COZMART: Corner Shop of Visiting Gods

Chapter 125 125 | Reverie Sanctum

Reverie Sanctum did not look like a place built for living things.

It opened before them as a black mouth in the rock, too wide to be called a doorway, too deliberate to be natural. Veins of light ran through the stone—thin at first, then brighter the deeper the eye followed them—threads of violet and cold blue caught under obsidian like mechanical heartbeats.

The air around them felt charged; with every inhale, Eathan could feel the cavern resonating with a strange hum that vibrated through his bones.

The mirrors started before the threshold.

Sheets of crystal embedded in the walls at awkward angles, catching fragments of the world and returning them slightly wrong. A lantern from the road behind them showed up twice in one pane, six times in another. In a taller shard near the entrance, Eathan saw himself, then Bai Hu, then neither of them at all.

Chewie squinted at the glowing seam cut into the dark. "This place looks like someone stuffed a mirror maze into a divine tomb and then handed the interior decorating over to a cursed algorithm."

ai Hu tipped his head back, studying the entrance the way he had studied everything since re-forming: with complete, dangerous sincerity. The dark glasses Mingrui had given him reflected the shifting light in blank bands.

"Do all sanctums look like this?" he asked.

"No," Eathan said.

Chewie folded her arms. "Most sanctums do not look like they jumped straight out of a cyberpunk livestream."

That, unfortunately, felt accurate.

Eathan stood for a moment with the Echoing Lantern cupped in both hands, feeling its faint warmth through the metal ribs. The closer they drew to the entrance, the harder it hummed. Lavender light slipped in thin breaths from the seams.

Foxfire had sent them here with a smile. Meng Po had sent them here with a warning. Between those two facts, Eathan felt justified in assuming the place wanted something from them.

He glanced sideways at Bai Hu.

The White Tiger had been quieter since leaving Super-House. Not less curious—he'd still paused on the way here to stare at a shrine kiosk's rotating display of miniature karmic bells until Chewie physically steered him onward—but quieter. Less outwardly lost. His steps had steadied too. There were moments, brief and disorienting, when his silence stopped resembling vacancy and started resembling thought.

That might have been a good sign.

It also might have been the kind of sign people wrote down right before things got worse.

"Stay close," Eathan said, because practical instructions felt safer than theories. "And if the mirrors start showing you anything that looks too personal, don't go toward it."

Chewie shot him a look. "That sounds very specific."

"It's a maze built out of reflection and regret," he said. "I'm covering the basics."

Bai Hu nodded once. "Do not follow emotional mirrors."

"Exactly."

Then he realised who he'd just said that to and amended, "Unless it's me or Chewie. You're allowed to follow us."

Bai Hu considered that with visible seriousness. "Okay."

They crossed the threshold.

The sound changed first.

Midnight Avenue had still been behind them in a faint way—music, crowds, the occasional shout. Once inside, all of that dropped as if the Sanctum had simply decided external noise no longer applied. Their footfalls came back wrong. The floor should have echoed. Instead, every step vanished into the black crystal underfoot after one soft tap, like the sound had been swallowed before it could travel.

Eathan drew the lantern up chest-high and pressed his thumb against the Memory Whisper ring.

For a breath, nothing.

Then pale blue spread through the lantern's lavender glow. Threads spilled out of it like silk pulled through water, trailing forward into the dark. They brushed the first set of mirrored walls and reacted immediately. Eathan paused as he saw some pathways repelled the threads; others absorbed them, the lavender light flowing forward like an inviting whisper.

Chewie let out a low whistle. "I'll say one thing for Commander Meng. Her tools know how to mind their own business."

"It's distinguishing true paths from illusions." He exhaled. "Let's move quickly."

He kept one hand wrapped in the trailing end of Bai Hu's scarf while they walked. It felt ridiculous, tugging his commander through a death-mirror labyrinth like a child in a museum, but the alternative was losing him to curiosity and explaining that to the entire Area 001 and Li Wei later.

The path curved.

Mirrors rose on both sides now, tall and narrow, edges catching blue light. Some reflected them accurately. Others stretched their bodies thin or blurred their faces or swapped the angle of their shadows. Once, Eathan saw himself a few steps behind where he actually was, lantern raised in the wrong hand. Another panel showed Chewie walking alone.

He looked away before his mind could start trying to resolve which version of reality was lying.

For a while, the lantern kept them honest.

