Alphard pushed into one of the dark side passages winding deeper into the complex. As he moved further from the candle's faint glow, the air shifted drastically: it grew dense, leaden, weighed down by an invisible pressure that seemed to freeze the very oxygen in his lungs.
He took another step, but his legs gave out beneath him. The atmospheric pressure bore down on him like the grip of a titan, crushing him against the ground. His knuckles trembled violently against the cold stone; his pores broke out in an icy sweat.
What is this?! Am I... am I going to die here?! he screamed inside the confines of his own mind, choked with panic as weakness drained every muscle in his body.
Then, the physical horror struck.
Without warning, the scar on his stomach — the same torn flesh he'd woken up with the moment he transmigrated into this world — tore open again from within. The tissue split in a hot, bloody gash; blood surged out in a flood, soaking his clothes and pooling on the floor.
The pain that followed wasn't of this world: it was a volcanic torment, a red-hot needle twisting through his insides. An ordeal ten times worse than the one that had marked his first death.
"Ahhh... damn it... it hurts!" He bit down on his own lip until it bled, choking back his screams so as not to alert Antonie or Didier.
Unable to stand, he began dragging himself like a worm across the rough rock. Every inch gained was its own hell: the frayed edge of his open wound scraped and caught directly against the jagged stone floor, wringing spasms of pure suffering out of him.
Desperate to understand the cause of his agony, Alphard forced his Spiritual Sight awake.
The physical world dissolved. Before his astral eyes unfolded a boiling ocean of spiritual essence, a tide of suffocating density enveloping everything, and from it radiated that crushing pressure.
And at the exact center of that ethereal storm floated a silhouette.
It wasn't the barren carving of a lockless key like the ones covering the walls. This was a real key, three-dimensional, pulsing with an ancient power. The entire tide of essence flowed directly from its shape.
It... it was the one calling me out of the darkness...
Gathering the last reserve of his soul, Alphard stretched out a trembling arm and closed his blood-soaked fingers around the metal.
The contact was instant.
His spiritual vision shattered and collapsed into absolute blackness. Gravity vanished; the unbearable pain in his stomach evaporated at once, and his sense of his own spiritual power dropped to nothing, leaving him floating in a weightless, silent void.
Have I... made it back home? he thought, gripped by a numb disbelief.
Then, in the vastness of that nothingness, a pinpoint of light sparked to life. It was infinitesimally small, dimmer than the most distant star on a moonless night. The wisp of light began to expand and twist, taking the shape of a fine, curved line without lashes, resembling the silhouette of a closed eye.
A jolt struck Alphard's chest. His heart began slamming against his ribs with savage fury, drenching his soul in a primal despair: fear, terror, anguish, and a misery so absolute it threatened to smother him.
The curved line began to slide open, lazily.
When the eye opened fully, something vital and sacred shattered inside Alphard.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
A tearing scream ripped from his throat. The surrounding darkness cracked like a shattered mirror, casting shards of visions from his past life, tangled together with aberrant, unnameable shapes.
Alphard's body turned into a furnace: his guts burning like molten metal, his eye sockets on the verge of bursting under the pressure, his bones and joints softening like wax held to fire. His throat tore raw as the scream kept pouring out, endless.
And then, he felt the invasion.
Something foreign, cosmic, and parasitic tried to force its way into the very structure of his being. His skin began to warp: small slits appeared, curling into grotesque smiles, dozens of random mouths surfacing across his arms, his chest, his neck, murmuring mockery and unhinged laughter.
The gigantic pupil of the central eye surged toward him, growing so monumental that Alphard's body seemed like a speck of dust before its vastness.
In a paroxysm of creation and madness, the reality around him began to reshape itself.
A colossal structure rose into being: solemn tiers arranged in a semicircle, packed with rows of empty seats stretching off into the horizon. Alphard's convulsing body was set down violently onto an elevated platform, a sovereign stage rising above the eye. The enormous ocular entity flattened out beneath him, morphing into the very floor of the platform, humming with a chorus of laments and whispers from forgotten ages.
There was no ceiling. Above his head opened an infinite sky, dotted with grey clouds, glowing nebulae, and the silhouette of unknown planets. The floor of the platform wasn't stone or metal; it was a metaphysical glass, revealing, from these celestial heights, a full, detailed view of the city of Fercluse.
At the same time, the unbreakable law of that space etched itself into his mind: the platform ruled over the tiers. Whoever stood on the platform could address the spectators, but no one in the tiers could ever set foot upon the stage's sacred ground without the express permission of its owner.
