Arthur’s nose twitched as he suddenly found his sensual organ being invaded by the odious and repugnant smell of blood, and his ears filled with the piercing sound of a child screaming. He tried clearing his mind to figure out what was going on, but soon the metallic taste of blood on his tongue overwhelmed him and had him close to vomiting.
He groaned as he swung out his hands erratically, trying to fan away whatever it was that seemed to surround him, even though in his vision he could see nothing. Then, the whole world around him went red, and the screams in his ears turned into a ravenous and relentless high-pitched cackling.
He felt his emotions flare and then explode within his chest as the cackling voice seemed familiar. No, it was familiar. He knew the voice; it was the murderous man from the woods. Was he still alive? What was going on? Why was there blood still running out of his mouth?
He tried suppressing his growing fear, swallowing it down whole, storing it away for later, and then he swore he felt liquid hope begin to course through his veins as suddenly every one of the mad symptoms he was experiencing began to lessen until they were almost bearable.
It was only after a minute or so that he realised that it was not something as intangible as hope coursing through him, but a very real feeling mystic energy that he could now somehow see with his eyes that he hadn’t been able to before.
This energy did not just run through him, however, as all around him there seemed to be a form of this energy. Though it was not his own and its look was hideous as though it were dark and corrupted, and as he looked closer, he realised that somehow his energy was repelling the other energy, keeping it from touching him.
His mind raced with ideas as to what this strange energy could be, then the answer seemed clear to him. This had to be his Qi. He had known it had felt familiar, and now that he identified it as such, the energy seemed to resemble the energy that had pulsed from him upon his ascension to the Foundation realm. And, if this energy was his Qi, was this his cultivation space?
He hadn’t been inside his cultivation space since that night in the cave, primarily because he’d not needed to cultivate personally due to his irritatingly effective perk, so it was no surprise to him that it had taken him a while to come to grips with where he was.
Yet, as his consciousness of the situation grew, he noticed that the strange Qi beyond the protective shield of his aura had started to congeal and conglomerate into a whirling mess of disgusting light and soon it exploded, and the environment changed.
He no longer stood in an empty void, sparing himself and the energy. Now, he stood and watched on in horror as a scene of sheer evil played out before his very eyes. The world around him depicted that night from the forest, yet there was no sign of Arthur anywhere, no sign he even existed. The campfire was slowly dying as then the murderer could be seen creeping out of the forest – a knife in his hand, a hungry look in his eyes as he approached the helpless Lucas.
The man’s features, however, were far more monstrous and repulsive than they had been in actuality. His flesh was rotten, his fingernails black, and instead of shoes, he had only bare feet that ended with sharp, elongated, black claws. It didn’t take much mental ability to figure out the thoughts that were running through this abomination’s mind, even if what was in front of him was only some ghoulish spectre created by his cultivation space to drive his cultivation.
Arthur felt the world around him begin to shake as his aura seemed to run wild and his emotions roared in his chest. His aura exploded from out of him and soon the air around him began to crackle with truly electric power. Soon cracks in this perverted reality began appearing in his vision, right before the horrid monster of a man could drive his dagger through the vision Lucas’ chest. As the world around him returned to being a void-like environment, a loud demonic shriek of pain could be heard as the vision before him shattered into a million pieces.
Arthur felt his aura slowly calm as well as his mind as the scene seemed to have disappeared. Then, he glanced in the direction that the shriek had come from, and he saw the half-disintegrated form of what looked to be a small, black-coloured goblin with eyes that were as yellow as sulphur.
Cautiously, he approached the strange monster. As he did, he started to hear the monster coughing harshly and caught the exact moment that orange viscous liquid erupted from its mouth with a belching sound. The monster looked to be in tremendous pain, but Arthur couldn’t help but suspect that this creature had played some role in whatever he had just experienced. So, he did not let himself feel sorry for the demonic-looking gremlin.
The gremlin then turned and looked at him, its eyes immediately locking onto his. It let out a roar before it snarled, and it did something that caught Arthur off guard, it spoke, “You! Accursed human! What kind of monster are you?!” Its sentence was punctuated with more orange viscous fluid flying out of its mouth and a pained whimper.
Arthur couldn’t respond, his mind still trying to process what exactly it was that he had just heard, seen, and experienced, and who exactly this strange gremlin was.
If the entity had been unintelligent, he’d have probably killed it without a second thought and assumed that this whole event was just another trial he had needed to face in his cultivation space and moved on. Yet, as the entity seemed to possess some form of intelligence and had addressed him as though it were a second person, that meant this creature might not be merely a spectre of his cultivation space but instead a being that somehow found a way to enter and manipulate his cultivation space.
