Chapter 486
Theo slowly opened the book.
Its pages rustled softly when touched by the wind from Ilux's aura explosion.
Then he stopped at a particular page.
His eyes read a sentence that had been written there long ago.
The writing was short.
Yet its meaning was far from simple.
Written on that page were the words:
"The true Disturbers is Ilux."
Theo shifted his gaze to the next line.
"Fourteen The Disturbers will come to debate it."
He slowly closed the book.
A faint smile appeared at the corner of his lips.
Not a satisfied smile.
More like someone who had just realized that the stage he had built was finally beginning to be filled by its players.
In the distance, Ilux's black mist grew even more violent.
And in a place far beyond this universe—fourteen beacon lights were still shining.
Announcing one thing to all realities.
That something long awaited had finally returned once more.
Theo looked at the sky, which was beginning to crack under the pressure of that transformation energy.
"At last."
The whisper was almost inaudible.
Yet those words carried a meaning far greater than a mere small victory.
Because for him—this was not the end of an event.
This was merely the closing of one part of the story.
And the beginning of something far greater.
The first arc, episode eleven, had reached its conclusion.
The first arc, episode twelve, had begun.
The sky above the academy was no longer whole.
It looked like a canvas torn apart from within—tear after tear of black mist spreading, crushing the blue into a pulsating dark gray like an open wound.
Theo stood at the edge of the vortex, his coat fluttering softly even though there was no natural wind.
His eyes moved back and forth.
Once toward Ilux's body, now floating two meters above the ground, surrounded by swirling energy that continued digging deeper into the earth; once again toward the sky, toward a direction that could not be seen by ordinary eyes, yet could be felt by his consciousness as a subtle vibration of something beginning to move in the distance.
He let out a breath.
Then, slowly, he opened his coat and took out that pale yellow-covered book once again.
The same book he had closed with a faint smile a few minutes earlier.
Now, he opened it once more.
His fingers traced the pages already filled with his own writing until they stopped at a blank sheet.
"There's still time," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.
The black wind from Ilux's transformation slammed against his back, causing his hair to be swept forward, yet his body did not shift even slightly.
He pulled out a pen from the inner pocket of his coat—a simple pen filled with pitch-black ink that never ran dry—and began to write.
The first words fell onto the paper like traces long awaited.
"When the Nothingness begins to awaken in an imperfect form, the ceilings of reality do not scream. They merely let out a long sigh, like someone who has waited a very long time for bad news."
Theo wrote without haste, his eyes occasionally glancing toward the center of the explosion, observing every change in the increasingly dense black mist.
He wrote details about how the energy did not spread like waves, but instead absorbed the surrounding space—making distances feel longer than they should have been, making the air feel heavier than what should have been possible.
The pen softly scratched across the yellow paper, leaving strokes that looked far too neat for notes written amidst chaos.
When one paragraph was completed—long, sprawling, filling nearly half the page—he stopped.
His head lowered, his eyes sweeping over every word he had just written.
Then, with a slow and deliberate movement, he began circling several words.
"Imperfect."
One circle.
"Absorbed."
Two circles.
"Bad news."
Three.
He lifted the pen, tilting his head slightly like a painter evaluating the composition of his own masterpiece.
"This will become the opening," he said softly.
"Episode twelve will begin from imperfection."
Circle after circle began appearing within that new paragraph.
"Fourteen beacons."
One circle.
"Debate."
Two.
"Right."
Three.
The pen paused briefly above the final word he had just circled—"right"—as though he were weighing whether that word was heavy enough to become the backbone of the next conflict.
He found no reason to erase it.
Around him, Ilux's black mist began to change rhythm.
No longer expanding recklessly, but beginning to pulse.
Like a heartbeat.
Like something trying to find its own rhythm.
Theo let out another breath, this time longer.
He did not fully close the book, merely leaving the cover half-open with the pen tucked between the final pages he had written.
"One episode ends. Another begins."
That cycle repeated like the heartbeat of a dying world.
Every time the black mist pulsed, every time the sky cracked deeper, Theo would lower his head—writing, circling, evaluating—before raising his face once more to observe the sky and Ilux's body with measured pauses.
Eight times he repeated that rhythm.
Eight paragraphs flowed from the tip of his pen, each becoming a small map of something currently unfolding.
Notes about how the black mist had begun devouring light.
Not merely covering it; about how the ground beneath Ilux was no longer ground, but instead some form of solid emptiness that refused to be called matter; about the fourteen points in the sky that were no longer dim, but slowly growing larger like fourteen eyes opening their petals one by one.
"They're getting closer," Theo muttered in the middle of his fifth writing, without taking his eyes off the paper.
"But Ilux hasn't even reached halfway yet."
The black wind continuously striking his coat now felt colder—not the cold of temperature, but a cold born from the absence of something, as though warmth itself was being sucked out of the world.
He circled the word "devouring" in the sixth paragraph, then "emptiness" in the seventh, then "eyes" in the eighth.
Eight small circles were scattered across those yellow pages, each resembling a question mark deliberately left hanging.
When he finished circling the eighth paragraph, Theo drew in a long breath.
The hand holding the pen stopped in midair, not immediately descending toward the next blank page.
Around him, Ilux's black mist pulsed once more, but this time the pulse was different—slower, deeper, like something holding its breath before a massive leap.
The sky above them was no longer dark gray; it had begun to break apart.
Not shattering like falling glass, but breaking like the surface of water struck from within, creating concentric ripples spreading endlessly in every direction without ever truly becoming calm again.
Theo slowly lowered his hand.
He did not write immediately.
Instead, his fingers touched the edge of the blank page, feeling the texture of the paper moving—moving?—as though something behind the sheet was pulsing in rhythm with the black mist.
"Interesting," he whispered, his eyes narrowing.
"Even this book is beginning to respond to it."
He placed the pen atop the book, letting it rest along the center crease of the open pages, before closing his eyes.
When his eyes opened once again—with a very slow movement, like someone waking from a sleep he had never needed—his gaze shifted.
Not toward the sky.
Not toward the book.
But toward the vortex of black mist, toward Ilux's figure now floating amidst the ever-growing chaos.
To be continued….