly, I knew nothing about mind magic—not even the basics. I could only sense the urgency, the need to react before the battlefield devoured us all.
"What do we do?" I asked, my voice tight with tension.
"We need to regroup with the girls first," Waan replied, her eyes fixed on the horizon of darkness and chaos.
I nodded, my body vibrating with the phoenix's energy, ready to channel any spark of opportunity that appeared.
"I'll clear the way. Don't fall behind," I said, stepping forward—each stride weighing tons.
My body flickered with electricity. Five energy orbs floated around me, shooting lightning like electric serpents across the battlefield. The impact was immediate: even under mind control, not every competitor could use their abilities with the same precision as their true selves. Each bolt that struck opened a gap, sending bodies flying away from the girls, breaking the suffocating pressure that surrounded them.
I took a deep breath and tore open a rift in front of me, the air cracking under the tension of raw energy.
I leapt inside—and when I emerged on the other side, I was beside Weel.
She was breathing heavily, eyes wide with exhaustion, surrounded by Varetha, Nathanael, Norwenna—less threatening here—and Alden, who manipulated the water on the ground like a lurking predator. He was, frankly, a massive headache.
"Come with me," I said, grabbing her by the arm.
The touch carried a strange reassurance, as if it silently promised that the madness of this place wouldn't consume us. Not that she had much time to resist anyway.
Without hesitation, we entered another rift, reappearing beside Waan, who was barely holding out under the renewed, coordinated assault that had resumed against her.
"Delivery service! Please sign to receive your package," I joked, trying to squeeze a smile out of the suffocating tension.
But before anyone could react—or question my sanity—I had already vanished into another rift, emerging somewhere else.
Each spatial jump was faster than the last. Each movement a blow against chaos—a precise dance amid the madness. The rifts were behaving strangely here. It felt like every portal only covered a fifth of the intended distance, sometimes even less.
That's why I had to cross several in sequence while dodging a deranged archer—the elegant, well-dressed demon girl swinging two blades, one of fire and one of ice, in wild, unpredictable arcs—and another competitor whose actions made no sense at all. He drank glowing liquids from small vials, screamed, stomped the ground, and random effects followed. Sometimes I'd suddenly shift positions, fall into a portal and exit the same one, or even have my prana flicker out for no reason.
I finally reached the far edge—the border of the mist surrounding Eva.
"Come with me."
"Don't come near me," she said, her voice cold enough to cut through the air like a blade of ice.
"We need to work together if we want to clear this first trial," I replied, my voice trying to enforce reason.
"No, you idiot! I mean you _can't_ get close to me. It's about distance! Just clear the path toward the other two," she snapped, frustration dripping from every syllable.
"Alright, alright… Phew… got it," I muttered, accepting the restriction.
Lightning sparked across my body, dancing along my skin and through my muscles as I burst forward toward Waan and Weel, clearing the way for Eva to move.
Ahead, the path was anything but simple.
The dark-skinned demon woman wielding an ice-bladed scythe advanced like a specter—her steps nearly silent, yet her presence crushing. Above my head, the orbs spun furiously, firing bolts of lightning in every direction, carving openings through the enemy formation.
Beside her, Von charged like a living fortress, absorbing my attacks with his colossal shield, completely ignoring the damage surrounding him.
Further away, another competitor fired explosive arrows—each projectile freezing midair, as if gravity itself had been distorted to trap them before detonation.
Eva manipulated her red mist, dissolving the arrows before they could explode, turning each assault into little more than a nuisance. I took advantage of the distraction and rushed toward the reaper and Von.
An icy arc streaked toward me, a direct hit aimed at my chest. But my eyes blazed with concentrated lightning, and two massive bolts erupted from me, striking both the weapon and its wielder before they could pierce me.
The energy lit up the surrounding darkness, and for a second, I felt total control of the battlefield.
Then a heavy shield slammed into my right side. My body spun, the world twisting in slow motion, and I was hurled across the shallow water. The impact cracked like thunder, and for a moment, everything around me split between chaos and silence.
But I was still conscious.
Eva appeared in front of Von, molding her red mist into a dense, pulsating cone. It was a strange, almost surreal sight—the mist writhing as if alive. Von backed away, as though the fear of being melted by the substance outweighed the mental compulsion controlling him.
I seized the opening, took a deep breath, and launched myself at full speed across the battlefield. My choice was clear: neutralize the archer first. I accelerated until I vanished into a spatial rift, emerging several meters ahead. She blinked, startled, unable to follow my trajectory. I entered another rift, reappearing almost beside her.
Before she could react, I inverted her gravity. The effect was immediate: her feet lifted from the dark ground, and she shot upward into the black sky, completely off balance, her bow and aim ruined. I didn't hesitate. I appeared behind her, my hands crackling with concentrated electricity, and electrocuted her with enough force to send her crashing back down.
Still, I stopped short of doing real harm. She hit the ground, stunned.
I charged forward again through the battlefield. Eva, now moving in sync with me, stayed behind, guarding my flank as we pushed forward. The dark reaper and Von, charging like a living mountain, followed close—forming a very questionable formation.
We finally reached Waan and Weel.
They were overwhelmed, struggling to hold off the remaining competitors who still attacked with savage fury. The chaos of battle was absolute—but our arrival created a stable axis amid the storm, a nucleus where strategy, strength, and speed began to align.