"We’re standing inside what’s called a Chronos Domain, one born from that white sword of yours. This place is bound directly to you, tied to your soul in a way most Relics never manage."
Domains, as a rule, came in two forms. A Chronos Domain formed inside a Relic itself, and while plenty of Relics in this world carried smaller domains folded within them, one large enough to hold an entire world like this was almost unheard of.
A Territory Domain, by contrast, was something a fighter could manufacture in the heat of battle, but only after reaching Golden Core.
Unlike a Chronos Domain, a Territory couldn’t rewrite its own laws or bend reality to its will, since it existed layered over real space rather than sealed inside an object. It also drained a person’s mana reserves the entire time it held, which put a hard limit on how long one could last.
"But this Domain answers to one Absolute Law: you can never touch anything that belongs to your own past again."
"Though that law’s gotten a little tangled here, thanks to this sword and crystal being forced together the way they were. Every door you find pulls from a different fragment of memory, meaning the world behind your door won’t be the same as anyone else’s."
"So that’s why I met Miyu?" Lucian asked.
"But why did touching her feel exactly like touching you, Lumina? And how are you even here right now?"
Lumina pressed her palm flat against the center of Lucian’s chest, as if confirming, for herself as much as for him, that whatever he’d swallowed was the reason she could stay tethered to his side for a limited stretch of time.
"You’re the only one who can see me here, Lucian, because my real body isn’t present at all. This is only a fragment of my soul. I wanted to reach you sooner, but She held me back..."
Lumina pressed her cheek against his as she said it.
"You’re alone here, truly alone, my Lucian. If I hadn’t slipped you that pill, if I hadn’t found a way to appear beside you now, you’d already be lost somewhere far deeper in this world."
None of it made complete sense to Lucian, though given everything strange his own power had already shown him, very little surprised him anymore. Still, one question kept gnawing at him: what exactly had she forced down his throat.
Before he could press her further, a wave of heat rolled off the yellow door behind them.
And Lumina’s hand closed around his at once, pulling him to his feet.
"It’s already starting."
"What is?"
"Weren’t you curious enough about that one person? This door might finally give you your answer."
Excitement lit up Lumina’s face. She wasn’t truly present here, not in body, but everything about her manner made it obvious this was exactly what she’d wanted from the start, chasing down whatever waited beyond that door, using Lucian as the key to reach it.
I really am curious about Miyu, more than I want to admit.
But if I keep letting Lumina drag me around like this, doesn’t that just make me her slave, even more than I already am? She doesn’t even have a real body here. I can barely hold my own against this Domain as it is. What if something worse is waiting behind that door?
Every door he’d opened so far had left its own kind of scar on him.
"Relax.. Lucian. I’m always right here with you."
Lumina’s voice carried total conviction, though she’d offered him nothing but words while he fought the Murk alone moments ago.
"Aren’t you even a little curious who that person actually is? Or where that evil spirit came from in the first place?"
He shook his head, refusing to go along with whatever she had planned.
Lumina kept pulling at him anyway, hard enough that he had to grab the edge of the staircase in a panic just to keep from being dragged forward.
"I said I don’t want to"
"Lumina! Damn it, how is a fragment of your soul already this strong?!" Lucian cursed.
Lumina paid the protest no attention at all. She shifted her grip to his leg instead, lifted one of her own, and drove it straight into the yellow door in front of them. One clean, decisive kick, and the door burst wide open, Lucian never having touched it himself.
"Hey! How can you even open that thing?!" Lucian shouted, startled.
Before Lumina could answer, a violent pressure seized them both, and the darkness beyond the doorway yanked them straight through it.
"AGGHHH!"
Unlike last time, there was no falling sensation, no weightless plunge. What met them instead was a searing wave of heat against bare skin, and a thick sheet of sand crashing over both their bodies the instant they hit solid ground.
"Sand...? Is this a desert?" Lucian murmured, running his fingers through the grains still clinging to his palm.
