Chapter 134: The Sealed Heart

Reinhard had barely took a step forward kwhen another wave of Bloodkin came rushing toward him, and he looked deeper into the Garden and sighed, because apparently five minutes of peace was too generous a request.

His body was tired, his clothes were soaked in blood and dust that wasn’t his, and his Mana reserves were nowhere near full, but the sight of dozens of Third and Second Orders charging his way wasn’t enough to make him stop.

He rolled his shoulders and raised one hand. "Emily is definitely going to complain about this."

An invisible slash tore through the first group before they could reach him, dropping several while the rest kept coming, their Blood Mana spreading across the ground and knitting their bodies together into one crimson tide.

A blood-coated blade swung for his head, and Reinhard stepped aside as the Right Hand of God caught it out of the air and smashed the attacker into the ground.

"Thank you," he said, glancing at the crimson hand. "See, this is why I keep you around."

The hand faded as another group closed in, and Heavenpiercer appeared in his grip a heartbeat before he threw it without hesitation.

The golden spear tore clean through the formation and erupted into fire and lightning, scattering bodies in every direction, and Reinhard followed it in with Spatial Pull, dragging the nearest Bloodkin toward him just so he could punch it straight into the dirt.

He kept walking through what was left of them. All-Cutting Slash carved through the next cluster while Spatial Push swept the stragglers off their feet, an Ice Pillar erupted under a stronger one and launched it skyward, and Space Tear cut clean through the Blood Mana linking the rest together before they could even finish forming up.

He moved through all of it almost lazily, like a man strolling through traffic that had made the mistake of trying to stop him. Bathory and the First Order had set the bar high enough that nothing left down here could reach it.

One Third Order broke off and ran.

"Oh, don’t leave," Reinhard called after it. "I just got here."

Spatial Pull snapped it back toward him, and he put it through the remains of a stone building before continuing on, glancing at the new hole in the wall. "That was probably expensive." A pause. "Good thing it isn’t my house."

That was when he noticed something was off. The Bloodkin weren’t fighting like something was worth defending. Some came at him directly, but just as many tried to shove past him entirely, their eyes locked on the same direction every single time.

And the ones he killed only seemed to make the survivors more desperate. He slowed down and let the pattern settle in his head.

They’re not protecting something. He looked past them, toward the deeper section of the Garden. They’re trying to reach it.

Their Blood Mana pulled toward whatever waited ahead like it had its own current, and every kill only sharpened the panic in the ones still standing.

Reinhard frowned. "They’re afraid."

That made him more curious than anything else, because if Bloodkin were willing to throw themselves at someone they couldn’t beat just to get past him, whatever was waiting deeper in the Garden scared them worse than he did.

He threw Heavenpiercer again and grinned. "Now I’m interested."

The spear cleared the last formation, and he walked through the wreckage until he reached the deepest part of the Garden, where there was no door, no guardian, not even a visible entrance.

The passage simply stopped at a distortion that made the space around it look wrong, air folding in on itself, Mana vanishing into the dark, blood from the dead Bloodkin crawling across the ground toward it like it wanted in.

Reinhard stopped and activated Mana Sensing. Nothing came back. He tried Emperor’s Insight next, and the information collapsed the moment he reached for it. "Did you just refuse to be scanned?"

The Singularity didn’t answer.

He stepped closer and tried to bypass its structure with Space Tear, and the seams of space were there, technically, but they didn’t connect to anything the way space was supposed to. The whole area had been cut loose from reality itself.

This isn’t a wall. His expression hardened. It’s a prison.

He’d broken barriers before, disrupted seals, cut through space that didn’t want to be cut, but this was different. This wasn’t something standing in front of reality. It had been carved out of it.

He considered that for a moment, then smiled anyway. "That’s unnecessarily dramatic."

He used Spatial Step, and his body vanished and reappeared in exactly the same spot. "That’s rude."