Its threads flowed ahead with patient certainty, curving them around false mouths in the passage and away from stairways that only pretended to go somewhere. Deeper in, the Sanctum widened unexpectedly into chambers where mirror-pillars stood in uneven clusters like a forest of polished bones. Beyond that came a low corridor lined with prism arches, each one refracting Bai Hu's pale coat into a dozen ghostly silhouettes.

The White Tiger stopped once, gaze fixed on a nearby panel where the scarf at his throat had become a field of stars.

"Keep going," Chewie said.

"I was," he said, and moved again.

That earned him a long look from both of them.

"Talking more," Eathan said quietly when they were a few steps past the panel.

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Chewie made a noncommittal sound. "So is crying less. I'll take the trade."

The lantern dimmed a fraction.

Not enough to matter yet, but enough that Eathan noticed.

He adjusted his grip, thumb brushing the ring again. The threads recovered, then thinned almost immediately, finer than before.

He glanced at the roof of the lantern. One of the little circles etched there had gone dull.

"Don't say it," Chewie said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say Commander Meng's craftsmanship has limits."

He looked at her.

She looked back.

Bai Hu, between them, said with quiet thoughtfulness, "It does."

The path narrowed.

Mirrors pressed closer. Reflections multiplied until Eathan had to focus on the pull of the scarf in his hand more than what his eyes were reporting. The Sanctum's sense of geometry had started to fray, and the light around them no longer seemed to come from the lantern alone; sometimes the walls answered with a pulse of their own, blue through black, and for a split second the whole place looked submerged.

His sense of time went bad next.

Maybe it had been ten minutes. Maybe thirty. The Sanctum did not appear interested in offering clarification.

The lantern's threads grew thinner with every turn. At one crossing they frayed visibly, snapping and reforming like strands of wet hair caught between fingers.

Chewie saw it too. "Tell me that's not dying."

"It's not dead," Eathan said. "It's just…"

The last thread winked out.

Chewie eyed him flatly. "Now it's just a glorified flashli—"

He was about to say something defensive when the floor shifted under his left foot.

He stumbled sideways and hit one of the mirrors shoulder-first. The impact rang through the chamber in a long, thin note.

His hand slipped on Bai Hu's scarf.

The White Tiger turned at once, blinking at him through the dark lenses.

Chewie closed her eyes briefly. "Please stop body-checking haunted architecture."

"I tripped."

"On what? Reality?"

"Apparently."

The joke should have helped. It didn't.

The mirror he'd hit still vibrated, its surface rippling faintly as if the crystal were liquid under tension. His own reflection looked back at him—and for the span of one heartbeat, it wasn't there.

The empty space in the glass hit him like a hand around the throat.

Then his reflection snapped back into place, lantern and all, wearing the exact same expression of startled revulsion.

Eathan took one step back.

"Okay," he said carefully, to himself more than anyone else. "I'm still here. You're still here. We are going to keep believing in basic cognition for at least another hour."

Chewie glanced at him. "Did you just threaten yourself with rational thought?"

"I'm using whatever tools are available."

He tried to keep moving, but without the initial lead of the lantern threads, their sense of direction was rapidly deteriorating.

Pathways rearranged constantly, and Eathan felt dizziness seeping subtly into his consciousness. It felt as if someone poured two liters of milk down his throat then took him skydiving.

Suppressing the desire to gag, he shook off the nauseating thoughts. At first, he blamed the intense colors, refracted neon hues overstimulating his vision. But soon, the sensations grew stranger. Sound faded strangely around them, footsteps quieted to near silence, and an unsettling numbness crept slowly into his awareness.

He shook himself steady.

Memory was one of the Sanctum's currencies. Meng Po had said as much, though in more elegant terms. Eathan had expected his own past to press in on him sooner or later.

He had not expected the angle.

At first it was only a flicker caught in the edge of vision. A burst of white heat that vanished when he turned his head. The corner shop at Maple and 8th reflected in a panel that should have been showing obsidian wall. His own hand on a scanner. Rain on a rooftop. A dead thing with moth-wings and too many teeth.

The next mirror caught and held.

He saw the funeral home.

White flowers. Rain and grass. Eathan stared silently into that prism, the scene reflected in his eyes.

A tall man in white stood half-hidden beyond the open crowd, beyond the reach of the drizzling rain. His sleeves were wet at the cuffs. His gaze was fixed on the boy in the front row—the younger Eathan, shoulders locked, face rigid from the effort of not becoming someone pitiable in public.

Bai Hu.

