I descended and landed softly in front of the main palace. The shadow of its walls swallowed me whole, and for a moment I simply stared upward.
It wasn’t just large, it stretched so high into the sky that I had to tilt my head back until my neck ached. The structure rose in stacked tiers, each section slightly narrower than the one below, like a tower built to scrape the heavens.
From a distance, the palace had looked like one solid block of black stone, but as I came closer the details began to take shape. The structure wasn’t seamless at all. It was divided into clear sections, each layer split by long horizontal ledges. I counted them one by one. Seven in total.
Above those tiers rose eleven towers, scattered across the main body of the palace. They weren’t uniform either, each tower had its own height, like steps in a staircase reaching for the sky.
Each one rose higher than the last, their sequence climbing with precision. Yet when my gaze followed that rhythm, there came a point where the ascent no longer felt smooth. Between two of them the leap in height was sharper, less natural, like a note struck too hard in an otherwise steady melody.
The whole place looked measured, almost mathematical. Every line and angle carried a sense of purpose. But there was always a break, always a gap, like someone had set out to create perfection but lost track at the final step.
It disturbed the rhythm of the design, and that imbalance gnawed at me the more I looked at it.
"Hmm..." I hummed under my breath, staring at the anomaly, but I shook my head and pushed forward. Answers wouldn’t come from staring.
The main gate loomed ahead. It was already open, its dark arches following the same design as the castle gate I had observed earlier.
Inside, the castle was no different. Everything was blackened, charred, as if fire had scoured away every trace of life. The walls were clean, almost polished in their emptiness, the floors smooth and bare. No dust. No debris.
I spread my perception, letting it sweep through every hall, every corridor, every chamber of the massive palace. The response left me frozen, my jaw slack.
"Damn it... don’t tell me this place was really robbed."
There was nothing. Not a single chair, not a single painting, not even a scrap of cloth clinging to the walls. No throne in the main hall. No curtains, no carpets, no decorations of any kind. Just endless black walls and that strange, meticulous design.
It felt less like a palace and more like a hollow shell—emptied out, scrubbed clean, and left behind for reasons I couldn’t yet understand.
I narrowed my eyes. No one would leave a palace here, protected by a flame wall that could devour even grandmasters alive, and then fill it with nothing. That was too deliberate. There had to be a secret buried inside, waiting to be unearthed.
"All right then... let’s play your game. Absolute Domain."
I muttered the words and released my domain. A violet ripple burst out from me, spreading in every direction. The air shimmered as runes came alive across my domain, forming a collection of symbols that hovered faintly in sight.
"Right to Insight."
The moment I invoked it, the runes rearranged themselves, patterns shifting like pieces of a puzzle snapping into new positions. My domain rippled again, sharper this time helping me uncover the patterns.
I moved quickly. I walked the hallways, stepped into small chambers, crossed cavernous rooms, even passed through the throne hall. Nothing. Every room was stripped of use, spotless, lifeless.
I entered the smallest of the rising towers. Despite being the shortest, it was still massive, its halls winding and its rooms stacked one above the other. But again, it was too clean, too polished.
I scoffed and shot straight toward the tallest tower. I searched it as well, floor by floor, chamber by chamber. And once again, nothing.
Clicking my tongue in frustration, I forced myself to be patient and began combing through the towers one by one. It took time, but the result was the same. Emptiness. A flawless shell.
Yet as I rushed through, the thought of that anomaly I had noticed earlier gnawed at me. That subtle disharmony in the design. Now, with my Insight open, I began to see it more clearly. The patterns revealed themselves.
And the more I saw, the more certain I became. This wasn’t an accident. This place had been designed to be flawed.
"Now why would you do that?" I muttered.
One of the halls proved my point. At first glance, it seemed like a perfect square. But the measurements betrayed it, one side had been shortened, forcing the hall into a rectangle. A deliberate adjustment.
And once I saw that, I couldn’t stop noticing others. The stairs were supposed to be twelve steps. But the eleventh had been stretched wider, swallowing the missing count.
Windows in one tower—eleven, evenly spaced, when the rhythm clearly demanded twelve. Another hall, its length measured twelve units, but the breadth had been cut down to eleven, distorting its balance.
Everywhere I looked, the same pattern repeated. A design that had been made to stumble. As if someone had gone out of their way to bend the rules of harmony, always shaving down the number twelve into eleven.
I rubbed my chin, staring at the walls around me. "All right, I get it. You want me to see something. But where do I look?"
Then it hit me.
"Oh... I hadn’t checked there."
I turned sharply, vaulted out of the tower, and shot upward into the sky. The wind tore past me as I climbed higher until the whole castle spread beneath me, its walls, its halls, and its towers standing in clear view.
And there it was again. That same anomaly.
Eleven towers.
But everything I had seen inside told me there should have been twelve. The builders had been following a pattern, leaving hints everywhere. Yet from up here, the alignment looked flawless. Perfect symmetry. No gaps, no missing foundations, no room for another tower.
Still... my eyes caught the one thing that stood out. The height.
I descended slowly and hovered between the sixth and seventh towers.
That was where the flaw revealed itself most clearly. From the first tower to the sixth, the increase in height had been steady, almost mathematical. But from the sixth to the seventh, the jump was too large, unnatural.
I narrowed my eyes. If a tower existed between these two, sized properly according to the earlier pattern, the entire sequence of towers would fit perfectly. The height progression would make sense again. Twelve towers, not eleven.
But there was a problem. There was no space. No foundation had been left, no adjustments carved out, nothing to even suggest a missing tower. Everywhere else in the palace they had bent measurements, altered rooms, and even misshaped halls to hide the number twelve. But here... here they hadn’t.
They had left nothing.
"Unless..." I muttered under my breath, my gaze fixed between the sixth and seventh towers. "The tower doesn’t need space."