El drew a deep sigh of satisfaction and slowly began to walk away from the others with calm, measured steps. He left without once glancing back at the castle he had created. To him it was treated as something ordinary, as though he had already seen everything there was to know about it, though in truth he had not.
The hem of his white robe brushed lightly against the sand, stirring faint clouds of dust around his feet. The blood of the fallen had already dried, yet whenever he stepped upon the darkened stains he still felt a faint, damp sensation beneath his steps.
His hair moved gently in the cold, icy breeze. The red strands swayed quietly, their colour almost identical to the crimson that stained the ground around them. His black, absent, piercing gaze remained fixed ahead with quiet certainty. The battlefield around him blurred into the background. Only the path before his feet seemed to exist.
Leon and Elias followed behind him. Elias walked to his right while Leon kept pace on his left.
Ciel had already entered the Void Castle, leaving the battlefield nearly empty. Only the lingering scent of the dead remained, mixed with the heavy silence that follows war. Around them stretched a path that felt less like a road and more like the quiet approach toward something inevitable.
After walking in silence for some time, they arrived before something that resembled a door.
The door was a transparent gate. Its surface caught the cold moonlight and refracted it into faint fragments of pale light and drifting shadow, as though the glow of the moon itself had been broken and scattered across its form.
It stood alone in the middle of the desert.
Silent. Isolated. Unmoving.
"So, is this supposed to be the entrance to the Grey Castle?" Leon asked.
"Yes," Elias replied. "This is the door to the realm of balance and stability, otherwise known as the Grey Castle."
El turned his head toward Elias and smiled.
"I did not know you were knowledgeable about this place."
"I was not," Elias answered calmly.
"When the Domain of the Descent of the Gods had only begun anchoring itself into this reality, there was only one castle that emerged.
The Grey Castle.
Unlike the White Castle, which leans toward rebirth, righteousness, glory, and purity, and unlike the Black Castle, which leans toward destruction, darkness, insanity, madness, and death, the Grey Castle embodies both.
The Grey Castle is known as Balance. It is the measure of worth within this domain. It is also the strongest castle."
Leon listened quietly as Elias continued.
"How do I know this?
The Black Castle once waged war against the Grey Castle out of curiosity and arrogance. This happened during the time of Unification, when all the castles had been created and had begun to receive blessings from the Gods. It was an age of peace and prosperity for the ritualistic organisations of the Southern World.
Yet even during that era, the Black Castle challenged the Grey Castle.
The war ended with the Black Castle losing to a single man.
The man of the Grey Castle was unlike anything they had ever encountered."
Elias paused for a moment before finishing.
"This war was recorded in the Book of Black, which every ritualist of the Black Castle is required to study."
"Huh, so do we just go inside—"
Before Leon could finish speaking, El had already begun walking toward the door.
As he approached, he examined the faint distortions of space that rippled across its transparent surface. The subtle warping reminded him of the echoes of distorted reality he had once been forced to endure and listen to. Compared to those, this presence felt almost liberating.
He raised his hand and reached forward, intending to push the door open.
But the moment his hand neared the surface, the door responded.
Instead of opening, it consumed him.
El vanished instantly, his figure dissolving into the transparent gate as though he had been swallowed by it.
"El, you bastard!" Leon cried out.
"Do not worry about him. He is fine," Elias said calmly. "We should also get going."
They walked toward the transparent door with cautious steps; their figures reflected faintly upon its flawless surface. From afar it had seemed harmless, almost delicate, like a sheet of glass suspended in empty air. Yet the closer they came, the more unsettling it felt. The surface did not truly remain still. Subtle distortions rippled across it, like silent waves spreading through invisible water. Space itself appeared to bend around the doorway, twisting gently as though reality had grown soft in its presence.
The moment they crossed the final step, the door reacted.
Without warning, the transparent surface swallowed them whole.
There was no resistance, no sensation of passing through solid matter. One instant they stood before the door, and the next their bodies were consumed by it as though they had fallen into a depthless mirror.
Then the world changed.
In a single breath, everything familiar vanished.
They stood in the middle of nowhere.
For a moment none of them spoke. The ground beneath their feet felt real, yet the vast emptiness surrounding them seemed profoundly wrong, as if they had stepped outside the boundaries of the living world.
The sky above them was no longer the quiet night they had left behind.
The pale stars were gone.
The gentle moonlight had disappeared.
Even the comforting cold breeze that had once moved through the night air was nowhere to be found.
