The images that Rieren was shown weren’t so clear cut as they had been the last time she had experienced a vision under the influence of the Vital Essence of the world. Those had been explicit memories of the world. Its history as it had unfolded, a tapestry of its timeline.

Now, it was both more disjointed, more ambiguous, and more ethereal.

Rieren had no idea how long she had to fall through the strange hole. She hadn’t kept track the last time either. Mostly because the walls of the hole were filled with people.

Not alive ones, though. Dead. All of them were spirits, ghostly images of those who had passed away, no longer able to remain in the Mortal Realm. Not in any corporeal form, at least. When she had first seen the Abyss, she had wondered if it was a place for the dead.

She hadn’t been wrong, though that wasn’t correct. The Abyss was a place that caused death.

It had taken her a long while in the last timeline, when she had first tried to earn this specific Enlightenment, to understand what the world was showing her. Ghosts? Darkness? Some sort of morbid feeling, like a reminder that she was about to die?

That last one was what had led her to the real discovery. The Abyss wasn’t a place of torment and torture. It wasn’t a world filled with brutal monsters who solely wished to gorge on the hapless fools who were unfortunate enough to end up there. It wasn’t some mythical realm where only evil reigned.

No, it was merely a representation of the end that all things had to endure.

Everything in the world had a finite lifespan. Even those who searched for immortality, even those whose lives ended in godhood. Even they weren’t entirely infallible. There was proof of that too. After all, the lordless Banishedborn were only free because their god no longer existed.

In essence, the Abyss did represent death. But not in a terrifying, reprehensible manner, so far as she had seen. Its true depths might be another matter. Rieren hadn’t ventured there.

The problem was that this representation of death, of passing, of the end for all things, had come to life. Since the Abyss represented the finiteness of everything, it also included the means of ensuring that all things ended.

Rieren was sinking deeper into the dark hole. She didn’t have to worry about where she was going. This was nothing more than a spiritual journey. Though, in cultivation, even spiritual journeys could leave scars if the traveller wasn’t careful. Rieren had been on this sojourn before, though, so she knew how to keep herself from suffering any adverse effects.

The deeper she sank, the more the images turned disjointed and chaotic. Spirts were everywhere, but now, so were the many ways they had become spirits in the first place.

At one point, Rieren flashed by something burning. A little hovel was on fire. The heat was so ferocious, it baked her face even as she passed by harmlessly. That fire was undoubtedly unnatural. Nothing in the world burned enough ferocity to melt the ground to lava.

Worse instances passed her by. A tidal wave had consumed an entire city, the building-high flood stretching for leagues in every direction, bodies floating on its surface more numerous than the flotsam. Another showed a landslide burying an entire encampment of people. A cyclone tore up an entire village, leaving everything uprooted in its wake.

Cataclysmic deaths weren’t the only thing the Abyss represented. Rieren watched people wasting away through disease, crops withering in drought, beasts being hunted down and torn apart by predators, even a mountain being weathered to nothing more than dust, the passage of aeons compressed to a matter of heartbeats.

Dust that looked far too much like the one she had seen when she had entered the Abyss Rent. Dust that wasn’t going away.

Rieren had entered the Abyss again.

Spiritually, this time. At least, she thought so. She hadn’t passed through any actual Abyss Rents, and the gorge that did exist at the centre of the Enlightenment Locale couldn’t take one physically into the Abyss. Otherwise, the area would have been flooded with Abyssals and Abyss-Aspected Essence.

But she recognized the location all the same. The dead, white sand. The vast nothingness stretching out into the distance. Her line of sight being restricted by a blanket of mist.

Yes, this had to be the Abyss.

Curiously, there were no Abyss Rents in sight. While in the Mortal Realm, Abyss Rents might be located at only specific locations, the Abyss itself held an innumerable amount of them. They existed less like the jagged tears in space in the Mortal Realm and more as miniature realms shaped like tiny spheres. That was how one travelled through the intertwining worlds of the Abyss.

No more visions hammered home either. Rieren didn’t see any more deadly sights. No more proof of how the world would pass no matter how things upon its existed.

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Everything felt too… real for that. Rieren swallowed. Could it be that she was here in truth?

She couldn’t feel anything of her physical body. Her limbs weren’t here to move them, and she certainly didn’t feel her chest rising and falling in breaths or the thumps of her heart pumping blood. She couldn’t even feel herself blink.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to have gone. At this point, Rieren should have already obtained the first bit of her Enlightenment and her spirit ought to have returned back to the Mortal Realm before she obtained more of the world’s vital energy. But she sensed something was missing here. That there was more she should be doing.

Maybe the Enlightenment was different. Maybe, now that she knew what she was going to get anyway, she needed to find something new. Something deeper than the Enlightenment she had obtained in this Locale in the last timeline.

That didn’t seem right. If that was the case, she wouldn’t have reached the Mid-Enlightened realm without changing that too.

