"Unless..." I muttered under my breath, my gaze fixed between the sixth and seventh towers.
"The tower doesn’t need space."
I stretched out my hand. A faint ripple of Essence spread from my palm, carrying a deliberate fluctuation of space.
The air trembled, like water disturbed by a stone. My domain responded at once, runes of violet light spun awake and rearranged themselves, forming new shapes to catch anything concealed in the folds of reality.
I waited, focusing.
But the response was clear. Empty.
The runes shifted back into place, their glow pulsing with quiet certainty: there was no hidden pocket, no folded corridor of space, no phantom foundation lurking beyond sight.
The gap between the towers was exactly as it seemed, impossible, but real.
My jaw tightened. If the tower wasn’t missing in space, then where had it gone?
"That means..." I muttered, snapping my head upward toward the dark clouds.
They churned endlessly above the castle, heavy and restless, with thunder cracking through them again and again. The sound echoed so often it was almost hard to tell where one strike ended and the next began. Still, I kept staring, watching the rhythm, listening to the chaos.
Then I noticed it.
The pattern matched. Perfectly.
"Twelve echoes..." I whispered, a grin pulling at my lips. "Sneaky bastards."
Right then, black lightning tore across the sky.
BOOM!
The deafening blast shook the air. I focused, counting carefully.
The first strike was real, but after that came twelve more sounds. At first they blended together, but my senses were sharp. I was able to separate them, only one was real, the rest were echoes, hollow imitations that carried no weight.
Flashes of black light followed, strange and unnatural, but half of them gave off no real sound.
Just shadows pretending to be thunder.
My muscles tensed. I shot upward in a burst of Essence and stopped instantly just below the cloud’s edge.
Up close, the phenomenon was even stranger. The black lightning danced with a rhythm of its own, as though alive. It wasn’t the sky raging, it was something else hiding inside it.
I stretched out my hand and pressed it into the cloud.
The storm answered.
Lightning lashed at me instantly, black and merciless. My skin dissolved under its touch, devoured completely until bare bone shone through. A fraction of a second later, the current surged, hungry for the rest of my body.
But I was ready.
I snapped my will down, smothering the black lightning, forcing it to collapse into nothing. My flesh knitted back together, my hand returning to normal as though nothing had happened.
I closed my eyes and drew on the law of resonance. Essence pulsed within me, and the world shifted into rhythm. Every sound, every echo of thunder, carried its own unique vibration. I followed them one by one.
The first echo pulsed from directly above the first real tower below.
The second lined up perfectly with the second tower.
The third, the fourth, the fifth... all the way up.
Each echo wasn’t random, it was placed, aligned with the towers themselves.
When I reached the sixth, my heart tightened. I braced myself for the seventh. That was where the answer would be.
But it never came.
The resonance jumped from the sixth echo straight to the eighth, then to the ninth, and onward until it reached the eleventh.
The sky gave me no seventh echo.
Still, I waited, every sense sharpened, my Psynapse stretched to its limits. The pattern demanded twelve. And if the twelfth was real, then it had to reveal the truth that all the illusions were trying to bury.
The twelfth echo rang out, heavier than the rest. For a split second, my domain caught something odd.
A ripple so faint it almost wasn’t there, spread through the air like a warped reflection on water. But before I could focus on it, the black thunder roared again. The ripple shattered instantly, wiped away as if it had never existed.
I frowned and kept my senses stretched wide.
When the next echo came, it happened again. The same ripple, the same instant destruction.
My heart tightened. That wasn’t a mistake. Something was hidden here, something I wasn’t meant to see unless I acted. For that ripple to exist long enough for me to dissect it, I would have to stop the black thunder.
I tracked it back, following the violent crack that split the palace skies.
The origin wasn’t random, it came from the very center of the storming cloud above. My Psynapse sharpened, and I split my thoughts.
[Psynapse Fracture].
Two minds at once. One would focus on the ripple, the other on the thunder.
The storm swelled again, lightning curling within the black clouds. I raised a finger and let Essence gather, coating it with my will.
Just as the next thunderbolt was about to burst, I fired. A beam of raw Essence shot upward, tearing through the air. It struck the cloud dead center. The black thunder guttered out before it could crack.
At the same time, my other mind snapped toward the ripple.
With the storm silenced for that heartbeat, it spread clearer than before. My Right to Insight flared. I saw the ripple strike the space directly between the sixth and seventh towers.
My breath caught. The runes along the palace floor shifted, rearranging themselves as if they too acknowledged it.
Then I saw it. A strange flickering outline, a tower trying to exist but failing, its shape twitching in and out like a mirage.
My chest pounded. This was it, the twelfth tower. The one hidden.
I didn’t think. My body moved before the thought even finished forming. I roared Essence into my limbs, firing myself forward with everything I had. All cylinders burning, every channel pushing me toward that unstable image. The closer I got, the more it wavered, like I was diving into a reflection that didn’t want to hold me.
I didn’t let it reject me.
My Psynapse flared as my will clamped down.
I was Absolute.
If the tower flickered, then I would enforce that it stayed. I thrust myself headlong into the ripple and broke through.
For a dizzying instant, the world stretched and tore around me. Then it snapped back. I staggered, breath heavy, and looked around.
I was no longer outside.
Stone walls rose around me, carved and ancient, carrying patterns I didn’t recognize. The air was still, untouched by the storm. My feet rested on polished white marble.
I stood inside a hall.