Then…
It hit him.
Fear.
Not the creeping kind, not the kind that whispered. No.
This one came like a vice, clamping down on his chest, gripping his heart so tight it nearly crushed him in a single breath.
It suffocated him...
His eyes darted around, wild and bloodshot, and without a second thought, he spun on his heel and sprinted for the heavy door, the one that led down to the staircase below.
Boom!
He slammed it open with a palm.
"W-what?"
His voice cracked.
"What… is this?"
He froze.
It was the same.
The same goddamned main hall stared back at him.
The cup-littered table. The windows. The faint glow of the candles. All of it, exactly the same.
His hand twitched, and he stumbled back a step, then another.
Turning sharply.
Still the same hall behind him.
Panic burst into his limbs as he jerked his head again, peering past the heavy door.
Where there should've been a long stone staircase descending into the underworld beneath the manor…
Now?
Just another version of the same main hall.
Like a mirror image, identical down to the flickering shadows on the wall.
"What the hell is going on!!!" he screamed, voice tearing out of his throat.
Eyes blazing red, he ran forward, straight into the mirrored version of the main hall.
Only to find the nightmare didn't end.
It got worse.
He reached the exit door in the mirrored hall, grabbed the handle, pulled it open and the moment he started walking forward…
It happened again.
No matter how far he thought he moved from the table.
He always turned back to find himself within a single step of it.
It didn't make sense.
It shouldn't make sense.
He clenched his fists hard at his sides, knuckles cracking, shoulders tight with rage, fear, and helplessness.
This wasn't just panic anymore.
His entire life was being unraveled by some sick, invisible hand playing a game he couldn't understand.
I…
I've been careful my whole life…
Flashes. A flicker of memory behind his eyes.
I…
I've built my success with precision, with caution! I earned everything! Everything!
More flashes, him in the same hall, running again.
And again.
And again.
Same floorboards. Same flickering candles. Same windows that never led to anywhere but darkness.
I…
Don't want to die!
Something in him snapped.
He didn't know how long he'd been in here. Hours? Days? Weeks?
Time had gone soft, soupy, lost its shape. And the space? Still the same. Always the same.
The window never brightened. Not even once. Just that unchanging, suffocating darkness on the other side of the glass.
His breath stuttered. His mind blurred. His thoughts, what few remained, slipped through his fingers like wet sand.
He had tried everything.
He threw every spell, every technique he knew, at the walls, the floor, even the ceiling.
The result?
Nothing.
Not a scratch. Not a single crack.
Not even the courtesy of a reaction.
It was like fighting the concept of eternity.
And then.
Thud.
Finally, his knees hit the floor.
Hard.
Veins bulged around his neck, face red, skin slick with sweat.
His body trembled violently from the pressure eating him alive from the inside.
His fists were bruised. At one point, he had punched the walls over and over, not to test anything. Not out of logic.
But because it was the only thing left keeping him from breaking completely.
And even that…
Was slipping.
His knees buckled on the cold wooden floor.
He crawled backward in slow, shaky motions, like his limbs had forgotten how to move.
His spine hit the base of the table with a muted thud, and he slumped there, legs sprawled out, hands braced at his sides for balance.
And then… he just stared.
His eyes locked onto the exit at the far end of the hall, pupils faintly trembling.
His breath came uneven, sharp inhales, slow exhales, chest rising and falling like waves caught in a storm.
Whatever thoughts he had left in that fractured mind of his, they only led to one end.
A horrible one.
...
Silence.
A suffocating, absolute silence.
His gaze drifted to the side. One window, dark. Utter black outside, like the world beyond had simply vanished.
Then he looked to the other side.
Same thing. Just the same unnatural, impenetrable dark. As if something had swallowed the sky and buried the sun.
His gaze dragged forward again.
"...Is this… what they call heavenly punishment?"
His voice rasped out in a brittle tone, cracked and worn like it had been scraped raw.
A bitter laugh followed.
"It seems the hope of entering the Foundation Realm… is far off now."
The words felt distant even to him, like someone else had spoken them.
He didn't know how things got here, how everything turned so violently on its head.
One blink, and it all just… crumbled.
Everything felt bitter. Tainted.
Everything he had worked for, built with blood and fear and cunning, his empire, it had all collapsed. In a single moment.
This…
This was the real face of the world.
Cold. Cruel. Indifferent.
His body felt just as hollow as the room around him. But he didn't want to think now.
With a strained grunt, he shoved his arms against the floor and pushed himself up, unsteady legs trembling as he rose.
His right hand clawed against the edge of the table, using it for leverage, and he slowly turned his body around.
His head lifted as his gaze regarded the room again.
Then... he froze.
"...W-What…?"
His voice cracked under confusion.
Something was… off.
No, everything was off.
The main hall, his hall, one he had seen a thousand times, looked wrong. Different.
The table surface was bare now. Not a single plate, not a single wooden cup remained. No trace of anything that had been there before.
The line of candles that once lit the room? Gone.
The space had dimmed even further, shadows thickening along the corners like slow, crawling ink.
But that wasn't what made his stomach twist.
It was the figure.
At the far end of the long table, seated in an unfamiliar, strange-looking chair, was someone… something.
Cloaked.
Mask covering their face, white, expressionless, save for the sculpted shape of a crying face.
It sat still.
A cold dread wrapped around his spine and didn't let go.
