A single millisecond before the kitchen knife could fully drive into Morca's heart, the crimson moon above blinked—like a colossal, ancient eye that had finally witnessed enough.
Did… did the moon just blink?
A violent, freezing chill ran straight down Morca's spine at the sheer unnaturalness of the sight.
Immediately after the blink, the fabric of space rippled, tearing open into a microscopic slit. An invisible, overbearing force seeped from the fracture, wrapping tightly around Morca's arm like a vise in a desperate attempt to stop the knife from piercing his flesh.
"Not anymore!"
With trembling, white-knuckled hands, Morca roared against the crushing force of the celestial power.
No matter how ironclad his resolve was, this sudden intervention had far exceeded his expectations.
"I, Morca Sherman Nihility, refuse to bow!"
Perhaps it was due to the grueling year he had spent enduring a hellish, traumatic nightmare that his mind had hardened beyond ordinary human limits. Morca was barely able to resist the paralysis, pushing against the unseen force just enough to keep the blade on course.
Yet, at the absolute apex of his desperation, something else moved.
His shadow violently distorted, tearing itself free from the stone pavement. It crawled up his leg with terrifying speed, winding around his torso and over his shoulder before coiling aggressively around his straining forearm.
"This… where did this come from—?"
Morca barely had time to register the dark, parasitic movement.
Squelch.
A dull, wet sound broke the heavy silence of the mountaintop as the blade forcefully pierced straight through his heart.
The sudden, brutal impact caused tricolor blood—golden-black, golden-red, and ink-black—to splash from the puncture wound. A lone droplet of the volatile mixture landed directly on the shadow coiling around his hand.
The darkness twisted uncontrollably, thrashing in silent agony as if it had come into contact with a conceptual poison.
Little by little, the shadow began to disintegrate into nothingness. But before it could completely disappear, the remaining dark residue burrowed into the marrow of Morca's left index finger.
All of this transpired within a fraction of a second. Morca, his life force rapidly draining, failed to react to the bizarre mutation. He could only muster a small, bloody smile as a profound sense of satisfaction washed over him.
I have made my choice… I am finally free from the shackles of others deciding for me.
With a dull, lifeless gaze, Morca collapsed onto the mountaintop.
Watching the horrific scene unfold before her, a single tear slipped from Allina's chin.
Her once-vacant, halo-ringed eyes trembled repeatedly. A spark of genuine, agonizing light flickered back into them as she stared down at Morca's lifeless corpse resting on the crimson-stained stone floor, the kitchen knife still buried deep within his chest.
"Twice…" she whispered, her voice fracturing. "Twice I have watched you die before me."
She pressed a trembling, armored hand tightly against her own chest, where her golden blood leaked through.
"The first time left a permanent wound on my soul. The second… hurts deeper still."
Yet, even through the torrential downpour of her grief, a fragile, beautiful smile surfaced on her lips.
"But now I know you are not a weak child who hungers blindly for power," she said softly, slowly raising her tear-streaked gaze to the bleeding sky. "If only I could watch you grow… as a true Pathbearer."
Slowly, Allina lifted her slender left hand—her nails sharp, elongated, and stained with her own essence—and reached toward the heavens.
"Then let me steal the witness itself."
The massive crimson moon suddenly shuddered. Space itself groaned under immense metaphysical pressure. The entire trial-world trembled violently as the moon was forcefully torn from its celestial orbit, collapsing inward and shrinking exponentially until it hovered just above her open palm—no larger than a beating, blood-red heart.
Her right hand hovered over the miniature star. A sharp cut followed. Golden-red blood cascaded down, thoroughly bathing the miniature moon in shimmering, volatile sin-light.
"By my name," Allina intoned, her voice expanding and shedding its mortal limitations until it sounded like a decree from an ancient deity, "I open a path. I, Allina Rocian, bestow my order. His flaw shall be my order. His sin… my inheritance!"
With absolute finality, she pressed the bleeding moon directly into Morca's unmoving abdomen.
The light vanished.
Morca, who by all laws of nature should have been entirely dead, somehow witnessed the final seconds of the scene. But strangely, his consciousness was too detached; he didn't—or perhaps couldn't—react.
With the celestial witness stolen and consumed, the trial-world completely collapsed into absolute darkness. Every remnant of the mountain, the sky, and Allina was violently sucked into a complex, pitch-black tattoo that had rapidly taken shape around Morca's left index finger.
*****
Morca opened his eyes and found himself standing in a plain, infinite space.
Confusion instantly clouded his face as he cast his gaze around the blinding environment. The chaotic mountain was gone. Instead, he stood within an elongated, dead-silent corridor that stretched far beyond the horizon, defying the laws of geometry.
