There is a silence that does not mean peace.
It is the silence between screams—the breath the world takes before it vomits blood again.
Kael awoke to that silence.
His fingers were sunk deep into something wet and soft. It squelched when he moved. The air reeked—copper, feces, ozone, rot. He blinked, and for a moment, the darkness held shape: a ribcage torn open like the petals of a black flower, veins hanging like vines, still twitching. Something's heart had exploded beside him. Not burst. Exploded. He didn't remember killing it.
He tasted iron.
His mouth was full of blood.
He hadn't fed in days.
Was this a dream?
No. Dreams didn't smell like this. They didn't throb like this—like the world itself had a pulse. He turned his head. Bones crunched beneath his cheek. Human bones. Still fresh. No time for rot.
No time for regret.
Kael sat up and the cloak fell from him like a second skin. It had soaked up so much blood it clung to his back like muscle torn from another body. The rune in his chest throbbed—duller now, but still alive, like it was chewing on something inside him.
His body was healing.
But wrong.
Too fast. Too uneven. Scar tissue bloomed across his arms like fungal blossoms. His left hand—once thin and bony—had grown knotted, fingers warped into something closer to talons. His bones didn't ache anymore.
Because they weren't his anymore.
He stood.
The cave was filled with corpses. Not piled. Arranged. Like a ritual had happened. Or a war. Or both. Their faces had been removed. Not torn, not burned—peeled. Laid in a circle. Skinned masks staring at a pillar of wet stone that bled light from a crack down its center. Blood smeared the walls. Not randomly. Symbols. Spirals. Eyes.
One of them blinked.
Kael didn't scream. He didn't react. He just stared.
There was no fear left.
There was only… observation. Understanding.
The corpse that blinked wasn't a corpse.
It was alive.
It breathed through a gash in its throat. Its limbs had been twisted and nailed into itself. A flesh sculpture. Its eyes were gone, replaced by glowing stones. It stared at him through blindness and memory. Then it spoke—not from its mouth, but from the symbols on the wall. They whispered.
"It was you."
Kael didn't answer.
"You broke it. The seal. The silence. The scream."
Still, Kael didn't speak. He simply turned, walked barefoot over bones, past a child's severed arm, through a hanging curtain of flayed skin stitched together with black thread.
The world outside wasn't much better.
---
The Grand Magic Zone was weeping.
The sky had turned red. Not from dusk, not from sunset. From blood. It rained in pulses, thick, congealed. Mana-torn clouds swirled like torn muscle. Trees screamed as they grew backwards—roots breaking the surface to claw at the sky. Flowers bloomed with teeth.
Kael stepped into it like it was home.
And something answered.
The air split.
From the forest came a procession. Figures. Hunched. Crawling. Covered in robes made from intestines and hair. They bled from their eyes. Some had no eyes left. Just sockets full of moving worms. They didn't speak. They chanted. But the words weren't sound.
They were images.
Visions slammed into Kael's mind—men being skinned alive and reborn as books, children carved into lanterns to light forgotten temples, spells that required not mana but remorse. And in the center of it all… a mirror.
Shattered.
Each shard showing Kael.
But not as he was.
As he could be.
One showed him wrapped in chains made from souls, laughing as kingdoms burned. Another showed wings made of bone and fire bursting from his back. Another showed him holding Asta's severed head, offering it to a god of ash.
He laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was honest.
The procession stopped.
The leader stepped forward. No face. Just a cage of ribs wrapped in cloth. It knelt and held something out.
A spine.
Still twitching.
Wrapped around it, like a parasite, was a grimoire. No cover. No leaf. No color.
Kael reached.
The moment he touched it, the world broke.
---
He fell.
Not through space. Through meaning.
The forest, the sky, his body—all torn away like lies. He plummeted through memory, through versions of himself that had never lived. A child who died in the Witch's Forest. A boy who begged for mercy. A man who walked away.
All erased.
He landed on thought.
A plane of screaming light. Beasts crawled across the surface—things made of law and punishment. They didn't roar. They recited. Rules. Chains. Boundaries. One approached. Its head was a judge's gavel, its mouth a courtroom.
"You cannot exist," it said.
Kael tore its head off and wore it as a crown.
Another came, chanting, "Freedom without balance is—"
Kael burned it with a touch.
He was not a mage.
He was a heresy.
And they could not cage him.
The plane cracked beneath his feet.
And then… he rose.
---
Back in the real, Kael opened his eyes.
They were not violet anymore.
They were nothing.
Empty. Void. Perfect.
The grimoire floated beside him, spinning slowly. Every page was blank.
Every page hungry.
His body screamed with mana—not raw, not wild.
Free.
And Bound.
Two forces inside him, trying to kill each other, both failing, both growing stronger. His veins glowed silver. His shadow moved on its own.
Something approached.
A creature. Giant. Misshapen. Built from corpses. Its mouth was a pit, its voice was static. It shrieked and charged.
Kael didn't move.
His grimoire flipped open.
No spell was written.
But one was cast.
The air collapsed.
The creature folded in on itself, like meat into a grinder. Bones pierced skin. Blood sprayed upward like a fountain. Its body turned inside out mid-scream.
Kael watched.
And whispered.
"Next."
---
Three days passed.
He built a monument.
Not of stone.
Of error.
Bodies stacked into a tower. Every corpse sewn to the next by memory. Each one had wronged him. Or might've. Or simply could. The tower bled continuously. At its top, he placed the spine-wrapped grimoire.
And he prayed.
Not to gods.
To freedom. To control. To the duality that lived in him now.
And something answered.
From the sky, a tear opened.
Not a portal.
A wound.
Through it, a hand reached.
Pale. Infinite. Fingerless. Covered in mouths.
It offered him a gift.
Not power.
Not knowledge.
But truth.
It touched his forehead.
And Kael saw it:
The origin of the magic in him.
Freedom—not the right to live, but the refusal to die chained.
And its mirror—Control—the ability to impose chains upon others.
He was not just wielding magic.
He was becoming it.
A living paradox. A curse wrapped in potential. A new rule in the world's broken game.
---
When he walked again, the forest parted.
Even the mana itself retreated, refusing to touch him.
His voice returned.
He used it to name a tree after his first kill. To curse the sun. To promise that if the world tried to chain him again, he'd feed it its own heart.
Kael smiled.
And behind his smile, a thought:
"Let them come."
"Let them try."
"I am not a hero. I am not a villain. I am the rejection of both."
"I am Kael."
"And I. Am. Free."
---
And far away, in the heart of the Clover Kingdom,
Yami Sukehiro lit a cigarette he didn't remember picking up.
The smoke curled the wrong way.
And something in his gut twisted.
"Something's coming," he muttered.
Then he grinned.
"And it's gonna be fun."
---
Hope you liked the chapter , shower me with power stones for an exciting novel ahead.
And thank you Ariel_Seary for supporting me with the powerstones, really greatful for it.