Beneath the colossal statue in District Two.

Chu Qing knelt in devout silence under the stone giant, flanked by Order Keepers hooded in white like winter gulls.

They bore what they called holy water. She took the golden basin, and poured the liquid from the crown of her head like rain.

The instant it touched the statue, their chant rose like wind through pines. From earth below and sky above, countless sigils surfaced, black-lit patterns that snuffed the candles on either side.

Ring after ring of marks crawled like bone-gnawing grubs. They turned into a biting swarm, chewed her skin, burrowed into blood and bone, and branded her deep inside.

From that day on, she heard unknown whispers. They tempted like sweet wine, yet truly gave her power to grasp any end. She stepped from a tiny First Symphony into Cantata Two.

The Order Keepers told her that, used well, this power could even defeat Chapter Three.

By chance she lifted her eyes. In the statue’s chest a pulsing organ swelled and fell, a heart, the wellspring that bridged heaven and earth, sleeping right beneath the Order Keeper headquarters.

Chu Qing snapped back. That Chapter Three still towered before her like a cliff.

Cold sweat slid down her brow. Fear hit first, pride second. She’d thought divine favor let her clash with an unsealed Chapter Three. One exchange, and she was taken. She had been naive.

The gulf between Cantata Two and Chapter Three was a sky-wide chasm. With favor, she might beat a weak, unsealed Chapter Three. It didn’t mean she could beat the one behind her. That one wasn’t ordinary.

She had to run. Panic flared, then a plan. If she fell into Rouge Rabbit’s hands, all she’d fought for would turn to ash.

Would that Chapter Three let her go?

Of course not. She’d crossed every line. Rouge Rabbit had no corner left for her shadow.

But she had a backhand left. Not strong, but enough to drown Rouge Rabbit in chaos. Then she might still seize that heart.

Divine favor wasn’t only for sharpening oneself. Now was the best moment to use another path. Those words had haunted her ear since the blessing fell.

They were also the key to stir that great power. With her strength, the price would be ruin. A Cantata Two couldn’t carry it.

“Divine pity, Magic Armor sacrifice!”

“Great god, grant your oracle. Forge a hall from the river of stars. Lay a stair of eternal lamps. Offer the hunger of our vision, and the blood of the earth...”

The Chapter Three holding her felt the chill first, then the memory. Someone had said something like this when they Unsealed.

But the woman before her was Cantata Two. So it wasn’t her own Unseal call. She didn’t know what it did, only that it could not finish.

Chapter Three thrust out her hand. Her fingers clamped Chu Qing’s throat like an iron collar. Chu Qing didn’t stop. From the crushed well of her voice, she forced the last words through.

“In this moment, Unseal.”

The line wasn’t the usual call, yet the surge felt the same. A branch from the same spring, still running to the same source.

Old Unsealing fed back to the caller. This one gave no clear return. Chu Qing’s target wasn’t herself. It was—

Her Magic Armor bloomed like a night flower. In the next heartbeat, her body shattered with the bloom. Pitch-black runes tore free of her flesh. Twisted sigils hung over the empty sky of the undercity.

Space wavered around those warped runes like heat over dunes. The scene buckled. The earth flipped like a bowl. The Abyssal Aura buried beneath Rouge Rabbit’s undercity surged up like a flood.

The nearby Aura gathered. Thunder boomed. Sharp blasts shrieked. A dreadful rift ripped open and swallowed the underground district whole.

Her words had worked on every hidden thread of Abyssal Aura. In living bodies. In dead Monsters’ limbs. In evolved Magic Stones. In the air itself. Those traces had been processed or too faint to count. The line wrung every last strand. A whisper of miasma became a storm that blanketed the city and cracked the Abyss wide.

The price taken was her life and her Magic Stones.

To stop or slow the opening, you needed a deluge of Mana to counter the Aura’s mass, or a special seal.

She had sealed Abysses before. But now she stood alone. Without Unsealing, it was near impossible. And her body could no longer bear more Unseals.

Chapter Three flung out her hand. A river of Mana poured down like rain. She chose not to Unseal to seal the Abyss. She chose to slow its mouth.

