The journey back was strangely peaceful. Following the river's course, with the pink-eyed cat nestled on his shoulders like a peculiar sentinel, Indra expected ambushes, distant howls, the slightest sign of danger. But nothing came.
The Vallencourt Forest, once a pulsating nightmare of threats, seemed to have breathed its last sigh. The Rings of Ecstasy were now lifeless, like charcoal after a great fire. The silence was profound, broken only by the constant sound of running water and the occasional rustle of leaves under his feet.
It was then that Indra perceived a new facet of his power. Focusing his attention, a new awareness awoke within him—not through his eyes or ears, but through the very energy now circulating in his core. It was Energy Sense, an innate ability every Paranormal awakens upon Graduating.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Instead of darkness, a new dimension opened. His consciousness expanded, releasing microscopic filaments of his Qi into the environment. They spread like invisible spiderwebs, touching everything within a radius of about fifty meters. He felt the moisture on the stones, the tiny life of insects under the earth, the sap flowing slowly in the trees. And, crucially, he felt the absence—the absence of the chaotic, predatory energy signatures of the creatures that once infested the place. The territory was empty. Clean. As if a great cosmic cleaning had swept away the corruption.
The cat on his shoulders purred softly, as if it too felt the unusual tranquility.
The tranquility, however, evaporated when he reached his destination.
The scene was one of pure devastation. The cave entrance, once hidden behind the waterfall's veil, was now exposed and unrecognizable. The ceiling had completely collapsed, turning the secret refuge into a chaotic pile of massive rocks. The waterfall water still fell, but now mixed with something else—the black, coagulated blood and viscera of the Lesser Creatures and Imps that hadn't escaped the collapse. The purple and deep red liquid trickled between the cracks in the stones, creating sinister streams that stained the riverbed. The air smelled of fresh water, metal, and death.
Indra stopped at the edge of the destruction, his heart heavy. That place had been his sanctuary, his place of discovery. And now it was a tomb.
But he wouldn't give up so easily. The Elven engravings of the Sword Dance were there. Perhaps, by some miracle, some had survived.
Entering what remained of the cave was a treacherous task. The terrain was a minefield of unstable stones and puddles of bloody water. Every step had to be calculated to avoid slipping on the viscous mixture or triggering another small landslide. The cat jumped from his shoulders, watching from a safe point with its attentive pink eyes.
Indra began the arduous work. Some stones were small, easy to move. Others, however, weighed hundreds of kilograms, requiring him to use Amplification in his arms to lift them, his newly developed muscles straining under the effort. The worst were the stones that were interlocked, forming tension arches; trying to move one meant risking making the entire pile collapse further.
His hands were soon dirty with earth, dried blood, and water. He turned over stone after stone, his hope dwindling with every empty or hopelessly cracked diamond-shaped fragment of wall he found.
The conclusion was inevitable. The Sword Dance was lost.
Most of the glyphs had been pulverized or cracked in ways that rendered their patterns incomprehensible. The few that survived were isolated, disconnected, like single words from a forgotten poem. A glyph here, showing a foot position; half a symbol there, suggesting the arc of a blade. Without the complete sequence, without the narrative flow of the 48 movements, they were unsolvable enigmas.
But Indra was no longer the same. Resignation gave way to determination. Something was better than nothing. He raised his wrist, activating the obsidian smartwatch. Carefully, he took pictures of every legible fragment he found, from every angle, meticulously documenting every clue chance had left him. After the Practical Exam, he would beg Sophie. She, with her vast resources and knowledge, might cross-reference these fragments with other Elven records, try to reconstruct part of the sequence. The technique was too precious to be simply abandoned.
It was while moving one last large stone, his mind already preparing to leave, that his fingers touched something different. It wasn't the rough, broken stone of the cave. It was smoother, colder, and covered by a thick layer of damp moss.
He wiped the surface with his hand, and a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran down his spine.
It was the stone. The sealing stone that guarded the entrance to the underground.
It seemed different. Before, it emanated an oppressive presence, a silent promise of contained horror. Now, it was just a rock. Heavy, yes, but inert. The forest's deafening silence, the absence of anomalies... it all made sense now. Whatever was down there, whatever was causing the corruption in Vallencourt, was gone. Or asleep. Or had fulfilled its purpose.
Indra stared at the stone, a spark of stubborn curiosity burning through the fatigue and disappointment. He hadn't been through all that to give up on the threshold of the greatest mystery of all.
"Since I've come this far..." he murmured to himself, his voice sounding monotone but with an underlying excitement. "...I might as well find out what's going on."
Without ceremony, he positioned himself, sank his feet into the soaked ground, and placed his hands on the cold edge of the stone. Amplification flowed into his limbs. The stone was immensely heavy—easily a ton or more—but for a Graduate, a newborn in power but a Graduate nonetheless, it was an obstacle, not an insurmountable barrier. With a grunt of effort, the muscles in his back and shoulders corded, and the stone pivoted heavily to the side with a deep track in the mud.
