Rieren was tempted to curse Elder Olg. Did he really intend to kill her with those things?

She couldn’t truly blame him. After all, he was thrown a desperate situation where he had to take the quickest decision that would save the Shatterlands. But still. Why did he have to throw her into it too?

The first meteor crashed into the city well over a league away from Rieren’s current position. She was safe. Mostly. While the city shook and the distant buildings fell, they absorbed the worst of the meteor’s impact.

Though, the meteors were coming in thick and fast. It wouldn’t be long before one landed close enough to her location. Well, in such a case, Rieren could simply use Earthfall Blade. But that wouldn’t really save her. She was stuck in this forest of ruins filled with ghosts who cared not a whit that the world around them was coming to a calamitous end.

In fact, Rieren actually wasted a second staring when a distant meteor landed right atop of a spirit and the old man did absolutely nothing to acknowledge his imminent destruction.

And then he was gone.

“Any time now, cat,” Rieren said, quickly identifying and moving to the next safest destination. “An Abyss Rent would be quite helpful now.”

Bacat only purred hard on her head. Its claws were out, digging into her hair and lightly scratching her head. Rieren grimaced. She was going to have to figure out a way to survive this mess without the Spirit Beast’s help.

As the meteors continued destroying the city, the whole area started breaking apart and sinking. Rieren swallowed. Sinking. Was there an even greater depth beneath this city?

No. Of course, there was. They hadn’t seen the true heart of the Abyss yet. The endless churning miasma of destruction and creation. They hadn’t reached the location she had experienced within her vision when she had been advancing through the Enlightened realm.

The whole block around her broke off from the rest of the city and started descending. Not good.

Rieren’s heart lurched in her chest. It was one thing to visit such a location in a spiritual vision, it was wholly another to get there in corporeal form. There was no way she could survive an encounter like that in her current state.

Frantic, her eyes found one of the white pillars bringing down the desert from above. Interspersed among the sand were the glimmering orbs that formed the many pocket dimensions that the Abyss held within it. Of course. There was her way out. After all, she hadn’t had Batcat in her last physical trip to the Abyss.

Rieren charged. As she ran, she bought the Corrupter’s necklace from the System Ship. It was no small a blessing that she had enough Credits for the purchase. Channelling corrupted Essence wasn’t going to be healthy but there was little choice.

She never reached the pillar. A meteor appeared, dashing her hopes. Rieren had seen it coming, and had positioned herself to leap and meet it to deflect it with Earthfall Blade.

What she hadn’t seen as the Aetherian the meteorite brought along with it.

It was almost like watching a hatchling breaking free from an egg. The Aetherian pushed out from under the meteorite’s surface, even while the flaming rock flew through the air. Rieren had only a moment to notice the oddity before bashing it away with her sword.

But even as the crumbling meteorite was flung to a distant location where it couldn’t jeopardize her exit from the Abyss, the Aetherian broke free first.

“Treachery,” it said, its voice a trill like a bird that had learned to speak. “Thrown to the land of the dead. How dare. When we were promised a land that was alive.”

The monster who had broken free from the meteorite was difficult to properly see. Its shape was mostly humanoid with two sets of upper and lower limbs, though the entirety of its body seemed to be covered in some sort of oily tarp or film, a riot of rainbowlike colours running across its form. Veins and muscles pulsed under the cover here and there.

Rieren distantly considered who had done the promising. Her last conversation with an Aetherian had been fruitful in preventing more of the meteors from crashing down into the Mortal Realm. But clearly, not all of them had decided the same.

“I have no quarrel with you, Aetherian,” Rieren said. “Stay out of my way and I will let you live.”

“Live? Life?” The Aetherian made what looked like a spitting motion, but the tarp covering its mouth didn’t part. “I refuse to entertain any blathering nonsense from the likes of you. I too have more important matters to deal with.”

The ground shook again. Another meteor landed nearby, throwing up an enormous cloud and forcing Rieren to use Earthfall Blade to ward off the worst of the impact. At least the Aetherian was gone from her view too. Though, the monster didn’t seem like it intended to actually stand against her.

All thoughts about the Aetherian—and any more of its kind that might be present, considering the endless rain of meteors around her—faded as the ground shifted.

The city was falling.

There was nowhere for Rieren to run. No place for her to dash and retreat to, no safety to be had when an entire city’s worth of land around her was crumbling. Once again, Rieren started plummeting.

She shuttered her scream this time. Her hand jerked upwards to keep a grip on Batcat. The kitten hadn’t been too spooked by the goings-on, but Rieren’s touch did calm it down.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Rieren was glad she could maintain her footing. The world crumbled around her, the city soon disappearing from view. This was turning out to be the same as the time she had sunk through the desert to fall into the city in the first place, though a key difference was that it was much slower. Much more… controlled. As though there was a powerful draft from beneath.

Everything below Rieren was starting to shatter even more. The chunk of the city that had fallen out from under her was breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces. And through the gaps they left, Rieren found what was awaiting her at the bottom.

The core of the Abyss.

It was the centre of the monstrous world. The very same location of enormous power that she had neared as a spirit when she had been cultivating a few months ago.

The sight was even more awestriking in the flesh. Once the city had crumbled away, Rieren found herself entering another… well no, she couldn’t call this a chamber at all. This was another world entirely. One with its own sky they had just broken through, with its own horizons curving away to the sightless distance, with its own, burning, roiling land.

And it was this land that locked Rieren’s gaze for the time being. The world… this core of the Abyss was an entire sea of magma that was nearly too bright to look at. Instead of glowing molten orange like the blades of her Swordwing, Rieren was looking at a sea that glowed golden white, like a sun made of lava.

