I ran my hand against the stone wall as I floated across the narrow hallway. Mauri jogged behind me, trying to keep up with me, but I paid her no heed. After tracing the rough surface with a finger, I placed my hand against my back calmly.

“How close are we?” I asked as I stopped in my tracks.

“We’re ah…” Mauri was trying to catch her breathe as she struggled to answer me. “We’re close. It’s straight ahead.”

Unlike most dungeons which could be cracked open to reveal a secret passage straight towards the core room, this dungeon was heavily modified to suit the current owners. However, only dungeon core owners could shape a dungeon as they please, so how were the Order Knights able to change this place?

Of course, it was either the dungeon owner was working with them or there was someone powerful enough to defy the dungeon’s restrictions.

“Over there!” A group of four armored men approached. One of them was a battle mage, and the remaining three were normal grunts. They blocked my path and immediately attacked without any warning.

I placed my hand against the wall, and a hole on the floor immediately swallowed one of the grunts. I lunged forward towards one of the last two grunts and grabbed his neck before throwing him towards the other man.

The mage’s hand was sickly purple, and he shot a beam of purple light from his hand. Despite its speed, it was not fast enough to catch me. I casually threw my sword at the mage like a javelin, spilling blood as his skewered corpse fell on the floor.

“It’s annoying how I can’t use magic against these guys. Isn’t this like cheating?” I protested.

“At the very least, there’s still no one that would threaten you, Boss,” Mauri tried to assure me.

When we reached the end of the hallway, we found a large room filled with floating orbs. Inside the orbs were various kind of undead beings - some were still active, others were simply rotting carcasses.

I floated towards one of the orbs and found out that there was an empty husk of an armored skeleton holding a staff. The armor and staff had different kinds of jewels of every color, and two metal snake crawled around the staff as if they were real living snakes. Only a dried, hollow face was visible through the hood.

“This must be a lich, am I right?” Mauri asked as she also joined me in studying the decayed body.

“Indeed,” another voice answered before I could say anything. There was a masked man standing on top of a platform at the end of the room. Behind him was a cracked purple crystal which looked like a portal to space.

The man raised his arms to the air and said, “Long ago, that specimen was a powerful lich. Now, it is naught but a husk. As is all life, even the undead goes through the cycle.”

I looked at the skeleton, then back at the masked man. “This guy isn’t a lich. It’s just a normal skeleton knight.”

“What?! Impossible! He could cast spells!” the masked man argued.

“Most people could cast spells,” I scoffed back.

“Not basic spells! He was using advanced spells which should be impossible if he was just a mere skeleton knight!”

“Pfft. Even a pile of walking rotten food could cast advanced spells,” I mocked. It’s true anyway.

“Even still, he was a very tough opponent! It took an entire company to take him down!” the masked man shouted.

I shook my hand wearily, too tired to argue with some masked freak with a question taste in robe-fashion.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The masked man collected himself, then placed his hands behind his back. “So you two are the ones intruding upon my base. I am simply known as Overseer Althur, Master of the Order of the Returned Knights.”

“I’m Boss. This is Mauri,” I introduced, though it seemed that he ignored us in favor of staring at the large cracked crystal.

“I assume you are one of those people that has been attacking us recently. The new mysterious group of people. Though, ‘people’ might be stretching it. Afterall, I don’t see the undead as people,” Althur said as he turned back at us.

I pointed at the large crystal then asked, “How did you managed to enslave that dungeon core to you? Are you a spirit?”

Althur laughed then answered, “The gift given to us is very strong. But it is not enough, of course. It also requires talent given by the great Grandmaster of the Order in order to be powerful enough to manipulate a dungeon core.”

“Grandmaster?”

“Oh yes, undead. Grandmaster has seen the truth of the world. He knows everything about life and death, everything about the cycle, everything about the meaning of all this,” Althur praised with confidence resounding in his voice.

“Who is the grandmaster?”

“Grandmaster is Grandmaster. We do not know his real name.”

What a weird fellow. Must be an anti-social.

I waved my hand gently and all the orbs slowly floated away to the corners of the room in order to clear the path between Althur and me. “So this grandmaster person has been teaching you all sorts of things?”

