The wind howled in his ears, mingling with his own ragged, wheezing breaths that sounded like a broken bellows. A sharp, deep ache throbbed in Erika's arms from overexertion, but he dared not loosen his grip—he was running for his life through the Sanctum's night streets, half-carrying, half-dragging Loren in a desperate, clumsy stumble.
"Madman! You're a complete lunatic! Erika! Do you hear me?! Put me down!" Loren's curses, filled with terror and fury, echoed in the darkness.
The sounds of pursuit—pounding footsteps, the clatter of armor—grew louder behind them. The Golden Guard were closing in like hounds on a scent.
Erika's consciousness blurred and shifted—between breaths, fragments of memory pieced themselves together like broken glass:
The Moanweed's eruption.
The pervasive scent of the Deathbirds.
The Angel's Descent, the hall awash with destructive light.
The shock, the rage, the sheer disbelief on Hong Bo's face.
Erika's eyes snapped open as if from a brief, intensely real nightmare.
He found himself still lying on the cold floor of the 'Angel's Descent' hall, in roughly the same position as "before." There was no deafening explosion, no shockwave tearing through everything, no dozen simultaneous beams of annihilation.
Everything was… terrifyingly still.
He struggled to sit up, looking around. The hall was gripped by an eerie silence. Everyone stood frozen in place, wearing expressions of profound confusion and disorientation mirroring his own. The white-robed Clerics, the brothers, the surviving novices—even Hong Bo and Wolfgang—seemed to have collectively lost a moment, their eyes vacant as they stared at each other, silently asking: What… just happened?
No, not everything was unchanged.
Erika's hand instinctively went to his chest. The piece of Moanweed he had carried for so long, his memento… was gone. Not lost, but as if it had never existed, with not even a trace of its aura remaining.
It was then that a fearful gasp broke the silence. Someone pointed a trembling finger towards the very center of the domed ceiling, above the energy shaft.
There, a "presence" had appeared.
It was impossible to describe its form accurately. It resembled a swirling, collapsing, and blooming mass of dim starlight, within which minute points of light flickered like stars being born and dying. It had no fixed outline, yet projected an overwhelming sense of vastness, immense age, and absolute indifference. It hung there silently, wordlessly, yet seemed to drain all "sound" and "color" from the hall, rendering everything else a faded backdrop.
The Keeper.
It looked at no one, made no move, emitted no discernible energy fluctuation. But its mere "existence" was an absolute, soul-shivering pressure. The faces of Hong Bo, Wolfgang, and the other high-tier Clerics instantly turned grim; they could feel more acutely the insignificance and powerlessness of facing an abyss, of confronting the very rules of creation.
The Keeper had seemingly "repaired" a critical error, averting destruction.
But "repair" was not without cost.
A sudden, bone-deep weakness washed over Erika. It wasn't just the pain from the beating. It felt as if all his power—the energy from his newly-formed Marks, his basic stamina—had been siphoned away in an instant, leaving behind only the faintest trickle, a guttering candle-flame, just enough to maintain consciousness and basic movement. Looking around, he saw similar expressions of weakness and depletion on the faces of others—the white-robed Clerics, the novices.
The Keeper hadn't just quelled the chaos; it had seemingly balanced or absorbed the vast majority of available energy for some process of "reconstruction" or "stabilization." The Angel's Descent hall now felt like a furnace whose fuel had been instantly drained. The structure was intact, but all its roaring power was gone, leaving only dying embers.
It was then that Hong Bo's gaze, like two icy probes, shot towards Erika! His eyes shifted from initial confusion to stunned realization, and finally to a torrent of murderous intent so potent it felt tangible!
He understood! While the Keeper had erased the "process" and reset the "outcome," traces of the "cause" and the very fact of the Keeper's appearance—pointing to the source of the anomaly—allowed him to deduce the truth in an instant. The fatal disruption that triggered the Keeper originated with this boy! He had provoked a conflict at the system's foundational level!
"Seize him!" Hong Bo's voice was twisted with fury and belated fear, but he controlled himself, not lunging directly. Instead, he roared at the weakened but still obedient Clerics and the Golden Guard now rushing into the hall."Alive! We must find out what he did!"
The moment the order was given, the nearest Clerics and the entering Guardsmen, despite their weakness, lunged forward with ferocious expressions!
Erika's internal alarms screamed! Instinct for survival overrode weakness and confusion. He scrambled, rolling away from the first grasping hands. His peripheral vision caught sight of Loren nearby, also just struggling to sit up, face a mask of confusion and pain.
No time to think!
He didn't know if Loren understood what was happening, but he knew that staying here, falling into Hong Bo's hands, would be a fate worse than death. And Loren, as another "defective" and witness, had no chance either.
Mustering every ounce of his meager, returning strength, Erika charged at Loren. Ignoring the other boy's startled look, he hauled him up, slung him partly over his shoulder, turned, and fled towards a less crowded area of the hall that seemed to lead to a service passage!
"No time to explain!" Erika gritted out, his lungs burning, legs like lead. The shouts and footsteps behind them grew louder. "If you don't want to be taken back by Hong Bo for 'detailed study,' shut up and hold on!"
He crashed past a weakened brother trying to block the way, bursting through a side door with Loren in tow, and stumbled out into the Sanctum's night streets.
Icy night wind slapped his face, doing nothing for the fire in his lungs or the deep, draining weakness in his bones. Erika half-dragged, half-carried Loren, fleeing through the Sanctum's labyrinthine alleys that now felt endlessly long. Each step was a leaden effort. The new Marks on his arms felt like overheated embers, yielding only a trickle of energy, barely enough to keep his failing body moving.
