Mason jolted awake. What sort of dream did he just have? His head ached, and so did his whole body.
Thankfully, he didn't die.
"Argh," he groaned as he stood up. What had actually woken him up was the sound of swords clanging and uproars. He could think about the dream later; now he had to find out where the noise was coming from.
He placed his hand on his forehead and noticed the hilt of the knife had broken, leaving the blade stuck in his head.
'This doesn't look good. I need to think before becoming emotional next time.'
Looking up, he noticed the color of the sky had changed. The jagged, bleeding crack that served as a sun had sutured itself shut, replaced by a sky the color of swirling iridescent blacks and deep greens.
'Nighttime?'
But it wasn't exactly dark; the water beneath his feet had begun to glow and became more transparent. Aside from that, the sword blades that protruded out of the water were gone, and the noise that woke Mason up was coming from beneath the water.
He cursed himself for not trying to remove a blade or two and turned his gaze to the still water. At first, it looked blurry, but when he squatted to have a better look, it slowly became clearer.
Somewhere beneath the Endless Ocean, or perhaps within the very fabric of the water itself, thousands, if not millions, of warriors were at war.
It was a silent, subterranean carnage. Locked within the transparent silver depths, spectral armies clashed on a scale that made the everyday battles back in the Stone Slums look like a playground scuffle. Mason watched, mesmerized and horrified, as translucent cavalry rode through the liquid as if it were air, their spears piercing through infantry that dissolved into bubbles of light before reforming to fight again.
Mason realized with a jolt that the swords protruding from the water when he first landed in the region of this realm had not disappeared, but had only sunk. They were the weapons being wielded by the nightmare army below.
'Is this how it happens every day?'
He then suddenly remembered the Warden. Had it also been recreated and joined in the endless war?
"Now the name makes more sense. Scratch that, it's still stupid. What about something like... 'Water of Death'? No, no... 'Nightmare Water,' 'Shore of Blades'..." he said, emphasizing his words with magnificently stupid poses.
"Ocean of the Eternal Grudge!" he shouted, pointing dramatically at the silver surface. "Yeah, that's the one. Much more menacing."
Mason froze, his arm still outstretched in his magnificent pose. He felt like an idiot. Here he was, a dying boy with a knife handle snapped off in his forehead, standing over a literal sea of ghosts, and he was playing theater critic for the realm's naming department.
"I really am losing it," he muttered, dropping his arm and wincing as the movement pulled at his broken scapula.
He looked back down into the transparent depths. The war below was getting more violent. The colors of the spectral warriors, which were all in red and black, were beginning to be drowned out by a thick, rising liquid.
Every time a spectral soldier fell and dissolved, a tiny wisp of red smoke escaped from their form and drifted upward, hitting the underside of the water's surface.
Mason realized that the glowing water was acting like a filter. The surface tension was holding back the collective rage of millions of dead souls.
Suddenly, a massive shockwave rippled through the water from below. A giant, spectral war-elephant, clad in iron plates the size of houses, collapsed right beneath Mason's feet. Its fall sent a surge of that red smoke upward.
The water where Mason stood bubbled.
Tired of staring at the infinite war, his thoughts drifted to the dream he had.
He had dreamt about Jumong Ryujin.
The man who had turned the once manageable Still Water region into the Endless Ocean of War it was now.
'To think he had a hunch he was going to do something legendary here.'
Was this the legendary feat? Leading and then dying in a cursed war? Or was there something bigger than the cursed war? If there was, what was it?
Come to think of it, Mason had possessed Jumong's role on the water and not with the Nightmare Army. Jumong had rested his back against a tree and stared at the horizon with a bitter smile on his face before Mason had switched into his own body, and it was still like that a few seconds after the transmigration.
Why was he smiling? Who or what had killed him? What had prompted the war in the first place?
The mysteries kept piling up, so Mason decided not to think about them.
He stared at his body and grimaced. In the dream, he had seen the real Jumong, who was nothing but flawless. Well, that was the young Jumong, but still...
If the system had actually made the Jiangs use the bodies of the past humans of this realm for the tutorial, it would have been better.
'Well, at least I still have the white hair.'
That was still nothing compared to the real Jumong.
In the dream, the man whose soul he now inhabited wasn't a broken scavenger or a dying boy from the slums; he was a god of the blade. Mason remembered the feeling of the white hair whipping against his face and the absolute, terrifying stillness of the "diagonal step."
He recalled Jumong standing exactly where he was standing now, but the water hadn't been a graveyard then. It had been pure, reflecting a sky that wasn't broken.
"The Iron Lotus Pagoda," Mason whispered, the name feeling heavy on his tongue.
In the dream, Jumong had spent decades searching for a place that didn't exist on a map. He had "experienced the world" until the world bled into his soul. Mason looked down at the red smoke bubbling beneath his feet. Was this the "experience" the dream spoke of? Millions of lives, millions of deaths, filtered through a layer of silver water?
If Jumong was the "weakest dragon" because he hadn't yet experienced the world, what did that make Mason?
Truthfully speaking, it made Mason much better—at least from his own perspective.
He had experienced the world, from the everyday survival in the Stone Slums to the frequent appearance of portals.
Mason smirked as a dark humor filled his mind.
In the dream, Jumong had searched for decades to "experience the world." He had looked for meaning in the silence of deserts and the crystalline peace of untainted waters. But Mason? Mason had been born into a world that was already a corpse. He had experienced more of the raw, unfiltered cruelty of existence by the age of six than most legendary warriors did in a lifetime.
He knew the smell of ozone before a portal opened. He knew the exact weight of a stomach that hadn't seen food in three days. He knew the sound of a mother's voice fading into a toxic cough.
'You wanted experience, Jumong?' Mason thought, his fingers brushing the jagged blade in his forehead. 'I've got ten years of dying under my belt. That's a hell of a lot more "world" than a walk in a pretty desert.'
But that wasn't his full interpretation of experiencing the world.
To Mason, experiencing the world wasn't just about witnessing suffering or surviving a harsh environment. It was about the transition.
In the slums, you didn't just experience the "world"; you experienced the rejection of it. You lived in the cracks of a society that had decided you were already dead. To experience the world meant to understand the exact moment hope was traded for a knife, and when a prayer became a curse.
Jumong had searched for the world in the Tenth Realm, looking for a spiritual realization. Mason had found it in the silence of a dumpster and the black oil of a pothole.
For Mason, experiencing the world was the realization that existence is a debt that you never asked for, but are forced to pay in blood every single day.
The world isn't a place you walk through. It's a predator that eats you bit by bit. And if you're still standing when it's finished chewing, then—and only then—can you say you've "experienced" it.
Realizing this, he stared at the red smoke spiraling beneath the silver surface and then at the horizon. He walked to a nearby tree and sat, resting his back. He stared at the bone heap of the unknown creature in the distance, then back at the horizon.
He then suddenly frowned and spat.
"Like hell a bitter smile will appear on my face."