My air-sense was still buzzing as I worked on the ingredients—strategically stationed a safe distance from Greg’s corpse (still within Range, mind you) in case Quickpaw decided to pop in for a scare.

  I really hoped Lotte had packed a contingency or two this time, but as usual, a mage’s nose is sharper than a gossip’s, and it only took a sniff to detect a hole ripped right through Parda—the fabric of reality isn’t exactly known for subtlety.

  Belle fidgeted anxiously at my side while Alice helped mix the necessary components.

  I’d set aside some essentials, including a few items needed for drawing the ritual circle. It required fresh blood. I toyed with the idea of using Greg’s, but the poor guy had been dead long enough for his blood to lose its punch; my own dragon blood, on the other hand, would certainly deliver. Of course, there was the nagging worry: what if someone detected it was dragon blood when they eventually came poking around this wounded fabric of reality?

  …But then, I trusted Lotte on this one—there’s no way she’d have me attempt a suicidal ritual in a city like this.

  Alright!

  Alice handed me the crushed ritual mana dust, a fine powder destined for alchemical transformation. With a flick of my fingers-turned-claws, I sliced open my hand and let my blood drizzle over the powder. It met the dust with a sizzling hiss, as if seared by a tiny blaze, and soon the entire mixture was a vivid crimson.

  And thus, the process began.

  I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what kind of ritual I was performing—beyond the obvious goal of breaching Parda. Every ingredient had been carefully chosen for its thaumaturgic conductivity and symbolic resonance, an alchemical lexicon I knew all too well.

  Using my blood-infused powder, I started drawing the ritual circles. I sketched the primary sigil on a cleared patch of floor (grass uprooted by Alice’s quick hands), melding Euclidean geometry with alchemical shorthand.

  Yet, as I worked, I couldn’t stop my mind from analyzing every detail. I’d been down this road before and ended up with nothing but a dragon’s stubborn, overly curious brain. One of the rings formed a nonagon inscribed with Enochian vowels—what Lotte called vibrational keystones for dimensional harmonics. They had to be drawn with utmost care.

  The Middle Layer was designed as a truncated tetrahedron, its edges meeting at angles matching Varkaigrad’s leyline azimuth.

  The Innermost Circle was an Ouroboros-Klein bottle hybrid, a symbol of infinite recursion. Lotte explained it represented a M?bius strip of causality where Belle’s past and future would knot together. Spooky, but undeniably fun.

  Wrapping it all up, I embedded the bismuth crystals—grown by yours truly while artfully dodging actual lab work at Alchemy Tower with peak magical attunement—into each vertex of the nonagon, aligning their facets to catch and refract moonlight when it eventually broke through the canopy. Next, I drizzled mercury along the tetrahedron’s edges, where it pooled into self-organizing dendritic patterns. I’ve always had a soft spot for mercury—so damn useful. In this setup, its properties let it “remember” the ritual patterns. A truly fascinating ingredient.

  I glanced over and nodded in satisfaction—just as Lotte had described it. Still, even with all these details laid bare, my brain couldn’t quite connect what each element truly represented. Lotte really needed to up her teaching game. But hey, at least I wasn’t summoning a NetherBeast this time—no containment or binding runes, so… maybe that was a win.

  Belle sat statue-still, wide eyes mirroring the glyphs. Her claws kneaded the soil—not fear of the unknown, but fear of becoming its scribe. Like a dagger balanced on a precipice, trembling between plunge and flight. She wasn’t some alchemical ingredient to toss into a circle. She was… Belle. And I’d dragged her here.

  Couldn’t let her marinate in that dread. Not when the ritual demanded a leap, not a cower.

  “Anxiety’s a chatty ghost, Belle,” I murmured, scratching behind her ears. “Paces the ramparts, shouts at every shadow. But the thing is… it’s not the enemy. Just a overzealous sentinel seeing phantoms for foes.”

  She blinked, whiskers quivering.

  “Think of it like wildfire,” I said, tracing a claw through the mercury’s quicksilver cursive. “Let it rage unchecked, it’ll scorch your roots. Smother it, and you’ll never taste sunlight. But tend it? Suddenly you’ve got a forge in your chest. Caring that hard about survival isn’t cowardice—it’s physics. The gravity that glues your atoms together.”

  My own ribs ached, memories of the dungeon’s gnashing jaws rising like bile. “Learned this the hard way, chewing through monsters and my own doubts. Courage isn’t the absence of tremors—it’s charging forward despite the seismic forecast.”

  I scooped her up, our foreheads touching. Her breath hitched—warm, quick, alive. “This ritual? It’s a cliff dive. Not asking you to trust the water, just the fall. Even shattered glass casts a kaleidoscope.”