Alphard's torment reached its peak as his body writhed in violent spasms across the transparent floor:
"KILL ME! KILL ME! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! IT HUUURTS!!!"
Suddenly, the eye completed its final transmutation into the platform and the sky itself.
The grotesque mouths laughing across his skin folded back in on themselves and vanished. The scorching fire in his guts went out.
The devastating pain peeled away from his flesh like a robe torn off in one motion, leaving behind nothing but a residue of muscle tremors and involuntary convulsions.
Silence returned. The space fell still. Alphard lay sprawled across the platform overlooking Fercluse from the heavens, unable to move a single finger.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
He was terrified, exhausted down to the very marrow of his soul, though oddly enough his body showed no sign of physical fatigue.
"What... what was that?" he murmured, his voice broken, taking in the vastness of the place. "Where... where am I?"
Alphard rose slowly to his feet, gazing at the empty tiers stretching off into the distance. He walked toward the edge of the platform, from where the view dropped sharply down onto the panorama of Fercluse beneath its daylight sky.
"Where the hell am I?" he murmured to himself.
Without hesitation, he tried to step out into the void, but his sole struck an invisible, solid surface mimicking nothingness.
Lifting his gaze revealed an overwhelming panorama: an infinite sky populated by living stars and gigantic celestial bodies surrounding the monumental platform.
He walked toward the tiers and noticed an extraordinary spatial anomaly. Despite the distance, his eyes could make out the center of the stage with the sharpness of an eagle's sight, as if the very perspective were being warped by some ancient enchantment.
He reached his hand forward, and his arm crossed through an invisible fold, reappearing centimeters further out in the air.
Even if I move away from the platform, this rift lets me reach it as if I were standing right beside it. Strange... This whole place feels like the structure of an amphitheater, or some kind of dimensional circus.
At that, he focused his attention on his right hand. He spread his fingers, and at a sudden flicker of light, surprise froze him in place.
Resting in his palm sat the very same key he'd gripped in the temple floor while bleeding out.
This must be the key that grants access to this domain. But would it hold a physical form back in the real world? No — this belongs purely to the spiritual plane... The safest thing is to keep it stored here.
Alphard walked the perimeter of the tiers and tried to force his body through the small portal. But the barrier proved impassable: the gap allowed nothing wider than the width of an arm, permitting nothing more than reaching a hand through toward the platform.
Basically, this only works to transfer objects by hand to the other side, without any trouble at all, he deduced, grasping the mechanics of the space.
He made his way back to the central stage, but paused for a moment, staring once more down into the abyss beneath his feet, where the city of Fercluse stretched out, bathed in daylight. A suspicion began forming in his mind.
I've got an idea...
Standing on the platform, he confirmed the space's rules held steady. Still, what he really wanted to test was his ability to alter the environment itself. He extended his arm firmly, focusing his will on the emptiness, picturing with precision a vanity table, a mirror, cosmetics, and a chair.
In the blink of an eye, the objects materialized before him.
He took a second to sit and study his reflection in the mirror, searching for any anomaly or lingering effect from the earlier trance.
He hastily unbuttoned his shirt and lifted it to examine his stomach, the exact spot where his skin had torn open so violently only moments before.
There was no trace of blood, bruising, or scarring. His skin looked completely pristine, free of even the faintest blemish or wound.
Without wasting a moment, he took up the cosmetic jars and began applying paint to his skin, skillfully sketching out makeup in the design of a clown.
"This is completely absurd..." he murmured, letting out a faint, humorless laugh.
If the tiers are packed with seats, and this place functions like a stage, or some dimensional circus, then the chance of other beings ending up here is real. This paint will be my mask. If anyone ever crosses into this plane, they'll never know what face is hiding underneath it.
Suddenly, the physical world outside broke into his thoughts: the ruins. If he was standing on the spiritual plane, that meant his body of flesh and bone lay collapsed on the cold stone of the temple, motionless and defenseless. Alphard clenched his fist and drew it back in an instinctive gesture to force his return.
Around him, the monumental platform and the starlit sky began fraying into shreds of thick mist, plunging him back into the same absolute blackness he'd arrived through.
Out of nowhere, a spark of light burst at the center and expanded with a thunderous force until it consumed everything.
As though hurled down from some celestial abyss, he dropped abruptly back into his own body; his eyes flew open, pulse spiraling out of control, his heart hammering against his chest with fury.