The food on the fire started to bubble over, and everyone broke off their conversation to take it off. A few minutes later, replete and happy, they retired for the night. Sam started cultivating his Dao as soon as he entered his tent, and sunk into a deep meditative state for the next few hours. He was woken by a strange noise coming from outside the tent, almost as if something was walking out there. Walking on more than two legs.

Looking down to the bottom of his sleeping bag, he saw that Rax was still there. There was something else out there. Sam burst out of the tent, just in time to see a grotesque construction of bone and rotting flesh sniffing around one of the tents. Upon seeing Sam it hissed, and started running off.

“Oh, no you don’t!! Sam shouted, throwing his mace. The weapon soared end over end, and crushed the creature into the ground with its momentum. Sam ran after it, and staved in its skull with a single punch. The rest of the camp had woken from the commotion, and soon everyone was gathered around the corpse.

“What the hell is that?” Pyotr exclaimed, looking at the thing.

Eduardo crossed himself.

“The spawn of the devil,” he said, as he looked at it. “It appears like some of the creatures whose corpses we studied in the Vatican…”

Everyone looked at Eduardo.

“Hang on, you mean that demons are real?” Sam asked, the first to say anything.

Eduardo nodded.

“Either that, or there are creatures out there so evil that they may as well be called demons. Things have always lurked in the dark recesses of Earth, things best left well alone. However, they do not seem to want peace, instead trying to commit as many atrocities as they can before they are banished. Moments like this have tried my faith before. It might seem sometimes that all that are out there are demons, and the light of God is nowhere to be seen. However, I have always remained faithful.”

Eduardo backed away from the monster, and the others moved in closer to get a better look. It looked like a mix between a dog and a bird, with strangely long legs, and a beak instead of a mouth. It had no apparent skin, save for a light coating of stringy flesh, stretched tight over yellowing bones. If this had been a living creature once, it certainly was not now. Sam reached down and picked it up, finding that it was incredibly light. He set it down again and squinted at it, trying to make out a trace of elemental energy that he sensed. It was the same energy as Reaper had, which meant that this was an undead.

“The last time I was out here, I had to fight some undead creatures. This probably has something to do with it. Perhaps there is a necromancer around here or something like that,” he said.

Jeffrey shuddered.

“If there is, I have no interest in meeting whatever did this. Any necromancer around our level would have to be quite close to its summon to do something like this. There is no visible Death energy tether however, which means that this is an autonomous summon. The only kind of person that could do this would be a peak F Rank, or even early E Rank. We should not antagonize whatever controls this.”

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“So all undead are constructs? There are no sapient ones?” Lao asked.

“No, but the only sapient ones are usually extremely powerful, and are generally shunned by all. To survive as an undead, one must consume copious amounts of elemental energy, energy that can only come from ceaseless butchery.”

“Right. There was some guy like that in that information crystal. Altorias, I think. He might have been something different however. Apparently he cloned himself to the point of immortality,” Sam added.

“Altorias the Undying? Well, he’s not what I’m talking about. He’s just a very powerful Ascendant who decided to make some insurance in case someone killed him. No, the true undead are what Reaper is destined to be, if he continued on his path.”

“You think that this could be Reaper’s doing somehow?” Pyotr asked.

Sam shook his head.

“Definitely not. Last time I saw him fight, he could only create some minor spirits, nothing like this. Besides, why would he be here of all places? The chances of that are astronomically low.”

“I suppose. In any case, this is quite concerning. We have a potential threat near our faction headquarters,” the man answered. “Should we check it out?”

“No, the shield should be good enough. Not many things can match the combined energy of thousands of people, at least on this planet,” Jeffrey said. “Besides, we will gain more power if we find the Seven Seals first. If this truly is a peak F Rank being, or even higher, then it is likely one of the final tests of the initialization. It should not fully come into its power until later.”

“Very well then. What about this corpse though? Should we just leave it here?”

“We should at least take it away from the camp. Or, even better, we should just leave now. It’s already been a few hours,” Addas said to Pyotr, clearly spooked by the whole encounter. The others agreed, and they lifted up the creature, taking it about a hundred feet away from the camp, before packing up their tents.

They had hidden the creature beneath a layer of rotting wood, trying to prevent any scavengers, or even worse agents of whatever had created it, from finding the monster. Sam led the way towards the canyon, as they were starting to get close by now, and they all started moving at their full speeds as Sam indicated their closeness.

A few hours later, they were standing on the lip of rock overlooking the gaping chasm, and it took a few minutes for those who had not seen it before to speak.

“Well, that’s certainly not natural,” Lao said.

“No, it is not,” Eduardo replied. Turning to Sam, he asked him a question. “When you were here before, did you manage to garner any clues about its purpose?”

“From what I could tell, it seems to be some sort of natural barrier to our progression past the environs of our city. It is populated with powerful monsters, and it is far too wide to cross easily. However, there must be some way across, unless we are expected to fly.”

“How do we know that there is not some sort of crossing point further down the line? The System may be an uncaring and brutal machine, but it seems to have at least an idea of fairness,” Pyotr added.

“You might be onto something there. I doubt that the System would deliberately create an impassable obstacle. It might be difficult to cross, but that is just to test our worthiness. Besides, I doubt that the System would have enough interest in us to personally block us from traveling,” Jeffrey said, looking at Sam with a strange expression. Sam got the gist of what the man meant. The System had interfered with his Dao heritage. What if it was doing this now? Then again, it seemed unlikely. It had not known which of the possible headquarters sites that Sam would pick, and if something that large had been formed after the fact, then it would have been felt by the inhabitants of the city. No, it was probably just bad luck.

Sam told the others as much, and they all seemed to agree with him. Lao, as always, had a slightly crafty look in his eye. The man knew that something was strange about Sam’s connection with the Dao, but so far he had not voiced any of his theories. Instead, he merely gave Sam a look as they started off down the side of the canyon.