A strange sight indeed, here at the heart of the Abyss. Normally, one associated corrupted, Abyss-Aspected essence to be dark in colour. When concentrated, Rieren had noted that its shade varied between black, brown, and purple, the colour of bruises.

The corruption caused by the Essence was of the same hue too. Mottled and ugly. Painful to look at and contemplate.

But this… this looked like a star that belonged in the Aether itself. Even in the Celestial Realm, this curving sea of gold and white and orange gave the impression of Divine-Aspected Essence.

It wouldn’t have made sense—not when one thought about all the monsters that originated from the Abyss. But then, all Rieren had to recall was the origin of the Abyss itself. The gods. This central source of power had been established by the gods to serve their purpose, so of course it represented the kind of Essence they were best known for.

Besides, what better Aspect to make all the Abyssals flee from the Abyss itself than Divine?

Power thrummed upwards. This was it. This overflowing Essence that had been holding up the entire world of the Abyss above. It was strong enough to decrease the pace of Rieren’s descent towards the core, though it certainly didn’t stop it. Wouldn’t stop it. No, she would be pulled inexorably into that roiling mass of power, just like everything else.

For that was the main reason behind the Abyss’s existence, the main function of its heart. Take in all that the gods saw fit to throw down and turn them into what would serve their ends.

The power was beginning to manifest in physical sensations that made their presence felt. Heat was basking her, sweat drenching her robes and daubing her brow. It had grown difficult to breathe—though the fact that she still could breathe was certainly a blessing.

Rierne looked around. She wasn’t the only one being dragged down to the Abyss’s heart. Besides all the debris, several ghosts were falling too, though their wispy forms were hurtling downwards at a faster rate than her. And then there were some Aetherians too. Poor monsters had only just exited the Aether only to be sucked into the very centre of the Abyss. Served them right.

But the strangest thing she spotted were the other creatures heading towards the burning core of the Abyss. Those weren’t any Abyssals, and certainly not Aetherians either, as far as Rieren could surmise.

No, they were Spirt Beasts.

None were close enough to Rieren for her to interact with them in any way. Most were actually too distant for her to even make sense of their forms. What convinced Rieren that they were regular old Spirit Beasts instead of Abyssals or Aetherians were their Essence signatures.

Now that Rieren had progressed far enough, she could detect the kind of Essence certain beings inherently channeled. Her senses had sharpened. It was no difficult matter to tell that the vast majority of creatures falling towards the Abyss’s centre were channelling a variety of Aspects. Just what she would have expected from any random assortment of Spirit Beasts.

If they’d been Aetherians or Abyssals, they would have had a far greater amount of Abyss-Aspected or Divine-Aspected Essence. That wasn’t the case at all.

It only made sense. After all, the gods had introduced the problem of the Abyssals by forcefully turning the Spirit Beasts into the ravenous, rapacious monsters the mortals had come to call Abyssals.

Batcat meowed urgently.

“You are right, cat,” she said, gritting her teeth. “We need to focus.”

Her descent had slowed a bit more, but the impact with the Abyss’s core was imminent. There was no doubt Rieren would be hitting it soon enough, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see that happen.

“Grant me the power of the past, cat,” Rieren said. It was getting harder to talk. The air was not cooperating with her. It was crisp, brittle, every breath feeling as though she was inhaling shards of broken glass. “Hurry! We have no time.”

The cat murmured morosely. Rieren was tempted to curse. She had used Call of the Past too recently for the little Spirit Beast to grant her the same ability once more.

Rieren swallowed, though even that sent a slow lump of pain travelling down her throat. This was… not right. There had to be some way she could prevent the Abyss from claiming her, from doing to her what it did to the other Spirit Beasts.

The first tugs of the Abyss’s power touched her skin. It sizzled, and Rieren had to bite down on the stinging, needling agony riddling her whole body. Where the glowing strands of power touched her directly, her skin split and cracked, revealing flesh that blackened and began pulsing outwards. It turned into pustules, the corrupting running through her veins.

Rieren couldn’t believe it. To be caught in something like this—she forced the horror to retreat so she could focus. The System Shop. There were items that could slow down Abyssal corruption, some more expensive ones that could revert it entirely.

She just needed to have enough Credits for the basics. All Rieren needed was some more time.

But even as Rieren’s concentration was lost in the separate vision granted to her by the System Shop, where all she could see were lists upon lists of items, something strange occurred. She quickly pulled her attention back to reality, to where Batcat was taking it all in her place.

“Cat!” Rieren’s eyes widened to see the strands of the Abyss’s power somehow all coagulating around the little Spirit Beast. “What are you doing? Stop.”

If Batcat heard her, it gave no sign. Instead, it curled in on itself and tucked in its wings as dozens of the concentrated Essence strands latched onto the little kitten.

And then it began changing.

It was horrifying to watch. The same thing that had happened to Rieren where the Essence had touched her was now occurring upon Batcat, but much worse. Not only was its flesh becoming corrupted and changing, its very internal structure was becoming horribly twisted too. Its skeleton was lengthening, its snout turning bestial and its tail shriveling into a whisker.

No. Rieren was not about to let this go on. “Enough.”

She grabbed hold of the kitten once more and covered it up with her own body. The Abyss wasn’t going to get Batcat. Not on her watch.

Annealed. From some depth of memory, Rieren recalled what the Aetherian she had met in the Aether had said. That it had become annealed. To do that, it had to have gone through the Abyss’s core, a former Spirit Beast that had its whole life rewritten by the Abyss.

As the strands of the Abyss’s virulent Essence began corrupting her, Rieren realized there was only one way through this for her.

Straight through the Abyss’s core itself.