Revan watched from behind the row of decommissioned machinery, fifteen meters away, as the obsidian disc slowly rose into the air and hung suspended, spinning on its axis with a low hum that vibrated in his teeth.

The violet light intensified, and the engraved flower flared like a gash in reality.

Around the coin, the air curved inward, pulled toward the spinning disc by an unseen drain. Fire converged at the heart of the flower, the pattern flashed brilliantly for the final time, and the coin devoured itself whole.

Then, nothing. Only silence greeted Revan.

Revan waited with bated breath, hoping for something to happen in the next second. Yet, when the waiting turned into minutes, he frowned.

"...Eh?"

He stared at the empty patch of floor from behind the machinery, his face cycling through confusion, disbelief, and a slowly mounting indignation.

"That’s it? That’s ALL it does?"

He waited another ten seconds, just in case. His eyes darted left, then right, scanning the shadows for any sign of movement, any shimmer of violet, any indication that something, anything, had responded to the activation.

Nothing.

The facility hummed its usual dead hum. The universe carried on as if Revan von Alstaire’s desperate plea for help had been received, reviewed, and filed directly into the trash.

He stepped out from behind the machinery and walked toward the spot where the coin had been, his footsteps echoing in the empty bay.

"This is BULLSHIT."

The words bounced off every surface in the room and came back to him in triplicate.

He didn’t even care anymore if anyone heard him.

"I risked my life carrying that thing for days, and what do I get? Absolutely fucking nothing!"

He kicked a piece of debris across the floor.

"You know what, I should’ve known. I should’ve KNOWN. Every single woman in my life has done nothing but make things harder. Fuck! She just took my last lifeline and turned it into a magic trick that goes nowhere."

He threw his arms up.

"I’m done. I’m absolutely done with all these games and cryptic bullsh—"

"Ara."

A cold, disgusted voice cut through the air from directly behind him.

Revan instantly froze in place.

"I didn’t expect you to think of me so... passionately."

Resigned to his fate, he sighed and closed his eyes before slowly turning back.

A woman was sitting on top of a collapsed iron beam that jutted from the wall at the far end of the storage bay, roughly four meters above the ground.

Her legs were crossed, and the hem of her black gown spilled down the side of the beam like ink poured over rusted metal.

Everything about her was designed to kill, one way or another.

The black gown clung to her frame like a second skin, high-collared and cut from a fabric so dark it drank the dim light around her, making the pale luminescence of her skin glow by contrast like moonlight on obsidian.

Her hair fell past her shoulders in a dark cascade that moved as if it had its own gravity, framing features so sharp and so perfectly composed that Revan couldn’t decide whether the face belonged on a cathedral ceiling or a wanted poster, only that looking at it too long felt distinctly dangerous, like staring into the sun if the sun could stare back and was currently judging you.

And then there were her eyes.

Violet. Deep and burning and utterly still, carrying the weight of someone who had never once in her existence needed to raise her voice to make a room fall silent.

"How fascinating," she said, tilting her head slightly. "I thought there was finally something important you wished to discuss with me."

Revan swallowed.

"And yet, I find that you are... insulting me?"

"I—insulting?" Revan choked on the word.

She uncrossed her legs and crossed them again, the opposite way.

"I must say, it’s not the welcome I was expecting."

’I’ve told you time and time again, Revan — stop talking nonsense, you bastard. Just how much longer are you going to stay in this situation?’ he thought bitterly.

Revan carefully lowered his hands that had been frozen in the air, moving with the deliberate slowness of a man disarming a bomb as he forced his face into a mask of composure — though it likely looked more like he had just bitten into a sour lemon.

"I... I can explain," he stammered.

"Can you?" The woman’s gaze sharpened the moment Revan tried to speak.

"N-No. I — I absolutely cannot, my lady. B-but... eumm, I just felt like that was the right thing to say."

As the woman’s smile spread, Revan could even catch the sharp shimmer of violet light radiating from her gaze.