"Of course. We’re looking at Eosia right now, and a civilization that’s about to fall," Lumina said.
"This is a memory... from Eosia?"
Lucian’s mind went straight back to something the old man beside Miyu had mentioned once, a passing reference to this exact continent.
Eosia, as he understood it, was vast, split roughly into two very different halves. One half, known as the Green Lands, carried a rich eastern-influenced culture, its soil fertile, its people prosperous.
The other half, the one Lucian now stood in, was called the Red Lands, eighty percent barren desert and wasteland, with the remaining twenty percent clinging to a strip of coastline near the sea, a divide that had carved a deep, bitter gap between rich and poor across the entire continent.
He turned his face upward, toward a sky he had no way of reading. Heat struck him like a physical blow, seeping in even through the black cloth still wrapped over his eyes.
"This feels completely real," Lucian said.
"You can touch this world and feel every sensation in it, because that’s simply how this Domain works. But the people here can’t feel you back. Everyone you’ll see ahead of us is nothing more than a memory."
Lumina pointed forward. In the distance stood a small city rising out of the sand, dominated by a tall tower whose upper courtyard spread out wide and flat, unmistakably built to serve as an altar.
"We need to get over there."
"Where, exactly?" Lucian’s voice was thick with confusion.
"To track down a traitor from the Order of Lumielle, of course."
Lumina closed her hand around his and pulled him forward before he could even begin to unpack what she meant by "traitor."
Something about the way she’d said it left him certain, for the first time, that everything happening around him tonight was tangled up in some plan of her own making.
Even knowing this was little more than a projection of the real world, the sheer scale of the Domain still caught him off guard. It took nearly thirty minutes of walking across open sand before the city and its tower finally drew close.
After crossing that stretch of desert, they arrived at last before a set of gates carved with elaborate, sweeping reliefs. Lumina tightened her grip on Lucian’s hand the moment they stepped through.
"Hey, why does it feel like you’re trying to leash me, Lumina?"
"Because I don’t want you wandering off. This might only be a Domain, but it’s larger than you’d think. Chasing you down would be more trouble than it’s worth, especially in a body like this one."
A memory surfaced unbidden, the moment he’d left Miyu behind alone in the forest. Maybe, he thought, walking this close together wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
The two of them passed through the gates together, and the city swallowed them whole almost instantly, a wall of noise, merchants calling out in an accent thick and unfamiliar to Lucian’s ears, the whole square humming with life around them.
They’d stepped straight into a market, the kind of place where half a city seemed to have gathered at once.
But there was a strange contrast to it all. As they moved through the crowd, they could hear everything, smell everything, but not one hand could reach anyone here, not a single object either.
They walked through the press of bodies like any ordinary couple out among the stalls, until Lumina’s attention snapped suddenly to her right, toward a vendor selling food.
"Ah, that looks delicious..."
She’d caught sight of someone in this frozen slice of memory preparing a dish native to Eosia.
Over a steaming pot, spiced rice churned together with cuts of lamb, stirred evenly through, a rich peanut sauce ladled in afterward and worked through the mixture until every grain of rice had taken on its color.
What struck Lucian as strange was how long Lumina lingered on it, studying every spice, every motion of the vendor’s hands, as though she genuinely intended to recreate the dish herself one day.
This is really making me hungry. Guess that fish I ate earlier really was just a memory too, no wonder I’m still starving. Damn it, Lucian thought, his patience for this place already wearing thin.
As he turned, still caught up in his own hunger, a voice from a nearby fruit stall caught his attention, the vendor’s tone bright with genuine delight at whoever had just walked up.
"Ah, Moonmaiden Miyu, you’ve come. Your fruit’s all ready for you."
The figure addressed as Miyu wore a white robe marked with a crescent moon and golden stars, her face and hair impossible for Lucian to make out, but her voice, bright, unmistakably cheerful, wasn’t something he could ever have forgotten.
"Uncle, thank you so much for the fruit."
That’s really her, Lucian thought.