  A tap to head. “And this? Proof the best magic doesn’t come from stillness. It’s what erupts when you let the quakes mean something.”

  Belle’s squeak was a vow wrapped in velvet.

  “There’s my badger,” I grinned. “Let’s go vandalize the rulebook.”

  “An almost scholarly monologue, mistress,” Alice remarked, almost surprised, adjusting a bismuth crystal by nanometers. “Shall I alert the bards?”

  Huh?

  “Alert my foot to your backside!”

  Well, whatever helped Belle, I wasn’t sure she fully got me, but she certainly seemed more spirited. And that, in my book, was a win.

  Belle’s role in the ritual was twofold: both subject and symbiote.

  I sighed and withdrew a sterilized lancet—the very one I’d used on myself. With willing cooperation, Belle offered her paw, and I pricked it to collect a single droplet of her blood. Mixing it with predator bone ash, I whipped up a conductive paste. I watched the mixture shift to a deep blue with every droplet—a predatory resonance meant to anchor Belle’s consciousness during the ritual, keeping it from dissolving into nothingness. Satisfied, I smeared the paste onto the aether quartz.

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  “Hold still,” I murmured, securing the gem between her jaws. She obediently gnawed on it, her teeth etching fractal stress lines into the quartz as her biofrequency perfectly synced with its resonance. “Now, go stand in the middle of the ritual circle,” I instructed, rubbing her head affectionately. With that, she bounded past me to take her place.

  Alice materialized beside me, clutching the mycelium hydrogel. “Shall we commence the ritual, mistress?” Yes. It was time to begin—after a few warm-up steps, naturally.

  I selected another ingredient and sketched the Mother of Chains symbol with my mana, the spirituality in my throat coiling like a disgruntled serpent. Once again, it felt heavy with meaning. With that, I intoned the first part of the invocation. The mycelium hydrogel, placed before Belle, unfurled like a ghostly bloom at the circle’s center. I layered it with belladonna pollen and wormwood extract, then pressed Belle gently into the gel’s heart as my voice vibrated through the air.

  The spiritually charged words reverberated, setting off an uncanny vibration that filled the space. Slowly, Belle’s form began to blur at the edges—she was phasing between the corporeal and the shadow dimensions, a state I knew all too well.

  It was time.

  I clasped my hands together as mana surged from my core. It streamed out through one of my hands, and the circle immediately reacted—burning a bright crimson as it greedily sucked in the mana.

  Parda was called the “fabric” of reality, though its threads weren’t simply woven—they were braided. To unpick them, I needed to introduce a measure of controlled chaos.

  I crushed the aether quartz with my second hand, releasing its vacuum energy in a subsonic pop. The mercury trembled, its surface tension breaking into standing waves. Bismuth refracted the distortion into nine intersecting beams, which the Enochian vowels translated into an acoustic pressure.

  I felt it before it came.

  The air itself began to peel, cackling with the power of the realm I was about to breach.

  Revealing—

  Nothing.

  Everything.

  “Samsara nexi, solve et coagula,” I intoned—words less a spell and more a mathematical axiom: unbind and rebind.

  Belle closed her eyes as her form grew more intangible, fading to a mere outline threaded through the mycelium’s filaments. The predator ash enforced a deliberate asymmetry—a necessary flaw to prevent infinite recursion. The ambient mana of the forest, along with my own, plummeted as the circle siphoned energy. Little by little, leaves and trees withered into papery husks.

  I felt my own mana drain dangerously low, prompting me to gulp down a high-grade mana potion. A headache was already forming, but I refused to lose focus.

  No matter what it was, there was no room for surprise. It was Lotte’s ritual, and I was bound to believe that the big dragon had planned for every contingency. So when my mana tanked again and my skull began to throb, I gulped down another potion.

  The circles blazed nuclear. Fingers numb. Vision tunneling. Until—

  Crack.

  Not in the earth. Through it. A hairline fissure in Parda’s braid. The air curdled as the breach yawned wide, vomiting forth an eye. No—the concept of an eye. Kaleidoscopic, unblinking, its pupil fractaling into a thousand smaller eyes. A wide, unblinking orb that shifted its gaze a thousand times in a second, as if it were seeing the world afresh, snapping every detail into memory.

  Hunger radiated off it—not malice, but a… ravenous curiosity, like a child in a brand-new playground. Its gaze pinned me. Quartz dust in one hand, mana hemorrhaging from the other. I didn’t hear its voice. I tasted it—copper and static, a language of teeth and horrors. I understood it, almost intuitively.

