Fitran conducted a Causal Trace through a spontaneous blood ritual. Every drop of blood that spilled became a spiritual compass pointing in a single direction: the point where Shigure no Kami was bound to this reality. He was acutely aware of the mental risks involved—allowing the curse to enter meant he would have to experience the despair of countless shattered future possibilities all at once. Yet for Fitran, that mental toll was a fair sacrifice for an absolute resolution.

  Instead of jumping or using Entropic Bastion to completely block the assault, Fitran stood rigidly, allowing the storm to tear at his black cloak. The reinforced fabric, laced with magic, was shredded, its pieces swirling in the wind like confetti from a shattered dream. Some shards of glass grazed his cheek, inflicting thin wounds that immediately oozed dark red blood.

  Thick red blood oozing from the wound on his cheek does not freeze due to the temperature. Instead, the liquid instantly crystallizes into rigid, sharp granules like pomegranate seeds. This is the effect of Null Stillness summoned by Fitran, a decree that revokes permission for all forms of flow and change. Under this influence, even the essence of life within his blood is forced to stop, hardening into a static monument that refuses to submit to the laws of time.

  "Have you lost your mind, Architect?" Shigure no Kami taunted, circling Fitran like a predator toying with its prey. "You're letting yourself be destroyed piece by piece? Where's the pride you once boasted? Where's the void machine you revered?"

  Fitran ignored the mocking words. Inside his mind, a mathematical matrix began to form. He calculated the position of the wound on his right cheek: coordinates X-42, Y-19. The wind speed from the northern sector surged at 450 knots, fluctuating spatially. He knew Shigure was not fully present with him in that moment.

  "What are you talking about?!" Shigure spat, frustration evident in his voice.

  "You exist between the cracks of causality," Fitran explained, his tone unwavering despite the storm of glass continuing to shred his attire and nick his skin. "Just like the internal architecture of my soul. You exploit the uncertainty of space to evade direct attacks. You are not the storm standing before me; you are merely an echo of the tempest raging between one second and the next."

  Fitran closed his right eye, allowing his left eye—sombre and black, the Void—to seize complete control of his perception. By embracing the pain, he collected the data he needed. Every scratch on his coat, every droplet of blood spilled, informed him about the core of the Yokai. He was searching for the 'anchor point' where Shigure no Kami connected with the physical reality.

  “Do you really believe this small sacrifice will give you answers?” Shigure no Kami roared, intensifying the storm around them. “I will tear you to shreds until not a single atom remains for you to count!”

  “Sacrifice is an emotional term that bears no relevance,” Fitran replied, his voice steady. He raised his left hand, fingers splayed as if grasping an invisible formula. “I refer to it as the necessary data collection. Efficiency often demands minimal damage to the external mechanisms to protect the heart of the system.”

  Fitran focused intently now. Amidst the swirling chaos of glass, there remained a singular point of stillness. It was as small as a speck of dust, hidden behind the folds of twisted space. That was the heart of the storm.

  “I found it,” Fitran declared, triumph threading through his voice.

  “Found what—” Shigure no Kami stammered, a hint of uncertainty creeping into his tone.

  “Your zero point.”

  Fitran stood firm, not swinging his sword. He didn’t unleash a massive surge of energy. Instead, he whispered an incantation, a command directed toward the fabric of reality that lay under his authority.

  "Void Equation: Absolute Zero."

  In an instant, all motion within a hundred meter radius was halted completely. This phenomenon, however, differed from his previous applications. This time, Fitran concentrated every ounce of his magical computation on a singular mathematical point he had designated as the core of Shigure no Kami.

  The temperature at that point plummeted beyond the physical limits permitted by the universe. No longer did the atoms dance; even the very concept of 'movement' was erased from that coordinate.

  The glass storm that had roared with ferocity moments ago now froze mid air. The sharp shards of glass transformed into lifeless decorations, suspended in the emptiness of space. Where once there was an uncontrollable whirlpool of energy, Shigure no Kami was now ensnared in a rigid form. Black ice—ice born from the absence of energy—began to creep from its center.

  "N-no... this can’t be happening..." Shigure’s voice struggled through a thick haze, his words distorted by the loss of thermal energy. "How could you... freeze... time... within the void..."

