The bronze key sank into the mould and merged with the black monolith, whose smooth, reflective surface glimmered, stirred, and swirled. Blue, glowing symbols manifested, flashing their complex meanings. All functions regarding the first to fourth floors lay before the key holder.

Iris gave her black cane to Secain and, after taking out her laced glove, drew her right hand forwards. Her delicate finger tapped the monolith. It rippled like a wave pushing through a still lake.

Screeching noises reverberated throughout the fourth floor, shaking it. Blue lines emerged beneath Iris. She tilted her head, smiling, as she pushed her right hand onwards. It sank past the liquid-like surface, met the compact shell beneath, turned incorporeal, and went through it.

Her fingertips, flickering with dark purple light, grazed the inner circuit of the monolith. Her Corruption Power infected the energy pathway, circulating through the control panel connecting to the entire array. It morphed into a tide of ghostly fog and marched through the intricate land of interconnected lines.

Upon detecting the invasion, the blue light became blood-red. The floor under Iris caved, and from it emerged steaks of crimson electricity. They snapped through the air and formed layers of cages upon cages with Iris as their prisoner. While rotating, they fried everything attempting to enter or exit, even the light itself.

Their sizes rapidly contracted, their sparks breaking down nearby magical particles. Iris’s subordinates panicked; they cast their spells to save her, but they failed to overwhelm the trap powered by Mystic Tower itself.

Only Secain and Lorient stayed their hands. They observed Iris’s cool expression, convinced that she was invincible.

Even if the sky were to collapse, the Deities descend, she would survive.

“Show me what you’re hiding,” Iris said.

The myriad electric cages ceased moving. Their flow of electricity dispersed as dimly illuminating glitters. Every shrieking noise quietened. Every crimson flash faded.

The bloody light emanating from the monolith morphed into wicked purple. Its energy exuded a hint of enchanting fragrance, a wisp of perfume whose impression stirred its victims’ hearts.

Using Ludmint’s knowledge regarding magical formations, Iris temporarily took over Mystic Tower’s formation. She closed her eyes, sending her spiritual perception inside the monolith.

The magical barriers, traps, security, electricity, defence mechanism, all fell into her grasp, and, with a mere thought, she disabled the shackles weighing on her imprisoned kind. The ethereal prison gates vanished under the floor. Chilly winds of freedom blew into the prisons, gripping the hearts of the prisoners whose ashen hopes reignited.

They hugged, kissed, and cried. Their lives had ended and begun anew.

The Court moved in to give them spare uniforms, dressed their wounds, physical and mental, and introduced them to Iris, their new mistress, their saviour. The captives swiftly converted to The Court, their souls arrested by Iris’s mystique.

While they restored themselves, Iris soundlessly contemplated. A vivid structure of Mystic Tower, excluding the mist-shrouded fifth floor, revealed itself in her soul. Every scratch on the brick walls, every splinter protruding from the cracked ceiling, all kinds of information assailed her, but they failed to harm her who had once experienced the knowledge of the entire world.

Her spectral vision passed through the fourth floor, swept the third, permeated the second, overlooked the first, and then fell beneath the tower, plunging into the endless blackness that shouldn’t exist.

Everything was too easy; the formation’s security was too lax, too plain. Mayhaps its calm surface hid below it something?

Iris’s perception dug deep into the ground. Unlike the real world, where neighbouring buildings and fences and trees and pipelines existed, only static nothingness eddied outside Mystic Tower. Only a miniature glowing tower existed in this unreal space.

As Iris flew undergroundwards, everything grew tinier and tinier until she could no longer tell where she came from, remained in, or was heading to. Everything and nothing encircled her.

She only needed one thought to leave this suffocating silence.

But her stubbornness chose otherwise. She seemingly wandered as if blinded by her naïve hope. She imagined a body, and a body she received. She imagined dancing, and dancing she did. Her performance, a ballet, an elegant spin, a harsh bow, received no witness except for herself.

She tiptoed through the void, her unbeating heart quivering with an unfamiliar feeling. She knew not what she was doing but knew that she was following her heart, her soul, her incomprehensible intuition.

Something was leading her, something was luring her. A tinge of foreignness, of unfamiliar similarity, lay on the other side.

She jumped forward. Her body crashed with emptiness and shattered a nonexistent curtain. Despite keeping her eyes shut, a gap materialised in her vision. She frowned and seized herself and averted her sight, yet that rift widened, engulfing her awareness.

Through that creek, searing fogs churned. Like saw blades, they cut through the fabric of imaginary space-time, turning the spiritual plane into a physical one. Iris’s ephemeral figure gained solidity as her gaze passed to the other side.

Barbed chains, whose ends grew from the flesh of its prisoner and entwined with the infinite hellscape, rattled whenever the sharp vapours bit away the demonic figure’s regenerating, decaying, mutating, dying flesh. He violently yanked his arms, all six of them, such that they went through the chains, cleanly sliced into blood mists, yet he failed to loosen the restrain on his being.

His black-blue blood gushing out of his wounds, he lifted his head. His crimson eyes locked onto the silent gap between him and the mysterious lady, whose soul glimmered like the moon.

A peculiar scent emanated from her existence, a lovely yet appalling, vast yet fleeting fragrance. It reminded him of the once-glorious supreme being whom he worshipped.

“An Otherworlder?” he said as he attempted to move forward. “Did Lord Lacross send you? No . . . you’re too pure. Under which of the Five Catastrophes are you?”

