They were speckless and symmetrical. Lines of carved scripture ran down breastplates and bracers, glowing harsh with blue light. Masks covered their faces. They stood in perfect formation, spears grounded, an ugly ring of order inside chaos.
At the very centre of that circle, forced to his knees and head bowed—
was Eathan.
Or rather, a version of him.
Chains of condensed law pinned that Eathan’s wrists, ankles, and throat, each shackle carved with the Jade Court’s sigils. Qilin antlers flickered in and out around his shadow, trying to form and being cut apart again. His hair hung limp; his eyes—what little Eathan could see behind the fringe—burned molten gold and wet.
“Eathan Lin,” a Paladin spoke, voice carrying with terrifying clarity despite the ruin. “Host of the Qilin fragment. You stand accused of unauthorized interference with a Commander’s core, disruption of established karmic order, unsanctioned traversal of the Realm of Passing...”
Each word dropped like a hammer.
“By authority of the Jade Court,” she continued, “your soul is to be detained, and your existence repurposed until damages are—”
The list went on. Chained Eathan flinched, shoulders hunching as if the accusations were physical blows. His mouth moved—small, soundless shapes that might have been I had to or I’m sorry.
Present?Eathan didn’t hear it.
Blood roared too loudly in his ears.
Dots connected in his head with sickening speed. Realm of Passing, Bai Hu’s core, Heaven’s orders—he’d known they were coming. He’d known, in a distant, theoretical way, that meddling with a Commander’s divine body painted a target on his back.
He’d just never… seen it.
Around him, bodies lay everywhere.
Mortals and mixed-bloods alike were strewn across the ground. Some were in uniforms he recognised—Urban Response, Elite Team, MSR analysts. Others belonged to HQ admin staff, lab coats stained dark, RealmNet technicians with shattered holo lenses.
Faces blurred past until they didn’t.
Willow lay half?buried under a collapsed archway, gauntlets cracked with dried blood and one hand still clenching around a shattered spear haft. Finn lay a few metres away against a broken terminal, the cursed eye scar dark and silent. His shirt was stained through, freckles stark against too?pale skin.
Another figure in something that looked like a torn commander’s coat—Meng Yao?—was slumped against a broken wall, dark hair sprawled and matted with blood.
Everywhere Eathan looked, there was someone he knew.
Blood pulsed through his skull, and he felt like throwing up. His brain tried to catch up, to remember how things ended up this way. The world around him felt like a broken recording, and the air hummed under everything, almost like—
The thought tore away as someone screamed.
“Boss!”
The voice knifed through the noise—furious but familiar. Eathan’s head whipped toward it automatically.
The world tilted around a single point.
In the centre of the ruined plaza, above a jagged bowl of broken wards, something hung.
Taeril White.
Or what was left of him.
The White Tiger’s divine form was suspended midair by a web of chains that skewered the sky. Silver hair spilled around his face, matted with something too bright to be blood. Cracks ran through his chest and arms, fissures of blinding white that split his outline into fractured panels barely holding together.
Eathan’s brain buzzed. He took a step forward, then another, boots splashing in blood.
You wanted to save him.
Look.
“No,” Eathan said. His voice came out wrong, raw. “No, no—”
He ran.
The world narrowed to the line between him and that circle. Noise blurred, and motion tunnelled to a single pin. At that moment, his brain didn’t have room for anything except get there.
Eathan barely registered the second cry until it shivered the air.
“Boss!”
Chewie’s voice—except it wasn’t the twelve?year?old he knew.
This Chewie smashed into the scene like a thrown star.
She dropped in from above, banner?blade swinging in her hand. Her hair was longer, unbound as it trailed her movement like a crimson flag. Chi You’s aura roared off her in waves as she approached the ground, turning the broken stone beneath her into a momentary battlefield again.
She hit the first line of Paladins with enough force to crack their formation. Two went flying, spears skittering across the ground. Chains snapped with a sound like overloaded ice. For a heartbeat, the lightning around Taeril’s bonds flickered.
“Let go of him!” she snarled, banner slamming down hard enough to carve a trench.
Paladins moved like a single organism, spears twisting as scripture along their weapons brightened. They met the demon warlord in a clash that shook the air.
All around, Area 001’s agents… moved.
Eathan saw someone he thought was Tanke push himself up on shaking arms. Willow, bleeding from the temple, was dragging herself toward a dropped weapon. Finn, still bleeding in one eye, was forcing a half?broken talisman into the ground with teeth bared.
They were done. Exhausted. Bleeding. But they were standing.
It should have been heroic.
