The Mountain of Illusions

The Mountain of Illusions had no wind.

There were no gentle mirages, no fleeting illusions dancing in the distance, no false paths, no echoing laughter, no trickling illusions to mislead a weak mind.

There was only death and the screeching of infected.

Vastarael was running with desperate speed, his breath coming out in heavy, sharp rasps. Every step he took dug splashes of crimson into the pale, snowy broken earth beneath him. His left leg—more bone than foot now—dragged like a half-anchored chain, leaving a trail of meat and blood behind.

He should have collapsed. He should have let the mountain take him. But behind him, the clicking hadn't stopped.

The swarm was close. Too close.

They were infected Krepsunas but not the kind the world knew. These weren't just mindless killers infected with corrupted rot.

They were mutations.

He was running away from humanoid beetles, each towering at over three and a half tall with angular exoskeletons that looked like they had been welded with obsidian and bone. Their faces were grotesque mockeries of humanity with mandibles twitching where mouths should be, black goo leaking from empty sockets, and thoraxes that pulsed with glowing crimson ulcers. Their legs moved sideways, then forward unnaturally fast. Their claws dragged along the rocky mountain walls, shredding anything in their path.

And they were fast.

Every tendon screamed in his body.

His fleshy arm was gone, torn off at the shoulder just twenty minutes ago when one of the beetles had managed to grab him mid-strike. Being invisible wouldn't help since it would never activate in combat.

He turned a sharp bend and dived into a shadowy crevice in the mountainside. The entrance was low, barely enough for a full-grown man to squeeze through, but he didn't hesitate. He grunted, forcing himself into the narrow opening, shoulder scraping along stone. His blood smeared the rock. He fell through and rolled into the darkness.

The cave was tight.

His vision flickered and for a brief moment, everything turned black.

But he wasn't unconscious. Not yet.

He dragged himself to his knees, panting. The moment his body cleared the entryway, he slammed his palm down into the earth.

There was a low hum and then a wall of sapphire materialized, coating the entire entrance of the cave like liquid glass freezing in place. It crystallized with a roar, forming a flawless, translucent wall of blue.

The first beetle hit the wall. Hard.

Its mandibles opened, clamped down with such force that it made the sapphire quake but it didn't break. The wall held.

Then the second. The third. Dozens.

They crashed against it, one after another, their limbs scraping, punching and thrashing but the sapphire held. For now.

Inside, Vastarael collapsed again, this time not moving for a full minute. His body was broken. He was coated in a mix of dirt, black goo, blood, and blistered skin. His entire chest was ripped open, exposing torn muscle that throbbed with every breath. His lungs were shallow. His ribs were bruised. His stomach had claw marks that hadn't even clotted yet.

But worst of all, his right foot. Or rather, what remained of it. From the ankle downward, it was nothing but chewed bone. The flesh had been flayed off mid-escape. The tendons snapped and splayed outward like the cords of a broken marionette. Blood pooled beneath him.

And then, his Body Reconstruction activated not because he willed it but because it was the only thing left keeping him alive.

The crackling began at the shoulder. Flesh regrew. Veins wove themselves back into existence like threads of living silk. Muscle and sinew twisted in place with agonizing slowness.

He gritted his teeth and screamed, the sound muffled into the back of his throat, biting into his arm to not alert the horde outside.

The pain was unimaginable.

It wasn't like healing through divine or arcane means. It was manual reconstruction, pulling every inch of him back into coherence, cell by cell. His nerves ignited like wildfire. Bone cracked and realigned, then were forced into regeneration. His arm stretched out mid-air like clay being sculpted by invisible fingers.

It took only moments but each of those seconds felt like centuries.

Sweat drenched him. He shivered from shock. He grunted again, slamming the back of his head against the cold cave wall, trying to drown the pain in pressure.

Then came the foot.

It began with the marrow knitting itself into place. A thousand microscopic tendrils reconnected. Muscle wrapped around his bone like roots. Skin layered over the rawness. Toenails grew in last.

His body was shaking now.

And when it was over, when the final capillaries sealed and the flesh stopped twitching, he let himself collapse against the wall, breathing hard.

A full minute passed before he spoke. His voice was hoarse, low, but alive.

"…This mountain…" he said between gasps. "This isn't a mountain of illusions…"

He coughed, spitting blood to the side.

"It's a graveyard of truths... pretending to be something it isn't."

He turned his head slightly, eyes still locked on the thrashing beetle-forms pounding at the sapphire wall, unaware that their prey had just cheated death again.

And as Vastarael sat there, he whispered to himself.

"I can't die here…"

His fingers curled into fists.

"I won't."

There was blood in his eyes.