The shouts and clatter of armor on stone behind them were a relentless drumbeat. The Golden Guard knew this city's shortcuts far better than they did.
"Cough... Let... go..." Loren struggled weakly on his shoulder, his voice broken by jostling and exhaustion, full of fear and anger. "You... lunatic! What did you... do?! Those Angels... that thing in the light... what was it?!"
Erika had no breath to answer. All his will was focused on finding a path and driving his legs forward. Yet Loren's questions hammered at his confused thoughts.
What did I do?
He didn't know the exact answer. He only knew that the moment the Moanweed's aura had spread, something... deeper had been triggered. Not a simple energy clash. More like a rusted key, accidentally shoved into a door sealed for millennia, meant to stay locked forever. And the "warden" behind that door had been stirred.
That shimmering, star-birthing-and-dying phantom above the energy shaft—the Keeper. It had no emotion, no words, only a soul-freezing sense of absolute "correctness." It appeared, and then everything returned to "calm." But this calm carried the emptiness of drained energy and a strange, unsettling "tidiness," as if the prelude to destruction, his desperate defiance, everyone's fear, were just "errant code" to be erased.
It fixed the "error," but the cost was all our energy, and...? Erika thought vaguely, feeling that not just power, but something more abstract had also been "balanced" or "reset."
The Moanweed, once a token of remembrance and now a symbol of vengeance and release, had vanished without a trace—and with it, the last fragile thread of hope within him. Erika forced herself to stop clawing at that suffocating sense of loss. Only one thought burned through her now, sharp and relentless: Run. Get out. Now. She could not be caught. She would not become the next Cecilia—a silent, lifeless specimen on some cold altar.
Erika couldn't comprehend. He only knew his desperate gamble had apparently stirred a hornet's nest far beyond imagination, and now the swarm was upon them.
They ducked into a narrower alley, only to find its end blocked by a tall, moss-covered stone wall—a dead end!
The footsteps behind were unmistakable now. Torchlight stretched the figures at the alley's entrance into long, monstrous shadows.
"There!""Surround them! Don't let them escape!"
Several fully armored Golden Guardsmen blocked the only exit, their spears glinting coldly, covering all angles. They too looked fatigued, clearly affected by the energy drain, but their numbers, training, and gear were more than enough to crush two exhausted prey.
Erika set Loren down, his own back against the icy stone wall, gasping violently. The Marks on his arms tried to flare again, managing only a few weak, guttering sparks. Sweat and blood mixed, streaming from his temple into his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision.
Loren slumped against the wall, face paper-white, his ice-blue eyes filled with despair. He watched the advancing Guardsmen, then looked at Erika, who stood swaying before him in a defensive stance. His lips trembled, finally forming a low, bitter whisper."It's over... we're finished..."
A dead end. A wall ahead, pursuers behind. Strength spent, bodies battered.
Erika's gaze swept over the cold faceplates of the advancing Guards, over Loren's despairing face, finally lifting to the narrow strip of dark-golden sky above the alley, tinted by the Sanctum's perpetual energy glow.
Is this it? After triggering such an incomprehensible event, after glimpsing a more terrifying shadow beneath this world's ice, to die like stray dogs trapped in a filthy alley?
No.
He clenched his aching fists.
Then, the change came—
Not from the pursuers. Not from themselves.
From the wall at their backs.
A faint, almost imperceptible ripple of energy, different from the Golden Circuit's, seeped out from the seam where the stone wall met the ground in a way that defied logic.
Just as the Golden Guard's spear-points were about to touch Erika's throat—
The solid, cold stone at his back... vanished!
Not shattered, not collapsed. It yielded and swallowed like liquid, a sensation utterly violating all reason!
"Wha—?!" Erika managed half a gasp before he, and Loren pressed against him, tumbled backward with the loss of support.
No impact. Only a brief vertigo, a suffocating sense of weightlessness, as if passing through a thick, cold, sound-muffling membrane.
THUMP! THUD!
They landed heavily on solid ground, the impact stirring up clouds of... dust?
Dizzy, Erika scrambled up. Loren groaned beside him. They immediately scanned their surroundings, stunned by what they saw.
This was not the other side of the alley wall. This was a... vast, enclosed space, piled high with indescribable things.
By some source of dim, unnatural light seeping from nowhere, they saw heaps of what looked like broken, lifeless "junk":
Shattered metal components with faded sigils, as if disassembled from some giant machine.
Mounds of grey-white, petrified-looking energy crystal shards.
Twisted, inert slabs of crude Mark-formation substrate.
Even containers and tool fragments made of unfamiliar, strange materials...
The air smelled oddly of rusting metal, inert energy residue, and stale dust.
"This... where is this? The Sanctum's... junkyard?" Loren's voice trembled with disbelief. His family's education evidently hadn't included this place.
Before they could process it, the wall-surface they had "fallen" through above them rippled again with that abnormal light-distortion!
Several armored Golden Guard figures, cautious and determined, were carefully probing, squeezing through that strange "interface," trying to breach this hidden space! Their spears and armor gleamed coldly in the dim light, their eyes locking onto the two youths like hawks'.
Before them lay an unknown, bizarre energy wasteland. Behind them, death still pursued.
Out of the wolf's den, they seemed to have fallen into an even deeper, more mysterious abyss.