Diluc Ragnvindr lay on the narrow bed with both hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling in silence.
Compared with his previous cell, this room was brighter and marginally cleaner.
Unfortunately, the bed felt as though someone had placed a blanket over a slab of stone and decided that qualified as hospitality.
From somewhere beyond the reinforced door came a continuous series of crashes, metallic clangs, distant shouts, and the unmistakable sound of heavy objects being thrown into walls.
Diluc’s brows drew together.
What in the name of Barbatos was happening outside?
For a brief moment, he considered getting up to investigate.
Then he remembered what he had seen while being transferred through the lower experimental levels.
People restrained to operating tables.
Bodies altered beyond recognition.
Prisoners who were still alive only because Dottore had not finished learning from their suffering.
Diluc had crossed much of Teyvat and encountered more cruelty than most people his age could imagine, but even he had never witnessed anything quite like those laboratories.
Sometimes, knowing more did not make a person wiser.
Sometimes, it merely made sleep harder.
He forced himself to relax against the unforgiving bed.
Numbing his thoughts, even temporarily, was preferable to lying awake and imagining what the Fatui intended to do with him.
Then the door exploded inward with a deafening bang.
“What kind of cursed door is this?” an irritated voice complained.
“It won’t push open, and it won’t pull open either!”
Lucian Vale stepped through the ruined entrance.
The laboratory’s sliding door had been forged from a steel plate nearly ten centimetres thick.
Lucian had apparently mistaken it for an ordinary hinged door and shoved it inward until the entire slab bent at a perfect right angle.
Diluc shot upright.
Before he could ask who this stranger was, Lucian strode across the room.
“Up you get.
Your nap is over.
I’m taking you back to Mondstadt.”
He grabbed Diluc by the collar.
Diluc’s eyes narrowed.
“Wait—”
Lucian threw him into the bathroom mirror.
Diluc’s thoughts went completely blank.
The wall rushed toward him.
Acting on instinct, he raised one arm to protect his head, expecting glass, stone, and pain.
Instead, his body passed through the mirror like water.
There was no impact.
He landed awkwardly on an open floor and immediately rolled to his feet, one hand reaching for a weapon that was no longer there.
A vast chamber stretched around him.
Mirrors of every size and shape covered the walls.
Tall standing mirrors, hand mirrors, polished metal plates, oval frames, square frames, and fragments of reflective glass all floated or rested throughout the room.
Their surfaces showed no consistent reflection.
Some revealed empty halls, others distant landscapes, while a few shimmered with darkness.
This was not the prison.
It was a separate world created through Man in the Mirror.
Under Lucian’s control, the Stand ability had evolved far beyond simply dragging targets into a reflected duplicate of the surrounding environment.
He could now construct and maintain an independent space according to his own preferences, connecting it to mirrors wherever he wished.
Lucian’s voice came through the surface Diluc had entered.
“There’s a refrigerator inside.
Eat something if you’re hungry.”
Diluc turned sharply.
The mirror’s surface rippled once.
Then the connection closed.
“This man came to rescue me?” Diluc murmured.
No one answered.
He studied the chamber for several moments, but there was no obvious exit and no immediate threat.
Since matters had already become this absurd, there was only one sensible course of action.
Eat first.
Diluc knew what a refrigerator was.
Such devices were expensive, but hardly unknown among wealthy merchants and noble households.
He opened the large cabinet near the wall.
Cold air washed over him.
The shelves were packed.
There were elegant desserts from several nations, cuts of meat from rare animals, fresh vegetables in unfamiliar shapes and colors, jars of sauces, prepared dishes, fruit, cheese, and enough ingredients to supply a high-class restaurant.
The lowest compartment held wine.
Diluc’s expression changed.
He recognized more than thirty bottles worth over one hundred thousand Mora each.
None had been chosen merely for their price.
Every bottle was a respected vintage with an excellent balance between quality and value.
Whoever Lucian Vale was, he understood food and wine.
A man of culture, then.
On the upper shelf, Diluc noticed several unfinished dishes.
They would spoil sooner than the sealed food, so he took them out first.
The stranger had explicitly told him to eat.
If Lucian objected later, Diluc could compensate him.
He began with half of a roasted pigeon.
The aroma alone nearly destroyed what remained of his restraint.
Diluc took one bite.
His eyes widened.
He had no idea whether imprisonment had sharpened his appetite or whether the cook was simply that skilled, but he swore it was the finest roasted pigeon he had ever tasted.
By the time he realized what he was doing, he had eaten the bones as well.
Next came a bowl of tomato-and-egg noodles.
He finished every strand.
Then he drank the broth and, after glancing around to confirm that no one was watching, scraped the plate so thoroughly that even an aristocratic upbringing could no longer defend his dignity.
It must be because I was starving, he told himself.
That explanation was good enough.
Alone inside a world of mirrors, Diluc abandoned etiquette and continued eating.
Outside, Lucian turned away from the ruined laboratory and walked back into the eleventh underground level.
The prisoners parted before him without being asked.
Some looked at him with reverence.
Others watched with desperate hope.
They had seen Leon Cristiano restored from a dying old man to the healthy appearance of a thirty-six-year-old in a matter of seconds.
To them, Lucian was no longer merely powerful.
He was proof that Dottore’s damage might not be irreversible.
As Lucian passed, Leon opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it again.
Lucian noticed.
“Where is the prison’s monitoring room?”
“Three floors above ground,” Leon answered immediately.
He had intended to ask Lucian for help freeing the others, but before he could gather the courage, Lucian vanished from sight.
Leon stared at the empty corridor.
Then his uncertainty disappeared.
“Everyone, move out!” he shouted.
“We’re going up!”
His back straightened, and the command in his voice carried the authority of the Fatui lieutenant he had once been.