The more she fought, the more life felt precious. Fear breathed first, reason after. Unsealing was beyond her now. She was no longer the Magic Maiden who once called herself justice.

She prized her life above another’s. A selfish hand over a candle, yet it kept the flame in the wind.

Crimson Magic Armor unfurled. Under sunlight, it gleamed faintly like melting wax. Petals of crimson Mana drifted from the sky, falling into every corner of the undercity like a gift of snow.

Chu Qing had told the red-armored girl something. Night Frost didn’t know what. It looked like a forbidden rite. She had offered herself and tore a vast Abyssal Rift. Yet under the red-armored girl’s pressure, the rift couldn’t spread.

“So strong...”

Night Frost’s eyes widened like a child’s at dawn. Rouge Rabbit really had a Chapter Three. She’d thought it a joke. The Magic Maiden who held up the sky and parted the earth wasn’t rumor.

Night Frost knew she couldn’t linger. She folded into a safer shadow and kept her gaze on the crimson-armored Magic Maiden aloft.

She had found the woman familiar already. After she saw her use Mana, the feeling clicked. Wasn’t she one of the six Magic Maidens in that movie who fought the Black Dragon?

The Magic Maiden who calls herself Crimson.

Crimson hovered in midair. Mana gathered in her palms and streamed back out. She pressed down the rising Abyssal Aura, and braced the falling miasma from above.

Lin ran under the Chapter Three and raised both hands. Chapter Three understood. She tossed Yin Chen Yue into Lin’s arms, then sprinted for the edge of the undercity.

The Doctor’s experiment shattered on the blast like glass. He felt the Abyssal Aura in his cells being drawn out, pulled toward a swelling Abyssal mass.

Someone had used an unknown method to gather the nearby Aura. They meant to wrench open an Abyssal Rift. That was the Doctor’s clean judgment.

Behind him, the gold-red Earth Dragon Heart thumped. Half a person tall, its skin of fine golden scales regained a faint sheen. Unlike other things tainted by the Aura, this heart drank the miasma from the air and woke with it.

A faint pressure bled from deep within, like an ancient Earth Dragon stirring. Low dragon-song rolled through the snug lab, a call from a cave.

Powerful heartbeats rang through the undercity. Everyone’s pulse fell into step with that drum.

The Aura that Chapter Three had held back streamed toward the Earth Dragon Heart. On its surface, a new Abyssal Rift opened like an eye.

This rift felt deeper and stiller than the one above. More a long, narrow corridor. A road into the unknown.

The Doctor peered down that road. His gaze couldn’t find the end. The Aura inside was so thick that even he, with Abyss-creature genes, would struggle to breathe.

“Two hearts are beating.”

The staff had evacuated. The rift itself was hushed. The Doctor could hear cleanly. Near his ear, the Earth Dragon Heart pounded. Far away, a fainter beat throbbed from the rift’s depths.

The two rhythms were alike, yet subtly apart.

There had to be something there.

He gritted his teeth, then plucked out his right Eye Orb. He tossed it into the rift. He’d modded it like his left, though it wasn’t as capable.

Wrapped in a thin membrane, the Eye Orb skimmed the black corridor. In four or five breaths, it braved the Aura and flew a hundred meters.

But the Aura was too dense here. It stared at whatever wasn’t its own. Soon, the Eye Orb would rot away in that fog.

Almost there. The Eye Orb caught a thread of light deep in the Abyss. Barring mishaps, that was the source of the second heartbeat.

He’d guessed it was a heart. The size still shocked him. Even from so far, it was already twice the Earth Dragon Heart. If he drew closer, how vast would it be?

The Doctor stared, spellbound like a moth to flame. Without thinking, he stretched his hand into the rift.

Soaked in Abyssal Aura, the Eye Orb corroded fast. As his body was about to slip fully into the Abyss, the orb ruptured. The right-eye feed dimmed to black.

He jolted awake. Tendrils burst from his back like snakes, climbed the braces, and held his slow fall. They hauled him out of the Abyss.

The Doctor collapsed to the floor. His heart hammered like a storm drum.

“Whose heart is that?”