Zeo didn't sleep that night.
He sat in the basement, candlelight dancing wildly on the walls, and before him: a pile of symbols he'd drawn himself from observations of victims, from crows' blood, from whispers he'd recorded in his head.
He'd always thought chaos was a weapon. But now he knew—chaos was a door.
And Darzel was the one waiting behind it.
Zeo opened an old black book—his mother's book that had once been said to contain forbidden magic. But this time, he didn't read it as a student. He read it as a uniter.
On page 117, there was a note he'd never understood before:
"When the boundaries of the world weaken, it's not power that Darzel seeks… but connection. He doesn't come to destroy. He comes to unite with someone who understands his way of thinking."
Zeo closed the book slowly. Then he smiled.
"Then I'm not a tool. I'm not bait. I'm a candidate."
That night, he went to the first place he'd ever burned—the remains of a cattle pen. There, he began to draw large symbols in the dirt. Symbols that required sacrifice.
And for the first time, he did not take an animal life.
He took a human life—a salt seller who had secretly beaten his mother.
But Zeo did not kill brutally.
He killed quietly, slowly, and ritually. Like someone writing a letter with flesh.
And as the victim's blood formed a complete circle on the ground, Zeo knelt down, placed his palms in the center, and whispered:
"I am not afraid of you, Darzel. I want to learn from you."
And in the stillness of the night, the ground beneath him shook.
Not an earthquake. But… a response.
As if something down there was smiling back.
Veyrn stood at the edge of the barn that Zeo had burned. He stared at the ground, now covered in blood-stained symbols. Even though it was daytime, the air around the circle was cold. Too cold.
He touched the ground. Then he lifted his finger—there was a thin trace of steam. But not from fire.
A trace from another world.
"He already knows how," he murmured softly.
A soldier from the capital approached. "Sir, this was a simple murder. The victim was a commoner—no history of magic."
Veyrn didn't answer right away. His eyes remained on the ground, then he unrolled a small scroll from his pocket—a writing from the First Order, an ancient record of the Rupture of Worlds phenomenon.
"When someone who resonates with Darzel performs a blood ritual on land that has absorbed dark magic, their body slowly no longer belongs to them. It belongs to the boundary itself."
Portals aren't gates that can be opened with keys.
Portals are humans who are corrupt enough to become the door themselves.
And Zeo fits all the criteria: trauma-bound, with control over forbidden magic, and—most fatally—without moral boundaries.
"If he is a living portal…" Veyrn stood slowly. "Then killing him is not enough. We must seal him before he fully opens."
The soldier hesitated. "But… he is still human."
Veyrn stared hard.
"Not anymore."
Meanwhile, from afar, Zeo watched everything from the shadows of the forest.
He saw Veyrn. He saw the symbols he had left behind, read, interpreted.
And he smiled—not like a predator, but like a student who had just frustrated his teacher.
"Good, Veyrn," he whispered. "You are beginning to understand. But too late. Because this door… is already opening from the inside."