Chapter 339 Volume V - Chapter 57: An Abnormal Place
This time... I died, didn't I?
Using Mana Ascension for so long, trying to control an atmosphere full of mana must have absolutely killed me.
But... I can think, doesn't that mean I'm not actually dead?
What happened last time? I need to think...
I remember seeing the wolf where Lucia and Sue were hiding, I activated my mastery and my ascension skill. Then I threw my spear toward the wolf. And then... I interacted with all the mana in the atmosphere, I tried to wipe all the wolves off the face of the planet, and I would have succeeded... but one of them stopped me.
The leader of the wolves, right? It must have been their leader to be that big, to give off an aura so much more frightening than the others.
But... not only that. That wolf was not simply their 'leader'. Because that wolf communicated with me. No, it didn't talk to me, but... it simply communicated. When I looked into its glowing eyes, it seemed to... speak to my mind.
It was a creature that could think, no matter how primitive. All the wolves it led were like that. They had realized that with the power I had gained through my skill and the awakening of mana in the atmosphere, I could actually kill each of them, so it had proposed a duel.
If it would kill me, it would win. Or I would kill it and win.
And then we fought. It wasn't a very hard fight. With all that atmospheric mana at my disposal, it was really easy. I would even say it was one-sided.
And then what happened? I remember the wolves making way for me, I remember going to Lucia and Sue. I was sure the wolves wouldn't hurt us, would even protect us, so I lifted the rock over them.
Then... darkness, nothing.
But... if I'm dead, what is this place? And if I'm not dead... again, where is this place?
I tried to look around, and I succeeded. Strangely enough, I had a body, and it wasn't a spiritual body. I could feel, I had arms and legs. I could walk.
It was a black place where I was, there was nothing but me.
My eyebrows furrowed, a feeling of uneasiness came over me.
This is not a normal situation. Something is wrong... absolutely wrong. I shouldn't be here.
Reflexively, I walked slowly toward the void, took a few steps, but once again... nothing happened. My footsteps made no sound, it was as if I was walking on a floor that never made a sound.
It took me a minute of walking without doing anything to realize that I was going nowhere. There was literally nothing here, just me and... darkness.
Finally, I closed my eyes. I put my senses in the background one by one, I wanted to make sure that there was really nothing but myself in this huge space, so I put all my focus on something completely different from my five senses, on mana.
My heartbeat slowed down, accompanied by my second heart. The flow of mana in my body calmed down. Then... I shifted my focus outward from my own mana.
There was not only darkness here. Just as I had predicted, there was also mana. And... it had a flow. An abnormal flow. It was not random, as it should normally be. On the contrary... it had a pattern. None of the streams of mana twisted and collided with each other, did not scatter. On the contrary... they were in harmony with each other, in perfect order. As if... as if there was something controlling them, even.
The moment that last sentence crossed my mind, I don't know why... a strange silence fell over me. It was so strange that I accidentally lost focus, all my senses came back to me quickly and... I realized what had happened.
My eyes slowly opened of their own accord and I looked out into the darkness. It was no different from before, just endless darkness. But... it was also different from a few minutes ago.
There is something. Something in the direction I was looking. It was a fleeting moment, yes, but I felt it. Something... and something definitely not normal... looked in my direction. I'm sure of it.
Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. It might not make sense to call out to something that I can only feel and that doesn't make me feel good when I feel it, when it's silently watching me...
But is there anything else I can do?
"Hello...?"
My voice echoed and echoed and echoed through the darkness. I heard this one word so many times that for a moment I thought it would go on forever, but eventually, after a while, it stopped.
"I... I know you're there."
I continued to stare at a single point, never taking my eyes off it, never moving a muscle, just waiting.
After about ten seconds of silence, which felt like an eternity... a tiny white dot appeared where I was looking out of nowhere.
At first, I was surprised. Of all the things I expected to happen, the appearance of a simple, tiny white dot was definitely not one of them. But then I noticed something different. The white dot was... growing. It was slow, a little hard to notice, but it was definitely growing.
When I squinted slightly and focused on the dot... my eyes suddenly widened.
No, the dot is not growing... it's getting closer to me!
And the moment I realized this fact... I felt that presence again, I felt it looking toward me again. But... it was very different from the previous split second of awareness.
Everything froze except for the white dot that continued to approach me. I couldn't move a muscle, I couldn't even move my eyes, I couldn't even breathe, as if an unstoppable force had me in the palm of its hand.
It was overwhelming, powerful. It was... much stronger than me. Just feeling its presence made me dizzy.
I tried to open my mouth, to say something, but no sound came out, my lips refused to part. The only sound I could make was something strange that sounded incomprehensible.
The white dot kept growing, kept getting closer to me. My eyes were on it, I couldn't look at anything else. But... after a short time, I calmed down a little bit, even if I didn't want to.
Because the white dot, or rather an orb... came up to me and stopped. It wasn't too big, it didn't look like it was going to crush me. It was just... a white orb the size of my fist.
Shortly after it stopped in front of me, the orb trembled. The absolute white it emitted began to fade slightly, and a motif appeared on it. It was a familiar motif, as if... I had seen it before.
Soon, the motif around the orb shimmered with a golden glow, beams of light appeared on it and rose upward. But it did not stretch into infinity. Rather, it kept rising about a meter from where it was. The beams of light began to merge where they stopped, forming a shape... or rather a sentence.
An inscription appeared in front of me, just like the motifs on the orb. I had no idea what it said, what it meant... it was completely unknown. But as I continued to look at the writing, a strange feeling came over me.
It was a feeling I couldn't make sense of. It was literally... strange. But I wanted to give myself over to this feeling, it was also a magical feeling.
So... I did as I felt... I gave myself to this feeling that was growing inside me, I didn't think about anything, there was nothing else I could do.
But the moment I did so... I also felt the power growing inside me. My eyes widened as I felt my normally not very long hair fall over my shoulders and saw the golden runes running along my skin.
I tried to deactivate my skill. Using it one more time... this time it could actually lead to my death. I couldn't risk it, but... I couldn't do anything, as if my control over it had been completely taken away.
But after a while, I realized to myself that I didn't need to.
I didn't have that uncomfortable feeling whenever I used my skill. It didn't feel like someone was squeezing my heart in the palm of their hand. My body... it wasn't tearing itself apart.
No, nothing was happening to my body. I was... I was completely free to use my skill.
But I couldn't think too much about it. Because the golden runic writing on my arms caught my attention again. And my eyes widened once again.
The motifs on the orb... that's why they felt familiar. They were very similar, if not identical, to the motifs that surrounded me when I used my ascension skill.
Actually, it wasn't just that. Now when I pushed my memory a little, when I made the similarity between the two things... I remembered another similarity.
The disk I took from Lithoa's house that brought me to this dungeon... the motifs on it were just like these.
I swallowed involuntarily, turning my eyes back to the writing on the white orb. When I focused on them... this time they didn't feel as foreign as before. On the contrary, they were quite familiar. It was as if I had been seeing them for years.
But more importantly... even though I still couldn't read them, I could understand what they were saying.
Find me, it said. And it wasn't a normal 'find me'. The words were intricate, the curves were hard, as if they were written by someone who couldn't hold a pen properly. As if... as if the person who wrote it was in unimaginable pain.
Soon after I understood what the writing was saying and realized this fact, the writing turned to dust and disappeared, and a new one appeared in its place.
Come toward the mountains, this one said.
But no more writing appeared after that. On the contrary, this whole dark place... suddenly trembled violently. Everything came crashing together before I realized what was happening. All my senses went dark again, my consciousness slipped through my fingers.
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