Chapter 72: The Starless Edge

A swarm of humanoid creatures, their bodies mapped with glowing, molten veins and stark wings of light-fire, hovered in the dark ocean.

Beam after beam of searing light blasted toward an isolated geometric cube suspended in the water, but every shot passed clean through it as if it occupied a completely different reality.

Then, an alpha creature—noticeably larger and more terrifying than the rest—slid to the front of the pack. It pulled back its jaw and unleashed a torrent of light-fire twice the size of the previous strikes.

BOOM!

The massive shockwave hit the cube square-side, driving it violently downward toward the abyssal trench.

The sheer force shattered the delicate spatial equilibrium Sen had maintained, destabilizing the pocket. In a fraction of a second, the swarm closed in, descending upon the cube like piranhas.

Scraping, tearing sounds echoed from the exterior as dozens of claws clawed desperately at the barrier.

The cube held firm against their physical assault, leaving only shallow, frictional scuffs across its translucent faces.

Before the monsters could back off, the giant creature fired a second, concentrated flash.

CRACK.

The beam slammed directly into the side of the cube, right as it hurtled closer to the massive, glowing dome on the ocean floor. A spider-web network of fractures spidered out across the impacted surface, growing wider by the millimeter.

Inside the cube, Sen was tossed violently like a ragdoll, slamming from side to side against the unyielding spatial walls as the shockwaves rippled through his cube.

"Agh... damn it, that hurts," Sen groaned, his voice hitching as he cradled his left arm—the one that had taken the brunt of the impacts.

He pulled himself up, wiping blood from his chin, and looked up at the cube’s walls. One or two more beams of that magnitude, and the cube would shatter entirely.

Sen looked back down at the floating hilt humming in the center of the pocket. Though the entire cube was the manifested blade, the hilt served as the absolute anchor of control. He let out a long, weary sigh.

As he stared at the hilt, the memory flickered uninvited into his mind once more: his younger sister standing in the doorway, her small hands tugging at his coat, telling him to come back home safe.

He knew what she meant.

He looked around the small, protective geometry of the cube. This was absolute power—and the cursed blade was using it to keep him alive. But the power of the Starless Edge demanded an agonizing toll.

A system window hovered over the floating hilt, displaying the weapon’s true profile:

[ WEAPON / ITEM ]

Name: Starless Edge

Type: Saintess Tier 3 Spatial Blade

Description: A blade forged not of steel, but of fractured space. It sits suspended in distinct, floating shards. It yields no physical force, bound only by the wielder’s intent.

Sen didn’t care about the combat stats or the spatial geometry. His eyes dropped straight down to the warning label at the bottom, the mere sight of which made his blood run cold:

[ ASTRAL BURDEN ]

Erosion of the Self: The weapon exacts its price directly from the wielder’s identity. With prolonged use, personal memories dissolve. Names fade. Faces of loved ones become those of complete strangers, until even the wielder’s own reflection becomes entirely alien.

Sen let out a slow, heavy breath, realizing he had been holding it.

As the burden pressed against the edges of his mind, another fragmented memory flashed briefly behind his eyes—the exact moment the system had whispered this cruel truth to him after he cleared his first trial.

At first, the warning had felt like little more than a piece of annoying administrative red tape—just another system prompt to click away. But lately, that "warning" was turning into a persistent, grinding nuisance.

Sen remembered standing alone in the vast, quiet expanse of the Astral Void—a closed world made of endless starlight and grey dust—when the system message had first etched itself directly into his consciousness: Every power you wield comes with a price. Your astral burden has been placed upon your tether.

When he’d first received the burden, he hadn’t been angry. Not really. Back when he was just an Awakened, dealing with the cost of a power source was simple: you just made sure you held the right weapon on hand to offset the strain. It was all a matter of gear management.

But then he had broken through to become a Resonant.

That was when things got complicated. He learned he could manipulate space itself, but the breakthrough hadn’t filled him with joy. In truth, he had been furious, dragged kicking and screaming into attempting the brutal trials simply because his mother was a woman who took "no" for an answer from absolutely no one.

Only after achieving resonance did he realize the catch of his burden: to use spatial manipulation freely without tearing your own nervous system apart, you needed extraordinarily high-tier weapons to anchor the technique. And because Resonant contractors forge a metaphysical tether to their contracted being, the system’s burden had locked directly onto that tether.

It wasn’t that Sen couldn’t handle it. He didn’t particularly mind the abstract weight of it all. But a burden was still a burden—heavy, inconvenient, and entirely inescapable. You just lived with it, the same way you lived with bad weather or a chronic ache in your joints.

And a burden was just a burden. But things had undeniably gotten harder for Sen.

If he wanted to use his power to its absolute limit—like tearing open a stable spatial rift for long-distance transit—he needed a weapon that could withstand nearly all of his astral energy without shattering. Space manipulation demanded an immense vessel.

Of course, Sen wasn’t the type to go looking for a fight unless he absolutely had to, so for a long time, he barely felt the weight of the restriction at all.

That is, until he was forced through the grueling trials to become an Eclipser.

During that trial, Sen had been completely outmatched in every imaginable way. He had only survived and passed because he hadn’t been the only one challenging the gauntlet, and because he possessed a stubborn, lazy kind of creativity when his life was genuinely on the line. But that was when the hidden strain of his burden truly reared its head.

An average Eclipser should have been capable of manipulating entire expanses of space at a whim; Eclipser-rank contractors were terrifyingly powerful entities.

Yet, to unlock that true scale of power, he needed a spatial blade capable of channeling it—and standard Eclipse-rank blades simply couldn’t handle the load, no matter the tier. Compounding the problem, Tier 5 through Tier 7 spatial weapons were virtually impossible to find, let alone forge.

That desperate bottleneck was precisely why his mother had eventually tracked down and secured a Saintess Tier 3 blade for him.

Sen let out one final, heavy breath, his eyes fixed on the floating hilt before him.

Ps: Sen’s Astral Burden is Anchor’s Torment