The sensation was undoubtedly strange. Rieren had entered the Abyss before. She had known what exactly it was going to feel like. Nevertheless, entering an Abyss Rent still felt like being splashed with freezing cold water. The shock of something like that couldn’t ever be fully acclimatized to.
Darkness closed in when she struck the Abyss Rent as the immediate chill subsided. There was no other physical sensation accompanying the feeling. She was just grateful it wasn’t painful.
When she could see again, Rieren had arrived in the Abyss.
Contrary to what little children’s tales liked to claim, it wasn’t a dark and desolate land filled to the brim with madness, monsters, and worse. Well, desolate was somewhat accurate at least.
Rieren couldn’t see far. After about a dozen paces in any direction, thick fog shrouded the distance. Shadowy ruins and other, stranger forms loomed in them, all too amorphous to be sure of anything. She was standing on a bed of white sand. Not salt—she had tasted it once—just sand that was the colour of bone.
But what did she recognize was closer at hand. Tiny glinting orbs hovered all around her, floating this way and that like lazy fireflies. None of their colours were the same, nor constant. Their hues kept shifting over time, turning from orange through blue, black, gold, and so on.
Rieren swallowed. Every time she had been here before, she had been faced with the exact same scenario. Little glinting orbs filling up the entire universe.
The Abyss wasn’t a single plane of existence as the Mortal Realm was. There was no one world where everything existed together. Instead, everything had its own little realm—the tiny orbs floating before them.
She was certain that a few of those contained the rest of her companions from the chamber with the Abyss Rent. Then there was the Gravemark Puppeteer. And Elder Olg too. All in their own, disparate little existences just as Rieren was in. It was only thanks to her use of the firemine that the Puppeteer hadn’t been able to pull them into its orb.
Of course, there were ways one could meet others in the Abyss. The only way was to make the glinting orbs intersect with each other physically. Which normally required cultivating a good deal of corrupted Essence.
But Rieren had other plans.
She walked over to the nearest glinting orb and placed a single finger on it. It didn’t move, didn’t even feel like she was touching anything at all. But the colour turned constant. Now, it was stuck on a dull brown.
“Can anyone hear me?” she asked.
It was a bit of a risky process. While she couldn’t manipulate any of the tiny orbs without using Abyss-Aspected Essence, she could interact with them individually, so long as she was physically touching them.
A wash of images overtook her mind the moment the orb’s colour stabilized. Another plane of dismal, white sand. More of the same orbs floating everywhere. Except, at the centre was an orb that was growing larger, its shape deteriorating as parts stretched out now and then, as though something was trying to break free.
Rieren pulled away from it. There was the risk of trying to find what each orb had in that manner. The one she had just snooped in on had held an Abyssal about to be born. Those already existing would have Abyss-Aspected Essence within their possession, and they would be able to manipulate Rieren’s tiny orb to cause irreparable harm.
Only after they found hers, of course. Interacting with the orb alerted its occupant to her existence in the Abyss, but did not simply grant them knowledge about which orb she was in.
She tried peeking into more of the glinting orbs. One of them contained a baby Blightmane, a creature that a distant part of her might have even called cute. It actually reminded her of Batcat.
Which held the unfortunate reminder that she needed to find the winged cat’s whereabouts. In the chaos of the Gravemark Puppeteer’s attack, she had lost all sight of the kitten.
It took a few more tries through multiple glinting orbs before she found what she sought. Most contained various monsters, some she hadn’t even seen yet in this life, and a few other curious occupants—one held what looked like a treasure chest, another a strange building falling in on itself, and yet one more had nothing but a tombstone.
The one she finally paused on contained Folend.
He was staring into the distance, not moving from his spot. For a moment, Rieren was curious what exactly was running through his mind, but there was no time for idle thoughts and chatter.
“Folend,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
He twitched in surprise at her voice, twisting his head this way and that to see if he could spot her. Of course, she wasn’t there physically, so it was a futile effort.
“Folend,” Rieren continued. “I am not there in person. All you need to do is listen to me.”
“I was moments away from pulling out my mace and destroying everything in sight except… there isn’t anything but these strange… whatever they are.”
“They are our way out of here.”
“Where is here? On that note.” He glared into the sky. “Where are you? What is going on, Rieren? Did your little explosion destroy the Abyss Rent and now we’ve ended up in the Beyond?”
“Nothing so dramatic, I assure you. This is the Abyss.”