Instead, an enormous red sky stretched endlessly above them.
It was not the red of a sunset, nor the warm glow of dusk. This was a suffocating, oppressive crimson, thick and unnatural, like an ocean of blood poured across the heavens. There were no clouds drifting across it. No traces of mist or vapor softened its vast surface. The sky existed as a single unbroken expanse of violent red.
It hung above the world like a wound that had never healed.
Silence followed.
Then they noticed the sun.
At the centre of that endless crimson sky, something impossible hung suspended above the world.
A sun.
But it was not a sun that gave light.
It was black.
Perfectly black.
It did not shine, nor did it radiate warmth. Instead, the dark sphere devoured the sky around it, swallowing every trace of colour and brightness that dared approach its presence. The crimson light of the heavens seemed to fade and weaken as it neared that unnatural star, as though the very concept of light was being consumed.
It resembled a hole torn into reality itself.
A wound in the sky.
A silent devouring abyss.
Looking at it for too long made the eyes ache and the mind recoil. The longer one stared, the more it felt as if that black sun was not merely hanging above the world but watching it. Observing everything beneath its gaze with a cold and patient hunger.
The air around them felt strange.
Thin.
Dispersed.
Each breath felt slightly hollow, as though the world itself lacked the substance required to sustain life. The atmosphere carried no scent of earth, no trace of wind, no familiar presence of living nature.
Instead, something else filled the air.
Fear.
Not the ordinary fear born from danger or uncertainty. This was heavier, older, and deeply unsettling. It pressed against the skin like invisible pressure, creeping into the lungs with every breath. Elias, Leon, and El stood barefoot upon a sea.
It was not a sea of water.
Beneath their feet stretched an endless expanse of thick, inky darkness, a deep blue so dense that it resembled liquid night rather than ocean. The surface churned violently, restless and unstable, as if something vast and furious stirred beneath it.
The waves did not move with the rhythm of a natural tide. They twisted and collided in chaotic patterns, rising suddenly before collapsing into trembling ripples that spread in every direction. It looked less like an ocean and more like the aftermath of a silent war taking place beneath the surface.
Each movement of the sea carried a disturbing quality.
The ink appeared dry, yet strangely moist, clinging to their feet with a sticky resistance. Whenever they shifted their weight or attempted to step forward, the dark substance gripped their ankles and pulled downward with slow persistence, as though the sea wished to swallow them piece by piece.
The deeper they moved, the heavier the resistance became.
Around them, the sea erupted into disasters.
Great walls of ink surged upward like tsunamis before crashing back into the dark expanse with thunderous force. Violent waves rose in jagged formations, clashing against one another like rival armies. Ink splashed into the air in wild arcs, scattering black droplets that vanished before they touched the surface again.
It was chaos.
An ocean of endless turbulence.
And it stretched without limit.
No matter how far the eye wandered across the horizon, the sea continued. There were no distant lands, no faint outlines of mountains, no narrow strips of shore. Not a single tree, not a single grain of sand, not even the shadow of an island could be seen anywhere.
There was only the sea.
An eternal, ink-dark sea that moved and trembled beneath the red sky.
And within that vast emptiness, there were only three living figures.
El slowly surveyed the strange world around them, his expression tightening into a faint frown. His gaze moved across the chaotic waters, then lifted toward the crimson sky and the unnatural black sun hanging above it all.
After a moment of silent observation, he turned his head toward Elias.
If anyone possessed knowledge about such a place, it would likely be him.
Yet when their eyes met, Elias merely raised his shoulders in a quiet shrug. The gesture carried no explanation, no hidden meaning. His expression clearly revealed the truth.
He knew nothing.
Not where they were.
Not how they had arrived.
Not what awaited them here.
El's frown deepened slightly.
"What is this place…" Leon began, his voice uncertain.
He stood stiffly, his eyes wide as he stared upward at the black sun suspended in the blood-red sky. His jaw remained slightly open, the words struggling to form as confusion and unease filled his mind.
But the sentence never finished.
Without warning, the black sun trembled.
A thin tear suddenly appeared across its surface.
At first it resembled a faint crack, barely visible against the endless darkness of the sphere. Yet the fracture widened rapidly, spreading across the sun like a wound torn into reality itself.
The crack deepened.
Then it split open.
Darkness poured outward from the tear, stretching the sun's form until the once perfect sphere warped and collapsed inward. The shape twisted violently, folding into itself as the growing wound consumed the remaining surface.
