?As the battlefield outside grew heavy with tension, an otherworldly silence descended upon the interior of the mansion. Abdur Rahman walked toward the old library, where the memories of Ariyan’s father lay gathered under layers of dust. Below, Razia and Sabuj stood together, quietly gathering the final fragments of their existence.

  Nihira, with her supernatural senses, realized that the long-standing protection of this house had finally found its source. A golden aura began to emanate from the bodies of all the domestic staff.

  Sabuj stepped into the garden. Twenty years ago, during a horrific famine, his entire village had been wiped out. As he sat crying beside the corpses of his family, consumed by hunger, Ariyan’s grandfather had rescued him. He had said, "Learn to grow new life in the very soil that takes life away." Since that day, Sabuj hadn't just tended to the garden; he had guarded the earth around the house so that no evil force could ever take root.

  Sabuj whispered, "Now, it is time for me to return." Starting from his feet, his body slowly turned into fine dust, blending with the wind to find shelter among the leaves of the garden trees.

  Razia was an ordinary woman. During the war, she had nearly lost her mind after losing her children before her very eyes, left wandering the streets until Ariyan’s grandfather gave her refuge in this house. In her cooking, she didn't just mix spices; she infused the love she could never give to her own children. Looking into the eyes of Maliha and Malisha, she said, "Don't cry, my daughters. From today, the keys to this house are in your hands. Take care of Master Ariyan." Razia walked slowly toward the veranda, and with one peaceful sigh, her body vanished into the air like millions of fireflies.

  In that secluded upstairs room where Ariyan’s father used to study, Abdur Rahman sat in the chair. Old days flashed before his eyes.

  Abdur Rahman was not merely a servant. He was the childhood friend of Ariyan’s father. When Ariyan’s father used to cower in fear of this family’s cursed legacy, Rahman had promised, "When you are gone, I will protect your blood." Rahman was once a high-ranking military officer, but he had abandoned his identity and donned the disguise of a servant to protect his friend's children—for he had lost everyone in the war. He knew that the wound in Ariyan’s chest would one day seek to consume the world, and to extinguish that fire, someone’s life would have to be offered as a sacrifice.

  Abdur Rahman looked toward the window and smiled faintly. The prayer beads in his hand fell to the floor. He saw Maliha and Malisha standing at the corner of the door, weeping uncontrollably. Rahman said, "Friend, I have kept my word. I did not let your son be alone."

  In an instant, Abdur Rahman’s body began to crumble like the worn pages of an ancient manuscript. The winter wind blowing through the open library window carried that dust toward Ariyan’s room.

  Nihira felt an ethereal emptiness fill her chest. The ancient souls of this house were departing one by one, leaving behind only memories and a heart full of lamentation. Ariyan was still outside fighting the darkness, unaware that to keep his every breath moving, these elderly guardians had turned their very existence into grains of sand.

  The sky outside was no longer just crimson; it had turned into a dense, black, eternal void. As the sacred aura of the sacrifices of Abdur Rahman, Razia, and Sabuj formed an invisible armor around Ariyan, a blue flame erupted from the wound in his chest.

  The demon within Ariyan’s consciousness finally shattered the walls and emerged. His pupils vanished, replaced by a profound, cold darkness. Nihira possessed the Thanatos Optic, which could control the concept of death, but what appeared in Ariyan’s eyes was the Origin Thanatos Optic—a power one step above Nihira’s and extremely uncontrollable. It did not just control death; it had the power to permanently erase the very essence of existence.

  The air around Ariyan began to tremble in a violent vortex. He was turning blue under the heat of his own uncontrolled power. Just then, wiping away their tears, Maliha and Malisha rushed to him. In their hands were two ancient daggers—The Twin Eyes of Nihility. Their ancestors had guarded these daggers for generations for this very day.

  Maliha screamed, "Master! Take these! Only these daggers can serve as the vessel to contain the surging power of your body!"

  Ariyan, staggering, took the daggers. The two eyes embedded in the hilts suddenly twitched. One eye reflected the Truth of Emptiness, while the other revealed the Hunger of the Void.

  Ariyan could not use 'Conceptual Magic' before. However, the twin daggers possessed a unique passive ability. Whenever Ariyan struck the air with them, it didn't create a normal wound; instead, an invisible wave was generated, capable of striking up to five meters away, acting as an AOE (Area of Effect).

  Ariyan could now clearly see the "Origin Point" of existence. He could see the relational lines between multiple objects, which he could sever in an instant. These lines and points were far brighter and clearer than the ones Nihira saw. The wound on Ariyan’s chest healed completely.

  Ariyan and the demon within him had now become one. Ariyan brought his power of nothingness under control. He sent all the shadows into the void. But even after striking the "Main Shadow," nothing happened to it. The shadow restored its existence once again.

