The secret chamber beneath the tunnels seemed to shrink, as if the drawn walls were breathing. Sol stood before the wooden table, his gaze fixed on the words: "Sketch No. 0." He felt the urge to erase them, to erase himself entirely—but the sound of the Philosopher's footsteps had already reached directly behind him.
"Do not attempt to flee, Sol. This place is drawn with a precision your simple mind cannot comprehend."
Sol turned slowly. The Philosopher looked like he had stepped out of a classical painting of a wise king—but his eyes were empty white voids, without pupils or irises. In his hand, he held the Golden Eraser, a ring-like instrument radiating energy capable of dismantling the visual atoms of any being.
"Where are my friends?" Sol asked, his voice like burning paper rustling.
The Philosopher smiled coldly."Your friends? You mean the mutilated knight and the scrap-gathering master? They are now in the Deconstruction Phase. We do not kill in this world, Sol—we merely recycle. Their ink will be used to paint new clouds in the upper city's sky."
Rage flared in Sol's blue eye. The diamond-tipped brush in his hand glowed with a purple light."You speak of them as if they were oil stains—but they have a will… a will you never drew, nor your deranged painter!"
"Will is merely an illusion in a closed canvas," replied the Philosopher, raising the Golden Eraser. "And now, it is time to return you to the margin from which you emerged."
In the blink of an eye, the Philosopher unleashed a wave of Absolute White. It was neither fire nor magic; it was a wave that erased colors and lines from anything it touched. Sol saw the air before him turn into empty white, as if a portion of the world had been cut away with scissors.
Instinctively, Sol raised his brush-fused hand. He didn't try to block the wave; instead, he adjusted the contrast in the space before him. Shadows deepened, black as night, and the white collided with the darkness, dissolving into a majestic color battle.
"Oh? You've learned to manipulate light values," said the Philosopher, intrigued. "But can you withstand the Comprehensive Critique?"
The Philosopher muttered words in a strange, alien language. Suddenly, black threads emerged from the walls. They were Critique Pens, each one erasing meaning from any part of Sol's body it touched. One pen touched his shoulder, and he forgot how to move his arm. Another touched his foot, and balance abandoned him.
Sol fell to his knees, the diamond-tipped brush trembling in his grasp.
"You are not a real being, Sol," whispered the Philosopher, approaching. "You are a backup idea, placed by the painter in a moment of doubt. You represent chaos, we represent order. And now, I will extract the Eternal Pigment from your eye and end this ugly story."
As the Philosopher's hand neared his face, Sol remembered Constantine's words: "You are the lost message."
He did not close his eye. He opened it wide. In that instant, he didn't see the Philosopher as an enemy but as a geometric structure. He saw that the Philosopher himself was drawn with specific ink, and his existence depended on color balance.
"If I am the Eraser," Sol said, plunging his brush into the lined floor, "then I will erase the rules that make you powerful!"
Sol inverted the colors of the entire room. What was white became black; what was solid became liquid. The room's balance flipped. The Philosopher staggered in existential shock—the Golden Eraser in his hand began erasing his own hand instead of Sol's, because the concepts of "target" and "user" had been reversed.
"What have you done?!" the Philosopher shouted, watching his arm dissolve into golden dust.
"I changed the painting style," Sol replied, standing with newfound strength. "I am not a fugitive sketch—I am the new painter of this world!"
With a single strike of his brush, Sol drew a tear in reality, a hole leading directly to the Repository of Rejects. He did not wait for the Philosopher to recover; the golden-wielding Supreme Purifier leapt into the void, desperately trying to redraw his lost arm.
Sol landed in a horrifying place: a massive repository filled with enormous barrels containing pulsating colored liquids. There, he saw Garrett and Constantine, bound inside magnetic frames that were draining color from their bodies.
"Sol?" whispered Constantine, his body now so transparent you could see the machinery inside him.
"Hold on," said Sol, raising his brush that now dripped with glowing ink. "I've come to redraw your ending."
But the guards here were not human. A Forgotten Colossus moved toward them—a creature made from remnants of thousands of failed paintings. Every step it took shook the foundations of reality.