Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1401: The Bottomless Land

A farce. Just as I suspected.

Hackzord floated above the northern sea and stared at nothing in particular.

For several days he had followed the coastline of the Land of Dawn, searching hundreds of kilometers in each direction—both ends of the continent’s ridge, the ranges that flanked it, every shelf and inlet the terrain offered. The letter had been sparse on specifics, so he had been thorough, methodical, unwilling to miss what might be disguised as ordinary geography. He had stopped only when he reached the sea of clouds connecting to the Blackstone region. Even then he’d circled back twice.

There was no island.

In open ocean, at sufficient altitude, a thousand miles of horizon could be read at a glance. If an island existed, anyone who had traveled the route between Blackstone and the Land of Dawn would have noted it centuries ago. The thing simply was not there.

His fists tightened.

Damned humans. They deceived the Sky Lord himself—and they used Valkries’ name to do it. That is the piece I cannot forgive. Nightmare Lord would not betray the race; betrayal was not her nature. Which meant the humans had taken her memories somehow, extracted what they needed and forged the letter from what they found. Whatever Witches were capable of, they had apparently added memory-theft to the list. And what that implied about Valkries’ current condition—

He wrenched a Distortion Door open and stepped onto the ocean’s surface.

“Bottomless Land! Realm of Mind!” His voice broke against the horizon, swallowed by the wind before it could reach anything. “All of it was nonsense! How could the land of deities appear in some mediocre stretch of open water—I should have known from the beginning!” He was shouting at the waves now, which was undignified and also necessary. “I had only to activate the Deity of Gods and wipe the humans out—instead I took the risk of infiltrating the Realm of Mind, and now a Senior Lord has become a prop in a human scheme, and the King suspects me besides. I am an absolute fool!”

“This ploy, I will—!”

He stopped.

He was standing on clear water. He had been. The ocean surface reflected sky and cloud with that particular winter sharpness. But now, without any transition he could identify, the water beneath his feet was hazy, the reflection gone. White mist pressed in from every direction, reducing visibility to a few dozen paces at most.

When did this appear?

He stepped back. The mist vanished. The ocean was clear again in every direction. He turned: nothing. Tranquil water, grey sky, no obstructions.

The anger in his chest went out like a flame meeting wet stone.

In its place: a cold and very precise attention.

This area is not far from either the Land of Dawn or the Blackstone region. Demons have traveled this route for centuries. No one ever noticed this.

He activated his ability and stepped back into the mist.

Caution, this time. The shouting was finished.

The dense moisture closed around him immediately, reducing the world to a radius of grey. He descended slowly and moved forward with every sense extended to its limit. After a short while, a shape materialized ahead—dark against the white, substantial, large enough that it took him a moment to assess the scale.

An island. Not small.

He landed at the edge, grass cool and springy under his feet.

Is this—what Valkries wrote about?

Nothing greeted him. He couldn’t see past the mist in any direction. He decided to move inward on foot; he had replenished his Red Mist supply recently, and the supply line through the ridge was well-maintained. The odds of an accident were low.

After a few hundred paces the landscape changed.

Stone tablets rose from the grass, at first scattered, then increasing in density the further he walked. Man-made, clearly—and not recently abandoned. The inscriptions on the few he stopped to examine were in no language he recognized, which meant something. Demons kept records. If this had been a demon installation at any point in the past few hundred years, the script would be familiar.

“Hello.”

Every hair on his body stood up simultaneously.

He was through a Distortion Door and airborne before the word had fully registered, positioned to strike, scanning the ground below.

The speaker had not moved. Had not, apparently, intended to attack at all.

She was a demon.

From her appearance—the clarity of her features, the evenness of her form—she was at least a higher ascendant, perhaps further along than that. But the Primal Demon’s roughness was entirely absent; she had evolved past the stage where the body’s power announced itself through bulk or distortion. She wore light white cotton robes and was barefoot on the grass, both hands clasped behind her back. Her manner was calm in the particular way that implies no need for defenses, and she lacked entirely the bearing that Senior Lords carried like a garment.

Hackzord maintained his altitude. “I am the Senior Sky Lord. Who are you? When did you arrive here?” A beat. “And this place has a Red Mist supply?”

She tilted her head and smiled, the expression natural rather than performed. “I hold only the name of Guardian. As for how long I have been here—it has been so long that I cannot remember.”

Guardian. He searched his memory. No higher ascendant by that name. And the claim of not remembering—impossible, by any demon’s reckoning. The First Battle of Divine Will hadn’t even reached the Land of Dawn’s northern coast. There was no timeframe in which a single demon could have been isolated on this island long enough to lose track of the years.

“You say you are not one of us,” Hackzord said carefully. “You say you do not decide your own appearance. That is not something I understand.”

“I know.” Her voice carried no impatience. “The truth is still the truth, whether it is understood or not.”

If she is not one of us, she may be an enemy. He also noted: no helmet, no breathing apparatus, and no apparent discomfort despite being outside the Red Mist. Her own statement confirmed it—she was not demon-kind, or at least not in the way that word usually applied.

“Is this the Bottomless Land? Where is the Realm of Mind?”

Guardian shook her head gently. “This is a bridge. It opens only with a key.”

“What key?”

She paused, as if sorting through concepts, selecting the right vocabulary. “In your race’s terms—a complete legacy.”

The revelation hit him like cold water. When all the legacy shards become one, the path to the Origin of Magic appears. Every demon knew this. It was not knowledge but inheritance, passed through the Birth Tower over generations. The race had built the entire shape of the war around it.

Whether she calls it a bridge or a path, the meaning is the same.

His mind moved faster than he could follow. “Can you show me—the bridge?”

She hesitated. Glanced north. “I can. But we must be quick. There is not much time.”

He followed her for perhaps a minute. Then the ground opened.

A pit. Vast and perfectly round, dropping into darkness that swallowed his vision before it reached a bottom.

“This,” he said slowly, “is the bridge?”

“Yes. But you cannot use it—you do not have the key. Without the key, you cannot even see what it truly is.”

He stared at it.

What bridge. What path. The race’s sacred words have led me to a sinkhole.

And yet the name fit. Bottomless Land. He had to grant that much.

So the Realm of Mind is at the bottom of this pit?

He had no intention of jumping in to find out. ‘Bottomless’ was a description, not a metaphor. He might fly back up from whatever lay below—or he might not.

But there was another way to verify it.

He drew a five-colored magic stone from his possession.

The underground civilization’s research had established that these stones could reflect the magic power signature of an Awakened and reveal its connection to the Origin. If this place was genuinely where all life converged and ceased—if the Bottomless Land was truly that—it could not be without trace.

Hackzord raised the stone to his eye.

The light that hit him was so absolute that for a moment he lost the ability to process it. Not one beam—countless beams, arriving from every direction, from every point of the compass and above and below, all converging at the mouth of the pit before him and plunging downward in a single column so dense with brightness it looked white. The spreading arms of light above, fanning outward in all directions, formed a canopy that blotted sky and distance. The trunk descended into the dark with a force he felt in his chest rather than saw with his eyes.

He lowered the stone.

He had no framework for what he had just witnessed. He stood in the mist and breathed, and something moved in him that was not a thought—something older than thought, something that lived below the layer where language operated.

Whatever this is—it is real. And it is beyond anything I imagined.

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