He tried an Enhanced Space Tear thirty meters out instead, and the Singularity swallowed the opening before it lasted a full second. "You’re really committed to being annoying."

He cut straight at it with Space Tear, and the slash vanished the moment it crossed the boundary, no resistance, no mark, like it had simply stopped existing.

He tried All-Cutting Slash next and watched that disappear too.

His expression sobered slightly, and he summoned the Right Hand of God, the enormous crimson fist driving its claws straight into the distortion.

For one brief moment he watched the claws sink in.

Then the Singularity swallowed those as well, and Reinhard recalled the hand and stared at the dark space in front of him. "Okay. That’s actually annoying."

It wasn’t stronger than what he threw at it. That would have at least made sense. It simply didn’t interact with any of it the normal way.

Whatever crossed the line stopped being real.

He took another step forward, and that was when he felt his Mana drop, only slightly, but enough to notice. His breathing grew heavier, his body turned sluggish, and he looked down to find a thin thread of blood pulling out of a small wound on his arm and drifting toward the Singularity.

He used Mia and closed the wound.

The bleeding stopped but drain didn’t.

Mana, vitality, blood, even the energy behind his own abilities, all of it was being pulled toward the sealed space a little at a time.

He stepped back, and the pull eased.

The longer I stay here, the weaker I become. Then another thought followed right behind it. Archon stayed inside one of these things before.

He remembered the fight from before, the spike in her Mana, the slash that had torn straight through reality, the Singularity cracking open from the inside while she walked out of it like it had been a mild inconvenience.

He remembered the look on the Collectors and Silent Night’s faces too.

She actually brute-forced it.

He stared at the distortion and let out a slow breath. "No wonder they looked terrified." His smile came back. "A Calamity really is something else."

For the first time he understood what her strength actually meant.

It wasn’t about hitting harder or holding more Mana than everyone else. It was being able to break something that had been built to sit outside the rules entirely.

He looked down at his own hand. "I suppose I’ll have to settle for being handsome and incredibly intelligent." A nod. "Tragic."

Before he could try anything else, the Singularity rippled, and his smile fell away as something took shape inside it. Not a future, and nothing like what the Mirror showed him.

A memory.

A tall man with silver hair walked down a quiet street in a black suit, a small child beside him in a black raincoat with the hood pulled low over her face. Neither of them spoke. They just walked, and then the image was gone.

"What was that?"

Another memory rose in its place. The same man stood across from the child in an open field, a weapon far too large for her small frame gripped in both hands, and he came at her again and again while she dodged, stumbled, recovered, and kept going until she finally landed a hit.

He stepped back and smiled.

The memory faded.

Reinhard scratched his cheek. "That looked like training." He considered it. "Although I’m not sure why he was letting a child hit him." A faint smile. "Unless he was impressed. Obviously, that’s what I’d do."

The next memory showed her older, standing in a field full of Bloodkin corpses while the man watched silently from behind her as she lowered her weapon.

Then the scene shifted again, the man sitting across from her and holding out a strange fruit Reinhard recognized instantly, a Mana Fusion Fruit, and the child shook her head.

He offered it again. She shook her head harder.

"You gave her a Mana Fusion Fruit and she said no?" He shook his own head. "That’s a waste."

The memory dissolved, replaced by the man standing in front of a blond-haired woman with golden eyes, the child watching both of them from nearby, and then that image vanished too. Reinhard’s smile faded with it, because something in the scene felt wrong.

Every memory carried an emotion that wasn’t his, buried inside the images themselves. Despair. Regret. And underneath both of those, something stronger, a desperate pull to reverse time itself.

He frowned. "That’s strange." He looked at the Singularity. "Is this how you’re supposed to work?"

He knew what the Mirror showed him, and he knew what an ordinary memory felt like. This wasn’t information being handed to him. This was carrying the full emotional weight of whoever had made it.

He raised his hand and cut at it again, and this time a voice answered instead.

"Can one go against their nature?"