“What? How can we even be in the Abyss when none of us channeled Abyss-Aspected Essence?”
“We did not have to. Recall the Abyssal that tried to—well, succeeded in—pulling in. We were connected to its threads, imbued with Abyss-Aspected Essence, and now we are here.” Rieren put in some steel behind her voice. “But it is gone now. We must act before we are discovered and then killed.”
“How?”
She explained her plan to him rapidly. “Do you see any of the corpses from the room nearby you?”
They needed to manipulate the tiny orbs, but since they didn’t have any access to corrupted Essence, they were going to need a bypass. Something that was available in the System Shop, though they would need more Credits to purchase it. Rieren didn’t have much on her that would give the sufficient number of Credits.
However, the Gravemark Puppeteer might have pulled some of the corpses in the chamber into the Abyss that they could sell off. Those webs it had flung out had taken over the whole room. It stood to reason that some had been pulled in as well.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
There was the possibility that multiple things pulled into the Abyss ended up in the same orb. The chance for that was rare for beings that were alive. But for things like corpses and other nonliving matter close to living beings, they tended to gather together with the nearest living being. For instance, that was the reason Rieren still had her clothes, her sword, and her storage ring.
Unfortunately, she had sold the corpse beside her to buy the firemine. A worthy purchase, of course, but Rieren still lacked something to sell now. Well, unless she sold what she had on her, which she was loathe to do.
“Oh, there’s one here,” Folend said. “We have to sell them, huh?”
She could understand his reluctance. Most of the bodies had been fellow disciples once. Simply selling them to the System Shop was a rather disrespectful sendoff. Then again, notions of honourable sendoff and whatnot could die in a gutter for all Rieren cared at the moment. They had to do what they needed to survive.
Thankfully, Folend agreed and sold off the corpse before she had to reiterate that to him. Rieren had thought that he of all people would be the most pragmatic among them. That he had hesitated even for a moment reminded that he actually had a heart, somewhere in that shrivelled chest of his.
“Once you find a Corruptor Branch in the System Shop,” she said as a reminder, telling him about the item they needed to interact with the orbs. “Make sure you pull in the correct orbs towards each other. You’ll have to hurry, though. Before the monsters find you. Once you alert one, it won’t stop until it finds your orb and then invades, seeking to—”
“Yes, I am aware. Be off with you and do what you need to.”
“May Fortune favour your steps.”
As Rieren pulled herself free from his orb, she was certain she heard him repeat the same to her. It took some time, but she eventually managed to find the others in the same manner, repeating the exact same information she had provided Folend.
She ought to count herself blessed in the sense that they had all been physically together when they had been pulled into the Abyss and they had been initially pulled to the same spot. Both factors meant that the little realms they had ended up in were somewhat close to each other.
In the same manner, she was certain Elder Olg was too far for her to find in the same manner. Not that it would stop Rieren from finding him somehow.
At least all her companions were fine. Avalien and the other guard had ended up together, both of them mourning the death of their comrade. Amalyse was pacing in her orb. They all baulked a little at the idea of needing to sell a corpse to get a tool with Abyss-Aspected Essence. It was necessary, however. As such, they overcame their reluctance soon enough.
Like Rieren, Amalyse didn’t have a corpse to sell. Rieren told her to wait.
“How did this even happen?” Amalyse asked. “Didn’t you hit that thing with a firemine? Brilliant move, by the way.”
Rieren shook her head, though of course, Amalyse couldn’t see it. She hadn’t found the orb in her little pocket of existence that held Rieren. “It was less brilliant and more desperate. But I believe we were being dragged in before the firemine actually struck the monster. Once it detonated, the threads broke and we ended up in different locations.”
“I see. We don’t have much time, do we…”
“Just do not interact with any of the orbs until I tell you.”
Rieren left Amalyse waiting. For now, she decided to sell her storage ring to get the tool she needed. There wasn’t much stored in the little band of Shardsteel to begin with. Her sword, some stray loot she hadn’t sold off yet, and, strangely enough, some of the biscuits Batcat liked so much. She barely remembered when she had even obtained those.
After pulling out all that the ring contained, Rieren sold it to the System Shop for twenty-three Credits. A significant chunk. Enough for a smaller version of a Corruptor Branch.
It was nothing more than an arm-length of a dead tree branch, crooked and curved with broken twigs sprouting here and there. What looked eerily similar to an E-Grade corrupted Beast Core was studded near the handle end of the length of wood. It seemed to have a life of its own, already interacting with the Abyss-Aspected Essence around her.
