The Grand Instructor stood alone before the rear sanctum of the Primordial Academy, a hand resting lightly on the air itself. Behind him, spires reached into the clouds. Before him, the shimmer of a gate—not built, but breathed into existence, woven from coiling energy and strands of ancient light.
Dawn approached silently.
"You're on time," the old man murmured without looking.
"You said the gate isn't physical," Dawn said, examining the shimmering wall.
"It isn't. Not stone. Not metal. It's woven from the residual pathways of a plane that should not exist. Folded under the skin of this world, yet older than this Academy itself."
Dawn narrowed his eyes. " Are you telling me that the forbidden realm isn't just beneath the Academy and instead the Academy is built over it?"
The Grand Instructor finally turned, his gaze clouded by memory. "A long time ago, before even the idea of this Academy, I walked these lands as a younger man. My friend and I were searching a ruin—apassion we bith shared. We thought it was just another relic exploration. What could have gone wrong after all?"
He paused.
"Then, as if mocking my thoughts, it all went wrong. Something just fell from the sky like thunder."
The air thickened, not with magic, but with meaning.
"A Vile Behemoth. One of those aberrant things born outside the laws of presence and form. It broke through the world boundary—tore it like wet silk—and descended on our heads. Its thoughts alone made men claw out their eyes."
"And you survived?" Dawn asked.
"We ran," the Grand Instructor said bluntly. "We barely made it. My friend… he dropped his journal in the chaos. We lost it when the ruin collapsed."
Dawn stared at the gate. "And the Behemoth?"
"Killed. Utterly destroyed. Not by us. By someone… other. Someone whose name is lost. Even I—who've seen ages grind into dust—do not know who it was. Just that their very presence rejected the Behemoth's existence."
He tapped the air beside him, and the gate pulsed in response.
"When the Behemoth died, it didn't vanish. Its fragments scattered. They infected the ruin like disease spores. Changed it. Not corrupted it—transformed it. A forbidden realm was born. The Academy was later built here to completely bury that infectious and chaotic realm."
He offered Dawn a long look. "Now… if you can retrieve that journal, I'd consider that a fine favor repaid."
Dawn said nothing. He nodded once—and stepped forward.
The gate folded around him.
---
The world turned.
There was no descent. Only shift.
He stood amidst a shattered dream—broken geometry, warped reflections, and decaying remnants of something once precise. Light here was brittle. Structures hung in place, neither alive nor dead.
Nothing in this place was wrong—only disorderly. There was no malevolence, only the decay of once-ordered thought. It wasn't a nightmare—it was entropy with a pulse.
The beings drifted in—fragments of the Behemoth's unformed ideas, motes born from malicious contemplation. Microbial things: twitching, seeking patterns, curious.
Dawn's body pulsed with quiet power. Not flashing or glowing. His Resonant Layer resonated gently, the Luminous Frame shaped space subtly, and the Infernal Mantle shimmered through his motion like oil across water. In the world outside, he never felt them as vividly as now.They were not forms he had to summon. They simply were. Similiar to Blood, bone, and flesh—unchanging constants.
He kept walking.
As he did, his mind wandered inward.
Why was a forbidden realm necessary for Cosmic Lattice?
The thought sprang into hisind without warning and continued to gnaw on his mind.
The Resonant Layer, the Luminous Frame, the Infernal Mantle… each was a reflection of blood, bones and flesh. Yet they didn't stack neatly like the physical body did. They existed, but not as a unified whole.
It was as if he had been earned three different pieces of gear and forced himself to wear them at the same time.
He had always thought the Cosmic Lattice would be the structure to bind them. To finally organize the chaos.
But this realm… this place of scattered remnants and broken logic… it felt familiar.
This is what my resonant layer, luminous frame and infernal mantle looks like, Dawn thought. No order. Just fragments of perfection, floating in confusion.
But then another thought struck him.
What if the Cosmic Lattice isn't about introducing order into chaos? What if… it's about constructing order within chaos?
If he could impose a unifying lattice on this realm—if he could make harmony out of this… then wouldn't that be the true expression of his next transformation?
He stepped through a corridor of floating stairs, where light poured sideways. At the end, resting on a crystalline platform, was the journal. Bound in old leather. Still whole.
Dawn stepped toward it—
And something pulsed.
Not from the book.
From within him.
The domain fragment.
The sealed shard trembled against his chest, growing warm. The realm around him slowed.
And then—
---
To be continued…