An invisible pressure piled atop Iris. Her soul quivered, though its form gracefully persisted. This Demon, radiating an antiquated aura, was an ancient existence whose power rivalled a True Master. In the Abyssal Plane, his formal title would be a Demon King.

Such an existence was too dangerous to even gaze upon.

Sensing Iris’s intention, the demon narrowed his eyes. The chains constricting his body vibrated along with the entire prison of suffering. His demonic aura ruptured, dispersing the searing fogs, widening the spatial rift.

Iris exerted her legs, her figure turning translucent. Her soul dissolved into nothingness, her essence warping through emptiness. The spectral Mystic Tower magnified before her, but it was infinitely far away, for the suffocating gases reached her, blocked her path, and shifted her back to the rift.

Standing before the crack in physical-spiritual, Iris faced the chained Demon King. His power pressing down on her, she tensed her psychic body and met his eyes, whose gaze pierced through her flickering body, gripped her fragile soul, and observed it like an artistic vase.

“Who are you?” Iris said. “What is your relationship with Lacross?”

“Your soul is abnormal, tainted by powers of the Transcendent,” the demon smirked. “Yet your vessel endures; it’s perfect.”

Iris reached deep into her realm of consciousness, where a burning ray of Faith motionlessly hovered amidst the darkness. Responding to her call, it flooded an ocean of Holy Power, filling her spiritual body with purifying light.

She also called for Duality but received no response.

Within this space of the nonphysical, no external artefacts could save her. Only her own power could protect her.

The Demon King laughed. The turbulent crimson gas thickened. The sacred currents inside Iris’s body dimmed, and the freedom she enjoyed vanished. The all-dominating wickedness suppressed the whole area, its clutch extending beyond the spaceless horizon.

“At last, my Destiny is at hand.” The demon sluggishly moved toward Iris. The chains yanking him back couldn’t contain his excitement. “Your body shall become my vessel, and I shall return to Master Lacross. He must know what I’ve found during my voyage!”

“My body and soul are of the Corrupted Race. Do you wish to die?”

“My infernal flame will burn away all restrictions, your soul, your essence, your appearance. All I need is a vessel, a blank slate, an anchor that will help me cross out of this prison.”

Unable to shift even her face, Iris pondered her choices. Her Call of the Stars required starlight, and Duality’s secret spell was too powerful; without her physical body, her soul would wither away in just one use.

Once more she realised her powerlessness. She had multiple tools, artefacts, and protectors, but they couldn’t watch over her forever. She needed strength, inseparable prowess, one that would exist as she remained, one that would sustain her as it persisted.

There was still one more thing she could use.

Iris ceased her struggle. She concentrated on the emptiness within her abdomen, imagining a dark purple sphere existing within her. The Shadow Heart Core and Fragment swiftly materialised. They poured out an ocean of blackness.

This blackness engulfed Iris and consumed the hellish gas. Its disruptive presence rumbled the fabric of unreality, shaking the rift between prison and freedom.

The demon clapped his hands. His orange-red arms combusted into a rain of fire, from which bloody stars emerged. Their crimson lights blasted away the curtain, revealing Iris, who was now adorned in a purple imperial dress.

She stared at the demon, not with apprehension but with indifference. Her dull gaze halted the flow of the demonic aura, the unravelling of space-time, the current of time, and even the chain of causality itself.

“Who . . . are you?” the demon said. “Where did she go?”

Iris swiped her right hand toward the horizon. Her loose sleeve fluttered. The world split in half, above and below, nothingness and reality, Pure and Corrupted. Time and space fractured, becoming recursive. The imaginary plane regressed unto itself, and the infinite distance between the interdimensional prison and the ethereal Mystic Tower evaporated.

The Demon King’s eyes widened. His body, along with his prison, fragmented, revealing his essence, his very soul. His memory became undone as his body and mind turned illusory.

Every trace of Iris’s imperial cloak, her supreme gesture, and her transcendental aura was cut from the river of time itself.

When the last recollection of the imperial Iris vanished, the demon’s soul and body mended themselves, and the split prison rejoined its seam. Everything returned to its starting point, except that Iris was no longer there.

The Demon King reopened his eyes, in which clouds of confusion drifted. He couldn’t recall what happened after he captured his victim. She simply slid away.

…

The dark purple wine in a wine glass rippled. Its disturbance caught Lady Fate’s attention. Seated on a pure-white marble chair, she reached for the glass and held it close to her nose. Its seductive fragrance tickled her. She leisurely smiled.

“Lilith, what kind of stage are you setting?”

Her muddled black eyes glimmered. Faint threads connecting her hair and the world vibrated, sending their minuscule signals throughout her Heavenly Kingdom. Not even her Archangels could detect this change, yet its disturbance shifted the unseen design which encompassed all of creation.

“Unfortunately, I can’t join the fun yet.” Fate drank her wine. Its Corrupted taste burned her throat, but she savoured the pain. “And now is not the time.”

She rose from her chair, placed down the empty glass, and strolled out of her garden. Countless silky strings, intertwining with each other as if they were spiderwebs, wrapped around her silhouette, weaving into a loose translucent dress, whose pale veil masked her face.

With her dress completed, she merged with the world. Before her figure vanished, she glanced at the empty glass.

“Iris, you must grow quicker, stronger, and prettier.”