** Two weeks had passed.
Or the equivalent of that in here: time seemed to drag on, spiral, as if the very world was turning slowly and endlessly. I had remained disciplined. No distractions. No detours.
With every breath, I drew in the spatial energy that pulsed through the thin air of this insane world.
With every heartbeat, my prana core was fed, spark by spark.
Now, I stood at the threshold.
Sitting atop the translucent sphere where the serpent still lay motionless, as if frozen in time, my breathing grew heavier. The energy built up in my core with growing pressure, as if the entire universe was being compressed into a single point inside me.
And then, everything spilled over.
Saturation began.
My energy channels were erupting, to the point of affecting my blood vessels, which boiled like lava.
Literally.
The energy surged in bursts, escaping the core and setting my internal pathways ablaze. I felt my blood turn into a molten mixture of fire and thunder. It was as if every capillary was trying to carry a star.
My skin began to peel.
Slowly, painfully. Red and golden flakes came off like ashes in a silent breeze. But even before the flesh beneath was fully exposed, new skin began to emerge—firmer, more elastic, with a texture almost mineral. As if it were the shell of something newly forged.
Teeth.
They cracked under the force I was clenching my jaw.
Snapped with an audible crunch, like shattered glass. The pain was instant, searing, but within seconds, bone sprouts pushed through my gums—straighter, stronger. Each new tooth pulsed with vital energy.
Bones also broke and rebuilt themselves.
My spine groaned, my shoulders popped. It was as if my skeleton were being replaced by a purer version of itself. Dense. Resilient. Like flexible obsidian.
And then came the stretch.
I felt every tendon extend, every joint adjust.
But each of them was an eternity of pain and adaptation. Muscles creaked, ligaments strained. My body was reforming, like a serpent shedding its skin or an ancient vase being broken and reforged with molten gold.
In the soul, it was as if a silent symphony were playing.
My spiritual presence expanded. The prana core, now saturated, pulsed with its own light—a living, blazing sphere at the center of my being.
And within my inner world, something turned.
Slowly, yes.
But enough to generate a spiritual shockwave that surged through my entire body like an eternal tidal wave.
My mind cleared, as though a fog had been lifted.
And I realized—there was still time. Two weeks left inside this world before Seraphine would be waiting for me on the other side.
The second challenge awaited me: the staircase that stretched into infinity, trembling with dimensional rifts, twisting the laws of physics.
**
The cold mountain wind lashed her face once again, but Seraphine barely felt it.
She was pale, nearly translucent, with cracked lips and wrists marked by the hundreds of drops she had offered to the chalice. Her eyes, once vibrant, now carried the dull weight of someone trapped between exhaustion and eternal vigilance.
Dórian remained unmoving at her side, his chest rising and falling with a faint rhythm. Aeloria and Dália were also still, as if the dungeon had stolen even their dreams.
But then, something shifted.
The sky above the fifth mountain trembled, like a curtain being pulled back by invisible hands. The rocks twisted, the shadows folded in silence, and the entire mountain began to vanish, swallowed by rifts the size of the horizon.
Seraphine lifted her eyes, her heart tightening.
And in that moment, she felt it.
A wave of raw prana swept across the peak like warm breeze, brushing against her skin like the heat of a fireplace in deep winter. It was unlike any energy she had felt before, as if the world itself had, for a moment, breathed in sync with someone.
The hairs on her neck stood on end.
And then, her eyes sparkled.
A faint thread of hope shimmered there, between pain and fear. She clutched the chalice with trembling fingers, holding it to her chest.
"...You're coming back," she murmured, her voice hoarse but firm.
**
The staircase wasn't meant to be climbed.
It was a trap of paradoxes, shaped from fragments of floating black wall, as if the structure itself teetered on the brink of collapse. Each step floated in the absolute void, and between them, fractures in space flickered like frozen lightning, stretching in impossible geometries.
I approached the first step with caution, my body still throbbing from the recent cultivation. The air was thick with energy, and though windless, the world hissed as if reality itself were being sliced open.
The fractures weren't random. I could see that now.
I studied one closely—a fine, translucent line that distorted everything around it like broken glass. I watched it quiver slightly. A pattern. Then another line, intersecting it at a similar angle.
"If two rifts collide on the same vector… would the collapse cancel out?"
It was a hypothesis. I called it the equal counterpoint. If space tore on one side, perhaps a second rift on the same axis could stabilize it, even for a moment. A balancing act between tears in the fabric of the world.
I had to try.
I raised my hand, taking a deep breath. I focused spatial energy at my fingertips and, with a subtle motion, created a controlled rift, mirroring the angle of the one before me.
The air trembled.
The two rifts collided and for an instant, there was silence.