  "I didn't freeze time," Fitran declared, stepping cautiously toward the petrified entity. His voice echoed through the silence, steady but tinged with an undercurrent of urgency. "I merely restored your kinetic energy to absolute zero. In the Void Equation, stationary variables have no impact on the final outcome. You no longer possess functional existence."

  With a trembling hand, Fitran touched the frozen core, his fingertips brushing against the icy surface. A chill ran through him, not just from the frigid contact but from the gravity of what he was doing.

  "The elimination process begins now," he murmured, steeling his resolve. An unsettling calm surrounded him as he initiated the procedure.

  Then came the sound—a barely audible thrum, akin to the snapping of a fragile needle—

  "The storm's final breath didn't emerge as air but as a deafening static frequency. On the brink of collapse, Shigure's fractured visage loomed closer to Fitran's visual sensor, uttering his last curse.

  "You may be able to freeze the storm, Architect... but you cannot freeze the hunger that is to come. My next brother will not merely cut your skin—he will devour your emptiness until you crawl, begging for emotions to return!" said Shigure no Kami.

  Fitran stared at the ice fragments before him with unwavering determination in his black eyes. "Hunger is merely a matter of resource management. I will empty its belly permanently."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Followed by a sudden shattering. The entirety of Shigure no Kami fractured, shards of its once mighty form scattering like a burst of glass. What had threatened Fitran's life just moments before now crumbled to the ground as harmless ice dust.

  In that moment, the primordial entity vanished, absorbed back into one of the floating fragments of Kagutsuchi no Ura that hovered ominously in the air.

  Fitran stood resolute amidst the falling ice dust, the remnants swirling around him like a winter storm. His cloak hung in tatters, revealing fresh wounds etched into his arms, yet he bore no signs of pain. Instead, his gaze fixed upon the third fragment, now calm and glowing with a steady rhythm that seemed almost alive.

  "Analysis complete," he whispered, though the words hung heavy in the cold air. He wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his hand, the contrast of warm crimson against his chilled skin stark in the dim light. "Threat level of Shigure no Kami: High. Elimination method efficiency: Ninety eight percent. Mana consumption: Within tolerance limits.”

  As the frozen dust of Shigure finally began to settle, a true silence did not follow. Instead, the air over Yamato hummed with a restless, jagged energy. At the very center of the crater, a single shard of glass—darker, sharper, and more obsidian than the rest—remained suspended in the void. It refused to crumble or fall, vibrating with a frantic, metallic intensity.

  The shard began to sing. A thin, piercing resonance spilled from its surface, rising into a chime that sounded like thousands of cracked cathedral bells ringing in unison. Fitran narrowed his eyes, studying the unstable frequency as it rippled through the air.

  “The Singing Shard,” he murmured, his voice barely a breath.

  The sound swelled, but as it did, the texture of the voice shifted. It was no longer the wild, storm-bound howl of Shigure no Kami. Something heavier, something burdened with the terrifying weight of divine authority, began to emerge from the fragment. It was a voice that did not belong to the earth—a collective resonance from the Golden Heaven.

  “Architect,” the voice intoned. It was vast and solemn, echoing through the fractured sky like a funeral march. “You have extinguished our storm. But in your arrogance, you have carved a permanent scar upon the very canvas of the cosmos.”

  The shard pulsed with a dim, sickly gold light.

  “Your Void is a wound in the center of our stars,” the voice continued, the sound vibrating in Fitran’s marrow. “And now… the gods have begun to look toward your darkness.”

  In that exact moment, the thin cut across Fitran’s cheek—the one left by the storm's glass—flared with a violent, agonizing heat. A sickly, venomous gold light began to seep from the opening, dripping down his jaw like molten poison.

  The injury had transitioned. It was no longer a simple tear in the flesh; it had crystallized into a Lingering Causal Curse. Shigure was gone, but the fate of pain Fitran had accepted to track the storm was now a permanent fixture of his reality. The heavens had seized that specific moment of vulnerability and rewritten it into a constant. The wound would never close. It would bleed eternally—a brand declaring that the eyes of the Golden Heaven were now fixed firmly upon him.

  Fitran felt the curse burrow deep into his existence, a hook driven into the very center of his being. Something inside his mind shuddered and snapped.

  A memory vanished.

  The specific, brilliant blue of a summer sky from his childhood—a color he had once found endless and comforting—faded instantly. It was erased from his thoughts, sacrificed as fuel to hold the agonizing pressure of the curse at bay. For a brief second, the world felt perceptibly dimmer, a shade of beauty stripped forever from his internal palette.