He waited for a trap, for a curse, for a jet of corrupt energy. Nothing happened.
The disappointment was a bitter draught. He had expected an ordeal, a final challenge that justified the seal. Instead, there was only a dark opening and a worn stone staircase plunging into the most absolute darkness he had ever seen. The air rising from it was cold, stagnant, and smelled of forgotten time and wet earth.
There was no hesitation. Curiosity was a magnet stronger than fear. Indra looked at the cat, who was observing the opening with an inscrutable expression on its feline face.
"Let's go," he said simply.
And then, without a flashlight, without a plan, guided only by his Energy Sense stretching ahead like a blind sonar, Indra plunged into the darkness. His feet found the damp steps and he began to descend, each step echoing in the sepulchral silence, leaving the world of light and destruction behind, entering the unknown bowels of Vallencourt. The cat, without a sound, followed him, its pink eyes glowing like minuscule beacons in the darkness that swallowed them.
---
The descent down the stone staircase was a journey into darkness itself. Each step Indra took seemed to suck him deeper into a void that wasn't just an absence of light, but a living, oppressive entity. His Energy Sense, so clear and comprehensive in the forest above, was here suffocated and distorted. The filaments of his Qi met a thick, oily barrier, like trying to see through black tar. The darkness wasn't natural; it was a creation, an emanation of power so vast it corrupted perception itself.
The cat on his shoulders, once relaxed, was now tense. Its small muscles were rigid, its purple claws pressing lightly into Indra's shoulder. Its shocking pink eyes glowed like tiny lighthouses, sweeping the darkness ahead with fierce intensity. It emitted a low meow, almost a whisper of warning, and Indra understood without words: they were nearing their destination. He swallowed dryly, his throat parched with apprehension.
The last step gave way to a circular chamber. The air changed instantly, becoming heavy, stagnant, and laden with the metallic smell of dried blood and the mold of forgotten ages. It was a scene ripped from the deepest Gothic nightmares.
The walls were of rough black stone, spattered with dark stains that Indra knew, with visceral certainty, was ancient blood. Blasphemous symbols and impossible geometries were scratched into the rock, glowing faintly with a residual energy that made the hairs on Indra's neck stand on end. On the floor, an intricately detailed pentagram was drawn with what looked like mercury and ashes, but its lines were interrupted and stained by splatters of dried blood, as if a ritual had been violently interrupted. Ornate silver candelabras, black with soot, dotted the walls, their arms twisted like fossilized bones.
But it was the objects in the center of the room that stole Indra's breath and held his gaze.
In the center, a monolith of black stone, taller than two men, rose like a funerary obelisk. Its surface was covered in writings in an ancient, angular language that echoed in Indra's memory—it was almost Elven, but distorted, corrupted, as if spoken by non-human throats. He felt he should understand it, but the meaning escaped his mental grasp.
To the right of the monolith, a sarcophagus of polished obsidian leaned against the wall. It was easily two and a half meters tall, built for something colossal and non-human. Its smooth surface was engraved with more of those disturbing runes and stained with patterns of dried blood that seemed to tell a story of violence. It was designed to open in the middle, a perfectly straight line dividing it vertically. And right in the center of that seam, a piece of white paper was pasted, with inscriptions in black ink. A seal. Or what was left of it—the paper was almost completely torn in half, its crucial words irrevocably lost.
To the left, a writing desk of dark wood, simple and antiquated, seemed absurdly mundane amidst the horror. On it rested a book bound in dark leather, closed, its cover untitled.
Indra took an instinctive step toward the desk, his curiosity temporarily overcoming the primordial terror the room exuded.
That's when the cat acted.
With an impossibly fast feline leap, it positioned itself between Indra and the sarcophagus, its small body puffed up, fur bristling. It didn't meow—a low, continuous growl, more threatening than any sound an animal that size should make, echoed in the chamber.
Indra froze, his blood freezing in his veins.
And then, the sarcophagus opened.
It wasn't a mechanical movement. It was an event. The heavy obsidian lid didn't swing or slide—it exploded outward with a silent, absolute force, hovering for a microsecond before dissolving into a fine black powder that rained down on the floor.
There were no words in Indra's lexicon, or in any human language, that could describe the wave of pure terror that emanated from the opening. It wasn't fear. It was an absolute, crushing certainty of death, of the end, of total annihilation. It was a weight that crushed his soul, numbed his mind, and froze the blood in his veins. Every fiber of his being screamed to flee, to hide, to cease existing. The fear the colossal bear had inspired was a childish tickle compared to this.
His training as a Cultivator—calm in chaos—was the only thread that kept him from completely collapsing. Think. Assess.
Sophie, he thought, desperate for a reference. She is a Supreme. Power to destroy islands. He had never felt the full extent of her power, but the presence coming from the sarcophagus was... more. Much, much more.
Academic knowledge surfaced in his mind, cold and clinical, a counterpoint to the hysteria threatening to overwhelm him. The peak of human power: Transcendent. Capable of destroying planets. For Creatures of the Other Side, the path was one of profanation. The equivalent of a Transcendent was a Corrupted. And a creature with ten cores... an Abyssal Corrupted.