Space stabilized, and the first step became safe.
One step.
First step, conquered.
I kept going.
Another rift ahead. I applied the same principle, adjusting angles, intensity. A dance between forces vying to exist on the same plane.
Second step, secured.
Each new step demanded greater precision. The energy of the place didn't help—it pulsed, vibrated, made my own control waver. As I climbed, the rifts became more aggressive, alive, almost aware.
Third step. Fourth.
On the fifth… I failed.
The rift I tried to create wavered at the wrong angle. It didn't cancel. It amplified.
And then everything around me imploded.
**
I woke up in a white, barren plain covered in bones.
Pale sky. No sound. No wind.
Just bones, piled up to the horizon.
And then they began to move.
Skulls turned. Jaws creaked. Bones rattled. A dry crack rippled through the ground like thunder made of splinters.
From the center of the plain, hundreds of skeletons rose in unison, eyes glowing with a dead blue light.
I ran. But they ran too.
A flash.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM"
The sound was like something breaking the sound barrier—a bone pierced the ground beside me, blowing the earth into a flaming crater.
"What the fuck is this!" I shouted, exasperated.
An endless rain of bones came down on me. It was like a missile strike—wherever they hit, everything exploded.
One bone burst near me, ricocheting another that struck my leg.
The pain was instant, sharp, incandescent. I fell to my side, trying to stifle the scream, hot blood spilling over the cold bones. The skeletons closed in. Each step a sentence.
"A rift—I need a rift…!"
I dragged myself. The world spun, bone shots kept coming, tearing through ground, air, everything.
Then I saw it.
Beneath a mountain of bones, barely noticeable—a ripple in space. A strange reflection. A natural, unstable rift.
Without hesitation, I dove in.
Reality shattered like glass under pressure.
And I woke up again, gasping, on my knees, on the first step of the staircase.
My leg still throbbed. But it was whole.
I lifted my face. The dark void of the staircase still waited for me.
** Three days later. Thirty-first step.
"Oh, of course... again? Why not an army of specters, or a storm of blood? No. This time it's a damn dragon-serpent vomiting a damn hellfire on top of me!" I shouted to no one as I ran down the mountain, gasping, my ribs aching with every step.
The sky was red. A thick curtain of smoke covered half the horizon. Above me, the monster cut through the air like a living spear, its wings far too long for its body, its torso spiraled like a serpent from ancient myths.
The breath came.
A beam of purple fire, thick as a molten river, roared from the sky with heat so intense it melted the ground beneath my feet. I rolled to the side and, with my hand extended, tore through space with pure intent.
I swept my hand with nearly all the energy I had left, creating the longest rift I could manage.
The rift appeared: a curved blade in the air, translucent, as if the very world had been carved by a divine knife.
The fire struck the rift… and ricocheted.
The dragon screamed.
The flame spiraled back in reverse, crashing into its neck and burning off half its face. Scales exploded, flesh melted, and the beast writhed through the sky, disoriented.
But I didn't wait.
I ran.
The terrain wasn't solid ground—it was a field of ancient death, fossilized corpses piled for millennia, compacted by eternity. Bones cracked under my feet. Decomposed bodies, corroded armor, limbs that still bore rings on their fingers, crowns and fallen masks—kings, mages, fallen gods? Who knew.
With every step, the wounds on my body throbbed. My right leg was bandaged with torn pieces of my own tunic, soaked in blood. My left shoulder burned—result of a direct impact back on the twenty-seventh step. My side had been stitched together with spatial thread, sealed hastily to stop it from splitting open again.
Three days of this... three damn days running from this fire-spitting lizard.
The only comfort was that time seemed to stop whenever I was inside those damned rifts.
So far, thirty-one steps. I'd advanced quickly in the beginning—up to the twentieth with only two mistakes. But from then on, each new step felt like it spat my soul into realities worse than the last.
I failed on the twenty-first. Then the twenty-second. Again. And again.
And now... the winged serpent.
The ground shook. The dragon descended, howling in pain, spitting fire blindly, turning the world into black flames. Corpses ignited all around me, making it rain human ashes.
That's when I saw a narrow tunnel, half-hidden beneath an old throne made from giant vertebrae.
I felt the distortion.
A rift.
With my last ounce of strength, I tore the air before me to clear a path, compressed my steps, and dove into the hole with surgical precision.
The world shattered.
The heat vanished. The smoke dispersed. The dragon let out one last roar before disappearing, like a badly digested nightmare.
I returned to the staircase.
Bleeding. Shaking. With scorched skin on my shoulder and my chest full of bruises.
But still alive.
"DAMN IT!" I shouted, staring at the cursed rift I still had no idea how to solve.