The floating woman continued to stare at him with her bleeding, crimson eyes, when finally, Red saw her mouth move.
“Enter.”
The sound of her voice didn’t reach his ears, and yet the meaning of her words rang clear in his mind. The youth felt his eyes sting with an unbearable pain, and he was forced to look away from the woman. He stumbled on his feet, almost falling down onto the rushing river a few meters to his left.
His senses twisted and flared, as if the world around him was becoming too much to understand. Undecipherable noises, overwhelming smells, cold and hot drafts of air blowing against his skin at the same time, a blurring chaos in his vision. Even his crimson sense, ever his constant guide, seemingly stopped working, as he could no longer feel Domeron’s fluctuation nearby.
Unable to find any purchase in the physical, Red tried to focus on his mind. Out of pure reflex, he entered into a meditative state, his expanded awareness inspecting what was happening to his body. What he saw made little sense, either.
His flesh and organs seemed to be twisting and coiling into incomprehensible forms, in a state of constant change. The youth didn’t know if this was a reflection of reality, or if this was all mere illusions.
Whatever the case, Red felt lost, unable to react or move his body. The only thing he could do was to hold on to his consciousness while whatever was going on outside continued.
After what felt like an eternity, the maelstrom of sensations seemed to weaken. He felt control of his body return as his senses started to take in the surrounding environment again.
The first thing the youth felt was the still air. A damp sensation that pervaded his breath and skin - the feeling of a place that was closed off to the world, where nothing but the rain waters could reach through the cracks between the earth.
A very familiar feeling.
Red opened his eyes and looked around. Complete darkness, yet the sounds of droplets and the feeling underneath his feet were very familiar. A cave.
Immediately, a shiver ran up his spine.
‘How?’
He reached down to the side of his waist, grabbing for his sword. His hand came up empty, however.
The youth frowned and looked down. Neither his sword nor his pouch were there. In fact, Red noticed he wasn’t even wearing the same clothes that had been on his person mere moments ago. Instead, a large robe covered his body, with its hood pulled over his head.
He paused once he saw this. Inspecting his body, he noticed his physical form seemed to be the same, but none of his previous belongings were there with him. A possibility crossed his mind.
‘Is this an illusion?’
It was the only thing that made sense to him. Yet, every sensation he felt with his body was still as clear as day. In a sense, at a high enough level, the difference between illusions and realities was indistinguishable for someone without the capabilities of seeing through them.
Red closed his eyes and entered a meditative state, searching his body for any oddities. To his surprise, the crimson mist in his body was also completely gone. He felt a sense of panic rising in his mind, which was quickly extinguished upon further consideration.
How could the crimson mist be extracted from his body without him noticing? Or at the very least, without putting up a fight?
These impossibilities only led credence to his theory he was in the middle of an illusion. Yet, even understanding what was going on, it didn’t give him any ideas on how to free himself from whatever realm he had landed on.
Red took a deep breath and started to take in his environment with more focus. His dark vision didn’t seem to work in this place, meaning that for the first time in a long while, the youth was in complete darkness, unable to examine the cave in any detail.
The echo of droplets of water falling onto the ground told him that this cave wasn’t that big, no more than a dozen meters across. His feet were bare against the ground, feeling the coarse stone against his soles. Other than that, there were no sounds or sources of light to help him make his way through the darkness.
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This illusion had taken from him all of his weapons and powers, leaving Red no better than the child he was back in the underground. Perhaps even worse, considering he didn’t even have a way to light his path.
He felt hesitant about how to proceed, yet what choice did he have other than to feel his way in the dark?
With careful and measured steps, he made his way to the nearest wall. His palms flat against the stone, he felt around, searching for something out of the ordinary. There was nothing but the cold, damp rock wall.
After taking a mental note of the location in his mind, the youth started to make his way around the room with the wall as his guide. He searched the cave carefully, hoping to find any openings that could lead him to another chamber, or any hidden mechanism that would reveal a passage out of this place.
It took him almost ten minutes before he returned to the initial spot, with nothing to show for it. As far as he could tell, the cave was completely closed off. Even the ceiling was shut tight, which Red checked with much effort on his part. There was nothing.