Reinhard froze. The voice belonged to a man. Before he could react, a child’s voice answered it.

"Of course!"

"Why do you believe that?"

"If we were all fated to be something, then life would be pretty boring."

There was something oddly familiar about the way she said it.

The man laughed. "But it would be easier."

"Nope. Utterly boring. I mean, what if I was fated to be a retail clerk? Ugh, I would cry!"

Silence followed, and then the man asked, "A retail clerk. What is that? Is that a new job in this age?"

Reinhard’s eyebrows went up. "He’s really old."

"Why are you such a fossil?" the child sighed. "Sometimes I wish I could pity you."

"It’s the first time I’ve been pitied," the man said, amused. "Especially by a child."

"You sure have been having a lot of first times."

He laughed again. "Ahh, what would you do without me?"

"You’re right," she said. "I wonder."

The voices faded out, and Reinhard stood there turning it all over in his head. A silver-haired man. A strange child. A woman with golden eyes. Bloodkin. Training. A fruit worth more than most people’s lives. A conversation about fate. Despair, regret, and now a Singularity carrying every piece of it.

Was the Pale One that child? It was possible, but he didn’t have enough to be sure. Maybe the silver-haired man was the one the Bloodkin called Father.

Maybe the child had meant something to him.

Maybe she was the whole reason he’d changed.

His thoughts drifted toward Emily for a moment before he put that aside. There wasn’t enough evidence.

He trusted his wife.

He wasn’t about to suspect her just because a prison full of someone else’s grief had shown him a few fragments. Instead he focused on what he actually had.

Whoever that child was, she mattered to him. He looked toward the Singularity. Enough that someone wanted to reverse time.

"That’s one hell of a regret." He raised his hand again. "I suppose we’re not done."

He attacked it once more, and the drain hit him harder this time, his Mana dropping sharply enough to blur his vision for a moment before he steadied himself and stepped back. Space Tear did nothing. Brute force did nothing. All-Cutting Slash did nothing.

He lowered his hand. "I hate this place."

He looked at the distortion. "If I stay here much longer, Emily is going to come looking for me."

He could already picture her expression, staring at the Singularity, then at him, then asking why he’d spent so long trying to break something that was literally drinking his blood.

He smiled. "She’d tell me I should have left earlier." A pause. "She’d be right."

He thought of Lily, who was probably already trying to sprint toward him before Maki caught her by the collar, of Maki mapping every possible route into the Garden while insisting she wasn’t worried, of Yuna trying to hold the whole group together.

The Nephilim would be just as bad.

Rhea would want to charge in after him, Seraphine would calmly explain why that was a terrible idea, Rika would already be moving regardless, and Mara would have to wrangle all of them before the rescue turned into its own disaster.

Even Archon would probably sense that something was wrong.

"They’re probably waiting." He didn’t like making people wait. Especially people who’d started to matter to him.

Then the Singularity went transparent, and his smile disappeared.

Something was visible on the other side.

Deep within the sealed space sat a structure built on a scale that didn’t feel real, shaped almost like a heart, streams of Blood Mana pouring out of it into every corner of the Garden.

Reinhard stared as it moved.

Boom.

The ground shook under his feet.

His expression hardened, because the Heart wasn’t just sitting there. It’s connected to everything. The Bloodkin, the Blood Mana, the Garden, the Singularity, even the memories he’d just watched. All of it ran through this one thing.

The Singularity isn’t protecting the Heart. He looked at the enormous shape pulsing on the other side of the barrier. The Heart is what’s keeping the Singularity alive.

"So that’s what you’re hiding."

It beat again, the sound rolling through the ground like a second heartbeat laid over his own, and Reinhard tightened his grip around Heavenpiercer as his familiar smile crept back onto his face.

"All right." He raised the spear. "I’ve wasted enough time." His eyes gleamed as he looked straight through the impossible wall. "Let’s see how much punishment you can take."