The journey wasn’t bad. Long. In fact, long enough for fatigue to start crawling up her legs and ache into Rieren’s back. And quite dark to boot. Rieren would have been lost without a torch or would at least have been significantly slowed down. But not bad.

She supposed she ought to be thankful it wasn’t dank as well as dark. The stairs had ended quickly and the tunnel had turned into a long, low dirt track with the walls and ceiling suffocatingly close. If there were monsters or any other sort of enemies here, things wouldn’t go so well.

But mostly, Rieren was just glad it wasn’t slippery or muddy. The air had a feeling of moisture about it that reminded her of the dungeon with the captives, as though Rieren was walking under a lake. No sign of any water anywhere, though.

Perhaps a tiny bit hypocritical, coming from someone who channelled water-Aspected Essence on the daily. But really, that just meant she had a healthy respect for the danger it could pose.

“You are lucky I am carrying you around, little kitten,” Rieren said. “Now you can sleep away the entire journey until we finally arrive at our destination.”

Batcat didn’t even bother replying.

Rieren had lost track of time long ago. The passage weaved ever downwards, sometimes levelling for a little while before sharply going down again. She thought it best not to pause, even when the land turned momentarily flat and wouldn’t pull her downslope thanks to gravity.

But after a while—what felt like a long, long while—Rieren finally made it down.

Just as she remembered, the tunnel opened up to an enormous cavern. Rieren was standing on a thin ledge that overlooked the underground cavern. This place could have swallowed the gigantic chamber in Lionshard dungeon where she had defeated the Gravemark Puppeteer whole and with a great amount of room to spare.

Of course, Rieren had been here before, had seen all of this in her last lifetime. The awe at the sight was still powerful though. Not something easily swept aside.

Rieren hurried down the ledge closer to level ground. It was damp and muggy here as well. Heat and humidity pressed close upon her. She would get used to it, though. Especially once she was in the area for a month or more, just to get to the Late-Enlightened realm.

Her feet splashed down when she reached the bottom. It wasn’t water. Not just water, at least. Rieren had verified it the last time she had been here, but the thin film of liquid flooding the enormous chamber wasn’t a naturally occurring substance. It wasn’t even a strange concoction created accidentally by people, like the weirdness in the last Locale.

No, this came straight from the Abyss.

Batcat roused itself on top of her head and then meowed plaintively.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “You do not like the Abyss or anything to do with it, even though you literally ate enough of it to create Abyss Rents whenever you so desire.”

Batcat proclaimed its affront at her statement with a little hiss, before burying itself deeper into her hair.

Rieren smiled and patted it. “We will be fine. The influence of the Abyss here is… nothing like what we have seen before.”

That was true. There were no Abyssals here, nor any Abyss Rents from which they could arrive. Rieren wouldn’t have to worry about monsters.

However, that didn’t mean she would have no worries at all when it came to others. The Locale covered at least as much area as the last one she had used, if not more. And just like with that Enlightenment Locale, there were others in this vast realm of space.

When Rieren closed her eyes and focused, she could sense the distant pinpricks of Essence being channelled. It wasn’t unusual. As with the other Enlightenment Locale, she wasn’t the only one breaking through the Enlightened realm. She could have to make do with sharing this space with anyone else possessing the same goal.

The only problem was who exactly consisted of her fellow Enlightened-realm cultivators, if that was who they even were.

Batcat rapped her forehead hard with its paw.

Rieren glared upwards, though she couldn’t see the cat on her head, of course. “No, cat, I am not giving into my paranoia.”

The winged kitten disagreed with loud hissing, some argumentative meows, and several more taps on her head for good measure.

“No, this is an actual concern. I am not—”

Batcat hissed louder than ever, then bit her on the head.

“Ow, fine. I will only cultivate. Monkey’s balls.”

Truth be told, there were no cultivators nearby. All those pinpricks of channelling Essence were so far away from Rieren’s position, she really did have no reason to begin worrying about them. If one of them turned out to be a Masked Avatar in disguise, well, she would let her cursed little cat deal with it.

For now, Rieren did her best to focus on her cultivation. First thing first, she used the Arisen’s Beast Core to claim a lot of the resources she needed. Just as with the first one, she had obtained a flood of Credits, and though she might have preferred to save up and purchase another Temporal Recollector, she knew the resources speeding up her cultivation were more important.

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Thankfully, the number of Thunderous Fissure pills, Incandescent incense, Ascetic’s Cerebrum, and a few other odds and ends she had to buy still left her with a over two hundred of the seven hundred Credits she got from the Beast Core.

A part of her regretted that she hadn’t been able to claim anything off any of the other corpses from the battle. So many bodies just lying there. And she deserved a lot of the loot too. After all, Rieren had performed her share of the killings. She would in fact argue that she had been indispensable, even without taking the Arisen into consideration.

But Rieren was happy enough with what she had. Worries about more Credits could wait. First, she needed to break through to the Late-Enlightened realm.

She performed the same rites as before. Acupuncturing her skin and trying not to draw too much blood, setting up the incense to burn for a good while, establishing a schedule of when she would take the pills and the ginseng to maximize her cultivation, all of them needed a bit of thought and care. But when Rieren was done, she could finally begin.

Same as before, the idea was to draw as much concentrated Essence as she could. She’d have to do so all the way until she had drawn enough vital Essence in the area to achieve her Enlightenment.

Rieren remembered well what it was, mostly because it—and the one she would need next—didn’t solely revolve around the truths of the regular world.

Her current one involved the Abyss as well.

