There was no sky.
Only pages.
They floated, endless and screaming, twisting through a void where gravity didn't exist—only memory and agony. Kael floated among them, naked and bleeding, as if the marrow of his soul had been spilled to write them.
Each page bore words in a script no tongue could read, burned into the parchment with grief, hatred, and hunger. They whispered to one another—not in conversation, but in argument.
This was not the Grand Magic Zone.
This was inside Kael.
And the book?
It was him.
Not a grimoire given.
A grimoire born.
From abandonment.
From chains.
From freedom so absolute it became horror.
Kael's eyes opened, but he didn't blink—he couldn't. His eyelids had been torn away in some moment between existence and unbeing. Runes danced across his vision, embedding themselves in his retina, searing purpose into his nerves.
He drifted through the maelstrom of parchment, a single page following him like a lost child. It fluttered near his face, blank—waiting.
Waiting for his next death.
Then came the voice.
Not magic.
Not memory.
The page itself spoke.
"You are not a mage. You are a wound. And I am your scar."
Kael screamed. Not from fear.
But from recognition.
The page pulsed, and his skin peeled. Each inch of flesh stripped away revealed binding chains made of script, weaving through his muscle, holding his bones like scaffolding.
He wasn't made of blood anymore.
He was made of text.
He landed—suddenly—on something that wasn't earth. It was soft. Warm. Wet.
He looked down.
It was himself.
A pile of corpses, all Kael, each dead in a different way—burned, torn, drowned, eaten, broken by spells he hadn't yet learned.
They stared back, their mouths full of pages.
And one spoke.
"You didn't survive. You never did. You're just the version that kept walking."
Kael vomited black ink, and from it rose a cathedral of chains, wrapped around a throne made of jawbones—not human, not beast, but something in between.
And on that throne sat his grimoire.
Not floating.
Not passive.
Seated like a king.
It had grown limbs. A torso of parchment. Veins made of bleeding runes. Its face was a cracked mask, constantly shifting between Kael's and someone he never remembered being.
"Do you understand now?" it asked in a thousand overlapping voices.
"You were not given a grimoire. You became one."
Kael's jaw broke open as he tried to speak, dislocating as his teeth turned into tiny screaming faces. Blood spilled—but not his.
The grimoire was bleeding.
Every page written was an organ sacrificed. Every spell cast a piece of Kael's identity carved out and bound in script.
This wasn't magic.
This was necromancy of the soul.
The throne pulsed, and with it, Kael's ribs burst outward, revealing the living text wrapped around his heart. The grimoire stood and stepped down from the throne, dragging a chain behind it—the chain was Kael's past, each link a memory he no longer owned.
It raised a hand.
And the pages attacked.
They came like blades—sharp, insatiable. They cut into Kael, not wounding flesh, but rewriting. Each slash revised him—replacing truth with possibility.
He became a thousand versions of himself in an instant.
One raised by the witches.
One who killed Yami in the forest.
One who never survived the Zone.
One who became a devil.
And none of them were real.
Only the one who kept suffering remained.
"You are the draft," the grimoire hissed. "And I am the author."
Kael fell to his knees, body a mess of ink and chain, bone and glowing script.
Then he spoke, and his voice shattered the cathedral.
"No. You are mine."
His hand ignited—not with flame, but with command. The spell etched in agony across his spine pulsed:
"Unwritten Law: Author Reversal."
Chains flew from his ribs and spine, spearing into the living grimoire, dragging it back toward him.
He walked forward—limping, shaking, ribs exposed, teeth gone—but determined.
"You are not my master," Kael growled. "You are my trauma made flesh. You are my chains... and I will use you."
The grimoire screamed.
It howled in languages older than devils, clawing at the script around it, trying to erase itself, terrified of submission.
But Kael placed his hand on its chest—if it even had one—and forced the next page to turn.
"Write this," he whispered: "I am not yours. You are mine."
The grimoire collapsed.
It shriveled.
The throne cracked.
And from the dust of both rose something new.
A no-leaf grimoire, etched in black metal, covered in moving chains. Every page bore runes that shifted constantly, as if afraid of being read.
It didn't float.
It walked.
Behind Kael.
Bound.
Obedient.
Hungry.
Kael collapsed. The void shattered.
And he awoke—
---
Outside the Grand Magic Zone.
At the edge of a scorched field, where trees had bowed and died, their trunks turned inward, as if worshiping him.
Kael stood.
No cloak.
No boots.
No fear.
His left arm was no longer flesh, but a woven chain of rune-light, constantly shifting form.
His eyes were darker.
Deader.
More alive.
He looked at his reflection in a pool of blood that didn't belong to him.
And smiled.
For the first time in his life—
He wasn't bound.
Behind him, the no-leaf grimoire hovered, silent. Pages fluttered, writing something on their own.
Kael turned.
Far in the distance, over the hills—
Hage Village waited.
---
Elsewhere.
Yami Sukehiro stood on the edge of a battlefield littered with bandits, his katana soaked in devil's blood.
His head turned slightly.
He felt it.
A magic not born of nature, gods, or devils.
A magic wrought from the corpse of will.
He lit a cigarette.
"So you finally made it, brat."
He smiled.
"Time to show the world what kind of monster I trained."
---
A short chapter, but I didn't want to stretch it toouch, kept it a bit realistic in terms of magical world not real world...Thank you for reading, your support matters....shower me with power stones for better and lengthy chapters.....seeya, take care ><.