All his instincts, every cell in his body, screamed that this was what stood before him.
This mental monologue lasted less than a second.
Before he could fully process the horrifying magnitude of his discovery, the thing emerged from the sarcophagus.
The world trembled. Not the ground, but the very fabric of reality. The air distorted with a groan of agony, and the silver candelabras on the walls exploded into cold, silent flames of a profane blue, casting grotesque, dancing lights around the room. From the depths of the sarcophagus, two red lights ignited—not eyes, but abysses of pure hatred and ineffable antiquity.
And then, it crawled out.
Its form was an agony to the senses. It wouldn't stay fixed. It was a tangle of twisted, pale limbs, then a pulsating mass of eyes and mouths, then an absurdly tall, slender humanoid figure, its silhouette writhing and changing with every blink. The pressure in the air became physical, crushing Indra to the floor, forcing him to fight for every inch of space.
Finally, the form stabilized, a living blur of darkness that drank the blue light.
It rose. Two twisted horns, like those of an ancient demonic icon, crowned its head. Its eyes were a dichotomy of madness: one was pale, empty, the pupil dilated like a corpse's; the other burned with the fire of a personal hell, a red star of pure malice. A smile too wide, unnatural, split its face, full of uniform, white teeth gleaming like polished steel blades.
Its arms, long and disproportionate, rose, not in threat, but in a gesture that was both greeting and curse.
There was no defined body below the torso, only a churning of shadows and pulsating darkness, as if the creature were less a physical being and more a concept of horror given form.
And yet, its presence was tangibly real—as palpable as the coppery taste of fear in Indra's mouth.
The creature lowered its arms. Its gaze—that living eye and that dead eye—rested on Indra. The smile on its face wasn't one of hostility. It was... gratitude. An insane, disturbing gratitude that manifested as lunatic pleasure.
It was then that the cat meowed.
It wasn't a meow of fear. It was a sharp sound, a declaration of authority that cut through the oppressive pressure like a blade. The creature's attention instantly shifted to the small feline.
The smile on the profane face diminished for a fraction of a second, a flash of surprise or recognition. Then, it widened even further, becoming even more terrifying.
Indra watched, paralyzed, as the cat and the Abyssal Corrupted faced each other. There were no words, no movement. It was a silent battle fought on a plane of existence Indra could not comprehend. He could feel the exchange—waves of will, of power, of intent—and, to his absolute astonishment, the cat... did not back down. In fact, after a long moment, the creature's smile seemed to contract slightly, and it was the first to look away. The cat had won. Whatever that exchange was, the feline had emerged victorious.
The creature looked at Indra again, its insane smile back in place. It took a few steps forward. The cat matched every movement, vigilant, but no longer hostile. Indra, inexplicably, felt he was not in immediate danger. The desire to kill had dissipated, replaced by an intense, alien curiosity.
The creature stopped before him. It was over two meters tall. Indra had to look up into that nightmare face. Its smile twisted, showing a spark of curiosity and perverse amusement.
Then, it extended a hand. It wasn't a clawed hand, as he expected. It was long, pale, with fingers thin and strangely articulated. It touched Indra's left chest, exactly over his heart.
A wave of chaotic energy, cold and ancient, invaded his body. It was like being injected with pure darkness. His own Qi screamed in protest, his newly formed core wavered... and then, the strange energy stabilized, settling like a black seed planted deep within him, dormant, but present.
The darkness around seemed to contract, receding from the creature and Indra. The silence was absolute.
And then, the voice came.
It didn't come from the creature's mouth full of teeth. It came from the walls, the floor, the very air. It was deep, hoarse, like stones grinding at the bottom of the sea, and at the same time sharp like the tearing of silk. It scratched from within, a mental and physical violation.
"When you master this, I will repay my debt."
The entire room trembled. The floor groaned, fine cracks appeared on the walls. The air became so dense Indra could barely breathe. The words weren't heard; they were imprinted on his soul, an absolute and terrifying promise.
The creature then passed by him. Its movement was fluid, irrepressible. It ascended the stairs, and its oppressive presence vanished instantly, as if it had never been there.
The sudden release of pressure was as violent as its application. Indra fell to his knees on the cold floor, his body trembling uncontrollably, his mind a vortex of terror and confusion. He was gasping, cold sweat trickling down his temples.
The cat approached him and gently rubbed its head against his arm, a low, calming purr emanating from its small body. It was an absurd sound in that place of horror, but it was real. It was a comfort.
Indra wrapped his arms around the cat, pulling it close, burying his face in its soft fur. He didn't know what the cat had done, didn't know how or why, but one thing was certain: if it weren't for it, Indra would be dead. Crushed, consumed, erased.
In the end, in that dark chamber lit by profane blue flames, with the smell of ancient blood in his nostrils and a seed of darkness planted in his chest, only one thought echoed in Indra's empty mind, laden with bitter shame and the overwhelming reality of his insignificance:
'I am pathetic.'