“Indeed. I feel as if I’m about to reach ascendance soon. It is a shame that Grandmaster is all alone at the top, watching as us fool bicker and fight amongst ourselves. But, I will join him soon in ascendance so that he will no longer be all alone. I can already sense the truth, albeit faintly. I have already seen every past, every future. I am already all-knowing,” Althur boasted.

“So you know everything already?” I asked.

“Indeed. Not as much as Grandmaster, but I, too, have already seen everything. I simply have to understand and find the answer to the grand question - ‘Why?’.”

Without saying a word, I swung my hand downward violently, causing the floor under Althur to sink. He was caught off guard as evident of him tripping awkwardly onto the floor.

“I bet you didn’t see that coming, right?” I scoffed.

Althur’s body twitched just before he calmly got up. He patted his clothes clean then coughed. “Admittedly, you are very unexpected. It seems I may have overblown the fact that I knew everything.”

“As long as you know.” I shrugged.

“Though I say such things, I do not underestimate my opponents. I want you gone as fast as possible before you do any more tricks. Undead, prepare yourself for my best attacks,” Althur proclaimed as he clapped his hands loudly.

The walls around me slowly crumbled, and the orbs were stuttering in and out of existence. The stone floor slowly changed into a blank, white tiled floor, and the orbs were replaced with statues of winged figures.

It seemed that Althur started off by overriding the world with his memory. Upon reaching enlightenment, people at the top, called Constants, could reshape the world as they please in this ever-changing nightmare of an existence, but at the cost of losing their true meaning in life.

In the first place, nobody has the answer to life.

Constants would believe that the entire universe was but a dream for them to play in - a sandbox. But the problem?

They’re not alone.

Who was the real owner of the dream? Who does the world bow to? Like how only one emperor can rule over an empire without the empire collapsing, only one Constant would be allowed to exist.

Althur wrongly believed that only his so-called grandmaster sat atop the peak of the world. Was he not told otherwise? Or perhaps his grandmaster wasn’t even aware of it.

“When two Constants meet, only one remains. Ever heard of that?” I nonchalantly remarked.

For a second, the statues crumbled before returning to normal as if nothing happened.

“How did you know that?” Althur asked.

I waved a finger at him then shook my head. “You are close to ascendancy, but unfortunately, your way of thinking is what prevents you from achieving ascension. A Constant must be unique, thus shared knowledge would only make you a muddled, inferior version of the original.”

“Are you saying that because my knowledge isn’t my own, but of Grandmaster’s, I will never be able to become a Constant?” Althur guessed.

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I walked up to one of the winged statues then inspected it. The statue was a cloaked woman offering her hand forward, while holding a sword in the other hand. A common depiction of angels… or at least in the Western Continent.

“You seem to be a reasonable fellow, but you are an enemy. If my companions faced you, some of them might become… permanently dead,” I told Althur. “I have no choice but to wipe your existence.”

“I’ve already sparred with Grandmaster. I know how to deal with the likes of you,” Althur replied.

Althur opened his palm and started reciting a divine chant for an energy bolt. “Flow of energy, devoid of meaning…”

I raised an energy barrier in front of me just before he finished his chant, but he swiped his hand and feinted his energy bolt into a void charge. “...Full of meaning, lacking in energy.”

A yellow bolt arced from Althur’s hand and across the room. I crumbled the barrier and immediately created a deflection spell to counter the demonic spell. The black ball was slapped off-course by the deflection spell and rammed directly onto the floor beside me.

I balled my hand into a fist, and flames erupted all over all the white room. The bright, white color of the tiles was replaced with a scorching red-and-yellow garden of fire.

“W-What’s going on, Boss?!” Mauri shouted.

“Ah. I had forgotten you existed. You haven’t said anything all this time.” I sighed.

“I-I just thought that being silent would be better, but now…” Mauri gawked at where we were standing on currently.

The scenery was changed into a burning forest littered with angel statues. The forest was reminiscent of Satel’s own life - a fairy, a forest, and a lot of unstoppable flames.

Althur teleported close to me, then began freezing the floor while preparing a large ice shard to hurl at me. I swayed my hand to the side, and several trees began uprooting themselves then floated up. I threw the large burning trees at him, and Althur hurled the ice shard at the trees instead.