’What the fuck did I just say? Are you an idiot, Revan? You idiot, idiot, idiot! You’re dead, you’re fucking dead!’ he screamed hysterically in his mind.

Revan cleared his throat reflexively. "What I meant was—"

"Forget it. You’re wasting my time." The woman raised a single hand, silencing him the way one might silence a barking dog.

The sight made him tremble.

’Calm down, Revan... Turns out she’s just a beautiful, generous lady, isn’t she? Now, get a grip. Take a breath, and let’s lead her straight into a deal she can’t refuse,’ he thought to himself.

The mysterious woman’s eyes left Revan and wandered across the space around them, taking it all in with the expression of someone who had just stepped in something unpleasant.

"I didn’t expect you to summon me to such a vile place. How did you end up here, little servant?"

"Yeah, well, I’ve been wondering about that myself," Revan answered quickly, his composure slowly stitching itself back together now that her attention wasn’t boring directly into his skull.

Her gaze returned to Revan, and the faintest trace of genuine curiosity flickered behind the cold amusement.

"Being in places like this... it’s become something of a hobby," Revan continued.

"I can see that," she replied flatly.

"But you truly are something, little servant. For some reason, you look even more like a corpse than the last time we met. Well, technically, you already are one, aren’t you? Hmm... I don’t know," she continued in a mocking tone.

"I get that a lot," Revan answered nonchalantly.

"Well then," the woman said, her tone shifting from amusement back to a flat, icy chill.

"Let’s stop the pleasantries. I can tell from the look in your eyes that you’re either still cursing me or scheming something that will annoy me. So which is it? What do you have?"

The words "Aren’t you looking down on me a little too much?" rose in Revan’s throat. But the moment he saw her face — twisted back into that unpleasant, lethal expression that suggested she would devour him alive if he uttered another word of nonsense — Revan forced himself to swallow them back down.

’Come now, Revan, are you serious? Are you really going to take an inch and ask for a mile? Be wise, you damn fool.’

Revan quickly reorganized his thoughts for a moment before speaking.

"This facility produces Crimson Tears," he said instead, letting the words land clean and hard, leaving no room for a preamble.

Something shifted in her expression.

"I was escorting my master through the Dead Zone when our party was ambushed. We were separated during the attack, and I ended up here through a Territorial Phenomenon that folded the space beneath us." He kept his voice level.

"The facility is sealed, surrounded by a permanent sandstorm, and every exit is warded with constellation-class architecture that I can’t break in my current state."

Revan didn’t bother trying to hide his mission from her, for he was certain she had been watching his every move since the moment she gave him that coin. Well, even before they had met, the woman before him had already been watching him.

"I remember what you told me in that alley," Revan continued, his voice dropping an octave. "You said The Garden of Eternal Bloom took something from you. Something you intended to take back."

He paused, watching her carefully.

"And I am here to offer you this. This is the place for you to take back what was stolen from you."

"Hooo?" The woman’s voice curled upward like smoke. "Quite arrogant of you, little servant. What makes you so certain this place can free me from my grudge?"

Revan’s composure flickered. He cleared his throat, buying himself half a second.

"Forgive my impudence, my lady." The words came out steadier than he expected.

"But from my experience so far — where there’s Crimson Tears, there’s The Garden. That’s the one constant."

Her expression didn’t change, but she didn’t interrupt either. That was enough.

"I don’t know what they took from you. Honestly, it’s none of my business. But this place is a thread connected to them, and I’m offering myself as a bridge for you to pull on it."

Silence fell over Revan once more after he spoke. He waited patiently, watching her expression as she weighed his words.

"Hm." Her voice broke the silence.

"Then what is it you want from me?"

’Fuck. This is it.’

Revan’s tongue instinctively moved to lick his cracked lips, but remembering his current state, he thought better of it.

"For starters, I need to get out of here alive."

He left it at that, deliberately vague. He wanted to hear her offer first, knowing that if she could teleport into this facility using the coin, she likely possessed an exit strategy far more efficient than anything he had originally planned.

