Inside the sanctum of a high-altitude lecture hall, where the subjects of surface realms and the essence of the soul were dissected...
Upon the seamless, polished stone floor of a vast chamber, grand chandeliers descended from the ceiling like hundreds of candles suspended above a dense, ghostly fog. Drapes of gossamer cotton, woven with patterns of photosynthetic magic, clung to the window frames. Looking out, one saw only an endless sea of clouds and the jagged hints of the world far below. Rare flora, birthed from light-seeds, bloomed in gargantuan pots their blossoms, reminiscent of cerulean irises, grew to the size of ancient trees. Their petals overflowed, spilling onto the lectern and stretching their branches until the cavernous room felt suffocatingly narrow. These flowers... like the people within, were stifling the thoughts of the man who commanded silence as he descended the stairs.
He appeared a man possessed by a frantic urgency, yet his eyes burned with a relentless resolve. His mind was a tempest of inquiry, analysis, and deduction, accelerating with every hurried step down the stone flight.
"The world is a vast expanse when viewed upon this board, but my vision... it shall reveal truths you have yet to fathom." He began to trace the contours of the world... erasing, redrawing, and obsessively refining. He spoke of territories and scrawled names of lands as if he were the first cartographer at the dawn of time, discovering the world anew.
"I shall provide an example, though I suspect it may sound tenuous to your ears." The students' gazes locked onto him. He appeared frail, his face gaunt, with heterochromatic eyes—one a pale green, the other a deep amber-brown—rendering him an enigma, neither wholly human nor entirely asura. His hand gripped a specialized quill designed solely for this board. He sketched millions of infinitesimal shards swirling around the map's skeleton, erasing them with the eagle-feathered pommel of his instrument. He drew again, inscribing Runic characters that many in this room had not yet earned the right to study. He glanced at the scholars; their faces were masks of disdain. Some even stifled laughter as he rambled about a cosmos they had studied a thousand times, about gods who existed only through the weight of mortal belief, and the ultimate question: does faith possess a tangible essence?
"What I have drawn for you is a theory conceived in the wake of the recent maritime wars. It is not born of the heavens or the distant galaxies we struggle to imagine. It is... a mosaic of shattered glass. My theory is this: our world is rife with the inexplicable. Our history may be a lie, or perhaps a half-truth. I want you to realize... our collective forgetting is not merely a product of magic or the soul. It is tied to something else. We perceive the world as a sphere, a cone, flat, or inverted; we believe it to be the center of the cosmos, the nexus of soil, water, fire, and air. But it is not. It is a world of shattered glass... fractured, containing depths we can never reach. The shifting lands on our maps are not errors of perception—they are the reality. Perhaps, even now, we are not where we think we are. The shards are spinning. We believe we stand upon a stable earth, but we do not. We stand upon a fragment. We—"
This was an academy of the elite, perched so high above the earth that one's neck ached to look upon it. The occupants wore vestments that signaled their status—long, floor-dragging robes of obsidian, azure, and luminescent green. These were the scholars of the Kingdom of Seniffort, destined to master the mind, to harness mana, and to decipher the Whispering Soul-Scripts. Some among them wielded power enough to unmake entire continents.
But this man, dressed in deep indigo with a crimson sash draped over his left shoulder and trailing behind him like a streak of blood, was different. He wore his beret low. From his vantage point, the tiered seating rose like a steep mountain of intellect, a pinnacle of wisdom... yet he was being mocked as a madman, branded by society as a hollow vessel of nonsense, a thief of time.
"Has your sanity finally slipped away? Did it drown when we threw you into the Mana Well during the soul-simulation trials, you fool?" The presentation of his theory—vast and overflowing in his mind—found no sanctuary here. It only served to paint him as the stereotypical deranged sage.
"Sir, I do not wish to say your theory is wretched, but! If the world is truly a collection of shards, why do we see society, life, and the flow of mana as we do? We sail the seas, we traverse lands... how is that possible? The routes remain unchanged. They have never shifted once." The questions began to rain down. He had no answers for them. The interference in their collective memory prevented them from reaching the truth, and he who had grasped it was cast out from the grace of the common man. Who was right or wrong? It was not a matter of fault. It was a cruel world that withheld the truth—a decadent, disappointing world where even Heaven and Hell were debated as mere myth or absolute fact.
"You speak with absolute truth, yet the ignorant of mind shall never grasp your vision."
As the voices of the mundane grew louder—the students gossiping and mocking his substantiated theories—he felt the weight of their rejection. They would always deny the different. The Soul-Whisper, a jagged memory, pierced his mind. He had heard it always "Seek the one whose feet are as wooden roots. Find a companion in the lost sage of the past... seek them both, and you shall find the Question."
"You are a bloody idiot! We've wasted enough time on the likes of you! Go back to your corner and rot!" The Great Sea War... millions of wrecked ships lining the shores. Ancient beasts in the fields, watching from beneath the grass and soil, searching for those who would be forgotten once the war stripped everything away.
"Ugh—" He collapsed as the whispers grew into a roar he was unprepared for. He had not anticipated that speaking his inner theory would invite such a violent intrusion from the unseen depths. Despite their previous insults, a few in the room rushed forward to prop him up.
"High Priest... Master... I—" His memory began to fracture. The world—no, not the world—Existence... it lacked a definitive form. This unstable reality shattered the fundamental laws of being. Where could they, or you, or it, find the truth if they never questioned? Or if, upon questioning, the thought was immediately purged from their own minds?
Beyond the mysterious thickets on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Seniffort... a group of disciples followed an elderly sage and a priest who struggled with every step. The priest's body, unaccustomed to such toil, ached with every movement.
"It is so beautiful here that I have forgotten my pain for a fleeting moment," Prorson remarked, his voice laced with exhaustion. He forced himself to stand straight, walking alongside the aged sage.
"A land of distinct boundaries... Seniffort. I was one of its architects. Hmm... I miss those days, born of such profound misunderstanding," Wileffs said, his voice steady but tinged with a distant nostalgia. He rested a hand on the shoulder of a hot-tempered disciple who was currently glaring at the sky. There was no sound but the howling wind, fierce enough to uproot trees and send them tumbling past. The gale was so strong it flattened the tall grass, turning the wild landscape into an open plain. They looked toward the center of the greenery—the vast farmlands beneath the Celestial Kingdom, sprawling like a country in the distance. It was a wondrous atmosphere. A beauty that many dreamt of but few would ever behold. Commoners, humans who never perceived the Great Transition, would never find this place.