"I-I… uhh… I…"
Words fumbled out of him like broken teeth. He stared at the figure, dread prickling under his skin like ants crawling.
He scrambled mentally, grasping for something, anything, to say.
Something logical. A question. A greeting. A plea.
"I…"
But nothing came.
His tongue curled back, numb. His thoughts felt like mist. His mind, already fractured from earlier, couldn't keep up.
Then the figure nodded.
From behind the crying mask, he saw it, light. A faint glow emerging from the hollow eye sockets. But that wasn't human. Not at all.
He swallowed hard.
Desperately, he looked around the room, just to ground himself. Something to hold onto. Anything normal.
But then.
There.
To his right.
Opposite the figure's position on the other side of the table… a chair.
A chair that wasn't there before.
Somehow, without sound or warning, it had materialized directly beside him.
"H-Huh…?"
His lips parted. No answer came. He didn't even question why. His body just moved.
He dragged his weary frame toward the chair and sat down.
His hands fumbled across the armrests awkwardly. He didn't know where to place them.
Didn't know how to sit. His back hunched. Shoulders stiff. Neck tilted slightly like he was trying not to flinch.
But maybe… maybe this was good.
A moment to breathe. To think. To put the scattered shards of his mind back together.
He inhaled deeply, held it, then exhaled, slow and quiet.
Then, finally, he spoke.
"S-Senior…?"
His tone trembled slightly, but it was steadier than before.
His right hand lifted halfway, as if to gesture, then slowly dropped back to his lap.
Lips pressed into a thin line.
"I… c-can't… understand on… what's happening."
His voice thinned toward the end of that sentence, cracking faintly. He didn't know how else to say it.
Didn't know what else to feel. He just knew this. He felt strange. And the figure across the table hadn't moved an inch.
Time dulled.
It didn't pass. It dragged, like something was pulling each second by the hair across broken glass.
He sat there, frozen, eyes locked on the cloaked figure across the long, empty table.
Waiting. Hoping for a response. Anything.
But none came.
Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen.
Half an hour slipped by, and still, the two of them just sat in that suffocating silence. No words. No motion. Not even a twitch.
Beads of sweat rolled down his face, collecting at the tip of his jaw and dripping to the floor below.
His shirt clung to his back, soaked and chilled. His whole body trembled, not from cold, but from the kind of dread that seeps straight into your bones.
Anxiety clawed at him from the inside.
He was panicking, desperately. Trying to keep it buried beneath his skin, but it was there. Gnawing.
Compared to the endless mirror hall he'd been trapped in earlier, this… this was worse.
It didn't even feel like torture anymore. It felt like being slowly peeled apart without anyone touching you.
Then, finally, he tried to speak.
He drew in a shaky breath. Opened his mouth. The pressure in his chest pushed air up toward his vocal cords.
But before the words could leave his lips.
"Your name…"
His pupils dilated, jaw shut.
The voice wasn't his.
It stopped him cold.
The words reverberated unnaturally, like they weren't coming from the figure at the end of the table, but from everywhere.
Echoing off every wall of the hall, curling into his ears from all directions.
A chill ran down his spine. His gut twisted with a sudden, irrational thought:
'That thing in front of me, it might not even be real'
Swallowing the panic, he stammered out a reply, voice small and tight:
"I… I-I mean… This junior's name is Yellow Lu, Senior."
The silence returned for barely a second.
"Your age…"
The next question came fast, catching him off guard. Simple. Oddly so. Still, he answered.
"Sixty-seven."
"Your dreams…"
"I… I want to be a powerful immortal cultivator."
There was a pause. Just long enough for his throat to dry out again.
Then came the last question.
"Your fear…"
His lips parted, but the words didn't come easily this time.
"I… I fear…" He gulped, eyes darting. "I fear the sense of losing my dream…"
And just like that, the questions stopped.
No response. No follow-up. No movement from the figure across the table.
Nothing but the familiar, soul-scraping silence.
He sat there like an insect roasting over a fire. Every moment in this chair felt like it was eating at his nerves.
His body was tired, his mind even more so, worn ragged from everything that came before.
And now this.
Strange questions. An unmoving figure. A room that kept changing its rules.
He didn't dare to ask what was happening. Didn't want to press. His mind drifted, recalling the little he knew about the world's most terrifying aberrations.
Mutated taboo beings.
Unlike the mindless taboo beasts that only killed and fed, mutated taboo beings followed paths. Each was born from emotion, and each embodied it wholly.
Wrath.
Pain.
Fear.
Hope.
Love.
Lust.
Each one followed its own twisted principle.
The worst part? They didn't kill right away. No. They trapped their prey.
Played with them. Broke them apart to pieces.
Made them suffer horrors that lined up with their particular "path." And once your mind snapped, that's when death became a mercy.
Compared to the common taboo beings, mutated taboos were thinkers. Puppeteers. Sadists in disguise.
To survive a mutated taboo being, there was only one rule:
Follow their rules.
Which meant he had to understand what this one's nature was. What emotion it represented. What game it was playing.
And he had to do it fast, by piecing together every small, cryptic detail before it was too late.
But what he doesn't know.
It was just a test from a person. A person that doesn't even know what he is.
A sane person?
A crazy person?
A calm person?
Liam doesn't know.
But one thing was clear, "Today is such a bloody day"