It looked, to him, like a slow?motion wipe.
Every time someone got their feet under them, a spear hit, and another body would fall back down. The Paladins’ formation barely wavered. Their armour stayed pristine.
Chewie was carving a path through them like a comet, but even she moved like someone burning on fumes. Her blade left afterimages. Her breathing was ragged. When three spears pinned the banner?cloth to the ground, she roared and ripped it free, but her knees dipped.
The chained Eathan strained uselessly against his bonds, antlers flaring. Every time he surged forward, the sigils on the cuffs brightened and snapped him back to his knees.
Taeril, above them, flickered like a dimming star.
Eathan ran faster.
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He didn’t think—couldn’t. There was no room.
He aimed straight for the closest Paladin, throwing himself between that spear and Taeril’s chest.
“Stop—!”
The spear went through him.
There was no pain.
Eathan stumbled—not because he’d been hit, but because he hadn’t. The weapon passed through him without resistance, without even a chill. The Paladin didn’t react; the fight didn’t pause. Chewie’s blade, swinging in from the side, sliced through his shoulder like he was smoke.
Eathan spun, breathing hard.
“Chewie!” he shouted. “Hey—!”
She barrelled past him, eyes locked on the chained Eathan, not so much as flicking in his direction. Her shoulder clipped his; Eathan’s body jolted on reflex—and his hands sank straight through her.
Through her, through the rubble, through a shattered comms tablet that fizzled and sparked on the ground.
His stomach dropped.
I’m… not here.
The thought slid cold and clean through the panic.
He forced himself to stillness.
It took effort. Every muscle wanted to keep sprinting, keep flailing at enemies who couldn’t feel him. But he locked his knees and planted his feet in the middle of the ruin.
He sucked in a shaking breath.
Smoke. Blood. The crack of scripture, the roar of Chewie’s blade. Future?him’s hoarse shouting, the White Tiger’s terrible, failing light.
And under it—
Something else.
The faint, familiar texture of [SYSTEM] threads brushed against the edges of his mind, alone with trailing voices.
“Three Throws of Samsara tests one’s wit, luck, and emotional stability…”
“Ten seconds to call it… Karmic Truth or Crafted Illusion…”
He’d forgotten.
He’d let himself forget.
Eathan heart thundered as he yanked up his HUD on instinct. It glitched once, scrambled by the domain, then snapped into hazy focus at the periphery of his vision.
“…”
Seeing the numbers fall was almost worse than the bodies.
Eathan's throat tightened. Reflex clawed for an old, dangerous comfort—let it drop, let it all burn out, if none of this is real anyway—
“No,” he said, out loud, voice barely a rasp.
His thumb twitched.
He tagged a memory without fully meaning to: warm counter light, the antique clock’s ticks, a hand shoving instant noodles at his chest with a sigh, “Eat before you die in my shop, Eathan.”
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
Skill [Soul Anchor] has been activated!
1000 Karma has been subtracted from your [PROFILE]! (8860 → 7760)
A weight yanked down at the base of his skull, like someone had tied a thread from his chest to the Mortal Realm and given it a sharp tug.
The world didn’t get less horrible.
But it stopped spinning.
Eathan’s breathing evened by a hair. Noise blurred less, and he realised he could think in full sentences again.
Use your brain, Eathan, he told himself, staring at the massacre. What are you really afraid of?
A Paladin’s law?strike slammed down. Future?Chewie threw herself in its path. Somewhere on the ground, Future-Willow’s collapsed form twitched and went still.
It wasn’t dying.
He’d made his peace, in some sideways, cowardly way, with the idea that he might not walk out of this entire mess.
No—the thing twisting under his ribs as he watched wasn’t fear of his own death.
It was this.
Everyone else dying because of him.
Because he’d gone into the Passing. Because he hadn’t left the White Tiger to disintegrate quietly. Because he’d pulled a Commander’s core off its assigned path and dragged it screaming into some other one.
Because if this was true, if dragging Taeril’s core back from the Passing only ended with him shattered further, everyone dead, Area 001 destroyed—then what was he doing?
How many people would he be dragging down with him?
Tremors ran through the ruined plaza. Somewhere, a broken array sparked, then went dark. Above, Taeril’s cracked form flickered, edges dissolving into drifting motes of light.
Future?Eathan lifted his head just enough that their eyes seemed to meet across the divide.
He looked tired. Not the physical fatigue from a long mission, but the kind of tiredness that comes from standing between a god and a ledger and losing both battles.
Eathan bit his lips.
The illusion wasn’t subtle.
It punched directly where it hurt.
