"Marsha! My dear Marsha! Is that you?"
Jemos's voice was thick with excitement as he tiptoed toward the woman in the black dress, reaching out to turn her by the shoulders.
Behind him, in the carriage, Leilin's eyes flickered—but he made no move to stop him.
The situation was exceedingly strange, and he needed someone to scout ahead.
Jemos applied a gentle force, and the woman in the black dress turned around.
What he saw was a face with no features at all—only a black vortex where a face should be.
Whoosh! Jemos's face froze in terror as his entire body seemed to be drawn out into a thin black thread, twisting and spiraling, before being sucked into the vortex on the woman's face.
The whole process was breathtakingly fast—almost complete by the time Leilin was about to act—yet it played out with perfect, terrible clarity. Leilin could still vividly recall how Jemos had been stretched, inch by inch, into a thread over a dozen meters long before being dragged into the whirlpool on the woman's face.
This sensation of time flowing out of sync made Leilin nauseous.
And his heart sank immediately.
"This is no ordinary spirit! It's something far more advanced and terrifying—a higher-dimensional existence that I can't yet comprehend…"
Leilin instantly recalled a passage from an ancient text archived in the Chip. In the distant primordial era, when two high-ranking wizards clashed in battle, the fallout could sometimes not only destroy land and sea, but even shatter the barriers of time and space, causing catastrophic distortions across dimensions.
And in such places, many bizarre entities were born.
Some of these entities were feeble—easily destroyed by even a third-rank apprentice. But others were nightmarishly strange, capable of extinguishing the radiance of a Dawn Star
"This woman in the black dress is merely a manifestation. Once certain conditions are met, the vortex on her face activates and devours everything…"
Leilin reached his conclusion in an instant: "Right now, I'm far too weak. And this particular manifestation is clearly not the weakest kind. Without any concrete information, fighting it head-on would be foolish. I need to flee!"
In the blink of an eye, his body dissolved into black mist and vanished from midair.
A flash of dark light erupted in the distance, and Leilin reappeared several hundred meters away, streaking outward in a black arc.
"Woooo!"
But immediately, the woman's shrill wailing reached his ears—higher-pitched than before.
Leilin stared in shock as his direction was grotesquely reversed, sending him hurtling back toward the woman in black.
Crack!
The woman rose to her feet, splitting open from the crown of her head downward. She divided into two halves, revealing enormous, razor-sharp teeth at the seam, her entire body transforming into a gaping maw.
Boom! The colossal mouth slammed shut, and an overwhelming wave of darkness surged over everything…
--- It felt like plummeting from an immense height and suddenly slamming into the ground.
Leilin's whole body jerked as consciousness returned.
"Did I… get swallowed by that woman?!" That final image had been too staggering—the woman's maw had expanded without limit, ultimately devouring heaven and earth. Even a Dawn Star Wizard probably couldn't pull off something like that.
"Where am I?"
Leilin rubbed his head and rose to his feet, surveying his surroundings.
Dim, cramped, corners thick with cobwebs—not a single piece of furniture, not even a window or a door.
It looked like a sealed-off, narrow cellar.
Beside him, Velin and Jenny lay on the ground with their eyes shut, apparently unconscious. It would clearly be a long while before they came to.
"A deeper layer of the phantasm!!!" Leilin's expression turned deadly grave.
"If the three-way fork I first encountered was the surface layer of the illusion, then the woman in the black dress was a level deeper—and this place is the third layer!"
Hallucinations and dreamlike powers were something Leilin had limited experience with. But according to ancient records, the Wizard World had once conquered a vast realm whose inhabitants were all masters of dream and illusion. Through the power of dreams, they could accomplish virtually anything—so much so that the benighted peoples of other planes worshipped them as gods!
From fragmentary passages in those old texts, Leilin also knew that the deeper one sank into an illusion, the harder it became to escape.
"I have to get out of here! Three layers deep—this is already extremely dangerous!"
Black flames instantly blazed to life in his hands: "Shadowfireball!"
The dark fireball slammed into a corner of the cellar and detonated, blasting open a deep, dark hole.
"First, I need to map out the basic structure of this illusion!" Leilin stroked his chin. He had no brilliant solution for this kind of power—only to study it first, then find a way through.
Leilin leaped down into the black cavity…
--- "The hundred and ninety-third time! And I'm back here again!" Leilin looked down at Jenny and Velin, still unconscious on the floor, his expression grim.
