Gravity quit.
Streets hung like torn ribbons. Stone spirals drifted. The sky lay in jagged panes.
Kai Xander stood at the center inside a gold flame that didn't burn so much as press—a daylight weight settling over the field. Behind him, Avalokiteshvara opened a fan of a thousand hands, every palm a calm sun.
Across the ruin, Yobokari smiled. His Akugan burned scarlet; veins mapped his face like fault lines. The Shi'en Jinkai loomed behind him, its palms inked in star-sick glyphs.
"Look at you," Yobokari said, voice thin and precise. "Veilbreaker. Hero. Jailer. Tell me, Kai—what is mercy when the wheel refuses to turn?"
"It still turns," Kai said. Quiet. Certain. "Break it a thousand times. It still turns."
Yobokari lifted his hand. Temples vanished—no sound, a flash, just gone.
"This is freedom," he said. "Cut every chain. Even gods are edits waiting to be erased."
Kai stepped once. Stone burst into lotus petals under his foot, glowing and falling up.
"You're not freeing anyone," he said. "You're trading one cage for another."
Avalokiteshvara moved. A thousand palms fell. Craters rang through the air. Yobokari flicked a wrist; whole rows of arms wiped away mid-strike like chalk under a sleeve.
Kai didn't raise his voice.
Karmic Reflection.
One surviving hand mirrored Yobokari's gesture. The field stuttered. A half-erased shrine flickered back—scorched, but real.
Yobokari's smirk deepened. His right palm opened and seven crimson eyes spiraled inward, each like a star eating itself.
"This," he said, low, "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 agreed to step aside.
"Then," Kai said, steady, "I'll answer with mercy without end."
The palms met.
White.
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 to the Bodhira mountains. A seventeen-year-old boy sat in lotus. Fire petals turned with his breathing.
His name was Kai Xander.
And the world hadn't learned why he would be called the Veilbreaker.
(Opening Narration)
In the world of Margerina, every life turns on the Arcwheel—a cycle of return bound to seven primordial truths. Power here is Muti, shaped by the soul's choices and memory.
For fifteen centuries, the Wheel has turned. Seekers—warriors, scholars, heretics—walk its edges, guarded by a law older than kings.
Now the turning falters. Whispers spread of broken births, fires that don't burn, shadows that dream. Across the fractured nations of men—Janoah, Chun, Rajistan, Vinlan—the age of order trembles. Somewhere beyond the Abyssal Line, a forgotten continent calls.
To most, it's a story.
To Seekers, it's a summons