Rieren began pulling in the orbs that held her companions. It was a simple matter of using the knife to push them along in the direction she wanted. They certainly didn’t resist, and their weight was minuscule. She still hurried along. Those monsters she had alerted in her search for her companions would discover her in time.
If an occupant wanted to move from their orb to another, they only needed to find the target orb. However, if they wished to interact with multiple orbs, then the faster method would be by bringing them all closer together in one pocket dimension. That way, the occupant wouldn’t need to go hunting for the subsequent orb after jumping to another.
Rieren hadn’t mentioned this explicitly to others in fear of frightening them, but the issue was that anyone was capable of doing the same. The Abyssals they had seen in some of the other orbs could all be coming as well.
They could have a better chance of defeating the monsters if they worked together, but then, the Abyssals could be coming in great force and numbers too.
In other words, they had to hurry.
It took longer than Rieren wished, but after some time, she had everyone’s orbs pulled together in the same location. Now, they all simply needed to begin moving into one orb.
The branch couldn’t help them channel the corrupted Essence, unfortunately. None of the other similar tools Rieren had eyed could do that. However, there was a different thing they could purchase that would work as an external conduit for Abyss-Aspected Essence to let them make use of it.
“Can you all hear me?” Rieren asked, touching the group of orbs.
They responded affirmatively.
“While we cannot pass through the orbs ourselves without the use of Essence,” Rieren continued. “However, dead or inorganic matter do not have the same restrictions. As such, I need you to pass through the orbs anything you have bought and any of the corpses still around you.”
Rieren waited a moment for their assent before pulling herself back from the little congregation of orbs. A moment later, various paraphernalia began to materialize in her pocket dimension.
There were the corpses she had requested, of course, but they came along with other things as well. Things that could be sold she hadn’t asked for specifically. It was nice to see that the others were thinking ahead. Not only had they forgone their hesitancy at using up the bodies of their former companions in such an undignified manner, they had thought to add more too.
Rieren sold everything, of course. The corpses, the weapons, the few articles of spare clothing, scraps of food, a skin with no water in it, and a few other odds and ends. When she was done, she had just over the number of Credits needed for her next purchase.
The Malformed Root was a necklace made from the dried tendril of some old tree’s root. Rieren placed it around her neck, feeling the skin their immediately begin to prickle. She had been forced to channel Abyss-Aspected Essence a handful of times in her last life, and she had never enjoyed it.
It was the same case this time as well. When Rieren drew in the Essence around her, the root started growing. Smaller tendrils burst to life along its length and spread outwards like tributaries of an evil river, the main branch encircling her neck again and again like a noose drawing tighter.
The important bit, though, was that she now had Abyss-Aspected Essence in her grasp without having endangered her meridians, her elixir field, or any of the Essence she had already drawn in.
Her next touch took her right through one of the orbs.
“What in the—” Avalien held back a curse. “Mistress! You’re about to be strangled!”
“I am alright,” Rieren said. “But we cannot waste a single second here. Come.”
Avalien pulled up the other guard who had survived thus far, though she looked a little shellshocked by all that had gone on. Rieren was rather impressed she had held herself together for so long. She was a guard of Lionshard Sect, but she looked young. Someone who might have died early in the last life, and had never gone on to see the true horrors of the apocalypse.
The momentary pity vanished as they entered the next orb. Only one of them was required to channel the corrupted Essence to manipulate the orbs. So long as the others touched Rieren, they would be teleported alongside her.
Amalyse stood up with a smile when she saw Rieren appear. “Took you long enough.”
Rieren beckoned her over with a wave. “Come. No time to waste.”
Amalyse hurried over, recognizing the gravity of the situation. But just when she touched Rieren’s hand, one of the orbs started malfunctioning. Rieren stepped back, warning the others to get away as well.
The strange orbs pushed away the others near it to spread them out, though not, thankfully, with much force. They were near enough that they wouldn’t have to hunt them down among all the other orbs in the vicinity.
But the more worrying bit was that the troubling glinting ball in question was no longer spherical. Its shape was changing just like one of the ones Rieren had seen in her search. Not only had it grown big, but it was also threatening to break apart, its surface on the verge of shattering. Before Rieren could decide what to do, it did indeed break apart.
Revealing none other than the Masked Avatar.