《The Arcanum Algorithm》

Chapter 6 The Unseen Realm

The dead, cooked eyes of the pig-headed candle held Grimm in a paralytic grip. A cold sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled down his spine. The air, already thick and silent, grew heavier, charged with a malignant awareness. This was no hallucination. This was a layer of reality peeled back, and it was insane.

A sound shattered the profound quiet.

It was a voice, but thin and reedy, like paper being crumpled. “Ha! I have finally breached the Supreme Realm! The sky! The earth! The evil dragons! Nothing can hold me back now!”

The voice was brimming with triumphant arrogance, yet it was so ludicrously out of place that Grimm’s fear was momentarily stunned into submission. He turned, his movements slow and dreamlike, toward the source of the noise.

It came from a book left open on a lectern, an illustrated volume of the kind nobles read for amusement. He knew the story—a clichéd tale of a commoner’s rise to power and love. An illustration depicted the heroic protagonist standing over a defeated foe.

The paper itself was moving.

A figure, the very hero from the illustration, was peeling itself up from the page. It was a two-dimensional man, standing upright on the parchment. His front was beautifully detailed, his face a perfect mask of heroic astonishment. But his back was flat, printed with the text of the story. He was a living, breathing page.

“What devilry…” Grimm breathed, the words soundless in the frozen air.

The paper man looked around, his inked features shifting into confusion. “What sorcery is this? Where are the celestial plains? The adoring masses? I was to ascend to godhood!”

His tiny paper eyes landed on Grimm. With a dramatic flourish, he drew a sword that was merely a darker line of ink on his paper body and pointed it at him. “You! Are you a deity of this divine realm? Identify yourself!”

Before Grimm could even process the question, the marble floor beneath his feet groaned. A long, jagged crack split open directly between his boots, running the length of the hall. The crack widened, not into a chasm, but into a mouth—a lipless, stony gash in the world.

“Identify yourself? Identify yourself? Identify yourself?” the floor-mouth intoned, its voice a grating, echoing rumble of grinding stone. It was mockingly repeating the paper man’s question.

From the unsettling darkness within the fissure, a tongue emerged. It was not flesh, but a slithering, squirming mass of tiny, crimson serpents, knotted together into a single, grotesque appendage. It ignored Grimm entirely, though it passed right between his legs. With impossible speed, it lashed out, wrapping around the paper figure on the book.

The hero’s triumphant expression vanished into one of sheer, inked terror. A high, thin shriek, like tearing parchment, was cut short as the serpentine tongue retracted, dragging the struggling paper man down into the infinite blackness of the floor’s maw. The crack sealed itself, leaving the marble floor smooth and unblemished.

The entire nightmarish sequence had lasted only a few seconds.

Grimm stood alone again in the absolute silence, his body trembling so violently he feared his bones would shake apart. This was the Sorcerer’s world. This was the truth behind the veil. It wasn’t glorious. It was a chaotic, hungry, and utterly terrifying chaos where the very concepts of reality were meaningless.

*This isn’t real. This can’t be real,* his mind screamed, a desperate mantra against the overwhelming absurdity.

As if the thought itself were a trigger, the crystal sphere on the Sorcerer’s table flared with a light so intense it bleached the color from the frozen world. Grimm felt a violent, pulling sensation behind his navel.

He was yanked backward.

The world snapped back into motion with a deafening roar of sound.

“—Mental resonance of twelve. Acceptable. Stand behind me.”

The Sorcerer’s dispassionate voice washed over him. Grimm stumbled, his hands falling away from the crystal sphere. The light was gone. The hall was normal. People were murmuring, shuffling, living. The side table held only food. The floor was solid stone. The book on the lectern was closed.

It had all been an illusion. A vision. A test.

His body moved on numb, automatic legs. He walked around the table and took his place behind the Sorcerer, his mind reeling, his soul deeply shaken.

A wave of astonished chatter rose from the crowd. “Twelve? A servant boy?”

“By the gods, he actually has the gift!”

“My boy once pushed him into a mud puddle… we’re doomed!”

The Sorcerer let out a soft, chilling hum that was not quite a cough, and the hall fell silent again. The Lord’s daughter and the tavern owner’s son, Weid, glanced at him. Their eyes flicked over his rough, servant’s clothing, and their initial surprise curdled into dismissive scorn. They looked away, dismissing him as a temporary anomaly.

Grimm didn’t care. Their judgment meant nothing. He clutched the hidden Manual beneath his tunic like a lifeline. He had passed. He had bought his ticket into that terrifying, insane world.

And staring at the back of the Sorcerer’s haze-shrouded head, he wasn’t sure if he had been saved, or damned.