The image formed without warning.

One moment, there was only the corridor, dark stone, cold air, the echo of my own steps—and the next, the world opened up into light.

A shoreline stretched out before me, pale sand glimmering beneath a sky washed in gold and soft blue. The sound of waves rolled in gently, rhythmic and calm, a cruel parody of peace in a place that existed solely to break those who entered it.

And there she was.

Belle.

She was walking along the edge of the water, bare feet sinking into wet sand, her steps unhurried, her posture relaxed in a way I had almost forgotten was possible.

The sea breeze played with her hair, lifting strands of black into the air, sunlight catching on them like threads of ink brushed with gold. She was smiling—not faintly, not politely, but openly, genuinely, the kind of smile that reached her eyes and stayed there.

Her hand was tightly intertwined with another.

A man.

Not me.

Someone else entirely.

I stopped.

It wasn't conscious. It wasn't a decision. My body simply… refused to move. Muscles locked, breath stilled, every instinct screaming at once while my feet rooted themselves into the stone beneath me as if the cave had claimed them.

I stared.

The world narrowed until there was nothing but that single image: Belle walking forward, laughing softly at something the man beside her said, leaning just slightly into him in a way that spoke of comfort, of familiarity, of a shared history I had never been part of.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, his face indistinct yet unmistakably there, solid in a way that mattered. His grip on her hand was secure. Certain.

Real.

The light in my eyes dimmed.

I felt it happen, slow and inevitable, like a candle being snuffed out not by a sudden gust but by the gradual suffocation of oxygen.

The warmth drained from my chest, my thoughts turning sluggish and heavy, sinking into something cold and hollow.

It was as though the world had lost saturation, colors bleeding out until everything became dull, gray, lifeless.

I must have looked like a corpse.

No, worse.

A corpse had at least finished dying.

I just stood there, unmoving, unblinking, watching as Belle—my Belle, the axis around which so much of my resolve had unknowingly formed—continued forward with someone else, her future unfolding without me in it.

And yet… that wasn't why I stopped.

Not really.

It would have been easy to say it was love. To reduce it to some tragic, romantic obsession—the mad devotion of a boy who had attached his heart to an equally mad woman and couldn't let go. I could have dismissed it as jealousy, as longing, as the simple pain of seeing someone you care about choose a different path.

But that would have been a lie.

The truth was far uglier.

This image didn't hurt because Belle was with another man.

It hurt because it awakened something I had never truly defeated.

Trauma.

An enemy older than magic, more persistent than death, and far more difficult to kill.

Trauma was not a wound you could cauterize. It wasn't something you overcame with strength or time or good intentions.

Trauma was a memory that learned how to think, a scar that rewired the way you saw the world.

It didn't just remind you of pain—it taught you to expect it.

To anticipate loss before it happened.

To interpret every bond as temporary, every kindness as conditional, every connection as something that would eventually leave you behind.

Trauma didn't shout.

It whispered.

And it whispered to me now.

I remembered my parents.

Not their faces—I had long since stopped caring about those—but the aftermath. The silence of a house that felt too large. The way people avoided my eyes. The way the word suicide hung unspoken in every room I entered. I remembered being told it wasn't my fault, over and over again, until the repetition itself began to sound like doubt.

Deep down, buried beneath layers of logic and distance, a part of me had always believed the same thing:

They abandoned me because of me.

They chose death over staying.

Even now, even after everything, I felt no real emotion toward them—no grief, no anger, no longing.

They were ghosts of a life I no longer inhabited. And yet the fear they left behind had never gone away.

The fear of being unwanted.

Of being left.

Of investing everything into someone only to wake up one day and find they had chosen a future where I didn't exist.

That fear had shaped me more than I ever admitted.

It was why I kept people at arm's length. Why I trusted cautiously, measured affection carefully, and rationed vulnerability like a finite resource.

It was why I told myself I didn't need anyone, even as I quietly built my entire purpose around saving someone else.

Seeing Belle like this—happy, complete, moving on—wasn't a betrayal.

It was confirmation.

Confirmation of the lie trauma had always fed me: You are temporary. You are replaceable. You are something people outgrow.

That was why I stopped.

That was why my body failed me.

And yet… something didn't add up.

Even as the numbness spread, even as my thoughts slowed to a crawl, a distant part of my mind observed the situation with cold detachment. Like watching myself from the outside. Like standing behind glass.