Old stories and legends had it that the Abyss was equivalent to some sort of underworld, an infernal hellscape that existed far beneath the inhabited surface of the world. That wasn’t the exact truth. As they had seen in dungeon within Lionshard mountain, the Abyss didn’t have any singular location where it existed.

Instead, it was everywhere and nowhere. There was nothing mooring the Abyss to any specific spot in the world, nor were its entrances and exits—the eponymous Abyss Rents—relegated to limited locations.

Abyss Rents could theoretically be generated anywhere with a high-enough concentration of potent, corrupted, Abyss-Aspected Essence. Although, possessing creation-Aspected Essence, which was what Dungeon Cores generally had to a great degree, made creating Abyss Rents much easier.

Travelling through a rent would lead one to the alternate dimension of the Abyss, while exiting through a nearby rent could theoretically deposit someone on the other side of the world.

Of course, Rieren didn’t know of such a thing happening to anyone. But that was what the old philosophers tended to say. Determining the truth was impossible because the Abyss hadn’t come into reality before the apocalypse had struck down.

That was another ongoing and perplexing mystery about the other worlds, both the Abyss and the Aether. While they had both been part of the folk tales of the Elderlands for generations, they weren’t as rooted in reality as a place like the Celestial Realm. Cultivators wouldn’t dedicate their whole lives to reaching the land of the gods if it wasn’t real.

But then, the apocalypse had struck, bringing with it the first Abyssals. Rare discoveries had highlighted how the monsters came from rents in space. The moniker of Abyss Rent had subsumed itself into the wider consciousness, and as such, the other side of the rents had been termed the Abyss.

The question was, how could a made-up location in stories end up being true? How could it hold the same sorts of eerie details that the old folk tales peddled?

Rieren hadn’t been able to delve deeply enough into them to determine the root of the oddity. Nor had anyone else, as far as she knew. Nevertheless, the truth couldn’t be denied that the Abyss was present here, in some strange form, deep within the bowels of the world in this Enlightenment Locale. As it was in a few others all over the Elderlands.

“Be careful, cat,” she said several hours later when Batcat had finished napping and had hopped off her head to go exploring as it had done in the first Enlightenment Locale. “This place may not be as dangerous as one might think, but it is still mysterious and unknown. I suggest you do not stray far.”

For all that it didn’t like the Abyss or corrupted Essence, Batcat didn’t seem to mind splashing around in the water-that-was-not-water. It turned back to look at her with an unreadable expression. Though, if Rieren squinted, she was sure it was telling her to not worry.

Then it padded off, lost in the low mist rising above the liquid. Rieren decided not to think too much about the kitten.

If it could hop through the Abyss with no trouble, this Locale shouldn’t be a problem.

Rieren focused on her cultivation. It was natural to be concerned that she was absorbing Abyss-Aspected Essence by drawing in the world’s natural energy. She even suspected that there was at least some Abyss-Aspect in the vital energy of the world present here. But the Essence she drew in was pure. Untouched by any corruption, bearing no Aspect at all.

It was difficult to tell how many hours and days passed. Rieren was certain she was going to need more time than she had at the first Enlightenment Locale. That was just how cultivation worked. It exponentially required more time for growth for more powerful stages and realms.

But that didn’t mean Rieren had no method of measurement at all. She had apportioned her Thunderous Fissure pills and the Ascetic’s Cerebrum ginseng just for this reason.

Well, and because she didn’t want to have to take too much or too little while in the midst of her cultivation.

Nevertheless, it was apparent to her after some time that she had run through three combined portions. Since each portion was to last her about ten hours, that meant at least two days had passed since she had begun.

Rieren was dimly aware that Batcat had returned on occasion while she had been cultivating. The cat hadn’t bothered her though, nor had it shared any memories. Perhaps there hadn’t been anything worth sharing. There wasn’t much interesting in a wide, dark expanse of uncanny nothingness.

Or perhaps it had been distracted by the biscuits she had bought and apportioned just like her ingredients. At least it wasn’t eating through all the biscuits at once. Smart kitten.

Channelling in Essence, trying to expand her Domain and elixir field even farther, and waiting for enough Vital Essence to gather soon became automatic. It didn’t even take a week until her thoughts were wandering every which way while her body and spirit continued the process of strengthening itself.

She assumed it was supposed to be boring to people. Doing nothing but simply sitting there, drawing in the world’s natural energy. There wasn’t anything fun. No source of excitement.

But then, this was a test of patience. Of endurance and even maturity in a way. One couldn’t seek to claim the heavens without understanding how the world truly worked.

Though, those had been proper tests when Rieren had been young. This was nothing now.

At some point, Rieren had begun to obtain her first visions, just as she had done in the first Enlightenment Locale. She had acquired enough Vital Essence, it would seem.

It wasn’t a surprising one. She had seen it before. The story of the Abyss.

Within her mind’s eye, Rieren was shown the exact area she was in, but from a bird’s eye point-of-view. Her vision roved over the entire Locale. She was a tiny bit sad the vision wasn’t occurring in real-time. It would have been nice to get a peek at who else was using the same Enlightenment Locale as her.

But then, the roving began slowing down. They were approaching a darker area of the Locale. A spot where the mist disappeared and liquid sounded like it was falling through a waterfall. Or a gorge.

The slice in the land reminded Rieren of an eye with no pupil. An ellipse but tapering to points at either end. It was through this hole—this rent—that the liquid and mist were falling.

And through it, Rieren fell as well. Into the heart of the Abyss.