Within seconds, the black sun no longer resembled a star.
It resembled a black hole.
A void that devoured the crimson sky around it.
And then the scream began.
It did not come from any visible creature.
It erupted from the sky itself.
The sound pierced the air like a blade driven through the world. It was not a single voice, but a dreadful chorus formed from countless sounds layered together in unnatural harmony.
There were cries of the dead.
The broken sobs of mourners grieving beside forgotten graves.
The hollow dread of those abandoned by fate.
The desperate pleas of the starving and the poor.
And within that terrible choir, there was something even stranger.
The joyful laughter of a newborn.
Yet it did not belong to any human child.
The laughter was alien, distorted, and deeply wrong.
"Arghh!"
Elias collapsed to one knee as the scream tore into his ears. His hands shot upward to clamp tightly against the sides of his head, his face twisting in pain as the sound burrowed deep into his mind.
The scream was unbearable.
It felt as if the world itself was crying out in agony.
Leon flinched violently, but he did not cry out.
And El remained silent.
Both of them simply watched.
Above them, the black hole continued to twist and expand, its surface trembling violently as the terrible scream echoed across the empty sea.
Then something impossible happened.
The void shattered.
Without warning, the black hole fractured like fragile glass struck by an unseen force. Cracks spread across the sphere in countless directions, splitting its form apart in a blinding instant.
And then it broke.
The darkness burst into innumerable fragments that scattered across the crimson sky.
Tiny pieces of the shattered void drifted outward like grains of black sand thrown into the heavens.
For a brief moment after the shattering, the sky remained still.
The countless fragments of darkness drifted through the crimson heavens like scattered dust, suspended in silent weightlessness. They hung there without purpose, like the remnants of a broken star that had forgotten how to fall.
Then something changed.
The fragments trembled.
One by one, they began to move.
At first the motion was subtle, almost imperceptible, as though the sky itself had taken a slow breath. The pieces of darkness shifted through the air and began to draw toward a single unseen centre.
Soon the movement intensified.
The fragments gathered together and twisted into a vast spiral high above the world, forming an immense whirlpool of clouds that stretched across the red sky. The swirling formation expanded wider and wider until it dominated the heavens, its motion smooth and deliberate, like a celestial current guiding the remains of the shattered sun.
But the darkness did not remain dark.
As the fragments converged, their colour slowly transformed.
Shadows dissolved into radiance.
Clouds of deep gold emerged first, glowing softly as if illuminated from within. Bronze followed, rich and warm like ancient metal touched by sacred fire. Between them streamed delicate ribbons of prismatic light, thin strands of shimmering colour that carried the gentle hues of a rainbow.
The spiral of clouds grew brighter with every passing second.
Gold flowed into bronze.
Bronze blended into radiant colours that shimmered with quiet grace.
The entire whirlpool became a masterpiece of divine beauty, vast currents of sacred light weaving through the heavens like brushstrokes across an eternal canvas. Each cloud seemed alive with gentle brilliance, drifting and folding into elegant shapes as the spiral continued its slow rotation.
The violent crimson sky that once suffocated the world now seemed powerless before the growing majesty of the formation.
It was beautiful.
Not the fragile beauty of flowers or distant stars.
This was the beauty of the heavens themselves.
A beauty so profound that it carried an undeniable sense of holiness.
A calm descended upon the air.
The sea of ink below continued to tremble and roar, but the sky above had become something entirely different. The swirling clouds radiated a quiet authority that silenced the chaos beneath them, as though a higher presence had entered the world.
At the heart of the great spiral, the clouds began to open.
The golden and bronze currents parted slowly, unveiling a distant brilliance hidden within the centre of the whirlpool. The prismatic lights stretched toward it like reverent streams flowing toward a sacred source.
And there, at the very end of the heavenly spiral, something appeared.
It looked like heaven.
Not merely a place of light, but a realm of impossible purity.
A vast gateway of radiant brilliance rested beyond the clouds, its glow gentle yet immeasurable, like the first dawn of creation itself. The light spilling from it did not burn the eyes, yet it carried a weight that made the soul feel small and exposed.
Soft golden luminance drifted outward from the distant realm, spreading through the swirling clouds like sacred breath.
The sight carried a strange serenity.
It felt ancient.
Holy.
As if the sky itself had opened to reveal a fragment of the divine.
And for the first time since arriving in that strange and dreadful world, the crimson heavens no longer seemed like a wound.
They looked like a curtain that had been pulled aside.