A completely closed off chamber shouldn’t have been possible, but the youth was keenly aware of the possibility he was dealing with something outside the realms of reality here.
‘If that’s the case… What can I even do about this?’
Logical thinking and physical abilities would avail you naught in a realm that didn’t follow the same laws of reality. In which case, he needed to rely on something more obscure.
‘Do I need to think about it again?’
Red had a similar experience back in the inheritance realm, except he couldn’t even feel his body back then. He was in a void, and only by calling upon the image of a certain being did he seem to free himself from that conundrum. Yet, did he dare do it now that he knew the true dangers of such practices?
‘No. I told myself back then that I would rely on my own powers. I can’t turn back now at the first sign of adversity.’
With that decision, the youth sat down cross-legged on the ground and closed his eyes. Since he couldn’t trust what his own body was feeling, he needed to look within for a solution.
Just as he was about to enter a meditative state, a sound reached his voice. It was so slight that he almost missed it, yet in this environment where the only thing he heard was the sound of droplets, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
Red opened his eyes and looked around. Still complete darkness.
A few seconds later, though, the same sound reached his ears, and with it, a glow appeared in his vision. Both were so faint that he had a hard time discerning them, but he knew they were there. The same phenomenon continued for a few times, but they remained extremely weak.
If he wanted to know what they were, he would need to get closer.
Red took a deep breath and got up.
‘Nothing in this place is real.’
He kept repeating the same sentence in his mind as he walked ahead. Sure enough, in the place where he was sure he inspected before, an opening seemed to have formed from where both the glow and the sound were coming from.
The youth frowned but didn’t stop walking. The opening led him into a corridor, one not unlike the ones he used to dwell in his time in the underground. In fact, Red felt he could even recognize this path somewhat, so ingrained in his mind that place was.
The only thing missing, of course, were the moonstones imbedded into the walls.
This didn’t phase him. It was an illusion, after all.
The corridor led him on for a hundred meters or so, until the sound became clearer to him. It was a human voice. Not just one, but several of them. They spoke in hushed tones, yet seemed loud enough to echo all the way to him in this enclosed space. He couldn’t discern their words, however.
Red kept following the path, repeating the mantra in his head all the while. Finally, the corridor led him to a chamber, from which the intense light was coming from. The glow was dark green, and it was the only thing providing any kind of illumination to the cave in front of him, bouncing off the walls of the large chamber. Yet it was more than enough to reveal the scene in front of him.
Dozens of people, kneeling on the ground with their hands held together in prayer, which only came across as incomprehensible muttering to Red’s ears. They wore different clothing, but the majority of them looked to have been peasants of different ages and genders, some of them even being children. Yet, what gave the youth pause wasn’t just that.
Rather, the peasants all seemed to be in different states of decomposition. Some of them were just bones, all the flesh having been melted aways from their skeleton, while others were still at the initial stage, their skin bursting from beneath with rotten meat and organs as maggots made their feast on their corpses. However, all of them, without exception, stood in that kneeling position, whispering the same prayer in disturbing disharmony, the voices manifesting from their mouth even if there was nothing left in their corpses to produce it.
The putrid and rotting stench reached Red’s nostrils, an overwhelming smell that he had never felt in his life before, not even in the piles of dead monster he came across in the past. At that moment, it became harder for him to tell himself this was all an illusion, but he held on, taking quick breaths to avoid taking in any more of this air than he needed to.
After regaining his composure, he examined the chamber again. The rotting corpses all seemed to be kneeling towards the same thing, further ahead in the cave. The youth followed the direction they were pointing at.
In the center of the chamber, he saw the source of the light. A man, his flesh slowly falling from his body, crawling forward through the kneeling figures. He was wearing a similar robe to his own, plain and completely dark, and the pulsing dark green light came from his head, pulsing through his cranium and eyes as if something was threatening to break through.
Red couldn’t help but notice he seemed to be crawling towards something with urgency, his eyes never deviating from a single spot ahead of him. The youth looked up, and there he saw it.
A white dagger.