Vastoria and Energy bested the dangerous pits of the Shrine. Managing to avoid the countless hidden traps set about in the second floor, as well as using what little loot they could find to their advantage against the gold-thirsty beasts of the third layer, they had finally managed to find solace in the fourth layer—A seemingly peaceful house interior that most resembled their own rooms meshed together into one. Vastoria found it charming, thus she got the harmless idea to lie down for a bit to regain her strength. This in turn was nothing but a trap in and of itself, as it put her in an unwakeable slumber. Energy was distraught; hundreds of alarms began to ring in his head about her possibly turning into a rotted. Now, after failing to kill her before this could happen, he anxiously awaits atop the safety of his own bed defense for her next move.

"...Ah!" He jolted once he saw what he thought was a finger twitch, "Sigh, just my imagination..."

Or was it? It was! ...No, it wasn't. This internal back and forth served only to further instill fear and doubt into his mind, constantly wearing out his mental fortitude over time. Before long, he started to get quite tired himself, but he knew better than to let his guard down with a potential rotted in the room.

"Vastoria, I'm sorry..." He clasped his hands together, choosing to hope for a miracle after exhausting every other alternative, "I'm sorry for what I did to you, but please—Wake up. I know it makes no sense, that wound should have killed you. But for some reason the fork refused to pierce your heart. Please, please... Get up and prove me wrong. Get up, look up at this idiot cowering instead of sucking it up like a man and coming down to help you... And sternly reprimand him for his childish worries."

He closed his Eyes to pray, even though he knew better than to leave her out of his sight. The rotted were a particularly sluggish bunch, given their bodies were decomposing by the minute. In essence, the people that turned didn't have much of their lives left to live—The lifespan of a rotted would equate to how long their bodies could keep themselves alive. The more they ate, the longer lived they were. In other words, a rotted does work off of instinct alone, but what makes their painful existence sad is that they simply have no other choice. To live is to cannibalize, and any living being has to eat to survive. Theirs is just a notoriously picky diet. Realistically, she could never climb up to him if she had indeed turned while he wasn't looking, which might be why he opted to so earnestly pray in the first place.

"Humankind wasn't always plagued with the Black Iro's Curse." He continued, "Besides, this is Heaven—A place free of such curses. Please, Vastoria. Prove to me not only that I have nothing to fear with you turning on me... But also nothing to regret for attempting to kill you. Please, please... I want you back... Gah!"

Opening his Eyes, he was petrified to find the lone pool of blood from her chest wound drying up on the spot where she was supposed to be. There was no trail, nor were there any traces of her in the room. It was as if she completely disappeared into thin air, which got him thinking. Possibly, she died and returned to the end of the previous floor? Or maybe even the floor before that? As he was thinking up whether or not to go back and check, a cold hand poked his back, making him jump and slip off the concrete highground where his bed was.

"AAAAAHHH!" He immediately backed himself into the opposite corner, frequently checking over his shoulder to see if she got any blood on it, "C-Contamination, I gotta make sure...! D-Do I have anything on me?!"

In his panic, he had glossed over the stupidity of asking that question in the current context completely. First of all, if she was truly a rotted and had contaminated blood, then she couldn't even reply to him. The rotted are mere husks of their previous owners' bodies, they have no cognitive sense nor intelligence. Apart from that, it should also be noted that while he was dragging his ass across the floor, he happened to slide right across the puddle of blood left over from her wound.

"...You're good." She gave him an uncomfortable scowl, "What the hell is wrong with you? I go to sleep for a minute and I wake up with a chest cavity? Did you do this?!"

"Y-You!" He bit his tongue, "Vastoria, you're... not one of them! You're alive!"

"Barely! Seriously, what happened while I was asleep?" She asked, sitting on the edge of his bed as she loomed over him.

"Get up!" He shouted, "It's a trap! Those beds make you go into a super deep sleep, I thought I lost you!"

"Sigh, I didn't ask that..." She hopped down, giving him a mean glare as she bent over him arms akimbo, "I asked you—What. Is. This?"

With the bloodied and exposed golden heart now quite literally in his face, he finally understood why it was that she didn't die, despite the fact angels and seraphim obviously could inside the Shrine. Her golden heart protected her from croaking, a miracle by all accounts. Given she didn't possess a golden brain like he did, Energy even understood how close he got to actually killing her. It was down to a fifty-fifty, and if he had stabbed the brain—She'd be kaput.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"I... I'm sorry." He begged her for forgiveness, "I might have tried to stab you through the heart with a fork because I was worried you were gonna eat my brains."