The woman was quiet for a moment, her violet eyes drifting to some middle distance that existed only inside her own calculations.

Then, with the casual indifference of someone agreeing to hold a door open, she spoke.

"I’ll take that."

Revan exhaled. The tension in his shoulders released so abruptly that his entire body sagged, and for one glorious second the crushing weight of the past several hours lifted just enough for him to remember what breathing without anxiety felt like.

"Don’t celebrate yet. I can’t teleport us out," she said, as if reading his thoughts.

’I wasn’t actually counting on it, to be honest,’ he thought cynically. ’I had already ruled out teleportation from the start, focusing instead on something with a higher chance of success.’

"The spatial transit that brought me here operates on a one-way mechanism. The architecture of this facility, combined with the Dead Zone’s own laws, creates a directional seal. Entry is permitted. Exit is not," the woman added.

’Exactly as I expected.’

During that hour of scouting, Revan hadn’t just been memorizing ward patterns and testing doors. He’d been running simulations in his head, war-gaming every possible scenario, including the one where the mysterious woman couldn’t teleport them out.

The logic was straightforward once you stopped treating negative mana as a magic cheat code.

Spatial manipulation wasn’t inherently positive or negative. It was structural, interacting with the fundamental geometry of reality itself, the dimensional fabric that sat beneath both polarities.

The Dead Zone’s suppression field targeted positive mana because that was what radiated outward from the environment. Negative mana bypassed it because the field simply wasn’t designed to catch energy that pulled inward instead of pushing outward.

But spatial locks operated on a deeper layer entirely. They didn’t suppress energy. They locked the dimensional fabric itself, physically preventing space from folding in the outbound direction. It wasn’t a mana problem. It was a geometry problem.

And at that level, the rules applied to everyone equally, regardless of which pillar they walked.

’The Four Pillars aren’t four separate realities. They’re four different expressions of the same underlying system. And that system has its own laws that no pillar can break.’

Which was exactly why Revan had never pinned his plan on teleportation in the first place. The door was always the answer.

’Besides, I don’t want to leave this place empty-handed anyway. I need to find out who’s behind the suffering they’ve put me through. Dammit... my life should have been easier than this. I should be focusing on the main problem — Sylvia’s impending downfall.’

When Revan snapped back to reality to discuss their escape plan further, the woman had already vanished from his sight.

He found her at the far end of the adjacent corridor, her pale hand resting against a buckled section of wall where one of the three terminal points sat half-buried beneath mountain stone.

’It took me an hour to find that. She didn’t even need to look.’ 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Revan approached cautiously, his footsteps deliberately quiet.

"Are you going to break it right now? If someone’s inside this facility, they’ll know the moment the ward falls."

The woman didn’t turn around.

"Let them know. It simply means their time of death has arrived."

’Great.’

He exhaled through his nose and said nothing more. There was no arguing with someone who treated mass murder as a scheduling issue.

Violet light bloomed from her fingertips the moment she pressed her palm flat against the terminal point, and in an instant, the entire facility lit up.

Every surface he had struggled to map blazed to life. From the walls to the heavy hatches, the hidden lines ignited into vivid spirals, coiling and branching across the room. They raced toward each other, interlocking and converging with relentless precision until a single, massive pattern consumed the entire facility.

Serpens Cauda.

One of the world’s ancient ward configurations, modeled after the constellation of the serpent’s tail. Now visible, it clung to the facility’s structure like a skeletal frame, turning the entire complex into the body of a living thing.

And from the terminal point, a surge of violet energy began eating it alive.

The light raced along the circuit lines, and wherever it touched, the mana within flickered and died. Node by node. Connection by connection. The serpent was consuming itself from the tail inward.

As the light grew blinding—

"Wait, wait—" Revan took a step back. "This is going to be fine, right? This isn’t going to expl—"

Before he could even finish voicing his concern, a massive explosion rocked the area, sending tremors through the entire facility.