The iron door groaned, not with the friction of rust, but with the collective sigh of a thousand voices that had forgotten how to scream.
Etched into the cold metal was the sigil of 『Pnu-Ytos』—the Great Mystery of Eternal Immortality.
To the commoners of Sacribes, this symbol represented the ultimate blessing of the gods.
To me, sensing it through the spatial ripples with my Invisible Tentacles, it felt like a stagnant pond where the water had long since turned to poison.
" Warning: You are entering the 'Silent Garden of the Unending' "
" Local Madness Pressure: Level 25 (Extreme) "
" Astral Phase 9 status: Synchronizing... Existence at risk. "
The air here didn't just carry weight; it carried memory.
As I reached out a semi-transparent limb to touch the handle, the skeletal hands holding the door from the inside began to move.
They didn't claw at me.
They reached, their bony fingers trembling, brushing against my void-mask face in a desperate, silent plea.
They weren't trying to keep me out.
They were trying to find something—anything—that still knew the meaning of an end.
"You seek a conclusion in a place that has forbidden it,"
I whispered, my voice a vibration that rippled through the non-Euclidean geometry of the hallway.
In my previous life as Ayana Shiramine, I was a prisoner of a different kind of immortality.
My family's wealth, my social standing, my very DNA—everything was designed to persist, unchanged and perfect, for generations.
I was a statue in a gallery of the elite, expected to remain flawless until the end of time.
I loathed it.
Perfection is a stagnant grave.
I pushed.
The door yielded with a sound like breaking glass.
The skeletal hands dissolved into fine, white ash, and I stepped into the 『Silent Garden』.
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The transition was violent.
The Madness Pressure slammed into my consciousness like a physical blow.
At Level 25, the reality of the game world was so thin that it had begun to tear, revealing the shimmering, iridescent rot of the Starry Gap (Between the Stars) beneath.
My HP bar, already flickering, began to drain with terrifying speed.
" HP: 820 / 1,110 ... 790 ... 760 ... "
" Alert: Astral Phase 9 entity requires immediate Profanation of environment to sustain form. "
I ignored the warning. I was too busy feeling.
The Garden was a masterpiece of cosmic blasphemy.
Trees made of calcified veins stretched toward a ceiling that didn't exist, their "leaves" consisting of thousands of twitching, translucent eyes that blinked in unison.
The "flowers" were clusters of teeth, blooming from soil that felt like wet, recycled lungs.
Through my Spatial Tactile Sensing, I could feel the heartbeat of the Garden.
It was slow, rhythmic, and utterly exhausted.
This was the result of the Mystery of Pnu-Ytos—life stripped of the mercy of death, forced to grow and mutate in an endless, agonizing cycle of Erosion.
"Welcome home, little star,"
a voice hummed.
It came from the center of the grove.
A figure sat upon a bench made of woven spinal columns.
It looked human—a woman with long, flowing hair made of silver mist—but her body was in a constant state of liquefying and reconstructing.
One moment she was a beautiful maiden; the next, a mass of squirming, undifferentiated cells.
" Entity Identified: Remnant of the Unending (Phase 9 Class) "
"You are not a Maiden of Sacribes,"
I noted, my tentacles expanding to map the sudden shift in the air's density.
"The Maidens bring the Wine of Sanity to dull the pain,"
the Remnant replied, her face melting into a cluster of mouths that all spoke at once.
"They fear the 'Unknown.' But you... you signed the Blood Pact. You came seeking the truth at the bottom of the dream."
She stood. As she moved, the ground beneath her feet pulsed.
"To know Eternity, you must first survive its hunger. If you cannot Profane this Garden, you will become part of its soil. Another eye on a branch. Another tooth in the field."
The Remnant lunged.
She didn't use a sword. She used the Mystery of Transfer.
Her arm elongated, turning into a lash of black, shifting matter that aimed to copy my own form and override it.
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The clash was instantaneous.