For the first time in years, he looked vigorous, fierce, and alive.
He would escape this hell.
Then he would help the man who had saved him.
In the monitoring room, another Dottore segment stared at the surviving screens with a deep frown.
Columbina had left.
Most of the cameras had been destroyed.
The experiment had yielded almost no useful combat data.
Dottore could only hope Lucian would clash with the failed subjects below.
If they forced him to reveal more of his abilities, even their deaths would have value.
Someone so young should not possess such extraordinary power.
To Dottore, it felt almost insulting.
He had pursued strength through centuries of research, sacrifice, and ruthless experimentation.
The idea that a youthful stranger might simply arrive with abilities beyond his understanding offended everything he believed about knowledge and progress.
A thunderous impact shook the room.
The reinforced door twisted inward.
Lucian stood in the opening, his figure framed by the light from the corridor behind him.
He said nothing at first.
He merely watched.
Dottore turned in his chair and quickly examined him.
No torn clothes.
No blood.
No sign of exertion.
The failed subjects had apparently not managed to force him into a meaningful battle.
“You arranged this?” Lucian asked softly.
Dottore did not bother denying it.
“One of my segments wished to test you,” he replied.
“Judging from his current condition, you interfered with him as well, did you not?”
Lucian ignored the question.
He was not there to satisfy Dottore’s curiosity.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
His voice remained calm.
“The people below.
Their bodies.
Their stolen years.
That was your work, wasn’t it?”
Dottore gave an indifferent shrug.
“Of course.
They were my experimental subjects.”
Lucian leaned against the warped doorframe.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
“Do you believe what you did was right?”
“Certainly.”
Dottore answered without hesitation.
“The pursuit of power is the right of every living being.
They wanted strength.
I helped them acquire it while advancing my own pursuit.
Where is the injustice?”
Lucian studied him.
The greatest evil was not always hatred.
Sometimes, it was the complete death of empathy—the moment a person stopped recognizing cruelty as cruelty and began treating every atrocity as reasonable.
“One final question,” Lucian said.
“Do you respect life?”
Dottore almost laughed.
Lucian’s reaction told him he had found a vulnerable point.
If he could provoke the stranger into attacking, he might still obtain valuable data.
This segment carried two Delusions and had been enhanced far beyond an ordinary human.
Once fully unleashed, its combat ability was at least comparable to that of a powerful adeptus.
“Respect life?” Dottore repeated.
“I am no god, and I have no obligation to love others.”
Lucian smiled.
There was no warmth in it.
He had once asked another monster a similar question.
That man had responded by asking whether anyone remembered how many loaves of bread they had eaten in their lifetime.
Dio Brando had eventually been reduced to ashes beneath the Egyptian sun.
“A very good answer,” Lucian said.
His expression became cold.
Dottore sensed the change and prepared himself.
At last.
The stranger was angry.
Now he would reveal—
“I brought you a gift.”
Lucian disappeared.
One second later, he returned and hurled a round object wrapped in cloth.
Dottore’s attention locked onto it.
What was that?
He shifted sideways to avoid the incoming object.
The bundle changed direction in midair.
It curved toward his head with impossible precision.
The cloth slipped away.
Dottore saw a severed head.
His own face stared back at him.
“What—”
Their foreheads touched.
Dottore’s voice stopped.
So did his thoughts.
The head had belonged to another of his segments.
The instant the two identical heads made contact, the connection binding Dottore’s distributed consciousness suffered a catastrophic rupture.
There was no explosion.
No burst of elemental energy.
No transfer of visible force.
Both heads simply disappeared.
It resembled a reflection being pushed through liquid mercury until the image and the object vanished into the same silver surface.
Across Teyvat, dozens of Dottore’s segments staggered simultaneously.
It felt as though a single mind had been seized, torn apart, and scattered across the continent.
Memories slipped out of alignment.
Thoughts fractured.
Every remaining segment suffered the backlash at once.
The segment still impaled upon the pneumatic stool was the first to regain consciousness.
His eyes opened.
Through the shared network, he witnessed another version of himself being struck by an attack he could not understand.
Then fresh agony crashed through the connection.
The headless corpse in the monitoring room toppled to the floor.
Lucian did not look at it.
He raised his head instead.
Someone was watching him.
Not through a camera.
Not from within the prison.
From somewhere impossibly distant and impossibly high.
Lucian’s vision sharpened.
Space seemed to collapse before his gaze.
Mountains, clouds, and the vast distance between the earth and the heavens became meaningless.
His eyes met another pair far above Teyvat.
Ronova.
The Ruler of Death.
Across Snezhnaya, every being sensitive enough to perceive that gaze looked upward at almost the same moment.
Something in the heavens was observing the world below.
And something on the ground had looked back.
Within a mysterious realm beyond ordinary reach, Ronova continued staring downward.
A tall, white-haired figure approached barefoot from behind.
“Ronova,” she asked lightly, “what are you looking at?”
It was Istaroth.
The Ruler of Time.
“That being who descended,” Ronova replied, displaying a rare trace of interest, “has just brought an unavoidable death.”
Istaroth followed her gaze.
She saw Lucian standing in the ruined monitoring room, looking directly toward the heavens.
The Fifth Descender had already left a deep impression on her.
Not long before, Istaroth’s own authority over time had suddenly slipped beyond her control.
The disturbance had startled even her.
After observing its source for a while, however, she had chosen not to interfere.
Lucian possessed the power to manipulate time.
With Istaroth’s tacit acceptance, he had gained the freedom to exercise that power throughout Teyvat.
The world had even acknowledged his presence by granting him a constellation of his own.
Now Ronova watched him as well.
And below, Lucian Vale continued gazing back.
🕷️ End of Chapter
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