The void did not welcome Kaizen so much as recognize him.
The moment he crossed the threshold, reality unraveled around him like frayed threads tugged by invisible hands. The air grew weightless. Sound became a distant memory. Colors dulled until only shades of silver and black remained — and even those felt borrowed, as if painted hurriedly by something that had forgotten what the world was supposed to look like.
Daniel's boots touched ground that wasn't quite ground. It pulsed faintly under him, like the slow heartbeat of a sleeping giant.
He was being watched.
Not by eyes… but by memories.
Fragments drifted through the darkness — faint silhouettes: a towering beast, a burning citadel, a lone warrior kneeling with a shattered blade. All of them flickering like candleflames in a storm. He reached toward one, and it recoiled the way a wounded animal might flinch from an outstretched hand.
"What is this place?" Daniel whispered.
His voice didn't echo — it absorbed.
A ripple spread across the void, forming a path of floating shards, each reflecting a distorted memory of him. Sometimes he was older. Sometimes younger. Sometimes scarred. Sometimes holding a sword he had never seen.
He stepped onto the first shard.
It chimed with a hollow resonance, vibrating through his bones. His chest tightened — not from fear, but from something older, something he had carried long before he knew the word destiny.
As he continued forward, the void thickened, pulling at him like cold tar. Symbols ignited across the darkness — swirling sigils shaped like twisted constellations. They rearranged themselves slowly, painfully, like ancient mechanisms forcing themselves awake after centuries of sleep.
A voice finally broke the silence.
Not loud.
Not soft.
Just inevitable.
"You return."
Daniel spun toward the sound. A figure emerged from the shifting dark — tall, robed in layers of shadow that behaved like living smoke. Its face was a smooth, unreadable mask, yet Kaizen felt it smiling.
"Return?" he asked, instinctively resting a hand on the hilt of his blade. "I've never been here before."
The figure tilted its head slowly, as if listening to something only it could hear.
"You have been forgotten," it said. "But the void remembers everything."
The temperature dropped. Frost crept along his fingers even though no wind touched him.
Daniel swallowed. "Who are you?"
The figure raised a single hand, and the void rippled outward. Suddenly Kaizen stood in a vast chamber of stars pinned to nothingness. In the center floated a cracked black sphere, its surface etched with deep claw marks.
The Heart of the Abyss.
"I am the Keeper of What Was Lost." The figure gestured toward the sphere. "And this… is what your world tried to bury."
The sphere pulsed — dimly at first, then brighter, flooding Daniel's vision with violent memories that weren't his:
Cities swallowed whole.
Armies erased in silent storms.
A colossal silhouette wielding ten swords made of starlight, each one screaming with millions of voices.
Daniel staggered backward, gripping his skull as the visions burned through him.
"Stop!" he gasped. "It hurts—"
The visions ceased instantly.
But the pain didn't.
The Keeper drifted close enough that Kaizen could feel the weight of its presence pressing against his ribs.
"You were not meant to awaken yet," it murmured. "But the forest called you. It always calls the ones who carry the mark."
"The mark…?" Daniel looked down.
The skin on his forearm shimmered — faint, glowing lines spiraling outward like a constellation map hidden beneath his flesh. He had seen the pattern once before, in ancient drawings Arron kept locked away.
The mark of the Ten Blades.
But those were myths. Stories. Legends carried by the wind to scare children and inspire warriors.
"I don't understand," he whispered.
The Keeper's mask split — not into a mouth, but into a crack of pure light.
"You will."
It lifted a hand and pointed behind Daniel.
He turned.
A doorway had formed — twisting, howling, shaped like a wound torn into reality itself. Beyond it he saw a barren battlefield under a storm of crimson clouds. Broken swords littered the ground. At the center stood a single, luminous figure with ten blades orbiting him like chained stars.
The figure slowly raised its head.
And Daniel felt the same mark on his arm burn in response.
The Keeper spoke again:
"Chapter Nine begins with a choice. Step forward, and the truth will devour you. Turn back, and everything you love will be devoured instead."
Daniel's heartbeat thundered.
He knew, even without understanding, that this moment was the hinge upon which his entire fate — no, the fate of worlds — would turn.
He took a breath.
And stepped toward the doorway.