Smooth white columns lined both sides of the passage in perfect, uncanny symmetry, repeating endlessly as they receded toward a distant, brilliant glow. The floor was polished to a flawless, mirror-like sheen, reflecting the pillars and the pale ceiling above so perfectly that the space felt infinitely deeper than it truly was.
There were no doors, no markings, and no signs of previous use—only the steady, maddening rhythm of identical pillars and the soft, sourceless light filling the passage.
The air felt completely stagnant, untouched by wind, as though sound itself hesitated to exist within these walls. At the far end, the corridor simply faded into a bright, undefined opening—neither clearly an exit nor a wall, just a wash of blinding light waiting at the edge of perception.
It was a place suspended entirely outside of time: empty, immaculate, and endless. It felt like an existential trap, silently inviting anyone who entered to walk forward, whether they wished to or not.
Yet, despite the flawless repetition of the architecture, Morca had an uneasy, creeping sense that the corridor was not entirely uniform.
Though he couldn't point out a single visual flaw.
"How did I end up here?"
Morca winced as a sudden, blinding headache flared through his skull when he tried to claw back his memories. But no matter how hard he pushed his mind, his recollection remained frustratingly fragmented, as if the stark whiteness of the corridor had intentionally shattered his thoughts into separate, isolated shards.
In this blank, amnesiac state, the only anchor Morca could hold firmly to was a single, intuitive realization:
I am still in a trial… but this isn't the first one. This is the second phase.
As for the specific contents of that first trial—his father's riddles, his mother's terrifying deific form beneath the crimson moon, and his own desperate act of piercing his heart—all of it remained trapped behind a fog of amnesia.
"What happened to me? Why can't I remember anything?"
The sickening feeling that his own mind was being manipulated irritated him deeply. Subconsciously, his hand flew to his chest.
However, there was no bloodstain, no jagged scar, nor a single ounce of lingering pain. His clothes and skin looked perfectly intact.
Crack.
It was a faint sound, barely audible to the human ear. However, no matter how soft the fracture was, the oppressive silence of the corridor amplified it through the open space, making it impossible for Morca to determine where it had originated.
Then—
Zzzzip.
The distinct sound of a zipper followed. This time, it manifested as a sharp whisper right beside his ear.
Morca snapped his head to the right, his eyes locking onto the pristine wall beside him.
There, the seamless white surface slid open with clinical precision, revealing a gloomy, black stone slab integrated deep into the corridor's structure.
Its absolute, light-absorbing blackness stood in violent contradiction to the flawless whiteness of the rest of the space.
The exact moment the slab was exposed, a suffocating, primordial presence emanated from the stone. It felt like the gaze of an ancient apex predator watching its trapped prey, silently inviting him to walk directly into its den.
A stone slab…?
Morca's deeply ingrained survival instincts screamed at him to back away, to put as much distance between himself and the black artifact as possible.
But his muscles betrayed him.
His legs moved entirely on their own, subconsciously taking a step forward.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The cold steps echoed through the infinite corridor, each footfall carrying a bizarre weight, as though the stone floor were recording every movement to define his very soul.
"I can't let myself be controlled," Morca growled, his jaw clenching as he fought his own nervous system. "I need to break free."
The sensation of losing control over his own physical body infuriated him. He wanted to break free—but this time, the threat wasn't his father's grand designs, nor was it a decree from Heaven.
He was fighting against the parameters of his own body.
By his third step, Morca's body began to show internal resistance. Veins bulged against his skin as he fought for dominance.
Yet, before he could fully regain control over his motor functions, he found himself standing directly before the gloomy stone slab.
His sharp gaze traced the coarse surface of the artifact. It appeared to be a roughly rectangular stone tablet seamlessly welded into the white wall. Its texture was matte and ancient, scattered with fine, shallow pits that created a subtly uneven, raw plane rather than a polished finish.
Save for two deeply engraved horizontal lines dividing the face of the tablet into three distinct, empty slots, there were no other visible inscriptions.
The surface felt intentionally blank, heavy, and deeply expectant.
It gives the unmistakable impression of a foundational object, Morca analyzed, his intellect overriding his fear. The ancient presence it bleeds doesn't want me to view it as a finished artifact. It is inviting me to engrave something upon it.
A sacred ritual.
"What is this phase of the trial trying to test?"
A deep frown carved into Morca's face as he muttered the question into the void.
The moment the words left his lips, a voice chimed through the infinite corridor.
"Three words shall define your awakening.
One binds your origin.
One binds your path.
