Leo, once again, risked his life on a massive gamble.

And as he stumbled down, struggling to turn his head down to face and embrace his fate…

‘Maybe they were going to let me live to gather information?’

An existential dread that caused an extremely cold sweat to appear all over Leo’s skin.

‘Maybe I’ve just killed myself for no reason…?!’

As parts of a single second trickled by… Leo continued to fall.

Faster and faster, down towards whatever fate had for him in the store.

Finally, Leo spun his body around so that he could look directly down.

‘Shit.’

The roaring of the air caused Leo’s face to deform, effectively stopping him from even cursing out loud.

Stifled by the raging current, the young man had no other choice but to keep his thoughts to himself as he fell down towards an extremely ugly-looking field of sharp, spiky stones littering a huge overflow field of the nearby waterfall.

Still mid-air, Leo figured that some other streams had to join in right down the cliff with the waterfall, for the small stream he noticed before could never fill an area that big.

‘Or maybe, it used to be a much bigger waterfall? Thus, explaining what lays at the bottom…’

The seconds stretched out seemingly into infinity, while the welcoming area of stone spikes only ever grew bigger in Leo’s eyes.

All of a sudden, the young man’s psyche stopped playing around with his perception of time, allowing it to resume its usual pace.

Air roared in Leo’s ears, nearly pulling his face off his head. A sense of overwhelming dread suddenly loomed over his back, as if the death itself came to watch his last moments.

And then, by yet another miraculous gamble, Leo fell into one of the deeper spots of the small lake, a good few steps away from the nearest spiky stone.

Striking the face of the water, Leo’s mind went blank.

It felt as if his entire body started to hurt all at once. As if every muscle and bone suddenly had to go from a relaxed state to testing the absolute limits of its endurance… and falling apart under the stress.

Still, the water broke Leo’s fall. And the cold embrace of the water, strangely enough, soothed some of the pain… which only decreased the mind-numbing burden of information overflowing Leo’s brain and actively increased the degree of pain he could feel.

‘I…’

Halfway through Leo’s attempt to, against all the pain, celebrate his survival, the depth of the lake proved not to be all that great.

With the water breaking Leo’s fall, it slowed him by a considerable margin… But before it could fully kill his momentum, Leo’s body sank through the entire depth of the lake and struck the lake’s floor.

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“Khe!”

The sudden change of pressure forced all the air out of Leo’s lungs, making him vomit it all out… Only for the water to rush into his mouth and instantly flood his throat.

‘Shit!’

Life flashed before Leo’s eyes. Without the air, his body lost its buoyancy. Choking on the lake’s water only made him heavier and turned his struggle to get to the surface all the harder.

Still, be it through the sheer power of his will or thanks to the nanites, Leo closed his mouth… before forcing all the excess water from his system out. The nanites even went as far as to purify some of the carbon dioxide stacking up in his lungs while directly refining the oxygen out of the already-used air within the circulation of his body.

Still, that was merely a crutch, a slight benefit of having the nanites injected into his bloodstream. A saving grace… that could only last for a short moment.

Leo clenched his jaws and grasped the lake’s bed with his hands, ready to push himself off.

His eyes traced the silhouette of the stone spike that nearly skewered him. The stone grew out from a pretty wide base at the bottom of the lake’s bed and pierced the surface of the water, gradually turning into the viciously sharp spike Leo nearly fell right on top of.

The spear that nearly got him through the stomach has now turned into the blessed support with the help of which Leo could crawl out of the water.

Leo rolled over from his back onto his stomach. In a desperate attempt, he pushed himself off… Only to fall right down on the lake’s bed as soon as he rose even a tiny bit. Even though he was merely three, four meters deep, this water…

It pressed down on his with much greater weight than it should!

‘I have no time for this now!’

Feeling the first sting of the burning sensation in his lungs, Leo desperately reached out and pulled his body up a step. And then another.

Bit by bit, the base of the spiky stone grew increasingly closer.

There!

With a desperate lunge, Leo reached out… and grasped a small protrusion that offered his fingers some support. His other hand soon found the next unevenness.

As the fire in Leo’s lungs grew hotter and more pressing, he climbed higher and higher, soon reaching the bottom of the lake’s surface…

Only for the already familiar sense of dread, threat, and immense danger to slam into the young man’s mind, nearly causing his fingers to lose their grip.

Leo’s lungs were aflame. His body desperately craved a breath of fresh air. The particles of carbon dioxide poisoned his body and almost made him involuntarily gasp for air.

‘Shit!’

The nanites helped to slow down the process, but they couldn’t change the outcome. Leo was drowning, unable to peek his head out of the water due to the unforeseen threat looming above.

‘I knew this place wouldn’t be any good when I saw those sword-flying bastards!’

Such was the reality of an average person in a cultivation world. To die like Leo’s teammates without even knowing what struck them down. Or to share Leo’s own fate of drowning to death just because peeking his head out to take a breath seemed like an even greater danger than air deprivation.

The fire in Leo’s lungs subsided. Now his lungs were the fire itself. His entire body ached, desperately craving the breath that was so close, just a few inches away.

All Leo needed was to peek just his lips out of the water to make it end. To regain this extremely toxic element that allowed the life as Leo knew it. To remove the poisonous CO2 from his lungs.

‘Wait, is there even any of it left?’

Quickly losing the grip on reality as various parts of his body systematically shut themselves down to leave just a bit more of the life-giving oxygen for the brain, Leo felt as if the water around him suddenly turned warm.

Or maybe it was the coldness that he could no longer properly perceive?

Leo’s vision blackened, turning the bright day of this unknown world into a dark and grim picture, perfectly fitting this world’s bloody nature.

Leo’s fingers lost their strength, slipping off the stone and sending him sinking down to the lake’s bottom.

Only a few inches separated him from the precious breath. Then, those few inches grew to a foot. Then, a meter. Then, Leo’s brain slowed down to the point of no longer recognizing something as abstract as measures of depth.

The threat looming from the top of the cliff persisted.

And the only thing Leo could draw satisfaction from was how he, until the very end, refused to give up and peek his head out.

Until the very end, he did everything he could to avoid the certain death weaved into the very fabric of the looming presence above.

And when all of Leo’s endurance, all of his nanites, all of his denial of reality finally reached their limits, his body simply gave in to the currents at the bottom of the lake.