The implications truly astonished Arthur, but mostly just thinking about it enraged him. He surged forward and grabbed the gremlin by one of its shoulders and lifted the entity, it then spat in his face.
“What are you?” Arthur said, a clear anger in his voice.
The gremlin only laughed before spitting in his face again.
After wiping his avatar’s face clean of the strange fluid, he let out his Qi more intently and the strange entity then began screaming out in pain. And Arthur then stopped.
The entity looked at Arthur with hatred, before saying, “Fine, you monster, I’ll answer your stupid question. I’m a demon, dumbass.”
A demon? That answer had everything clicking in his mind. This must be how demons got cultivators to stray from the official path, by manipulating their cultivation spaces, goading their emotions, and playing off their insecurities and failings. Yet, somehow, even though the demon had succeeded in making him mad, the plan had seemingly backfired as Arthur’s power had torn apart the demon’s own – probably resulting in the demon’s current disintegrated form.
Arthur didn’t waste a further moment, and, recalling what he’d heard from Oliver about the nature of all demons and demonic cultivators, he thrust a Qi-infused punch into the demon’s heart. However, when he looked up at the demon’s face, it was not filled with surprise, terror, not even acceptance. Instead, there was a smug grin plastered all over the gremlin’s face. A grin that would undoubtedly haunt the older man's thoughts for years to come.
Yet, with the demon’s death, before Arthur could do anything, he felt his consciousness fade away, and he returned to his restful sleep.
A few hours later, he awoke slightly startled. He recalled the events that had occurred in his cultivation space, and he frowned. The existence of demons had been explained to him by Oliver, sure, but to experience their attempts at corruption first-hand was shaking his very understanding of reality to its core.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Would this be a common thing? Would he always need to fight off demons in his cultivation space or was this only a one-time thing? Questions such as these sprung forth in his mind and he had no idea how to go about answering them. He was pretty sure that anything related to demons was not something you had casual conversations about in the multiverse, yet he also couldn’t start interrogating Oliver for details otherwise he might end up looking suspicious.
He sighed as yet another problem had been added to his pile of already existing ones. Then his eyebrows raised, as he noticed a few system prompts in the periphery of his vision. He focused on them, which brought them all before his eyes so that he could inspect their contents, and he was quite surprised by what he saw.
You have reached the 2nd step of the [Foundation] realm!
You have reached the 3rd step of the [Foundation] realm!
You have reached the 4th step of the [Foundation] realm!
Total Reward: +6 Points into Spiritual Stat
He had progressed 3 steps in a higher realm far faster than he had done in his prior realm, which could only mean that somehow defeating the demon in his cultivation space had done wonders for his cultivation. He wasn’t quite sure how that worked but simply accepted it as something that had happened and looked over at the bed on the other side of the room where Lucas slept.
The old man could see that the boy was sleeping soundly for the first time in quite a while. Arthur smiled, glad to see that the boy’s body at least was allowing the kid to sleep like he used to. The former butler had feared that after all that they had gone through, the boy would be unable to sleep normally ever again, but it seemed his fears were misplaced.
He could only thank God that the boy had not unlocked the system yet, so therefore presumably wouldn’t be receiving his own nighttime visits from demons out to corrupt his soul. Though the boy’s 8th birthday did approach, Arthur would have to make sure to keep his eye on the boy to best guide and nurture him so that he walked the best and most moral path. Though he was slightly worried if such a path could even be tread well in this power-addicted multiverse that they’d now entered.
Arthur was unsure that things such as his earthly human morality would even be considerations to the vast majority of the multiverse’s population. It seemed to him that the system didn’t care about morality, justice, or the safety of its people, with its sole objective seemingly being to elevate the gifted and the strong to become even more so with time.
He feared, more than anything at that moment, that eventually, that kind of might-makes-right attitude would rub off on him. Or even worse, it would rub off on Lucas. The impressionable boy’s passion for fighting with monsters, that he’d seen over and over again in the past few weeks, could lead the boy down a dark path paved for him by the system’s twisted incentives. And, should that happen, Arthur would have once again failed as a parent/guardian, just as he had done with the boy’s father, and the boy would become a menace to society just like Albert had been. If that happened, Arthur would probably break for good.
He then recalled those moments he'd seen Lucas display that unique sense of awe and wonder that only children his age can experience. He remembered the look on the boy's face that he'd seen when the Nourishing pill had filled his body with energy, how the boy had shown such interest when he had first told him about the system, and the look of awe he had seen on the boy's face as he took in the alien settlement only hours earlier.
He shook his head in resistance to the depressing thoughts of the future. The boy was now the only family he had left and so no matter what, Arthur could not allow a divide to form between them. He was the boy’s grandfather, he had to stick by him no matter what. So he resolved to himself that if the boy started becoming like Albert, Arthur would just have to try his best to drag the boy, kicking and screaming if he had to, out of the dark and back to the light.
