The warmth in the infirmary thinned. Above them, the lantern wicks hissed, the golden fire drowning into tiny, sputtering beads of pale blue.
"What is happening?" Yejin asked, stepping closer to Lai Zhin Te. "Why are the lights dying?"
Zhin Te looked up at the plain wooden ceiling, her eyes fixed on the empty space where the invisible anchors hovered. "A shinigami has found the seam, Lady Yejin."
"A shinigami?" Yejin's hand dropped instinctively to the hilt of her sword.
The retainers stiffened, their expressions tightening with dread.
"We need the Dae-Ryeong, Leader Lai," Xiao Ziming urged.
Zhin Te nodded sharply. She pointed at Kiro and Hwiseong. "You two, go find the Dae-Ryeong in the Saeron military house. If he is there, tell him to come immediately." She turned to her lieutenant. "Ziming, you go find the Dae-Ryeong in Choi estate. If he is there, make sure the message gets through without delay."
"Understood, Captain." Ziming gave a crisp bow, then spun on his heel, bolting through the doorway with the two young retainers right behind him.
The corridor outside echoed with the rapid slap of their boots against stone before silence reclaimed the room. Yejin turned back to the center of the chamber.
"Can we do anything from here?" she asked. "Can we reach them?"
"We cannot," Zhin Te said softly, shaking her head. "A shinigami lives in the spirit world. We can only feel the coldness of its presence, but there is no way we can ever interact with it while we are in our physical bodies. Our steel would pass through it like mist. To touch it, one must either cast their soul out through astral projection or summon a pocket dimension as Kei did. The laws governing the spirit realm are entirely different from our own."
"So we just wait here?" Yejin's voice trembled with quiet anger.
"Unfortunately, Lady Yejin, yes. We hold our ground," Zhin Te replied, placing a steady hand on Yejin's shoulder. "And we pray to the Goddess Amaterasu that they survive until Eunjoo gets here."
Yejin drew a slow, deliberate breath, closing her eyes against the cold. She bowed her head in silence, offering a quiet, desperate plea for the fate of all her retainers.
Inside the burning domain, the heat roared back with terrifying vengeance.
Young Vincent stood on the high ridge, his soot-streaked face twisted in agony as a deluge of white-hot fire erupted from his outstretched hands. The blast tore through Fenral's frost barriers, boiling the ice into thick, blinding clouds of hissing steam that stung the eyes and choked the throat.
"Vincent!" Kei shouted, shielding his face as boiling air washed over him. "Look at me! It's Kei!"
"Save your breath, Kei!" Fenral's deep voice rattled in his skull. "That is not your comrade! It is a phantom carved from the grief of his past. The boy who lives today is buried deeper. You must find his true consciousness elsewhere!"
The apparition screamed again, a raw sound of shattered youth, and thrust both palms downward. The sea of molten rock below surged upward, feeding the giant serpent of liquid fire. The beast whipped its massive tail through the air, smashing across the stone ledge and sending boulders tumbling into the abyss.
Fenral lunged forward. His frost-coated paws struck the fiery serpent's neck, pinning it against the cliffside while dozens of his shadow wolves swarmed over its scales, biting and clawing to freeze the creature into hardened slag.
"Go now, Kei!" Fenral snarled, his fangs buried deep in the thrashing monster. "Use your sight! I can sense the spark of his true vessel!"
Kei narrowed his right eye, focusing the pale blue glow of his Deathsight. The roaring fire and falling ash faded into flat gray, peeling away the chaos until a single, faint pulse of warm golden prana flickered far in the distance, swallowed by a wall of endless black smoke.
"I see him," Kei murmured.
Before he could take a single step, the crimson sky above them tore open.
The sound was like heavy silk ripping in two, followed by a sudden, sickening silence that killed the roar of the flames. High above, descending through the fracture, a creature dropped slowly into the air.
It was tall and skeletal, its porcelain-white skin pulled taut over sharp, brittle bones. It had no hair, no nose, and no lips—only a gaping jaw and two bottomless black hollows where eyes should have been. A tattered shroud of thick, oily black smoke clung to its shoulders, trailing behind its unnaturally long limbs as it drifted downward.
Tsuyu took a step back, her breath catching in her throat. "What in the Goddess' name is that?"