"Through experimentation, I've mapped out the approximate ternary structure of this place. Sure enough, with each deeper layer of the illusion, the ternary structure grows more unstable—until it finally collapses…"
If the ternary structure here collapsed, only two outcomes were possible: plunging into an even deeper layer of illusion, or having the soul fail to withstand the strain and be devoured outright by the illusion's master.
"I've tried everywhere else. Only this spot remains!"
Leilin kicked Velin and Jenny's bodies aside, revealing the dust-covered floor beneath.
A fireball shot out and shattered against the ground…
Boom! A massive crack split open in the ceiling of the cellar, and Leilin dropped through.
"Another cellar just like the last one—but Velin and Jenny are gone. Good. Very good. At last, something has changed…"
He swept his gaze around. It was still a cramped, dim, doorless cellar. The only difference from before was that Velin and Jenny had disappeared.
"The structure has sustained damage it can't repair in time. Now, I need to…" Leilin's hands moved through the air as though plucking the strings of an invisible instrument, sending out concentric rings of unseen ripples.
Under the motion of his hands, the entire space of the cellar shimmered like the surface of water, trembling with faint undulations.
The ripples spread wider and wider, the spatial distortion growing more and more intense, until—BOOM!!!
The cellar's space shattered like a mirror, and Leilin's body plunged downward through the fragments.
--- Mirrors! Mirrors everywhere, brilliantly bright, reflecting the figure of a black-haired noble youth.
"This must be the interstitial space between layers of the illusion!"
Leilin touched the cold surface of a mirror and drew his conclusion.
He had finally escaped the illusion, if only temporarily—but doing so would inevitably draw the attention of its master.
Still, that was exactly the effect he wanted!
"Wooo…"
At that moment, a sobbing sound drifted over—the voice of a very cute little girl.
Leilin whipped around. In one corner of the mirror world, a small girl with violet hair had appeared seemingly from nowhere, wearing a red dress with white stockings on her little legs. She was crying softly.
"Wooo… Alice lost her teddy bear! Can big brother help me find it?"
The little girl spotted Leilin and stopped crying, fixing him with a pleading gaze.
"Sorry! I can't!" Leilin shook his head.
"Why not?" The girl's expression was one of pure bewilderment. "Alice is being very good! Don't you like Alice?"
And as the girl spoke, countless reflections of her appeared in the surrounding mirrors—her back, her silhouette, multiplied endlessly.
"I think we could at least talk first!" Leilin fought to keep his voice calm.
He had little experience dealing with entities like this. It was a higher-dimensional being, its thought processes and perception utterly alien to everyone on this side. Leilin didn't even know if he could persuade it to let him go.
"Can you help Alice find her teddy bear?"
"No!" Leilin shook his head firmly. Ancient legends had long carried warnings about precisely this sort of thing. The moment you agreed to a manifestation's request, you were bound by some invisible covenant—enslaved, or dragged outright into a different dimensional plane.
There had been a lucky few who, through such bargains, had gained miraculous powers in return. But Leilin had never been a gambler—especially not when his own life was the stake.
Crash-crash-crash!!!
The instant Leilin refused, swarms of black beetles poured out of the mirrors, surging toward him like a tide.
"I have no choice but to fight!" Leilin's brow furrowed. He knew he had to demonstrate his strength to earn even a sliver of respect from this being.
"Shadowfireball!" "Petrifying Gaze!"
In an instant, his body was covered in fine scales, black flames streamed ceaselessly from his hands, and mysterious rays shot from his eyes.
Crack! Crack!
Clusters of black beetles turned to stone and clattered to the ground, crumbling to ash, while even more were incinerated to nothing by the black flames.
But still the black beetles poured from the mirrors in endless waves. The ones Leilin destroyed were a mere drop in the ocean.
"Her strength… far exceeds anything I anticipated!"
Leilin smiled bitterly and flung out a handful of crimson powder: "Scorching Touch!"
Two searing beams lanced outward, clearing two swathes of space.
Then Leilin's face went pale. The sea of consciousness within him trembled, and the crystallized spiritual power he had solidified cracked—nearly shattering outright.
Scorching Touch was a second-level spell, and since Leilin had crystallized a portion of his spiritual power, he currently possessed only first-rank wizard strength. Using a second-level spell so recklessly inevitably invited backlash.
And that was the mild consequence. Had he used a second-level innate talent spell, his sea of consciousness would have been thrown into instant chaos.
"Squeak! Squeak!"
The black beetles chirped in dense chorus and charged at Leilin once more.
With his spiritual power nearly depleted, Leilin could only watch as layer upon layer of black beetles swarmed over his body.