📘 Chapter 61 – The Mirror Recess
Light collapsed into silence.
When Yue's senses finally returned, the first thing she noticed was the air — heavy, crystalline, shimmering as though reality itself had been bent and left imperfectly repaired.
She opened her eyes to find herself lying on an uneven surface that looked like water but felt like glass. Ripples of reflected stars spread outward from every movement.
It was neither heaven nor mortal plane — it was between.
> "Ne Job…?"
Her voice echoed, fracturing across the stillness like shards of light bouncing in infinite mirrors.
A faint groan answered from a few paces away. Ne Job stirred, half-buried beneath the glimmering dust that passed for soil here. His Bureau uniform was scorched and torn, his hair matted with light.
Yue exhaled shakily — relief mixed with dread. "You're alive. Barely. That's… becoming a habit."
Ne Job blinked slowly, eyes struggling to focus. "Yue… where are we? This… doesn't look like any Bureau floor I've ever been demoted to."
"Congratulations," Yue muttered, scanning the horizon. "You've just been exiled to the part of reality even Heaven redacted. Welcome to the Mirror Recess."
The world around them shimmered — not a landscape, but an echo of one. Mountains hung upside-down in the distance, rivers flowed like reversed memories, and the sky above was an endless surface of glass reflecting scenes that didn't match the world beneath.
Every reflection showed something slightly different.
In one, Yue stood alone. In another, Ne Job was missing.
In another still, both of them were replaced by their younger selves, smiling — an image that twisted her stomach.
> "This place feeds on memory," she murmured. "It's where the forgotten fragments of divinity go to decay. If the Shard Court sealed it off, that means—"
"That means we weren't supposed to find it," Ne Job finished, pushing himself upright. His tone was surprisingly steady, though his aura flickered unpredictably — chaotic energy still seething beneath his skin.
Yue frowned, kneeling beside him. "That instability's getting worse. If I can't stabilize your signature soon, you'll start tearing the boundary between planes by breathing wrong."
He grinned faintly. "So… just another Tuesday?"
"Not funny," she snapped — then immediately softened, sighing. "Okay, maybe a little."
A tremor rippled through the air — faint, but enough to distort the reflections around them. The sky's mirrored surface rippled like water disturbed by an unseen current.
Ne Job tensed. "Please tell me that was you."
"It wasn't."
The ripple deepened, spreading like a heartbeat through the glass. Reflections began to blur, reshaping into faces — countless faces, whispering their names. Some familiar. Some impossibly ancient.
> "They're memory echoes," Yue realized aloud. "Remnants of gods erased by the Shard Court. Their fragments drift here, trapped in reflection…"
Her words trailed off as one reflection — a tall, robed figure with burning glyphs for eyes — leaned closer from the mirrored sky.
It looked exactly like Ne Job.
Only older.
And smiling.
> "You shouldn't have come here," the reflection said, voice resonating through both air and thought. "Because the Recess remembers what Heaven chooses to forget."
Yue instinctively raised a defensive seal, but the reflection's smile only widened — and every mirrored surface began to crack simultaneously, like glass under pressure.
Ne Job's aura flared in response — chaotic energy igniting without command.
> "Yue," he said quietly, eyes reflecting the spreading fractures,
"I think the memories are waking up."
The glass sky shattered — and a storm of reflections came alive.