[The Transition]
The ash of the Thunder Wolves vanished, replaced by a crystalline void that stretched infinitely in every direction. There was no floor, no ceiling—only floating geometric blocks and the hum of raw psychic energy.
The ancient voice resonated within Riha's mind, colder than before:
"Level Two: The Gate of the Void. You have entered a 5-Dimensional Space. Your mortal body remains on Nexus; only your soul stands here. One day on Nexus is one year in this dimension. You have three years to break the barrier. Failure means your soul will be discarded into the eternal drift. Begin."
[ The Infinite Grind]
Riha stood alone. She didn't need to eat or sleep, but the mental exhaustion was real. She summoned the Chandra-Has, the blade glowing with a pale lunar light. She struck the shimmering boundaries of the realm, but the blade simply slid off, leaving no mark.
Month after month passed in the silence. Riha spent the time wisely:
The Spirits: She captured the drifting spirits of the void to fuel her Mental Cultivation.
The Archives: she opened the Universal Law Scrolls she took from the Mayan ruins, studying the fabric of time and space.
The Attempt: She tried everything. Single strikes. Creating a thousand spectral copies of the blade. Combining them into one massive, high-momentum spear of energy. Nothing worked.
[ The Mirror of Despair]
At the eight-month mark, the silence broke. A voice whispered from the floating blocks.
"You're just a waste, Riha. A girl sold in a cage. You think you can lead an empire?"
Riha looked into the side of a dimensional cube and saw her past self—the bruised, broken girl from the auction. The reflection laughed, a hollow, mocking sound. Riha felt herself sinking into a thick, oily darkness. Her grip on the Chandra-Has loosened.
Kaelen Vane's voice flickered in her heart: "The ancestors will try to drown you in the shadows of who you were."
"I am not that girl," Riha hissed, her eyes snapping open with a violent violet light. She surged upward, shattering the dark hallucination.
[ The Kinetic Secret]
By the eleventh month, Riha noticed the flaw. In a world of 5-D light, nothing cast a shadow—except for a massive, rotating Kinetic Sculpture at the center of the realm.
"The power source," she realized. Every time she hit the barrier, the sculpture hummed, repairing the rift instantly.
She didn't just attack. She used the Chronos-Dagger to freeze the local time around the sculpture. While time was stopped, she summoned hundreds of Chandra-Has blades, stacking them on top of one another. She used her refined mental power to double their momentum.
[ Shattering the Void]
"Now!"
She released the time-freeze. The stacked blades hit the Kinetic Sculpture with the force of a falling moon.
CRACK.
The sculpture exploded into a million shards of glass. Without its power source, the entire 5-D dimension began to spiderweb. With a final deafening roar, the barrier shattered, and Riha's soul was yanked back toward her body.