Even after Body Reconstruction had done its numbing miracle, Vastarael's vision hadn't fully cleared. The world still pulsed in red and blue. His chest ached with every breath, the rhythm of it barely held together by tethered threads of stubbornness. The sapphire wall behind him groaned under another clawing strike.

But he didn't flinch. Not anymore.

He lay on his back, one knee raised, eyes half-lidded as he stared at the uneven ceiling of the cavern. The blood beneath his ribs had finally crusted into a stiff layer over the ruined fabric of his torn tunic. His regenerated hand twitched once, then settled into his lap.

"Damn bugs. You'd think Divine-level Scavengers would have better hobbies."

He exhaled slowly, then leaned his head to the side. A part of him wanted to chuckle. A small, stupid part of it, actually because for all the misery he was in, he remembered exactly how this entire descent into hell had started. They had stood at the foot of the Mountain of Illusions like conquerors surveying an unclaimed throne.

Zarvana stood with confidence bolstered not just by her power, but by the eight husbands she'd left in charge of supporting Vastarael's small army. The men had followed her word with reverence and a bit of fear.

Zeyn, Raika, Seyna, and her gruff yet ever-devoted husband Kezren were quiet in the way only experienced warriors could be.

They split into two teams as planned, him leading the forward scouting group with Elyonari and the others.

It lasted less than a day. It was the mist that did it.

One moment Elyonari was walking beside him, her staff tapping the ground in slow rhythm. The next, she was just gone, swallowed by a curtain of silver mist that moved like the breath of a predator.

He'd turned, called her name once and that was when they appeared.

Not two. Not ten but hundreds of Scavenger-Ranked Krepsunas. Divine-Level in Spheraphase rankings.

He hadn't even tried to fight not because he couldn't but because the second he swung, their bodies didn't even flinch. Their exoskeletons were like divine steel and their movements blurred faster than his eye could fully track. Every attack had been a decoy for another one, every miss an opportunity to shred off a limb.

He was prey and they were already halfway through their hunt.

So he ran through dead valleys, over blade-ridges and into the stone catacombs that threaded beneath the mountain. He had lost track of how many hours it had been. Blood loss had blurred time into heat and ache. And somehow, he was still alive.

He sat up now, groaning. His foot, newly flesh tingled. The tight space around him wasn't comforting.

"This is less a cave," he muttered aloud, eyes scanning the low ceiling and narrow walls, "and more a roach's idea of a hallway. I'm a prince, not a burrower. Insulting, really."

He rolled his shoulder, wincing at the tightness in the muscles. He tapped his chest, feeling the soreness deep under the bone.

"I need food."

His first thought was instinctual: The Bowl of Wisdom. One summon and he could conjure something warm, nutritional, tether-infused and restorative. The Bowl cooked in seconds, adapted to his state, and always replenished his focus and stamina.

He reached for his inventory and then stopped.

"…Right."

A faint smile touched his lips.

"I gave it to Shimmer."

He didn't regret it. Not for a second.

Shimmer's Bane was peculiar. She could only eat food made by him. No other food could nourish her. It was like the universe had declared a rule between father and daughter. He cooks, she thrives.

He could still remember the little smile she'd given him when he handed her the Bowl. The way her small fingers held it like it was a sacred artifact. She deserved it. He'd never take it back.

But now? That meant he had to cook the old-fashioned way. Which wasn't bad..

He opened his inventory with a flick of his tethered consciousness. A menu of compressed space revealed item after item, and from it, he withdrew a large slab of meat, still raw and glistening with faint veins of fat.

He slapped it onto the floor and drew a Heat Rune with two fingers, and cast it beneath the meat. The rune glowed orange-red. The meat seared instantly, aroma filling the narrow space. His stomach growled.

But he didn't eat. Not yet.

Instead, he called forth Fool's Copy, his artifact that mirrored whatever object was present in duplicates.

He placed the meat inside the golden box. A dozen copies appeared. Then two dozen.

He gave a sideways glance to the sapphire wall where the infected beetles still clawed, agitated now.

"Hmph. You bastards like heat, don't you?"

He looked at his palm, felt his own body's warmth, the latent tether glow that came with his Aeterium bloodline.

"Even though I've literally got no heart, I still run hot."

The humor wasn't lost on him. Nor the irony. He smiled again and began setting the steaks along the floor like bait.

But then, he paused.

His eyes traveled to the narrow, sloping tunnel at the other end of the burrow. It went far deeper. The ceiling dropped with every foot and the shadows thickened into a shivering kind of black. He leaned toward it.

"…So I can't go out." He tapped the sapphire wall behind him. "And I can only go forward."

He sat back down.

"Well. This is lovely."

His voice was calm. His nonchalance wasn't bravado. It was just who he was. He was Vastarael Richinaria. The man who once stood before a Divine and a Phantasm and didn't blink.

He sighed again.

"Guess I'm going deeper."