Eathan had encountered this memory enough times to gain some resistance. Yet, as his gaze lingered, something else drew him forward.

Behind the White Tiger, partially obscured by drifting rain, stood two figures he'd never seen before.

One appeared entirely crafted from clay, distinctly human-shaped but unnatural in its stillness. The other was little more than a spiritual outline cupping a soft, luminous sphere between its hands.

Eathan's pulse quickened, and he leaned closer before he could stop himself.

That image—those two strange shapes—had scratched at the edge of other moments before. Back during the battle with Taowu, in broken flashes he'd dismissed as residue. But in the past, this scene was manifested from an external illusion, but from his own memories, the two figures were undoubtedly absent.

A fresh wave of nausea washed over him. Eathan grimaced, pressing fingers to his temples. Was this memory even his own?

"Who are you," he heard himself say.

The answer, of course, did not come.

The mirror dissolved, and when his sight steadied again, the scene had changed entirely.

White ground underfoot, flat and bare as a scraped bone, washed over him as Eathan found himself staring at a lunar plain.

…Where was this?

Bai Hu walked across it alone.

His robes were stained dark at the hem, then higher, then across one shoulder with blood that had dried too long under pale fabric. His hair hung loose and damp against his face. More than the blood, more than the staggering steps, it was the emptiness in him that made Eathan stop breathing for a second.

He had seen Taeril tired. Seen him calm. Seen him furious. Seen him carrying silence like a weapon.

He had never seen him look hollow.

At the edge of that pale plain, another figure waited.

A woman, elegant in the way old deities often were. Her robes held the soft blush of blossoms under moonlight, sleeves drifting around her as if underwater currents moved through the air around her alone.

Her expression was soft, eyes fixed upon Bai Hu with an emotion Eathan could only interpret as sorrow. She just stood there, waiting.

The White Tiger stopped in front of her.

Eathan watched as Taeril lowered his head, silver hair falling forward to shadow his features. After a moment, he lifted his right hand, palm extending outward. Resting upon it lay something dark, an obsidian shard whose precise details Eathan struggled to discern clearly. Taeril's hand trembled as he offered it forward.

The woman did not take it at once. She looked at Bai Hu first, and the sorrow in her face sharpened into something worse. Then, slowly, she closed her fingers around the shard.

Her other hand lifted to Bai Hu's cheek, fingertips caressing his bloodied face.

The realization struck Eathan then.

This wasn't his memory.

It belonged wholly to the White Tiger. That much was suddenly obvious. The point of view wasn't just external—it carried weight he'd never have attached to the moment on his own. Something like relief and loss twisted together so tightly he couldn't separate them.

Eathan staggered back from the mirror, stomach heaving.

Wrong, his mind supplied.

This is his. This is his.

He shook his head, fighting the dizziness clawing at his consciousness. Heart hammering, he turned around.

"Chewie—"

No one answered.

The corridor behind him was empty.

The mirrors still stood, the light around him breathing in and out through their black depths. But Chewie was gone. Bai Hu too. The scarf he'd been holding no longer lay across his palm.

A cold rush of panic went straight through him.

"Chewie?" he called again, louder this time.

The sound came back to him strangely dampened, as though someone else had spoken in his stead.

Nothing.

Eathan's heart began to race. He reached behind himself on instinct, searching for the familiar drag of cloth, the easy certainty of Bai Hu's presence close enough to touch.

His fingers brushed something like a sleeve, and relief surged through him—

[Calamity Radar] flared amber so hard it made his vision spark.

Skill [Calamity Radar ω] has been activated!

Danger level: Amber Immediate reaction recommended!

The thing under his hand was cold in the wrong way, the still, dry temperature of abandoned objects.

His pulse tripped.

Slowly, very slowly, Eathan turned.

Sapphire eyes met his.

They were glass-bright and unblinking.

The face they belonged to had once been human enough to fool someone from a distance. Up close, the seams showed. Skin stitched with thread that shimmered and frayed at the edges. Joints wrapped in pale binding strips. Mouth too neatly carved, lips splitting at one corner where the stitching had begun to come loose.

It stood so close its loose threads brushed his sleeve.

The puppet smiled.

Heart freezing mid-beat, Eathan watched the stitches came apart as the puppet opened its mouth.

When it spoke, the voice came out level and flat, as if borrowed from a speaker hidden in a wall.

"Hello, Lin," it said.

One stitched hand lifted in a small, courteous greeting.

"It seems we meet again."