Haein drew her dark blade, the steel giving off a hungry hum. Her eyes wide in shock.
"Run, Kei!" Fenral roared, throwing his head back as frost misted off his jaws. "We are out of time! Go!"
Kei hesitated for only a fraction of a second before spinning on his heel, sprinting hard into the swirling dark toward the distant golden pulse.
The shinigami drifted toward the cliff. Phantom Vincent turned his hollow gaze toward the intruder, shrieking as he hurled a massive volley of explosive fireballs straight at the creature's chest.
The monster simply opened its jaw. Its mouth split impossibly wide, revealing a bottomless throat of swallowing void that inhaled the roaring flames like water down a dry well.
Before the phantom could cast another spell, the shinigami's long fingers stretched, hardening into jagged, obsidian talons. It blurred across the stone ledge, striking the boy's apparition across the chest. Even though the phantom was made of memory and smoke, the talons tore through it with a wet, heavy rip.
The young boy's dark essence sprayed from his chest.
Instantly, the sea of fire across the entire domain sputtered, the flames shrinking and turning dull orange as the memory core took direct damage.
"It struck that young Vincent even though it was intangible?!" Haein yelled.
She sprinted forward, her cursed blade trailing black sparks as she drove an upward slash toward the creature's arm. The dark steel struck the shinigami's claw with the deafening screech of grinding iron, the blade drinking a shuddering wave of the monster's rancid cold.
Tsuyu vaulted over a fallen stone pillar, drawing two short curved blades and carving a pair of rapid arcs across the monster's ribs. The strikes cut shallow, hissing lines of black ichor that dissolved into smoke before touching the ground.
Fenral seized the opening. Gathering a massive surge of true arctic prana in his lungs, the great wolf exhaled a howling gale of sub-zero wind. The blast caught the shinigami dead-on, encasing its spindly body in a massive pillar of solid ice.
For a heartbeat, the plateau went dead silent.
Then, a deep, resonant crack echoed through the stone.
The black hollows of the creature's eyes flared with violet light. With a sudden twitch of its shoulders, the shinigami flexed its limbs, shattering the glacial prison into thousands of jagged shards that whistled through the air like thrown knives. It shrieked — a sound that rattled the teeth in their skulls — and lunged straight for Fenral's throat.
Out in the physical world, Xiao Ziming burst through the outer gates of the Choi estate, his boots skidding across the raked gravel.
Dae-Ryeong Choi Eunjoo stood in the courtyard beneath the evening lanterns, clad in his deep blue cheollik, listening quietly to a report from an imperial watch officer.
"Dae-Ryeong Choi!" Ziming shouted, steadying his breath as he crossed the remaining distance. "Forgive the intrusion, sir!"
Eunjoo turned, his sharp, dark blue eyes narrowing slightly as he took in Ziming's sweat-soaked brow and hurried state. "Ziming? Why are you running like this? Has something happened to Zhin Te?"
"Not Captain Lai, sir," Ziming gasped out, bowing low. "It is your sister, Lady Yejin. She sent me to bring you to the infirmary immediately."
Eunjoo's expression hardened instantly, all casual calm vanishing from his posture. "What happened to Yejin?"
"A spiritual rift has opened inside the medical ward, sir," Ziming said, looking up into the commander's eyes. "A shinigami is believed to have entered the domain."
Deep inside the converging realms, Kei ran.
The path ahead stretched into an endless wasteland of cracked stone and black fog. He pushed anima into his legs, his shoes pounding against the ground in a steady, frantic rhythm as the wind howl in his ears.
He ran for three minutes. Then five. Then seven.
Yet no matter how hard he drove his body forward, the faint golden ember in the distance did not grow any larger. It hovered just beyond reach, mocking his efforts like a lantern hung on an unreachable mountain peak.
Kei finally skidded to a halt, his chest heaving as he braced his hands against his thighs. "The space is stretching," he muttered, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. "Is this a loop?"
He straightened and looked around, letting his Deathsight read the shifting landscape.
The burning ruins of Westex had begun to warp. The fiery rooftops and crumbling stone arches were peeling away, replaced by strange, quiet fragments of a world before the inferno.
Then, he heard a woman's voice echoed through the background, "Vincent, come over here, my son!"