Chapter 78: The Eye
The shelf gave way.
With a loud, splintering CRACK, the wooden frame buckled under Alina’s boot, sending brass pots, iron jars, and unlit candles crashing onto the stone floor. The heavy clatter echoed off the tall warehouse walls like a sudden burst of thunder.
Even Wan, who had only been leaning his shoulder against the timber to stretch, stiffened up, his dark eyes going wide at the noise. He immediately tucked his hands into his pockets and took two awkward steps backward, looking around with a guilty, defensive face like he hadn't touched a thing.
Nuri and Turman just turned around, staring at the two of them in dead silence.
They shook their heads in unison.
A dark, embarrassed flush rushed straight up Alina's neck and into her cheeks. She stomped her boot twice against the floorboards, huffing under her breath as she tried to brush off the humiliation.
Then... she froze.
Something wasn't right.
The sound of her footfalls had echoed twice.
She took another cautious step forward.
Tap.
Tap.
Alina’s jaw clenched.
There it was. Clear as day.
Someone else was walking at the exact same pace. Someone was tailing them through the shadows.
She turned her head to alert Nuri, but he was already twenty paces ahead, poking through a stack of crates. If she raised her voice now, whoever was lurking in the dark would drop on them before she could draw her spear.
Her eyes darted frantically across the rafters and crate stacks, looking for an exit or a weapon.
A thick hand tapped her shoulder.
Wan was crouching right behind her, making quick, sharp hand gestures toward the ceiling.
Alina stared at his grey face, completely lost. What was he trying to say? Hold on? It's fine?
Did he already know someone was stalking them?
A wave of relief hit her chest, her eyes widening as she looked at him.
Wan blinked, looking slightly startled by how fast her face changed. Without waiting another second, he dropped down on one knee, patting his shoulder to let Alina scramble onto his back.
He took off in a low, silent sprint, cutting between the heavy crate stacks toward Nuri and Turman.
Alina held tight around his neck, feeling a strange, uncomfortable sting in her pride. Usually, she was the one hauling people out of danger. But lately... it felt like she was getting carried around every single week.
Just as they closed the distance, Nuri stopped walking.
His head snapped up toward the wooden ceiling rafters as if a invisible wire had just jerked his neck.
Instinctively, Wan skidded to a halt, and Alina leaned over his shoulder to look up.
Their stomachs instantly dropped into a cold, hollow pit.
Directly above them, an entire set of storage shelves had been mounted completely upside down against the high ceiling beams, a grotesque, inverted mirror image of the main floor.
And standing right in the middle of those upside-down shelves...
A pale figure was crouching on the ceiling, staring straight down at them with glowing purple eyes.
"As I said... you are the only living soul capable of surviving what comes next," the pink-haired man murmured, stepping gracefully through a beam of sunlight like a performer on a stage.
"What comes next?" Lucien asked, his tone dropping into that flat, dangerous edge he used when he was five seconds away from losing his patience.
Lucien was clearly done playing word games with this lunatic.
The man didn't answer. He simply raised his pale right hand toward the high stained-glass window.
Outside, the bright mid-day sun didn't just fade, the golden light curdled, turning a dull, sickly pitch-black, as if ink were bleeding across the sky.
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Lucien tilted his head, his dark eyes locking onto the window.
Mo felt his heart leap straight into his throat. His small, eight-year-old chest heaved as he fought to pull air into his weak lungs, his pulse hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He stared through the glass, his jaw slack.
Something up there had swallowed the sun whole.
"Lucien... if you stand beside me, we can tear down the gods themselves," the man whispered, his eyes blazing with a wild, fanatic light. "I need your raw Heretic power."
Tear down the gods?!
Mo screamed frantically inside his own head, his small fingers digging so hard into the velvet armrests that his knuckles turned white. What happened to the script?! We were talking about border raids five minutes ago!
"Hah."
Lucien's brow pulled tight into a deep, ugly scowl. Even he had finally reached his limit with the theatrical nonsense.
"You pulled all this drama... just to hide behind another cryptic lie," Lucien sneered, stepping forward as his dark umbrella clicked against the stone floor. "You haven't told me a single clean truth since I walked into this hall. Why the hell would I trust a word out of your mouth?"
Pure disgust dripped from every word.
The pink-haired man didn't flinch. He didn't drop his posture.
He just smiled again.
Mo felt a cold shudder run straight down his spine, locking up his knees. The man's smile looked like it had been carved into his skin with a scalpel, frozen, lifeless, and completely unbothered by Lucien's threat.
"Not bad," the man purred softly, his voice dropping into a smooth, unsettling register. "You really are as sharp as the stories say..."
The pink-haired man slowly lowered his hand, his fingers lacing together in front of his chest.
"You question my methods, Lucien, but you cannot question the sky," he whispered, his smile stretching a fraction wider.
Lucien didn't answer him. His dark eyes remained fixed on the high stained-glass window, his scowl deepening as the sickening, artificial darkness continued to bleed across the courtyard outside.
The room had gone dead quiet. The shadows cast by the vaulted ceiling seemed to stretch, twisting along the flagstones like thick, ink-black tendrils.
Mo sat frozen in his chair, his small fingers still clamped white-knuckled around the velvet armrests. Every pulse of blood through his tiny, fragile vessels felt heavy, loud, and suffocating. His soul flared violently inside the young boy's body, his chest tight as he tried to drag in a thin breath of stale air.
Up above, through the cold, painted glass, the blackened sun suddenly shifted.
The dark mass curdled, the center of the ring tearing open with a violent, sickening tear.
Then, right in the middle of the sky, the blackened sun opened an enormous, iris-wide purple eye.
The eye didn't blink. It simply turned its vast, cold pupil down toward the estate, bathing the high hall in a harsh, violet glare that drowned out the room's torchlight.
Mo stopped breathing entirely.
His lungs locked up. His heart slammed against his ribs once, hard, and then seemed to drop dead in his chest. The raw, cosmic pressure bleeding down from that single eye was so absolute, so suffocating, that it felt like his skull was about to cave in under the weight.
Beside him, Lucien went completely rigid.
The bored, arrogant indifference that had sat on his face all morning shattered in a single second. His jaw tightened, his pupils shrinking to tiny black pinpricks as he stared straight into the giant purple eye.
For the first time since Mo had met him, Lucien looked genuinely shaken.