The air that rushed from inside the internal stone passage leading to the central chamber deep within the palace was nothing like what Dex had anticipated. Based on the novel's description, the Chamber of Stillness was supposed to be a sacred place, pure and restorative, inducing miraculous healing. But the air that struck his face now was saturated with a sticky, heavy, nauseating moisture that clung directly to the skin like the dying breath of a colossal beast gasping in the darkness.
Dex walked with measured, slow, precisely calculated steps. He placed his foot on the wet rock with the precision of a surgeon gripping a scalpel, distributing his weight across the sole of his foot so as not to produce the faintest friction sound, as though he were a shadow flowing through the belly of the dark. He knew, from his deep reading of the novel's world, that the most dangerous traps were not those standing before doors, but those that waited for someone who believed they had already passed the danger.
Directly behind him, Lumia moved like a being from another world that transcended the laws of physics. Her small feet never genuinely touched the wet, repulsive rocky surface, they hovered millimeters above it. Her long silver hair gleamed faintly beneath the cover of her simple gray cloak, responding to the hidden energies in the place. Her wide silver eyes swept the passage with celestial coldness and systematic analysis, dissecting every particle of dust, every air current, every stray mana pulse.
Lumia was not merely walking, she was continuing to deploy her celestial abilities. She was folding the space around them, enveloping herself and Dex in a thin, invisible, stable layer of the fourth dimension, rendering their physical and wave-form presence completely invisible and concealed even from the most precise magical sensing devices, as though they were mere ghosts that had slipped through a small tear in the fabric of reality.
Suddenly, Lumia stopped, and Dex halted instantly behind her.
"Dex," Lumia whispered in a voice as delicate as tearing silk in silence, a voice that cut through the passage's quiet without actually breaking it or sending sound waves outward, "stop. The mana ahead is profoundly disturbed. It is not natural, and it is not residual energy from the Duke. There is a very complex array, an invisible network enveloping the arched entrance leading to the main chamber. If we take a single miscalculated step and make contact with it, a catastrophic alarm will sound and echo through the entire palace, and the stone passage above our heads may detonate entirely, burying us alive."
Dex stopped at once, his body going rigid. He raised his right hand to confirm his understanding of the warning. He closed his eyes with force and decided to rely on his own technique, activating Fire Sensing.
In that moment, the cold, dark physical world vanished from his mental perspective. The harsh stone walls and the blinding darkness dissolved, replaced by an abstract world composed purely of energy lines and thermal pulses. In this new mental vision, he saw what Lumia had warned of with terrifying clarity: dense, extremely fine threads of crimson and black mana interwoven before them like a lethal and extraordinarily complex spider web, covering every inch of the arched entrance from floor to ceiling, forming an impenetrable energy wall.
Dex recognized this magic immediately, not from the body's memory, but from his memory as a voracious reader. This was no ordinary defensive array from the Williams family's magical heritage, which relied on light and air. This network bore a strange signature, an energy that was malevolent, cold, and deeply black. It was the signature of the Shadow Organization. Their magic was treacherous, blending precise sensing with lethal cursework, designed to ensnare intruders, absorb the mana of their bodies, and devour their souls before pain signals could reach their minds.
"Sylvester, that cowardly traitor. He trusts no one, not even the walls of his own home, not even his mercenaries," Dex muttered with biting bitterness, the muscles of his jaw clenching in fury until his teeth nearly cracked. "He has sunk so far in his degradation and desperation that he has allied himself with the Shadow Organization. He has defiled the family's ancient defenses with this filthy magic to guarantee that no one can reach my father's room."
Dex stepped forward with extreme care and raised his left hand, sheathed in a black leather glove, to within centimeters of the cold stone wall, hovering at the edge of the invisible network. He knew that any attempt to break this web with excessive magical force, or even to cut it with Lumia's spatial magic, would trigger a chain reaction that would detonate the array and unleash a catastrophic alarm. The only solution was surgical dismantling.
He focused his concentration entirely, placing every particle of his awareness at the blazing center of his chest, and summoned the phoenix fire. But this time, he did not call forth its explosive offensive form that burns and destroys. Instead, he called upon its purest essence. He sent an extremely light, impossibly fine and controlled pulse of pale blue flame through the tips of his fingers, a needle-thread of pure fire. This was not burning fire aimed at destruction, it was purifying and deconstructive heat, carrying the properties of rebirth that characterize the phoenix.
The blue flame crept at unbelievable slowness between the threads of the black and crimson array. Dex began directing the flame to dissolve the knotted magical bonds holding the network together, converting them to energetic vapor without violently severing the main threads, precisely as a brilliant surgeon might use an impossibly fine scalpel to separate a malignant tumor from a living body's veins without causing hemorrhage. Sweat streamed down Dex's brow, stinging his eyes, yet he did not blink.
The array emitted a faint, intermittent hiss as though in pain, then the crimson threads began to retreat and contract very slowly upon themselves, like a dying spider, opening at the center of the entrance a narrow, temporary gap barely sufficient for one person to pass through.
"Quickly, now," Dex whispered with ragged breaths, passed his body through the gap with extreme care to avoid touching its edges, and Lumia followed like a silent specter, flowing through the opening with celestial grace.
They finally passed through the massive inner steel door, prominently engraved with the gold lion crest, that guarded the actual entrance to the Chamber of Stillness, or as it was known in the old family records: the Last Refuge.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the atmosphere changed completely, and Dex's breath stopped in his throat.
The place was a colossal circular hall, carved with precision into the mountain's foundational bedrock beneath the city. The high, arching walls were covered entirely with large natural raw mana crystals.
But the sight that greeted them now was heartbreaking, it lacerated the soul.
The enormous crystals, once symbols of absolute purity and the power of the Williams duchy, were now pale, sick, and dead. A dark, contaminated gray coated them, as though they had rotted from within outward. The air was extremely heavy, laden with a sharp metallic smell resembling old blood and rust, mixed with the choking smell of burnt ozone. The crystals appeared, rather than healing their lord, to have absorbed his disease and the poison from his body in an attempt to save him, yet the poison was so malicious and powerful that it had contaminated the crystals themselves, killing their brilliance and sharing in their lord's slow death.
In the center of the dark circular hall, beneath a large crystal dome that had lost its luminescence, stood an opulent medical bed crafted from enchanted white marble. Around it hung a terrifying, desolate, utterly isolated stillness broken only by a regular, very faint, intermittent sound from the mana medical instruments monitoring the vital pulse.
Dex walked toward the bed slowly. He no longer felt as though he were reading a novel, or playing a role in a fictional story. Every step was heavier than the last, and every heartbeat hammered in his head like a mallet. Lord Marcus was no longer merely a noble and tragic character written on paper. The sight of this scene before him shattered the wall between reality and fiction.
There, amid white silk covers that appeared in the room's dimness like a shroud of death, lay Lord Marcus Williams. The great Golden Lion, a war hero, a man whose very gaze had made enemies tremble, now lay like a ghost. His face was pale as dead wax, and his massive body, described in the novel as a mountain, now appeared emaciated, broken, breathing with tremendous difficulty under the weight of a malicious poison that was stealing his life drop by drop.