"...You what?"

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Now, once everything had finally calmed down and they had completely cleared up the misunderstanding, they actually found it quite humorous, all things considered. Whilst it was true that she almost died, and he was almost the one to kill her, she was more or less fine after the fact, so no harm no foul. Still, she didn't exactly want to believe him on the whole "not sleeping on the beds" rule.

"My fatigue and wounds all disappeared the moment I closed my Eyes." She explained, "And since I did wake up eventually, I don't see why we shouldn't use them. We might face even tougher challenges in the floors to come, so I say we use any rest spot we can."

"Except there are no more rooms." He refuted, "This is it. The end."

"What? Oh come on, you seriously don't expect a place like this to have a hidden passage or something like that?" She reasoned, "In fact, I think that's the point of this room in general—It's goal might be to convince you to stay with the healing beds and safe atmosphere, but in order to progress, you need to be willing to give that up. The Gods would probably pull a stunt like that for a place like this."

"Well, we're welcome to try." He shrugged.

Thus, a lengthy room check ensued with the two of them leading the investigation. Each floor tile, corner, nook and cranny were turned upside down—both literally and figuratively—yet nothing came out of it. The entire time, the room was chipping away at their focus, and after enough time they were practically rubbing walls absentmindedly with their Eyes half closed. After each setback, they would yearningly turn around to look at their respective comfy beds. In fact, given he was still limping around with one leg and one Eye, Energy was the one more interested in Vastoria's promise that sleeping on them grants you a full heal. He would like at her open wound and wince, but she looked just fine despite the fact she had a hole in her chest. She seemed fine, and the bed was tempting. So very tempting...

"Oi." She caught him climbing his tall concrete block to reach the bed, "What happened to not trusting it?"

"Mnn..." He mumbled something unintelligible, "Whocares...? Lemmesleep~..."

And soon, the tables had turned completely. Now Vastoria was the only one still awake, however this led to her search becoming even more difficult. By this point they had practically inspected the entire room three times if not more and still haven't come up with anything that even remotely resembled a path forward. Maybe, she figured, this room really was the end of the Shrine? Could this truly be what the Gods were hiding at the very bottom? A personalized bed that healed you up to full? But what good would it do you if Heavenly Beings can't even suffer wounds on the surface? Maybe the journey was the true reward.

"But if that's the case, I totally feel grifted..." She pouted, opting to retreat to her bed again as well, "Then we'll leave and go tell Throne what we found after we had our well-deserved shut-Eye. This time I have no one to wake me up with a damned fork too, so might as well enjoy it."

Closing her Eyes with a content smile on her face never felt better. Though their mission couldn't exactly be called successful, since the entire point of the Shrine visit was to find a way to resurrect and all, she still felt they had accomplished a lot. Firstly, she found a new friend who knew of Throne as well. She saved him, and in turn he helped her go this far. An accomplishment she could not have achieved on her own. Besides that, they did learn quite a lot from the first four floors of the Shrine, meaning if they ever did try to go back to find out if there were more floors below this one, they could do so with far more ease. Throne would be proud of these results, surely.

"Hmm..." She craned her Eyelids open, rubbing them as she got out of her bed, "Eh? Energy...?"

This was the same room she went to sleep in. Or rather, the same corner. There was one key difference, and that was that the corner that resembled Energy's was now replaced with the remainder of her room. Even the door that led to the rest of her house was there.

"The hallway..." She warily walked out of the room, tiptoeing over to the living room with great confusion, "Tea and biscuits..."

This was, by all accounts, her house. Everything was the same, and even rays of sunlight could be seen from the windows. Exiting the house proved her suspicions right—She was on her floating island... She was back home.

"But then where is Energy?" She looked around before piecing it together, "Ah, right. If I got sent back to my own home, then surely he got sent back to his."

This was both good and bad for different reasons. On one hand, they were both safely outside of the Shrine safe and sound. On the other hand, however, they never did tell each other where they lived, and now they might not be able to find each other for a good long while. As she nervously paced around her yard in the sky, she glanced over at her house's window's reflection. Two things stuck out immediately.

"Right, I still don't have my wings anymore." She sighed, puffing out her chest to examine it, "...And the wound he gave me with the fork is now permanent."

Where there was blood in the Shrine, there is now gold. What went missing in the Shrine was substituted, and what was lost before that remained unreturned. The mystery of the Shrine was answered, but it also gave way to a thousand other questions in its place.

"...I gotta find Throne." She resolutely nodded, "He'll know what to do."