Deep within the easternmost reaches of the Dragon's Tail sat a large mountain that was wrapped on all sides with clear, cold snow. Though it rose about a league above the dense forests below, it was significantly shorter than those around it. What set this mountain apart from the others in the area was the verdant plateau at its peak, which was characterized by a completely different environment. Clear streams were visible here and there, along with lengthy swathes of beautiful flowers and tall trees that dominated its far side.

  Elder Calvin, the youngest person to ever achieve such station within the Nightshadow Sect, knelt down to inspect the corpses of his compatriots. The bodies had long-since rotted away, or at least what had remained of them after they had been killed. From what he could tell, they had been crushed by an arrayment or talisman that altered gravity within a specific space, though he didn't have to wonder long about who had killed them in such a brutal manner.

  Only one set of remains wore a different set of clothes than those of his fallen allies, who had worn the same black robes as he now had on. A heaviness weighed down upon his gaze as he stared at the tattered colours of the Crescent Moon Sect, the former Hegemon of the Western Isles that had recently been overthrown. He could barely make out the insignia of a protector of that sect, one of its most respected positions. Tracing an index finger over the fabric, he let out a disheartened mutter.

  "Aelia…why did this have to happen?" He asked despite knowing the answer. She had died because of the heir to the Crescent Moon Sect, a naive and foolish brat that Aelia had often complained about when they'd shared cups of ale in secret.

  Before anything else, Calvin lifted her body with a gentle expulsion of inner essence and brought her over to the tallest tree on the mountaintop plateau and took his time digging out a grave for her. Once she was buried, he knelt down and prayed to the heavens, hoping that she might hear his final farewell. He also did something that would have left his comrades staggered in disbelief were they here to see it; he began to sob.

  As the most talented youths of their respective sects, they had grown up as rivals of sorts. Unlike most within their own organizations, there had never been any animosity between them. Rather, he'd quite liked her, and hoped that one day they could have an open friendship without worrying about becoming the subject of any social stigmas.

  Keplin, the useless bastard, hadn't even stopped by at the site of his final assignment before he'd been killed by those mysterious youths outside of Ridgerock. Because of his failure, the frustrating task had fallen to Calvin, the elder with the least seniority now that that old wretch had died a deserving death. Another group had been sent out, but their life signals had inexplicably been snuffed out. The sect master hadn’t been able to project his consciousness to wherever they had died, because it seemed as if their bodies had simply vanished from this world.

  Calvin couldn’t detect any signs of anybody else having been in the area, not recently anyhow. Perhaps they never made it here?

  Once he had seen off the person that he'd just realized was his closest friend—an odd thing considering their limited interactions—he returned to the scene of her death and followed the devastation to a small fissure in the soil. Standing above it, he looked down with wary eyes, unable to sense the bottom despite having a cultivation at the first level of Genesis. He wasn't sure why, but the opening in the earth gave off an ominous aura.

  What happened to the others? He couldn’t sense anyone else on the mountaintop, which made him wonder after the fates of the previous group that had been sent out to remedy Keplin’s mistake.

  Just as Calvin was about to head to another area to investigate further, he was seized by the coldest, most heart-palpitating sensation of terror that he had ever felt. He belatedly realized that a demon-like claw of red energy—so dark that it was almost black—had emerged from the hole and clamped around his midsection. More frightening still was that this claw completely stole away his stamina and left him locked in place, at the mercy of the unknown entity that had just sealed his cultivation. Before he knew it, he was pulled into the hole with a rush of wind, though the wind resistance lessened significantly the moment that he passed the threshold into the darkness.

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  The first thing he noticed was the strong scent of blood, so powerful that he dreaded what sort of scene he was about to see once he got his bearings. Within seconds, he was placed atop a platform of cold, dark stone, though he couldn't sense anything around him save for two pillars of the same material that stood parallel to each other at the platform's centre.

  W—what is this place?

  The seal on his cultivation was abruptly lifted, and he instinctively cast his spiritual sense out into the surroundings so as to get his bearings. True to his fears, his spiritual sense told him that he was smack in the middle of a massive lake of blood, something that shouldn't possibly exist. A large arrayment had been constructed over the lake, in the form of a network of narrow bridges that were connected to one another by a large number of stone platforms similar to the one that Calvin had just been dropped onto, though these ones were of much cruder make.

  A spine-tingling silence dominated this hellish dominion. He could hear his heartbeat, louder than he would ever have thought possible, and belatedly noticed a trio of familiar auras on one of the nearby bridges. The young men had died minutes go, their bodies still warm, though something about their arrangement immediately disturbed Calvin. Two had been killed, evident by their slit throats, and one seemed to have committed suicide by opening up his wrists. The stomach-turning thing of note was that the two that had been killed were missing many pieces of flesh, as if they had been picked at by scavengers long enough for bone to be visible on some sections of their chewed-up limbs.

  More disturbing still were the tens of thousands of corpses that were interspersed throughout the nightmarish cavern, which he belatedly realized could not be beneath the mountain that he'd just been standing on. His instincts screamed at him to remember the fact that something had brought him here, which meant that he wasn’t alone in this frightening place.

  Frozen in terror, Calvin jumped back as an evil cackle—evil in its truest definition—sounded quietly from directly in front of him. He fumbled to take out a superior spirit stone, which revealed that the platform wasn’t empty aside from the pillars like he’d thought. Silver chains connected the pillars together like a metallic spider web that was completely undetectable, at the centre of which an elderly woman was suspended, the metal links pierced through almost all areas of her naked body. Most disconcerting were her eye sockets, which housed nothing but hollow darkness.

  The spirit stone fell from Calvin’s shaking grip, from hands that normally stayed steady in the face of the most fearsome opponents. Lying directly beneath the cackling woman and between the pillars were five corpses that he hadn’t been able to sense. Arranged in a loose star, their wrists had been slit, the reason why these corpses alone had gone cold out of the thousands that filled this dreadful place.

  "Yes…" grated the woman, a pleased tone to her cracked voice. “How lucky I am. Not only did that brat's escape connect me to the outside world for a brief moment, but he left the spatial tear in disarray.”

  Subconsciously, Calvin acknowledged that he had somehow wound up in an independent space, a dimension entirely separated from his home world. Even so, the only conscious thing he could do was urinate into his robes and begin to shiver.

  "W—who are you? W—where is this?"

  "Do not interrupt me."

  Calvin shut his mouth with enough force to crack several of his teeth.

  "You…there's work for you to do. I had higher hopes for you than the last few.”

  He kept silent, too afraid to speak.

  “If you manage to meet my expectations, then you may return to your homeland with your life.” She spat on one of the corpses below her, though evidently her mouth was too dry to produce more than what amounted to a bit of moist air. “You're lucky that I'm in high spirits. You see, I've recently learned that someone close to me is still alive, somewhere out there on that little island you call home. I must meet him…and you…will help me."

  Calvin tried to slit his own throat, too frightened by the raspy, menacing voice that seemed to whisper threats to his very soul. His hand fell off at the wrist, cleanly cut, the blood beneath refusing to pour out of the fresh opening due to the interference of a small seal of energy.

  "O—okay. I—I’ll help you.”

  His other hand fell off, though both of his fallen appendages were quickly reattached as if the previous pain had been a lie.

  "I told you not to talk.”

  Calvin nodded, though whether from subservience or from the quaking shivers that raked his body, he knew not.