  Raiyan had been watching Ariyan's supernatural transformation in stunned silence, but when he saw that even Ariyan’s waves of 'Nothingness' could not annihilate the main shadow, he could no longer remain still. Gritting his teeth, Raiyan pulled out two heavy pistols from his coat—The Dark Prophecy.

  The roar of Raiyan’s pistols echoed through the pitch-black darkness of the sky. The bullets fired from The Dark Prophecy were not made of ordinary metal; they were Raiyan’s own congealed blood. Yet, strangely, the bullets passed through the shadow’s body as if it had no physical existence at all. Not even a trace of the bullets remained in the air.

  Raiyan realized this battle would not be confined to ordinary limits. Under the intense pressure of the shadow’s power, the battlefield slowly shifted from the mansion toward the deserted outskirts of the city. Raiyan decided to employ his full strength. He drew blood from his palm and threw it in a straight line—Blood Drive. Raiyan wanted to destroy the shadow’s physical form so they could return to the real world, but the shadow remained unaffected.

  Raiyan became desperate. He condensed the stream of blood around him into a high-density sphere. The internal pressure was so great that it looked like the core of a dead star. He shouted, "Now, cease to exist!" As the sphere touched the shadow, a massive explosion occurred, as intense as a supernova. The plains were instantly blasted and drenched in blood, yet the shadow stood there as calmly as before.

  In a mix of frustration and rage, Raiyan attempted to mimic Ariyan’s nothingness waves. He created a massive wave of blood and tried to infuse it with those destructive vibrations—Blood Wave of Null. But it failed. Instead of touching the shadow, the massive wave of blood simply flowed around it. The entire area was flooded with Raiyan’s spilled blood. The humidity in the air grew heavy with the scent of iron.

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  Nihira could only hear the sounds of combat, but being far away, she couldn't understand what was happening. Due to the effects of her Internal Architecture, she still couldn't stand up. Tears began to fall as she felt helpless, unable to save anyone. She was only waiting for Niha to arrive; she was the only one who could handle this. She lay with her head on Adrian’s lifeless chest.

  Raiyan played his final card. He thought of using the floating blood particles in the air as fuel. He crafted a fire arrow using his own blood—Blood Fire Arrow. Shaping the fire into an arrow, he launched it at the shadow. The entire area lit up like an artificial sun, and a devastating explosion occurred that left a massive crater in the earth. The flames sought to touch the sky.

  As the dust and heat subsided, Raiyan looked into the crater, gasping for breath. His eyes were filled with extreme shock and terror. Despite such massive destruction, the shadow was completely unharmed. Not a single hair on its body was singed; there wasn't even a scratch. It was as if it existed outside the laws and powers of this universe. Raiyan whispered in a trembling voice, "How is this possible? Can an existence be so void that nothing can touch it?"

  Raiyan collapsed to his knees, panting. His long coat was soaked through with his own blood. With every breath, it felt as though his lungs were tearing apart. The massive black shadow before him hadn't moved an inch. It wasn't a monster; it was the living embodiment of 'Non-existence.'

  Raiyan realized that his ordinary blood magic or Ariyan’s immature power of nothingness was insufficient to stop this entity. Only Niha Valerius-Chronos had the ability to defeat the shadow. But Niha hadn't returned yet. He had to buy time until her arrival.

  A crooked, sorrowful smile appeared on Raiyan's lips. The man who had acted selfishly his entire life was now about to make the most selfless decision of all: to buy time with his own life.

  Memories unfolded before Raiyan’s eyes. His life had been a prolonged hell. In his childhood, he was an idealistic boy who believed all injustice could be wiped from the world. His father was a judge who taught him, "For justice, if you must sacrifice your most precious thing, you shall do so."

  The memory of a destroyed city appeared before Raiyan's blurred vision. His father, that idealistic judge whom Raiyan worshipped like a god, had called him into a dark room one day. Raiyan was only 10 years old. His father placed a hand on his head and said, "Raiyan, to maintain the balance of this world, many innocent people must sometimes be sacrificed. Sacrifice of the lesser for the greater good is true justice."

  That night, Raiyan first learned that his father was not a judge, but an assassin for a secret international organization that annihilated thousands of innocent people in the name of 'population control' and 'political stability.' His father made him carry out his first kill—Raiyan’s own beloved pet dog. On that day, the kind boy inside Raiyan died. A mechanical entity was born, one with no room for emotion.

  As Raiyan grew, he realized he had wanted to be a judge who brought justice to everyone. But along the way, he discovered the terrifying truth: "The only equal right humans have is death." He saw that those who spoke of justice played games of blood behind the scenes. He had lost his beloved due to one of his own wrong decisions while trying to save her from a rival group. In that grief, he had extinguished all the light within himself.

