The brilliant light of the teleportation array faded, leaving behind the sterile, mechanical scent of ozone and... blood.
Lu Chen's leather shoes touched the tiled floor. He looked around. They had arrived in a massive underground subway station in a modern metropolis. Or at least, it used to be a subway station.
"What is this foulness?" Kunto, the African Earth Guardian, gripped his obsidian spear. His deep voice echoed, but the echo sounded wrong—it didn't bounce off the walls; it sounded like it was being swallowed.
The station was completely devoid of human life, but it was far from empty.
The visual laws of reality here were completely broken. The digital billboard on the wall wasn't displaying advertisements; it was a writhing mass of geometric flesh and blinking, panicked eyes. The fluorescent lights overhead didn't emit light—they dripped a heavy, black, powdery shadow that fell upward toward the ceiling.
Depth perception was entirely gone. A staircase ten meters away looked like it was painted flat on a wall, while a ticket machine right next to them seemed miles deep.
"An illusion?" Bai Su, the 1920s Fox Medium, sneered. She tapped her smoking pipe. "A clumsy one. Let big sister show whoever did this what real mind manipulation looks like."
She blew a thick cloud of pink, seductive smoke, intending to overwrite the visual distortion with her own high-tier fox hex.
But the moment her pink smoke touched the black shadows, it shrieked like a dying animal and was instantly absorbed. Bai Su staggered back, her enchanting face turning pale.
"It's... it's not an illusion," she stammered, holding her head. "It's real! The physical appearance of this space is actually mutating!"
"Do not trust your eyes!" Elena, the Tarot Witch, shouted. She pulled a card from her deck—The Wheel of Fortune. "I will divine the correct path through the fabric of fate!"
She infused her magic into the card. However, the moment the card glowed, the painted figures on the card began to melt. They screamed, and black blood leaked from the eyes of the figures directly onto Elena's pale hands.
"Argh!" Elena dropped the card, clamping her hands over her own eyes as a terrifying headache assaulted her mind. "The 'Sight' of the universe here is diseased! It rejects all divination!"
Squelch... Squelch...
A sickening sound came from the depths of the subway tunnel.
Crawling out of the darkness were things that shouldn't exist. They used to be ordinary passengers, but now they looked like melted oil paintings. Their limbs were twisted at impossible angles, and their bodies were covered entirely in human eyeballs—all blinking frantically, weeping black fluid.
Visual Aberrations. Symptoms of a diseased universe.
"Stand behind me!" Kunto roared. The earth-runes on his dark skin flared with a brilliant golden light. He was the ultimate physical tank. He charged forward, thrusting his heavy obsidian spear directly through the chest of the largest Aberration.
The strike contained enough force to shatter a boulder.
But the Aberration didn't die. Because its visual coordinates were broken, the monster simply split apart like liquid paint around the spear and reformed behind Kunto. It swiped a shapeless, melted claw at the warrior.
The claw didn't cut Kunto's flesh—it cut the visual perspective of the space around him. Kunto's right arm suddenly looked like it was detached and placed three feet away, causing him immense, disorienting pain.
"Physical attacks don't work!" Kunto yelled, retreating with heavy breaths. "We can't fight a bad painting with a spear!"
"Then how do we fight it?!" Bai Su yelled, her fox aura fluctuating wildly as more Aberrations poured out of the tunnel, their weeping eyes locking onto the squad.
"You don't fight a corrupted painting with a spear," a calm, even voice cut through the chaos.
Bai Su, Kunto, and the agonizing Elena all turned around.
Lu Chen stepped forward. He walked past the towering African warrior and the trembling Fox. His white coat remained immaculate, unaffected by the visual madness around them.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his dark-purple calligraphy brush.
"When a painting is corrupted," Lu Chen said softly, his dark eyes locking onto the horde of cosmic nightmares, "you wash it with ink."
He didn't need paper. The distorted air itself was his canvas.
Lu Chen raised his arm. His movements were not fast, but they carried a weight so profound it made the space around him tremble. He channeled the ancient power of the Order-Weavers, the power to correct the broken laws of the cosmos, into the tip of his brush.
He drew a vertical line. Then a horizontal hook.
With breathtaking elegance and absolute dominance, a glowing, ancient seal-script character materialized in the chaotic air.
『 界 』 (BOUNDARY / DOMAIN)
The moment the final stroke connected, the universe responded.
A massive, golden shockwave of pure, unadulterated Order erupted from the character. It didn't explode like a bomb; it swept across the subway station like a rigid, invisible grid.
CRACK!
The sound of reality snapping back into place echoed like thunder.
Wherever the golden grid passed, the twisted visual laws were forced back into submission. The dripping black shadows turned back into bright fluorescent light. The flat staircases popped back into three dimensions.
And the Visual Aberrations?
The moment the golden light of the 'Boundary' touched them, their broken visual structures were forcibly corrected. Unable to exist within the laws of normal physics, they let out silent, agonizing screams before crumbling into fine, gray dust.
In less than three seconds, the horrific, sanity-draining cosmic nightmare was gone.
The subway station looked completely normal. White tiles, bright lights, empty platforms.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the glowing golden character 『 界 』 slowly fading into the air, and the young man standing beneath it.
Lu Chen calmly wiped the tip of his brush with a piece of cloth and put it back into his pocket. He turned around to face his new team.
Bai Su's mouth was slightly open, her pipe forgotten. Kunto stared at his fully restored arm in disbelief. Elena, her eyes no longer bleeding, looked at Lu Chen as if she were looking at a god.
"The visual distortion in this sector has been stabilized," Lu Chen said, his tone as casual as if he had just swept the floor. "But the source of the infection is still down that tunnel."
He looked at the three legends from the past.
"Well? Are we going, or do you need a minute to catch your breath?"