  But Fitran did not flinch. He didn't even reach up to touch the golden blood.

  “Let them watch,” he answered, his voice hoarse but steady.

  He lifted his gaze, his black eye reflecting the ominous glow of the Singing Shard with a quiet, terrifying defiance.

  “The closer they look,” he continued, “the easier it will be for this Void to swallow them whole.”

  The shard rang out one last time—a fractured, ominous bell tolling across the dead land of Yamato. And somewhere far beyond the broken sky, in the unreachable, gilded halls of the Golden Heaven, something ancient and terrible turned its gaze toward the Architect of Ruin.

  However, as he uttered the word tolerance, the seal in his eyes cracked slowly. An extraordinary chill pierced his central nerves. This time, the price was higher. Fitran tried to recall the tone of Inari's laughter, the voice that had been the anchor of his sanity. Yet, that voice now felt distant, distorted, and ultimately vanished like smoke blown away by a storm.

  He knew he had once loved that voice, but he could no longer hear it in his mind. The sigil on his arm dimmed to the point of near invisibility, signaling that the reserve of his soul's essence was approaching a critical point.

  He recalled Inari for a fleeting moment. In the midst of the storm, there had been a split second where he imagined how she would react upon witnessing him allowing himself to be cut for the sake of a calculation. Inari would surely cry. She would scold Fitran for his recklessness. She would gently touch the wound with her soft hands and whisper illogical words about 'bravery.'

  Fitran clenched his fists. Suddenly, Fitran's right eye, colored crimson, glowed with a painful light. Before him, the air did not refract artificial light; instead, it birthed an Akashic Echo. This was not merely a memory, but a fragment of Inari's soul harmonized with the frequency of Kagutsuchi's fragment at the altar, a reflection of a destiny drawn from the depths of dimension by the resonance of shared suffering. The figure of Inari appeared not as data, but as a poetic ghost trapped between 'what once was' and 'what will never return.'

  "You’re not here to protect me, Inari," Fitran murmured to the emptiness around him. "And I no longer need protection. I am the architect of this ruin. Every wound is proof that the Golden Paradise has failed to uphold its order."

  Suddenly, Fitran's right eye, the color of crimson, twitched erratically. A holographic projection, visible only to him, emerged before him—a transparent figure of Inari, dressed in pure white but surrounded by thick black fog. This was not merely a memory; it was a synchronization of the remnants of a soul trapped within the frequencies of Kagutsuchi.

  "Fitran..." whispered the figure, its voice sounding like a shattered bell. "In this endless darkness, I dream. I see a man with a heart made of emptiness, tearing stars from the sky just to illuminate my path. I see you, Fitran... The architect who will bring down heaven to take me home."

  Fitran did not turn away; instead, his trembling hand clenched tightly, causing his nails to dig into his palm. "Your dream is a data transmission error, Inari. I did not come to bring you back to a place that no longer exists. I came to ensure that no one else can harm you by erasing the entire system that created that pain."

  "But you are bleeding," Inari extended her shadowy hand, trying to touch the wound on Fitran's cheek; however, her hand dissipated into particles of light as it drew closer. "In my prophecy, you are the savior. Yet in your eyes... I only see the destruction you call love."

  "Love is the variable that causes this system to collapse," Fitran replied, his voice trembling for a moment before returning to its cold and detached tone. "I will complete this calculation, Inari. Even if I have to erase myself from history to stop your crying."

  The projection faded, leaving a void colder than Absolute Zero. Fitran closed his eyes, forcing his mental circuits to perform a hard reset on his emotions.

  The wind in Yamato had returned to a dead calm. Fitran turned his gaze toward his emergency altar. There were still five shards to be subdued; five more manifestations of the gods' failures that he had to face one by one before he could initiate his Endgame.

  "Fourth shard," Fitran said, re focusing his eyes on the task ahead. "Show me the form of hunger wrought by the greed of heaven."

  He stepped forward, traversing the remnants of black ice that slowly dissipated under his feet. Beneath the lifeless moon, the Architect of Void continued his solitary march, the only entity still moving in a world that should have long ceased to spin.

  The death of Shigure no Kami was merely another line of code fixed within the rebellion's algorithm. The true tragedy had yet to unfold, and Fitran was acutely aware of this reality. He was not seeking safety; he was pursuing an absolute resolution.