  He had brought himself to a level of ultimate fulfillment where no pain or fear could touch him. He thought of himself as no one in this world, merely a spectator. But through the company of Ariyan and Nihira, cracks had formed in his stony heart. He realized that 'nothingness' was not the ultimate truth; rather, the emotion of being by someone's side is what keeps humans alive.

  Raiyan laughed—a sorrowful, bloody laugh. He placed his hand on the left side of his chest. His heartbeat was very fast today. Looking at the shadow, he said calmly, "I have killed thousands of people trying to save people my whole life. I thought I was right, but I was just a murderer. Today, for the first time, I don't want to die as a murderer, but as a human."

  "All my life I killed people to save people. Today, let me sacrifice myself to create a happy family and save a city." Ariyan told Raiyan not to talk nonsense.

  By then, Nihira had crawled to the scene. She had heard everything. Nihira was supposed to be the only sacrifice, yet everyone was sacrificing themselves except her. She thought that if she hadn't used her Internal Architecture, she could have done something now. In trying to show off her power, she had become helpless.

  As Raiyan prepared for the final gamble of his life, Nihira moved forward through unspeakable pain. The side effects of her architecture made her body feel as heavy as stone. But a larger stone weighed on her heart. She listened to Raiyan’s words—the man who once sang only of death was now willing to tear his chest open to save the song of life.

  Nihira wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, "Stop, Raiyan! You said you were afraid of death! Then why are you standing in front of death today?" But only an indistinct moan escaped her throat.

  Ariyan came and held Nihira. Raiyan looked at Nihira and said, “That day I sat home selfishly while you went out to kill the creature to save Ariyan. Today, see how selfless I can be. And don't have the wrong idea—I am saving this city.”

  Raiyan spread both his arms. Thousands of liters of blood floating in the air suddenly began to vibrate. Raiyan began his final technique—Blood Sacrifice: Unlimited Judgment. He turned his entire existence into a vibration. Just as every object in the universe is made of a specific vibration, Raiyan sought to match his existence's vibration with that of the shadow.

  The purple sky throbbed like a dying heart. When the massive shadow descending from the void stood before Raiyan, the surrounding air didn't just turn freezing; it ceased to exist. It felt as if a vacuum of ultimate despair had been created. The shadow extended a misty hand toward Raiyan. Wherever that hand touched the ground, the very concept of earth or soil vanished into a strange, blurred smoke.

  An agonizing cry emerged from the shadow—it wasn't a scream, but the vibration of thousands of sobbing human voices. It began to pull Raiyan toward its center. It was the Lethe Anchor—an attraction that renders physical strength or immortality trivial. It didn't come to kill his cells; it was taking him back to the world of death.

  "Stop!" Ariyan screamed. The twin daggers in his hand glowed with an unstable black light. He tried to move forward, but the gravity of nothingness pinned him to the ground. "Raiyan, you are not a sacrifice! You are my friend!"

  Raiyan didn't look back. His body began to turn transparent; the blood in his body was no longer flowing outward but was blending into the air as a reddish vapor.

  "Friend?" Raiyan whispered. A single drop of pure blood rolled down the corner of his eye. "Ariyan, for a man with blood-stained hands like mine, that is a very heavy word. I have spent my life judging others to avoid judging myself. But today... the verdict is final."

  Nihira, still immobile, saw that the man who once mocked her soft heart had now become a shield that she could not be. She saw the shadow cowering in pain. Raiyan’s blood had turned into burning symbols that bound the nothingness within a specific structure.

  The vaporized blood from Raiyan’s body tightly entwined the void. No matter how much the shadow tried to free itself, the chains of Raiyan’s 'Unlimited Judgment' dug deeper into its existence. It wasn't just magic; it was the final reckoning of all the sins, virtues, and agonies of Raiyan’s entire life.

  Raiyan’s consciousness was sinking into a bottomless abyss of darkness. But within that darkness, the most painful page of his past life flickered—the one that had cursed him with the burden of immortality.

  Ten years ago, Raiyan was a young researcher working on the reconstruction of blood cells. His goal was noble—to cure human diseases. But that secret organization his father worked for wanted to divert Raiyan’s research. They wanted to create an army that would never die. Raiyan refused.

  As punishment, they attacked Raiyan’s laboratory. Raiyan was locked in a glass chamber. There, they released the experimental 'immortality virus'—which was essentially a concept-less parasite. The virus entered the human body and made the cells immortal, but in exchange, it took away the human right to die.

  From that day, Raiyan became an 'Immortal Living Dead.' His life had no end; his agony had no conclusion. He would never be able to see his wife again. Yet, he still feared death.

  Slowly, Raiyan began to fade into the air. He realized that the shadow only wanted to release him from this torment and let him enjoy death.

  He looked at Nihira and Ariyan and saw Nihira crying while holding Ariyan. He told them to take care of themselves. Looking at the sky, he said, “Death isn't that bad.” Then, he vanished into the void within the shadow.