The city disappeared. In its place lay a battlefield barely obeying gravity. Stone spirals floated in the air. Streets sank into quiet voids. The sky had shattered like glass.
At the center, Kai Xander stood inside a gold flame that shone like sunlight. It did not burn. It pressed. His aura settled over the field, beautiful and unavoidable. Behind him, Avalokiteshvara opened a fan of a thousand hands, each palm glowing with the same gold.
Across from him, Yobokari smiled. His Akugan burned scarlet. Veins ran across his face like fault lines. The Shi'en Jinkai loomed behind him, its palms marked with glyphs that pulsed like dying stars.
Yobokari said, calm and cutting, "Look at you. The Veilbreaker. Hero, savior, jailer. Tell me, Kai. What is left of your mercy when the wheel refuses to turn?"
Kai's voice was quiet and steady. "It still turns. Even if it breaks a thousand times, it turns."
Yobokari laughed sharply. "You cling to a corpse. I burn the wheel to ash, and you call that evil."
He lifted his palm. A temple vanished silently.
"This is freedom. Cut every chain. Even gods are edits waiting to be erased."
Kai stepped forward. Stone shattered into glowing lotus petals beneath his foot. He did not look away from Yobokari.
"You are not freeing anyone," Kai said. "You are trading one cage for another."
Avalokiteshvara moved. A thousand hands fell, each strike punching craters into the floating stone. Yobokari flicked his wrist. Whole rows of arms vanished mid-strike as if wiped from chalk.
Kai did not raise his voice.
Karmic Reflection.
One surviving hand mirrored Yobokari's motion. The field stuttered. A half-erased shrine flickered back into place. It still burned. It was real.
Yobokari's smirk widened. He raised his right hand. Seven crimson eyes opened in his palm. Each eye spiraled inward like a star devouring itself.
Yobokari said, low and surgical, "This is truth without mercy."
Kai drew breath. The thousand hands folded inward until only one perfect gold palm remained. The battlefield dimmed, as if every other light bowed to it.
Kai said, Steady, "Then I will answer you with mercy without end."
The palms met.
White swallowed the world.
Silence.
The battlefield was gone.
A voice, almost a memory: "That battle, that name, the boy who would shatter the veil. This is how it began."
White faded into the Bodhira mountains. A seventeen-year-old boy sat in lotus. Fire petals turned slowly around his body as he breathed.
His name was Kai Xander.
The story began before the world learned why he was called the Veilbreaker.
(World Introduction: The Law of the Arcwheel)
The world of Margerina breathes under an unseen law.
Every life and every memory turns upon the Arcwheel, a cycle of rebirth that binds all souls through seven primordial truths. Its rhythm governs nations, faiths, and the flow of Muti, the living energy drawn from the spirit.
For fifteen centuries, the Wheel has turned without fail. Seekers, a breed of warriors, scholars, and heretics alike, walk the world to study its patterns and defend its balance. Now the Wheel falters. Whispers spread of broken reincarnations, storms that burn without flames, shadows that dream.
Across the fractured nations of men, from Janoah and Chun to Rajistan, Vinlan, and beyond, the age of order begins to tremble. Ancient powers stir in the depths. Old gods wake. Somewhere beyond the Abyssal Line, a forgotten continent calls.
To most, it is only a legend.
To the Seekers, it is a summons.