Chapter 1665: Field of Devastation Events around him passed by, seemingly in a blur, and Kacius found himself at the threshold between the lower realms and the higher realms. In this corner was the Great Desert. From a distance, it appeared out of nowhere, like a gigantic dimension made entirely of sand. Kacius Black thought it resembled a beautiful brown pearl lightly kissed by the light of the morning sun. His division was not near the front of the army, so Kacius hurriedly created a Viewing Spell. In his consciousness, the image of the desert zoomed closer to him, and Kacius gasped in admiration. The Great Desert stretches beyond the horizon in his sight, and although this spell should have allowed Kacius to view all of it at a glance, he recognized that the spatial structure of this desert was such that those within would not be able to find its end. From outside the desert, at a high enough viewpoint, it was possible to see all of the Great Desert, but inside it, there was no way to see everything at a glance, for the inner world was nearly infinite. However, this did not stop Kacius from falling into admiration for what he was seeing. The desert was like an ocean of scorched earth and shifting sand. Endless dunes rise and fall like the frozen waves of a golden sea, sculpted by the whispering winds that carried the ghost of ancient storms. The air shimmered with heat, and the silence that covered the desert was vast, only broken by the faint hiss of sand sliding down the slopes or the distant howl of the wind that had encircled this desert for billions of years. Kacius wondered how this place would look at night; he believed it would be even more beautiful under the starlight. "Get your head out of your ass, Kacius, the battle would soon begin, and your pretty face would be battered beyond repair if you are still so close." The sweet voice of his sister shook him from the reverie imposed by the vision of the Great Desert. A finger poked him repeatedly in his cheeks, and he looked at his sister’s beaming face in annoyance before rapidly looking down. He was unable to face her for long because she was now an Old One, and he would go insane if he looked at her thoroughly for more than a few seconds. "Is my feet so exciting you are always peering down on it, brother? If you want, I can take off my shoes." Kacius cursed under his breath in faint annoyance and shame, but he knew that Lila had a good heart and teasing him was a way for her to relieve her stress. Lila was highly talented. He was her elder brother, and yet she was already an Old One. Her only problem was that she was something of a coward. With her character, she should not have been sent to a place of battle like this, but in this era, even an Old One had to follow the collective, or they would be wiped out. Kacius bowed to her in a mocking manner, knowing she would appreciate his levity, "You shield your feet and leave your face exposed, sister. It is pretty clear you like me looking at your feet." "Oh," Kacius heard a smack, as if Lila had struck her head. I had forgotten to reverse the spell. There, it’s all done. Now you can look at my face." Kacius did not fall for the bait. For the last three decades, his sister had made the same jokes about reversing the spell of concealment over her features, and he knew that until the day he died, she would never stop teasing him with it. He was looking to solve a particularly difficult spell model, and he had run into the Magus Tower of his sister, and Kacius had not realized that she had become an Old One. With familiarity born from millions of years of being her sibling, he had bypassed all her wards to reach her, calling out with excitement about the problem that had been stumping him for so long, when he saw one of the most horrific sights of his life. His sister was no longer a being of flesh and blood, but something out of a nightmare. At first, he thought he was looking at a bleeding hand that was folded into itself, until the hand sort of unfurled, as if it were emerging from dimensions beyond his perception. This creature was a twitching mass of elongated, boneless limbs, each tipped with too many joints and too many fingers. All of them twitched with an unnatural rhythm that left scars in the Aether, which was flowing around the creature in a storm. The creature’s skin was translucent, stretched thin over pulsing veins that throbbed with a sickly phosphorescent glow. The light did not illuminate it; instead, it deepened the shadow around it. Where a face should have been, there was only a gaping void, and from that void came an indescribable voice that droned nails of pain into Kacius’s mind. Suddenly, the creature moved, and its motion was simply wrong. It did not walk but flickered, and the sound it was making kept growing more horrifying. If Kacius could move, he would tear through his face, shredding his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth so he could not hear, see, smell, or taste this abomination that was coming close to him. Kacius knew he was screaming, but no sound was coming from his mouth, and then the void that represented the creature slowly lowered itself until it reached his face, and a cold and black tongue filled with sticky substance carrying a revolting stench touched his face, and he heard, "Ca... can.... Understand.... can you now understand me brother. If you keep staring at my feet so intensely, then I don’t know how to satisfy this fetish of yours except to allow it." "Wha... what?" was all the broken mind of Kacius could formulate from his consciousness that had long fallen into madness. "Bloody hell, I am an Old One!" An excited shriek tore through the madness that had filled Kacius’s mind "Can you believe I slept, woke up, and reached the eighth-dimensional level?! Ah, take that, Andar Erikson. I bet if the Magus council hears of my achievement, I might just be selected to be the premier genius of the mages. Brother, what do you think? Is your sister not incredibly awesome?!" "Sister... Lila... tentacles... feet... FEET!!!" Kacius screamed in madness. "Feet? Brother, I know my body has been renewed, but you can stop staring at my feet for so long. My face is here, you know." A monstrosity that defied imagination tore its way into Kacius’s consciousness. Finally, his mind broke, and he fell into a blessed darkness that did not stay silent for long before it was filled with monsters. It took years for his mind to regain full functionality again, and it was all because he had reached the sixth dimension of Memory, allowing him to possess a rugged consciousness that could heal from almost anything as long as a potent source of remembrance was close to him. His sister was the potent source, and it almost seemed fair that her carelessness was repaid by her nursing him back to health using her Memories of him, else his mind would have continued to degrade, and he would become nothing short of a monster in human flesh. Throughout his healing process, Lila did not leave his side, and she made sure she made a joke about her feet every single day. "Why are you here, sister? The battle is about to begin, and I can find my way towards my formation without your reminder." Kacius said, not daring to raise his head—and he was not staring at Lila’s feet! Her soft giggle entered his ears, "Oh, you know I just had to make sure you look at your lucky charm again before this battle. If I lose you, I will feel guilty that I did not do what was necessary to keep you alive." Kacius sighed in irritation, "Only you, sister, would think that I need to stare at a spell that mimics the shape of your feet as a good luck charm." "Well, I will have you know, brother, that this is not how the spell works. I am not mimicking anything, just showing you my real form, not colored by your erroneous perception of the higher dimensions." Kacius shuddered, a brief flash of recollection of the form of an Old One brushing past his consciousness. Then he spoke loudly, a clear hint of dismissal in his tone, "I will be fine, you can leave, in fact, my position should be here if we adjust the formation into its true form. So I am in the right place, while you are not." "Humph... I have forgotten how stubborn you can be, brother. Okay, I am off. After the battle, I will be coming to your Tower. I expect you to have the dishes I love prepared for me." Saying this, Lila’s presence began to vanish, and Kacius, not knowing what possessed him, looked upwards and saw the back of her sister. She was wearing a flowery dress, the same one that he remembered. He had bought this dress for her the day she became an Acolyte. "Sister... Lila, be safe," he whispered. She half turned and smiled, and his heart broke a little, a faint premonition of doom filling them. Then she was gone. Three days later, only Kacius remained on an endless field of devastation.