Part I: The Mirror Breaks
The mirror pulsed.Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, but it didn't shatter.
Instead, it bled—silver light dripping like memory turned liquid.
From that light, a figure emerged.
Tall. Unmoving.Its body was cloaked in obsidian robes stitched with strands of hair.But where a face should be—
A hundred faces.
All weeping.All screaming.Some smiling, as if remembering joy before death.
"The Mirrorless Warden," Gihyeon breathed.
Mujin stepped forward, jaw clenched.
"Are those… real?"
"They were.You wear some of them inside you already."
Part II: The Test of Names
The Warden raised one hand.
From the air, glowing sigils appeared—seven names.
Each one pulsed with a piece of Mujin's past.Each one demanded to be claimed.
"Choose your name, or I will choose one for you."
Mujin stared at the names.
One was his old journalist ID.One was the name his wife whispered.One… was Juhwa.
He didn't choose.
He remembered.
And said, "I'm not made of one name."
"I am all of them."
The sigils burned and merged, spiraling into his chest.The seal flared. His aura surged.
The Warden reeled.
"Then you are dangerous."
Part III: Blade Against the Forgotten
The room exploded into motion.
Skycut Fang clashed with a blade forged from screaming glass.
Every strike Mujin landed revealed a face in the Warden's body—some familiar, some unknown.
He saw his junior.
He saw his mother.
He saw himself, crying as a boy.
Each face was a stolen fragment.Each hit risked breaking the truth.
But Mujin kept going.
Gihyeon supported him with flame barriers, sealing echoes that tried to possess their memories mid-fight.
The Warden hissed, voice splintering into a dozen dialects.
"You bleed memory. We are born from it."
Mujin replied:
"Then die with it."
He drove Skycut Fang through the Warden's chest.
Epilogue: The Room of Silence
The mirror cracked fully.The hundred faces fell away—vanishing into mist.
The Warden collapsed.
And behind it—
A door.
No key. No handle. Only a phrase carved in bone:
"When memory is whole, truth is unlocked."
Mujin touched it.
The door didn't open.
Instead, a vision surged into him:
A battlefield in the sky.The Skybone Emperor wounded.A hand reaching out—
His own.
Then darkness.
Mujin fell to one knee, breathing hard.
Gihyeon caught him.
"You saw it," he said."Didn't you?"
Mujin nodded.
"Next… is the Gate of Origin."
To be continued…