Though, he hoped with all his heart, that it wouldn’t come to that. However, only time will tell.
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Blood dripped from her scarred face, though for the first time in the last few weeks, in her whole life really, the blood was not her own but that of her would-be oppressor and captor.
She looked down at the dying body of the man who had spent the last few weeks holding her captive and the only thing she could do was smile widely, though she wasn’t truly satisfied. The bastard deserved far harsher punishment in her books, but she guessed fate was not one that gives just anyone the chance to exact perfect vengeance.
This escape attempt of hers had been opportunistic, dirty, and brutal. She didn’t exactly have the time, nor did she have the power to set up an elaborate torture chamber, so she’d have to accept the man slowly dying on the floor of his own little make-do prison as enough of a punishment.
Her “cell” door was now in pieces, so she easily walked right through it. She looked into the small windows of the other “cells” but only saw the dead remains of other women, so she kept on walking forward – not even taking one look back.
Once she had broken down another door with her newly rapidly healing leg, she smiled as she finally saw the sun after what must have been at least 2 weeks. Looking at the sky above was almost nostalgic, for it had felt so long since she had last seen its vast expanse. Then, she recalled that night and winced.
After the system came, a guy who once sold her weed suddenly appeared at her shop and kidnapped her, showing an incredible, inhuman level of strength. At the time she had been totally helpless, her regular mortal strength nothing in comparison to a person enhanced by the system - a reality she’d been very painfully and sharply made aware of over the last few weeks.
During her lowest moments, her mind had been flooded with memories of some of the other worst moments of her life. Her mother’s death when she was 10, the killing of her best friend, and finally, when she had been forced by her psycho-ex-boyfriend to leave behind her only son with him or risk never seeing or hearing from her boy ever again.
She didn’t let her mind linger on those thoughts, deciding the emotional baggage would only bog her down when she needed her mind to be swift and agile – especially as her captor had ranted in bouts of intense paranoia about how the monsters outside were getting stronger and surviving was becoming more difficult.
If that man, who even she had to admit had been far stronger than her, was struggling to kill the nearby monsters – what luck did perfectly mortal her have?
The thought alone was enough to grow her already intense hatred for her captor. He had essentially robbed her of the chance to get stronger, in pursuit of his deranged fantasies, lording his diminishingly important strength over a group of captive women.
“What a scum bug.” She thought to herself. She’d now have to work 10x harder to become stronger than that moron ever had needed to, and she wasn’t exactly sure that even then she’d be capable of it. Monsters had tough skin and sharp teeth, and some even possessed magic for heaven's sake, and all she had on her was an improvised shiv that had barely managed to pierce the skin of her bastard captor.
She looked around her and groaned. It seemed that said bastard ex-weed-dealer, turned serial kidnapper and rapist, had taken her out into the middle of nowhere. She walked around the premises of the building, and it seemed she had been held prisoner in some sort of farmhouse deep out in the countryside. Her captor probably wanted to avoid being noticed by any other survivors and or feared that the authorities might soon reassert themselves, which it seemed they wouldn't or hadn't.
Then, as she looked around, she saw something off in the distance, but as her eyes kept squinting as she inspected it, she knew that what she saw was beyond odd. For what she saw was a weirdly shaped white spheroid, made up of a patchwork of almost glowing white hexagons, floating atop a tree. Curious about what this strange new landmark was, she cautiously made her way over to the tree.
Once she was standing directly below the tree’s branches, she felt a strange power being emitted by the floating sphere, and her instincts screamed at her to reach up toward it. Acting on those instincts of hers, she began climbing the tree, a pastime she had been quite good at ever since she was a child, and once she stood atop the top branch, she was just about unable to reach out with her hand and touch it. Her rather small height made her just too short for her to reach it, with her only being 5ft 6”.
Deciding to take the risk of injury, she jumped up towards the sphere, her hand pressing against one of the sphere’s hexagonal plates. As soon as her hand made contact, she was suddenly zipped from where she was, into the middle of what looked to be some fog-covered marshlands. If that hadn’t freaked her out enough, she then received a rather ominous system prompt.
SURVIVAL TRIAL STARTED:
Marshlands Survival Trial – Survive 5 days in the marshlands.
Difficulty (relative to the current world) – [A]
Reward: [C] Trial Completion Reward Chest, 100,000 EXP, A choice of weapons.
Penalty for Failure: Death
She let out a small morose chuckle in acceptance that this would likely be the end of her before her head suddenly turned as she heard a loud splashing of water, only to turn around and see a humungous rhino charging towards her. And, she scrambled to her feet and began running.