Looking down at the metal hallway, John felt an urge to explore it. It was the first sign of intelligent life he had encountered on the planet, except for Sage Full Blue. Rain didn’t really count, he thought to himself silently.

Looking over at her, he wondered how she knew about the structure. She was staring at it with a curious expression, so it didn’t seem like she knew what it was either.

‘Wait, is that what she was pointing at while we were flying? Was it just a coincidence that the centipede attacked?’

“Uwahha?” Rain asked, looking at John. Or at least it sounded like a question, judging by her intonation.

“Yeah, probably. Let’s go down and look, shall we?”

He turned his back to her and crouched, hoping she would understand. And she did, putting her arms around his neck and jumping up when he stood up. Larang was summoned by his feet, so he stepped onto it and flew down.

As he got closer, he could see the corridor get longer. It was deeper than he had thought, going on for at least a hundred meters.

It was also a lot shorter than he thought. He barely managed to walk upright once he landed and had to set Rain down so her antlers didn’t hit the edge. She was just short enough as well, with her antlers making her slightly taller than John was.

“Just so we’re clear, I’m taller than you,” John said as he turned to look deeper into the corridor, only now considering their heights.

Rain simply replied with a confused expression and a “Wahum,” before following after him.

‘I’ll take that as an agreement… Why is this place so weirdly designed?’

Other than the roof being so low, several things stood out to him as strange. The walls all had what seemed to be golden tubes running through them horizontally, covered by glass and steel frames. And it smelled like oxidized metal.

“... Is that actual gold? This place… doesn’t seem quite human.”

“Ahua.”

“Probably. Let’s explore a bit deeper,” John responded, hoping she was picking up some parts of his language.

Because of the darkness, John used his trusty torch spell, keeping a flame ignited above his hand and lighting the way. Due to the liquid essence, it was way brighter than usual at first, so he had to reduce the output.

They both journeyed deeper into the corridor, looking for anything that seemed interesting. Nothing stood out immediately, no visible doors or anything that looked intractable.

‘It’s almost definitely not something we’ve built. It seems… deserted. And for way longer than a week. Did another alien race get here before us?’

That explanation made sense. If portals could open up to Earth, the same could probably happen to other planets as well. And he knew they weren’t the only intelligent race in the universe.

‘... But what happened to them? Did they lose in the end? Did they even figure out how to use essence?’

Eventually, they could see the end of the corridor clearly, and it seemed to have some sort of door they could walk through. It was even lower than the ceiling, though, so they would have to bow their heads. Rain might even have to go in sideways due to her antlers.

She slowed down a bit as he got close to the door, positioning herself behind him and looking at the door cautiously. “Ahwaaha?”

John smiled, happy to see her rely on him like that. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe. Rain.”

She looked up at him as he said her name, giving him hope that she had understood what it meant. He pointed at her and repeated it, “Rain.”

Slowly, she pointed a finger at herself with a questioning look. “Laen.”

John nodded, happy to have gotten this far. Then he pointed at himself. “John.”

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“... Djan,” she repeated, close enough to count.

John nodded again, smiling as he turned back to the door. It didn’t seem like it had any handles, but there was a split in the middle that he probably could force open. And if not, he didn’t care much about breaking it.

His hands didn’t get much of a grip, so he used the solid essence to attach them instead. With only a bit of force, the doors opened, revealing a larger circular area split over two floors.

“What the hell…?”

The first thing that caught his attention was the ten corpses lying in a ring in the middle of the room. They all had strange metallic suits on, covering most of their bodies, but their heads were completely dried and ravaged by time.

The room seemed more like a research room than anything else John could think of. Bottles of strange fluids were inserted in large machines, and large boards filled with unrecognizable symbols, seemingly written by hand, were spread around the room.

John entered the room slowly, taking in the surroundings. The room smelled of dust and old paper for some reason. “This… Those aren’t humans, at least. But what are they?”

Rain followed him in, looking less nervous now. Her expression hardened as she lay eyes on the circle of corpses. “Aasveda.”

“Yeah, that’s a good name. The Aasveda must have come here through a portal just like us, but they don’t seem to have found much success. They seem to have been very technologically advanced, although I’m not the right person to make that judgment.”

Walking closer to the circle of dead Aasvedans, John noticed they all had holes in their heads. A very clear sign that they had lost hope, a ritual suicide.

He sighed, imagining how their last moments must have been.

‘Were they trying to research essence? Were they stranded here after the portal to their home closed? Did their home planet get destroyed? Or… could this be their home planet?’

The last thought also made some sense to him. He hadn’t seen any signs of civilization other than this place, but the planet was large. If beasts had started showing up here and they never unlocked essence, this would be a realistic conclusion.

“Let’s hope we’re not heading in that direction…”

A large piece of cloth on a table caught his attention. It was a map of the world they were in, but it was rather crudely made. John had no use for it since he could look up at the sky and have a much better idea of what the planet looked like.

‘Okay, they’re most likely not from here, then. They would have a better map if so.’

Rain also searched the room, but she made sure to stay near him, just in case. There was no guarantee that there weren’t any beasts here, after all. She looked very interested in the suits the Aasvedans wore and seemingly had no problems with them being dead.

The second floor of the room was just a floor jutting out of the wall around the room, barely higher than John’s head. It seemed more like an observation spot than anything else.

“Oh, there was one more?”

A final Aasvedan corpse was sitting on the second floor, clutching something in its hands as if in a prayer. John was about to jump up to that floor but froze as the corpse suddenly moved its head.

Two black sockets on its face seemed to stare right at him, while the head shook strangely from side to side. Its hands reached out toward him and slowly opened, seeming to offer the thing in its hands to him.

‘What the fuck?!’

The body was dead beyond any doubt, but it was still moving with purpose. It freaked him out, way more than anything else he had seen so far on this planet. Perhaps with the exception of the inversion.

Rain screamed in fear as she looked at it, running to the farthest corner of the room. She looked absolutely terrified and curled up into a ball on the floor.

John couldn’t blame her; his own heart was threatening to beat out of his chest. It was like something from a horror story he had been told as a child.

A whispery voice reached out to him, entering his mind directly. “Take this last vestige of our kind, granted by the Lord of Death for our sacrifice, the last vestige of our world and our everything. Weep for us, and survive the doom upon you, child of the creator…”

As soon as the voice slipped away, the corpse fell apart, letting the small object in its hands roll across the floor straight toward John. It was a silvery necklace centered around a small, perfectly black sphere.

The room was completely silent now except for Rain’s silent whimpering. John was still in shock, trying to process the events that just happened.

‘What the hell was that? Lord of Death? Child of the Creator? Survive the doom upon me? What does any of that mean? And… should I really take this thing?’

He looked down at the necklace that had fallen from the second floor and somehow landed right by his feet. It might as well have screamed, ‘I am a cursed object!’ at him. But he was very tempted.

‘If nothing else, they seemed to know a lot of stuff that I don’t. And it would be rude to deny them after all that.’

After bending down, his hand hovered over the necklace, trembling slightly. A mix of fear and curiosity warred within him. The rational part of his mind screamed that touching an unknown object from a long-dead alien race was a terrible idea. Yet, a deeper part of him longed for the knowledge it could contain.

In a burst of decisiveness, his hand moved that final little distance, touching the necklace. Then he lost consciousness and fell into a deep slumber.