“Three Throws of Samsara,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Past, present, future…”
First throw had been stupidly mundane; he’d miscalled a tiny, embarrassing truth and paid for it. Second had been that mirror arguing his motives to his face. Those had been tests of… what. Honesty? Self?recognition?
The throw of the Future, then, couldn’t be about guessing prophecies like multiple choice.
If this game was well?designed—and Foxfire seemed like the type of monster perfectionist who’d only play with elegant toys—then the last round wasn’t “can you predict what will happen.”
“A negotiation,” he heard her again in memory, voice lilting and amused, “a little cultivation with fate itself, dear.”
Eathan exhaled slowly, smoke and heat filling his lungs.
“So that was it.”
She hadn’t been gambling on whether he hit the “right” toggle. She’d been gambling on whether he cracked.
She’d been gambling on his answer.
Another Paladin spear skewered another familiar silhouette. Future?him jerked against his chains. Taeril’s light dimmed another fraction.
Eathan swallowed. “You’re very convincing,” he told the ruin under his breath. “I’ll give you that.”
The thought that slid in next was crystal clear.
If I’d walked this path blind, maybe this is where it would go.
If he kept making the same choices, ignorant of the Jade Deity’s pressure, of the inter-realm political tensions, of how fragile Taeril really was… If no one else intervened, if luck turned the wrong way at every pivot, if he hesitated at all the worst possible moments—
He could see the line now, arcing neatly to this burnt?out plaza.
A future.
Eathan clenched his jaw.
“But you asked the wrong question,” he said quietly.
The prompt the game had handed him was binary: Is this true or false?
But standing here, watching all this, that sounded… stupid.
The only question that mattered wasn’t “Is this possible?”
It was: Is this the only way?
He thought of Taeril blowing his own core to bits. Of Li Wei’s perpetual exhaustion. Of Meng Yao standing in HQ lights that made everything look like bad news. Of Chewie, smaller body, too heavy blade, throwing herself again and again at things bigger than her.
He thought of COZMART’s ugly neon and Sera’s flat stare and Luke’s terrible jokes and Emily’s exasperation and all the mundanity that would never, ever see this war.
And he realised—though the knowledge hadn’t fully bubbled up until right now—that there was no version of him that saw this exact vision and then walked forward unchanged.
That was the contradiction.
A “fixed” future that reacted to his awareness of it couldn’t be fixed.
As prediction data, this nightmare made sense. As a guaranteed endpoint, it was already broken the second it played.
“…”
Eathan looked up at the burning sky and, for the first time since he’d been hurled into the illusion, smiled. It was a small, dark thing, humour edged with something sharper.
“If you created this illusion thinking I’m the type to give up just like that after seeing all of this,” he told the screaming future, “then fuck you.”
Somewhere behind him, outside this bubble of carnage, in a den filled with watching spirits—a gavel must have been hovering at the edge of the count.
He heard the voice like a thread through everything:
“Challenger—please state your response.”
“False.”
Eathan didn’t look away from the ruins.
“False,” he said again.
He wasn’t denying the pain or the plausibility. He was denying its inevitability.
For a suspended heartbeat, everything held.
Then, the plaza shattered.
Light fractured like glass under a hammer. The Paladins, the bodies, the burning sky—all splintered into shards of violet and gold, drawn backward as if someone had yanked the plug out of a tube.
The Eternal Pavilion slammed back in around him.
The crowd’s collective gasp crashed into his ears. The polished floor under his feet was perfectly intact. His lungs burned like he’d run a marathon; his hands were clenched so tight his fingers ached.
Eathan was still standing in the gambler’s ring.
Chewie was at the edge of it, face pale, eyes very wide, with one hand fisted in the front of her robe like she’d been holding herself back from jumping in. Across, Lady Foxfire leaned forward on her velvet throne, tails flared out like a corona behind her.
The supervisor’s fingers tightened on the onyx gavel. With a voice a shade hoarser than before, he declared, “Result: Illusory future, contingent. Correct discernment. Challenger wins—two throws to one.”
A dim golden aura still clung to Eathan’s shoulders, fading slowly. At the same time, his HUD pinged in the corner of his vision.
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
Host has surpassed a mental milestone!
[Humanity] has increased by 3%! (31% → 34%)
[NEW SKILL ACQUIRED!]
? SKILL: Karmic Insight (Lv.1)
? USE: Host is now slightly less easy to be gaslit by "fate". Improves Host’s ability to discern between truth and illusion.
? COST: 200 Karma/use
? COOLDOWN: 72 hours
He would laugh about that wording later.
Right now, he just breathed.