This was an illusion.

I knew that.

I had faced worse. I had endured pain so profound it nearly shattered my sense of self. I had walked through memories of my sister suffering without breaking stride. I had stared down guilt, shame, and self-loathing and kept moving forward.

So why would this stop me?

Why would my mind, one of my greatest strengths, honed by logic, discipline, and sheer stubborn refusal to collapse, crack at something so… conceptually weak?

No matter how vivid the image was, it wasn't real.

Belle wasn't here.

She wasn't walking on a beach with another man.

Even if she did one day, that future wasn't now.

An illusion should not have this much power over me.

The realization flickered faintly, like a dying ember.

Confused but wary, I decided not to leave things to chance.

I began circulating mana.

Not aggressively. Not explosively. Just enough to test the waters. A careful blend of life and death mana flowed outward from my heart, warm and cold intertwined, spreading through my veins and into my limbs. It wrapped around muscle and bone, reinforcing my body, grounding me in sensation.

The numbness resisted.

That alone was alarming.

I pushed the mana further, guiding it upward, along my spine, into my shoulders, my neck—toward my head. The closer it came to my mind, the heavier the resistance became, like forcing liquid through hardened clay. Pressure built behind my eyes, a dull ache blooming into something sharper.

That's strange, I thought distantly.

Mana obeyed will.

It always had.

Unless something else was interfering.

I pushed harder.

The flow intensified, life and death colliding and harmonizing as they surged into my brain—and suddenly, I felt it.

A foreign presence.

Not a thought.

Not a voice.

A structure.

Something coiled around my consciousness like invisible wire, tightening not through force but through suggestion, nudging emotions, amplifying specific fears while dampening logic and resistance. It wasn't crude mind control. It didn't command.

It guided.

A mind hex.

The realization struck like lightning.

I wasn't stopping because I was weak.

I was stopping because something was making me.

Anger flared, not hot, not explosive, but cold and razor-sharp. I focused everything I had on that coil, flooding my mind with opposing forces. Life mana surged with vitality and presence. Death mana followed, absolute and unyielding, rejecting anything that did not belong.

The resistance spiked.

Then...

Crack.

It wasn't a sound.

It was a sensation.

Like a chain snapping inside my skull.

The pressure vanished all at once, leaving behind a brief, dizzying emptiness before clarity rushed back in. The numbness shattered, emotions returning in a controlled flood rather than a tidal wave. I gasped, breath finally tearing its way back into my lungs as I staggered forward half a step.

The illusion wavered.

Belle's image flickered, her smile freezing unnaturally before distorting, the man beside her stretching and blurring like wet paint dragged across glass.

Understanding dawned.

This hadn't been a test of love.

It had been a test of self-awareness.

The cave hadn't tried to overwhelm me with pain this time. It had tried to make me surrender control of my own mind, to accept emotional paralysis as truth, to let unresolved trauma dictate my actions without question.

And for a moment…

It almost worked.

I straightened slowly, breathing evenly, my gaze steady once more. The illusion dissolved completely now, the beach collapsing into shadow, the sound of waves cutting off as if a switch had been flipped. The corridor returned, dark and silent, but it felt different.

Lighter.

Inside my chest, something shifted.

I felt it settle into place, not with the dramatic force of revelation but with the quiet certainty of alignment. Pieces of myself that had been slightly misaligned, tilted by fear, by old wounds I thought I had buried, clicked closer together.

Another crack echoed through my mind.

Not breaking.

Opening.

Enlightenment did not arrive as a blinding light or sudden omniscience. It arrived as understanding, cold, clear, and irrevocable.

I saw, for the first time, how deeply my fear of abandonment had shaped my decisions, my attachments, my sense of purpose.

I saw how easily that fear could be exploited, how dangerous it was to leave it unexamined.

And I understood this, too:

Loving someone did not mean anchoring your entire existence to them.

Saving someone did not require erasing yourself.

If I wanted the strength to heal Belle, truly heal her, I needed to stand as my own person first, unchained by the belief that everyone I cared for would eventually leave.

The cave fell silent.

No new images formed.

No voices called my name.

Somewhere deep within me, I felt it, the second step completed, the second barrier crossed. The path to my goal had opened a little wider.

The final part of the trial loomed ahead.

And now I knew.

It wouldn't be gentle.

But neither was I.

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