The sand shifted under her. Rieren looked down. Sand. White as bone, blank as nothingness. Sand… that could be shifted. She had never thought to dig into the sand, but it shouldn’t be impossible. Sand was light and easily excavatable, after all. Though, she didn’t have anything to dig with here.

Apparently, the thought was enough. As soon as her intention was clear and settled, the sand began shifting on its own.

It receded outwards from beneath her. The sand moved away in enormous chunks to leave a wide hole where it had been before, a gaping chasm that Rieren could stare down into… and gawk. What in the world was she seeing?

Beneath the sand was nothing more than a city. A human city. The construction was familiar to her in an overarching sense, even if the exact architectural style was nothing she had seen before.

No one made blocks of stone of those proportions except as housing for people. No one had thick walls ringing the entire city, towers that rose high to defend the land, or a large, central structure as the seat of governance but people. What did it mean that the sands of the Abyss held nothing more than an ancient human city?

A skeleton. It was obvious that this was nothing more than the corpse of a city. No one could live in those crumbling buildings. A strong wind would be enough to turn the rest of the city into the sand it was buried under.

Another symbol of death. Of another age ending, its last remains preserved in the pit of a world that had never even cared for its existence.

The strangeness didn’t end simply at the presence of the city itself. Rieren might have been able to forget about it in time, if that had been the case. No, as she watched, the city’s image started flickering. One moment, a tower reached up towards the sky. The next, it turned into a stump of its former self, its highest wall no taller than Rieren herself.

She frowned as she slowly found herself lowering into the ruins. The deeper she sank into the former city, the harder it flickered in and out of transitory states. Buildings turned from edifices proclaiming the might of an ancient civilization to crumbling relics of a bygone age, barely recognizable as once having been an actual building.

Things got even weirder when Rieren reached street-level. Whatever madness was rife in this place had now thrown people into the mix. The spirits she had seen on her descent into the rent had been displaced here.

Some looked almost human, albeit in an ethereal, ghostly way. Others were nothing more than glimmers floating phosphorescently. Tattered shreds that had once been people.

What was going on he—Rieren really wished she had her hands just so she could massage her temples. No, there was some kind of message she was supposed to learn. That would explain why her Enlightenment wasn’t enough. A puzzle she had to figure out, a secret that the Abyss was trying to tell her. To enlighten her.

She tried observing the goings-on closely. All these buildings appearing and disappearing, all these people who were here one moment and gone the next… they weren’t simply vanishing and reappearing over and over.

Rieren found herself closer to the centre of the city she had noted before. The enormous structure was going through the same motions as every other structure. At one point, it stood tall and proud, if derelict and clearly abandoned for centuries. The next moment, it was nothing more than a site of broken-down masonry and tumbled rocks.

But in that moment of transition from an aged edifice to an unrecognizable ruin, Rieren finally glanced something important. Something that could be the truth.

The building was being destroyed.

Rieren had already seen it on her little spiritual journey. She had just failed to connect the dots. After all, hadn’t she seen an entire mountain crumble to nothing but dust in the matter of heartbeats? The exact same thing was happening here. Whole buildings turned to ruined remnants of their former selves in less than a blink of an eye. Only to be built back up again.

Destroyed and rebuilt. Over and over. Over and over.

For a frightening second, she wondered what would happen if she was here in person. Would she be torn apart before being built back up and shattered again? Was that what the Abyssals were actually feeling? This enforced, eternal cycle of destruction and reincarnation happening in the blink of an eye?

That begged the question why they hadn’t seen anything of the sort when she and the others had been here in person. They had flitted through the Abyss’s many worlds through its rents. Had those been what had saved them from this effect? Did it only exist in the deeper parts, far, far beneath the sands they had walked upon.

Rieren didn’t have answers. Finding the real truth would depend on her coming into the Abyss and investigating directly, something she didn’t have the time for.

And did it even matter? Knowing the truth of the Abyss wasn’t going to stop the Abyssals from trying to destroy the Mortal Realm and remaking it in the monstrous shape they desired. It wouldn’t stop them from killing the monsters no matter what.

But Rieren had to admit that she hadn’t obtained any Enlightenment here. A sign that there was a deeper truth that she was missing.

Her thoughts were suddenly pulled away from the Abyss when a sharp pain shot through her foot. Rieren winced, then blinked. She was back. The Abyss wasn’t real. She was sitting cross-legged, performing her cultivation, with Batcat biting her leg a little too ferociously.

“What is it, cat?” she asked. Her words came out a little too testily, but she had been pulled out of a disorienting event. The cat couldn’t blame her.

Batcat meowed quickly at her. Then it made some biting motions. Ah. It wanted her to go through its memories, and the way it was so insistent, suggested that it had found something pressing.

Heart skipping a beat, Rieren pulled herself closer to the little kitten and channeled her Essence through it. Once more, she was no longer present in reality.

Instead, she found herself in the presence of an unpleasant surprise.