Chapter 184: When Fate and Mirage Collide

A cold smile appeared upon the face of his spiritual form.

’So that’s why it failed.’

When the Taboo of Fate asked for his name, Ravian had not given it his current one.

He had given it a truth, but one that was no longer complete.

Ryan was truly his name and was tied to his old Records, which was why the attack had managed to find him, but it was not the name fully bound to his current existence and Records.

The Taboo of Fate had not failed because it was weak. It had failed because Ravian had lied to it using the truth.

As a result, the attack struck the edge of his soul instead of its core, leaving behind remnants of misfortune that had been unable to penetrate any deeper.

’What if I’d given it the name Ravian Veyr?’

A chilling possibility crossed Ravian’s mind.

He did not need much imagination to envision the result.

Perhaps he would have awakened from his coma in the camp, only for one of the Death Squad’s soldiers to stumble and drop his sword, causing the blade to plunge straight into Ravian’s throat.

Or a volley of warning arrows might have been mistakenly fired at him the moment he emerged from the tent.

Or one of his companions might have approached him during training, only for an ordinary movement to become a killing blow through a chain of impossible coincidences. There were countless possibilities, and based on everything Ravian had experienced since encountering that damned serpent, he understood one thing.

The attack would not have needed to kill Ravian directly.

It would have made the world itself search for a way to do so.

’I was right not to trust you, you bastard.’

Ravian left the black trace behind and moved on to the third.

This final trace was purple.

Or at least, it appeared purple at first.

Its color changed whenever he looked at it, shifting between violet, blue, and red before returning to a color Ravian could not describe. It writhed within the white lines of his soul like living mist, coiling around them and pressing against them before fading and reappearing.

Its connection to his soul was direct.

Unlike the trace of Fate, it did not cling to the outside. It had penetrated the first layers and settled within them like a poison the body had found no way to expel.

With every pulse it released, the crown above Ravian’s head trembled.

’The Nightmare’s curse.’

This was the trace responsible for destabilizing his soul.

It occupied a far stronger and more stable position within his soul than the black trace clinging to its surface, but it was fading with time.

Ravian observed it for several seconds before realizing why.

The energy within it was not being replenished.

The one behind the Nightmare, that Third-Rank Soul Polisher, could no longer supply the attack with soul energy. The connection between them had been severed when Ravian escaped that world and the bonds linking him to that entity somehow shattered.

’It seems that entity called the Nightmare truly suffered quite a bit,’ Ravian surmised.

That was why the trace within his soul was dying.

But its death was slow, and Ravian could not determine whether it would require a week or an entire year to disappear.

He continued tracing its reach through his soul, and that was when he noticed something strange—something resembling...

A wall?

It was a thin, transparent barrier separating the purple trace embedded within his soul from the black trace of Fate clinging to its outer layer.

The wall emitted no obvious power, and its color resembled an extremely diluted version of Sovereign Pride’s Void-gray, yet it prevented the two traces from touching even though they extended through the same region of his soul.

Ravian moved closer.

’Did the System create this barrier?’

He did not know the answer, but it did not seem likely. Otherwise, the System would have told him.

He raised his spiritual hand toward its surface.

He had no intention of breaking it. He merely wanted to identify the power from which it had been made and perhaps understand how two different traces had managed to settle within his soul without interacting.

His spiritual fingertips touched the wall.

A window appeared before him at that exact moment.

[Warning, do not—]

The wall shattered.

No cracks appeared across it, nor did it fragment like glass. Instead, the entire barrier collapsed in the same instant, as though Ravian’s touch had erased the very reason it had been capable of existing.

The black trace surged inward, and the purple trace erupted toward it.

The two forces collided in the heart of Ravian’s soul.

And in the next moment...

Ravian discovered that all the pain he had ever known was merely a prelude to what was coming.

Ravian could not scream—not in this spiritual form.

His spiritual form possessed neither a throat nor lungs capable of producing sound, but the pain swept through every white line of his soul as though thousands of hooks had sunk into his existence and begun tearing it in opposite directions with merciless force.

When he entered the black hole, he had felt his soul being stretched between existence and nonexistence.

When the fragmentary Descent of Truth tortured him, he had felt his Records being torn away one after another.

But what was happening now was worse.

The two forces were not trying to attack him. They were attacking each other, and his soul was their battlefield.

The black threads spread first.

They branched throughout his soul like roads leading toward thousands of different endings, and Ravian witnessed his death at the end of every one.

He saw his body fall from the bed and break its neck, even though it should have been far too resilient for such an accident to harm it.

He saw a guard storm into the room after sensing the disturbance, then stab his body after mistaking him for an intruder despite the fact that he clearly was not one.

He saw the manor burn around him while he remained inside, neither noticing nor even stirring in his sleep.

He saw Larette open the door at the wrong moment, stumble, and cause the sword hanging upon the wall to fall and pierce his heart.

These were not random illusions.

They were possibilities—paths through which Fate could push the world until it reached the outcome it desired.

Outcomes that were practically impossible became possible through a singular miracle that should never have occurred even once.

Then the purple Mirage erupted, forcing all of it backward.

It covered the black roads with false worlds and forced those possibilities to wear faces Ravian knew.

He saw his mother alive.

She sat before him inside their old home in perfect health, smiling at him while his bastard father sat beside her.

She told him that she had never developed cancer. She told him that everything he remembered had merely been a nightmare, and part of his soul almost believed her.

Almost.

Then the threads of Fate pierced through the scene once again.

His mother collapsed dead upon the table.

The world changed.

She was alive again in a better hospital, only for the power supplying her medical equipment to fail.

The world changed once more.

He found the cure, but it arrived one minute too late.

Then again. And again. And for the hundredth time.

Every scene unfolded before Ravian at an inconceivable speed, yet his soul somehow remained capable of comprehending each one as it passed.

Mirage created the lie, and Fate chose the cruelest possible path through which to shatter it.

Ravian’s memories became a battlefield that replayed his mother’s death before him in thousands of different forms.

’Stop,’ Ravian said calmly within his mind, despite the exhaustion from the spiritual and psychological agony being plainly visible in his eyes.

The two forces did not stop, and the white lines began to snap.

Ravian’s physical body convulsed upon the bed as blood trickled from his nose, while the crown above his spiritual form trembled so violently that its two crimson gemstones illuminated the entire room.

System notifications appeared one after another.

[Warning!]

[Two remnants of Law power have collided directly within the Host’s soul.]

[The precise nature of the remnants has been identified.]

’What?’

Ravian could not comprehend what was happening.

But this was only the beginning.

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Author’s Note:

Thank you all for your support and for the Power Stones and Golden Tickets.

I truly appreciate it.

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