Figuring that I was an undead, Althur conjured multiple holy spells at once and launched them at me. An unholy barrier formed in front of me and absorbed most of the spells, though some passed through. Of course, I was unharmed since not even the high priests of the Holy City of Aon could hurt me.

“I didn’t know you could use necromantic spells.” I turned to Mauri and placed a hand against my chin.

“I am, after all, the Spirit of the Road between Life and Death. I specialize mostly in life and death arts,” Mauri explained.

I turned my hand towards Althur, but he teleported away and shot another round of holy spells at me. He must had thought that Mauri’s barrier absorbed all of the spells, since he didn’t stop using holy spells. I tried to home my hand at him, but the bastard kept teleporting around like a mosquito.

“Enough.” I grew weary of his shenanigans, so I balled my hand into a fist, and forced a massive gravitational pull towards the floor. While Mauri and I was unaffected, Althur crashed onto the floor, unable to teleport anymore.

“Root.” I balled my hands together, and earthen hands clutched Althur down onto the floor. Since he was still recovering from teleporting, he was unable to dispel the earthen hands before they could cover him.

“Now, let’s see what’s in your mind,” I proclaimed.

“What? No! You monster!” Althur shouted in defiance.

“Come on. Don’t treat me like I’m the bad guy here. You attacked first, so this is just self-defense,” I argued.

I lurked deep into his mind, trying to probe him for information regarding the so-called ‘Grandmaster’. As I intruded upon his secrets, the scenery began to rapidly change.

The floor changed into a large lake, then the sky turned into a stone ceiling. The burning air turned into a hail of freezing wind, and the statues began weeping black ooze.

“Get off my mind!” Althur screamed as he began breaking through the layers of earthen hands, but Mauri kept wrapping him with vines. He began to desperately fight by rewriting his memory, and in turn, reshaped the world we were in.

“Mauri, stick close to me, the invisible bastards are beginning to open more gates to other-…” I turned to where she was standing, but she had disappeared. In her place, there were a few of what Kendra would call ‘faceless clowns’ standing on her spot.

They were laughing at me.

Praising me.

Crying.

Althur’s defiance was slowly calling more of these invisible bastards as they began gathering in front of me. They began chanting, and the already bright area was starting to become blindening.

Ah.

The songs. The orchestra.

I raised my hand then began waving my hand in the air gently as I conducted the stream of invisible figures into place.

“What are you doing to me?!” Althur shouted as his figure started shimmering.

I stopped dozing off, then snapped myself back to the task at hand. Althur was starting to disappear from reality, and Mauri was gone, too.

I searched within my robes and took out the vase I stole from the troll. “I wonder what Mauri will think if her life was equivalent to a vase…”

“Pardon me?” a voice rang out from my side.

I turned to see Mauri standing where she was supposed to be at, then found out that the vase had disappeared from my clutches. “Nothing. Let’s get this over with. Hold onto me, spirit.”

Mauri didn’t protest and obeyed me without a sound. She grabbed my shoulder then held onto it tightly.

I began exchanging my memories for Althur’s, which was a sort of uneven trade, especially since I had a thousand years worth of useless memories. The stacks of foreign memory added up, and there, I found a boy silently praying in a chapel.

The boy slowly turned into a grown man, then stood up before leaving the chapel. Just outside the chapel was a cemetery, where the man had dug up a hole to bury a wrapped body.

“Another one?” an indeterminate voice echoed in the memory and the man nodded.

“They’re fascinating, aren’t they? The undead, I mean. Are you sure they shouldn’t really exist in this world?” the man asked.

“Remember the cycle. Life, then death. There was no in-betweens. If I could somehow get rid of the in-between…”

“I understand.”

When I ‘woke’ up, I found myself standing at the dungeon core room once again. The orbs containing undead husks were sitting on the corners of the room, and the floor was once again dull gray stone. Althur was nowhere to be found, but the purple cracked crystal was still floating on the raise platform of the room.

“He’s gone, huh?” I pondered loudly.

“Who’s gone?” Mauri asked.

“Him…”

“There was no one here, though? It’s just us and these… weird balls of glass,” Mauri retorted.

“Nevermind.”