I didn't dodge. In this high-pressure environment, movement had to be efficient.
I focused my will, tapping into the Star-Spawn aura that radiated from my Phase 9 core.
" Profanity Initiated: 'Phase Fatal' "
My invisible tentacles snapped forward, not to strike her flesh, but to grip the very space she occupied.
I felt the curvature of her existence—a chaotic, unravelling knot of immortality.
The Remnant's lash hit my shoulder.
I felt the sickening sensation of my own cells being copied, my black mist form beginning to sprout her silver mist hair.
The pain was exquisite.
It was the feeling of my identity being eroded by an infinite sea.
"Haha... Is this all your Eternity has?"
I laughed, the sound echoing through the teeth-flowers.
"It's just... more of the same! More existence! More repetition!"
I tightened my grip. I willed the space to fold.
" Critical Hit: Dimensional Overlap Achieved "
Using the Mystery of Erosion, I forced the 'Phase Fatal' to invert.
Instead of just observing her internal organs, I forced the spatial vacuum of the Starry Gap to manifest inside her chest.
The Remnant froze.
Her silver hair turned into black ash.
The mass of mouths on her face opened wide, but no sound came out.
She was being unmade from the inside out, her "immortal" cells being dragged into a dimension that didn't permit existence.
" Madness Pressure stabilized: Level 25 → Level 30 "
" Environment Profaned. HP drain halted. "
" Experience Absorbed: Residual Eldritch Essence (Large) "
The Remnant collapsed into a puddle of iridescent slime.
As her form vanished, a small, glowing object was left behind on the spinal-bench.
It was a 『Gold-Axe Key』, pulsing with the cold light of the Old Ones.
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I picked up the key.
As my translucent fingers closed around it, the moon above the Garden—the cold, golden eye of an Outer God—shifted.
A beam of pale light pierced the darkness, hitting my void-mask face directly.
" Special Visual Triggered: 'Astral Beauty' "
The smooth, obsidian film that covered my face began to shimmer and turn transparent.
Beneath the mask, the arrangement of interstellar matter—the nebulae and galaxies that formed my true features—glowed with a god-like, merciless beauty.
For a few seconds, I wasn't a monster in a basement.
I was a celestial event given human shape.
I looked at my reflection in the iridescent slime of the defeated Remnant.
I saw the face of Ayana Shiramine, but it was hollowed out by the stars, perfected by the very madness I had sought.
It was a face that could drive a man to his knees and then burn his eyes from their sockets.
I smiled.
Or rather, the void where my mouth used to be rippled in an expression of pure, nihilistic satisfaction.
This was the "Despair" I had paid for.
The beauty of the void.
But the silence was broken by a sound from above. A chime.
Not the melodic chime of the Asylum's lower floors, but a thunderous, rhythmic booming.
" Alert: High-Frequency Sanity Signal Detected "
" The Maidens of Sacribes have arrived at the Asylum gates. "
" Mission: Descend to the 'Abyssal Throne' before the Purity reaches the root. "
The Maidens were coming with their "Holy Wine," their "Sacred Purity."
They would try to "save" this Garden, to heal the rotting immortality and turn it back into a boring, predictable heaven.
"They won't find a savior here,"
I murmured, my invisible tentacles coiling around the Gold-Axe Key.
I turned toward the deepest part of the grove, where a staircase made of petrified tongues led further down into the dark.
I didn't care about the game's objectives or the Maidens' crusade.
I only cared about what lay at the bottom of the next dream.
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As Nyx places her foot on the first step of the petrified tongue staircase, the entire Asylum trembles.
A system message, written in a font that seems to bleed off the interface, appears:
" The Mystery of 'anti-soul' has been triggered by an external force. The Sunken Asylum is no longer a prison... it has become a Bridge. "
Nyx looks back to see a pillar of blinding, white holy light descending through the ceiling, incinerating everything in its path.
The Maidens aren't just coming to save the Garden—they're coming to erase it.