One binds your end.
He who tells lies never possessed an identity.
To define oneself: lies are rejected, intent is reflected, meaning is recorded.
Hesitate, and your existence shall be forgotten.
A single word to a slot defines all.
What do you declare yourself to be—knowing the absolute cost?"
The voice echoed one final time, laying bare the brutal, uncompromising rules of the stele.
Morca, not given the luxury of time to fully process his missing memories or the implications of the words, stood rooted to the polished floor.
His crimson eyes stared hard into the three blank slots of the black stone tablet.
"A trial to define my own existence…"
Morca's expression darkened into an unreadable shadow.
The trial seemed deceptively simple on the surface, but the addition of these bizarre, rigid conditions changed everything.
My memory remains fragmented, Morca mused, quickly zeroing in on the core challenge of the gauntlet.
If his memories were entirely intact, this trial would have been trivial. But how could a man accurately define himself when his own past was locked away behind a shroud of amnesia?
Furthermore, the synthesized voice had explicitly stated that he only needed three single words to define his awakening.
But what if he defined himself as someone he wasn't? If he engraved a concept based on flawed deduction, wouldn't the stone reject it as a lie?
Beep—Ping!
An urgent yet strangely melodic alert shattered the silence of the corridor, followed immediately by the prompt of the robotic voice:
"Trial start now!"
02:59… 02:58… 02:57…
The digital numbers bleeding into the air suddenly triggered a deeper, visceral echo of a memory far beyond what Morca could currently remember.
A countdown…
Have I seen this exact scene before?
Then, a specific image flashed vividly through his mind.
Instead of the three-minute timer currently floating above the stone slab, he visualized a thirty-one-minute countdown—a red font displaying clearly on the white screen of a phone.
Fragments of disjointed memories strobed through his consciousness, but there was no time to piece the sequence together.
With no chisel, brush, or engraving knife in sight, Morca chose the most direct option available to him.
He used his bare finger.
The exact instant his fingertip made physical contact with the coarse surface of the first slot, Morca felt violent friction, as if his flesh had brushed against high-grit sandpaper.
Suddenly—
A sharp, piercing agony shot straight through his finger, traveling up his arm and delivering an electric, white-hot shock directly into his brain.
His eyes widened.
He instinctively tried to wrench his hand away from the black tablet, but quickly realized it was impossible.
His flesh had bonded with the stone.
His finger had become one with it.
Then, a grotesque transformation occurred, sending a freezing wave of terror straight down Morca's spine.
"How could there be veins… on the wall?"
Morca shivered, his teeth grinding together.
Like a rapidly expanding spider's web, thick black veins began spreading wildly across the pristine white walls, with the black stone slab pulsing heavily at their core.
Unknowingly, Morca's panicked gaze darted back to the timer.
02:29… 02:28…
Time is running out… I have to engrave something right now.
Spurred by pure urgency, Morca forced himself to ignore the piercing pain.
Slowly, the agony peaked before completely vanishing into a numb, hollow sensation. He could no longer feel where his organic tissue ended and where the ancient stone began.
He closed his eyes, desperately mining the empty spaces of his mind for anything that could serve as the first word.
He knew the rules of the trial now: with a total of three minutes, each of the three slots had to be successfully engraved within a strict one-minute window.
First, his birth name materialized in his thoughts.
Morca!
However, the very millisecond the name formed, a violent, hostile pulse surged from the depths of the stone slab, tearing through the finger connecting them.
In the next instant, his remaining memories began actively draining from his mind, pulled away like water down a drain.
My name is rejected?!
Beads of cold sweat broke out across his brow.
At that exact moment, if Morca had opened his eyes, he would have seen the pristine white corridor completely overrun by throbbing black veins.
The moment he had thought of his own name, the entire hallway had dimmed, flashing with a deep, warning-red light.
The stone was erasing him for a false entry.
Desperate, drowning in the mental void, another hidden memory surfaced to the top of his mind.
He saw an image of a young man.
The youth wore a dark eyepatch over his left eye, standing precariously on the edge of a massive, sweeping cliff. The boy was staring out into an ethereal evening sky, his expression hardened with absolute, unyielding determination.
There, on that lonely precipice, the young man named himself.
It was a name that had permanently altered the trajectory of his fate.
A name he had called out into the dark—and the void had answered.
A name written in an ancient, forbidden language.
A name that reality itself seemed entirely eager to erase from history.
A mistaken title he had once believed was a mere coincidence, but was actually a brand marking him as a true descendant.
Morca opened his eyes, his voice carving into the stone.
"Nihility."
The first slot pulsed.
It accepted the concept.