  I didn’t waste a moment. I pricked my hand once more, a bit too deep this time, letting blood pool before holding it aloft for the entity to inspect. As the droplet fell, it didn’t hit the ground but seemed drawn to the massive, staring eye embedded in the breach. The eye split open, revealing a maw lined with rune-carved teeth and a tongue that lashed out like a playful, if grotesque, mimic of life—baby-like faces wailing along its surface. Yet, the moment my blood met that bizarre tongue, everything froze.

  The pupil glazed over for a heartbeat, then shivered in place. It twisted, writhed, and twirled in the opening—a grotesque dance of pleasure as the tongue lashed out one last time. The tongue retracted, maw sealing with a wet schlup. The eye floated free, detached from its… whatever. Its hum conveying a simple response: Acceptance.

  Much like the first time Barn accepted my contract, the entity merged with Belle’s fading outline. The air stilled, and then—cackling softly—the eye dissolved with another pop, draping Belle’s outline in its wake. Slowly, like a thread spun by a meticulous spider, it formed a cocoon. Before long, a pulsing, red chrysalis enveloped Belle’s form, steadily drawing in more ambient mana as the breach in Parda sealed itself shut.

  And finally, I exhaled the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  What fresh abyss was that eyeball-laden horror? Lotte’s notes had waxed poetic about “shimmering chrysalises” and “symbiotic metamorphosis,” but somehow skipped the chapter titled Negotiating With Tongue-Lashed Eldritch Toddlers. Apparently, Lotte was as tight-lipped as last time, leaving me dangling on the edge of summoning a Gold-rank NetherBeast capable of, well, obliterating a country.

  I could only sigh as I stared at the chrysalis.

  Five minutes—Lotte’s estimate, if you can call it that—though the thing already throbbed with unstable harmonics, its surface twisting through non-Euclidean angles like it was trying to rewrite geometry. I scanned the area. And… where in the blazes was Alice?!

  After a short while, the doll finally emerged from behind a tree, teetering and trembling like a leaf in a stiff wind.

  “What happened?” I asked, noting her state—fear, existential dread, or maybe a cocktail of both.

  “M-mistress,” she stammered, voice tinny with static, “what was that… entity?”

  I shrugged, dusting ritual residue from my sleeves. “Ask the overgrown lizard who stitched you together. Last I checked, dragons consider ‘full disclosure’ a party foul.” I shrugged. “Anyways, whatever it was, it’s gone now!” I paused and eyed Belle’s chrysalis. “Probably… but don’t tell me you bolted and hid from it!” I chuckled, then softened as I looked at her still trembling form.

  It wasn’t exactly a horror show—just a little gross, with that tongue sprouting baby faces, didn’t help the vibe.

  My air sense still flared, so I decided to take a twenty-meter detour, and it looked like nobody was lurking around. Thank Thalador for that small mercy. Back at the pulsating chrysalis, I admitted that even its sight gave me a headache. Even Alice was avoiding direct eye contact.

  But it held. For now.

  The surrounding air reeked of iron-rich blood and ozone. Darkness clung to everything, save for Belle’s chrysalis, which glowed faintly like a cobalt ember amid the gloom.

  While I waited for it to hatch, I collapsed the ritual circle with a spritz of cleansing agent—clearing away my blood traces and leaving no forensic breadcrumbs.

  By the time I was done, I could sense Belle slowly stirring inside the chrysalis. It was odd; we shared a connection, but now it felt almost tangible. A wave of happiness washed over me through that bond, and my heart swelled along with it. It was weird how her joy affected me so directly—but it felt good.

  “Do you… feel her, mistress?” Alice asked me.

  “Like a second heartbeat. Weirdly… nice.”

  Maybe the ritual was a success.

  All it took was ripping a hole in reality and summoning a terrifying entity to donate its eyeball in exchange for my blood!

  …Eh, should be fine.

  ***

  Vorak’s lungs seized as he bolted upright, gut twisted like a hangman’s knot. Diviners of his caliber had fate’s greasy fingers up their asses 24/7—wards honed over decades to jerk them awake when the universe decided to take a dump on their doorstep. And holy hell, had it ever.

  A thing.

  A cyclopean fuckhole of weeping infant faces, tongues lolling like flayed eels. Blood geysered from his sockets, hot and thick as tavern stew.

  He didn’t scream. Iron Pact blowhards were too fancy for that gutter noise.

  (Didn’t stop his guts from painting his robes brown, though. Even diviner dickbags can’t outrun a colon’s tantrum.)

  By sunup, every Iron Pact shitlicker would be sweating bullets: something had peeled back reality’s skirt.

  And it was goddamn hungry.

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