It was actually bad that Rieren’s journey towards the core was slower than before. A faster tug would have meant she would be through it quicker, and there would be less time for the Abyss-Aspected Essence to corrupt her. The way the Abyss slowed her down was almost vampiric, prolonging the length it could twist her true identity.

But the situation wasn’t as hopeless as Rieren’s frantic mind would claim. There was a way out of this mess that would potentially allow her to come through intact.

Both her and Batcat.

As the Abyss’s core grew larger in her line of sight, as its brightness sought to claim everything and make seeing difficult, Rieren pulled open the System Shop. She had more than enough Credits to purchase a vial of Ebullient Toxin Estoc.

New Item!

The Ebullient Toxin Estoc comes with a handy dose of corruption and darkness. Now you have your own vial of vileness to playact all the evil of the world.

Rieren tightly grasped the little bottle with a murky brown liquid inside. One of the more interesting properties of the liquid was that it could attract and gather all the corrupted Essence in the vicinity to it. In other words, it had the same properties as that of the Inverted Essence Smoker, which gathered nearby Essence of a certain Aspect to one location.

The main difference was that the Ebullient Toxin needed to be applied to whatever surface the corrupted Essence needed to be attracted to. Of course, it would also work only on Abyss-Aspected Essence, whereas the Inverted Essence Smoker could be configured to any Aspect.

Rieren supposed one good thing about a slower descent was that she could perform other tasks without as great a trouble as it would have been had she been plummeting. Small blessings.

Which was a hard thing to think of when she could feel her skin peeling off and her flesh turning to ooze and sloughing off her bones. The pain was beginning to make it difficult to even think straight. That she wasn’t screaming her lungs out was an accomplishment in and of itself.

With shaking hands, Rieren pulled off the vial’s stopper with her mouth then started applying the liquid to the arm that was keeping Batcat safe.

The pain tripled. It got bad enough that Rieren lost her grip on the little bottle. She certainly didn’t see where it fell to. Her right arm was now attracting all the corrupted Essence that the Abyss’s core was trying to inflict on her and Batcat.

In other words, she could barely call it her arm any longer.

The horror of what was happening to it shocked Rieren enough to freeze her thoughts. Her arm was malforming into some kind of monstrous mess she could barely make sense of.

The sloughed-off flesh was hardening to scales and spikes. Her bones split and cracked to spill the marrow within, but the dark brown ooze started wriggling like they had turned into living worms. What flesh and veins and muscle and fat still remained on her limb were turning into a twisted, pulsing mess.

Even her fingers… Rieren could feel the bile rising as she watched her nails dig back into her fingers and split them into two. Now she had several rootlike appendages at the end of her hand. What in the ever-living Abyss was this monstrosity?

The pain began to blanket the rest of her thoughts. Rieren had done enough. The rest was up to fate beyond her control.

Things started becoming brighter and more twisted the further she went along. Her thoughts turned into a haze in the agony as well. All she could make out was Batcat in her arms.

The vial.

Rieren’s breath caught. It was right there. Of course, the Abyss core’s tug had slowed everything down. Even the vial and all the remaining liquid sloshing out of it had spiralled everywhere and were falling down just as slow as Rieren.

Grunting through the rising pain, she kicked through the floating droplets. She had to tug off one boot and free a leg first, which took a difficult amount of concentration in her current circumstances. Nevertheless, Rieren managed to get her leg infected with the corrupted Essence too.

Just an arm wasn’t going to be enough. Not when collision with the Abyss’s core was imminent.

Nothing came to save her. No miraculous power manifested from Batcat, and no sudden epiphany struck Rieren. The burning sea of power pulled Rieren under, the relentless storm of Essence drowning out everything but pain and agony.

It wasn’t enough. Foolish of her to think it would have been. This was the central mass of all of the Abyss’s power. Even cultivators at the peak of their strength wouldn’t have survived.

The concentrated Essence poured into Rieren, giving no iota of her any freedom. They poured into her all the pores on her skin, barged into her ears and seeped under her eyelids, opened wild new wounds all over her face.

Rieren was petrified by the agony. Where one bolt of consciousness-ending pain struck, another materialized not far from it a heartbeat later to draw away her attention.

She wasn’t going to last long like this.

Time was impossible to tell. At some point, like with everything else the Abyss took in, she was pushed out of the volatile core. Rieren ended up in a strange location she couldn’t make much sense of. Her senses were… different now. Not at all what she had been used to before. Her recollections were different too. Everything about her… was she even a she any longer?

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

Rieren—no, even that name was distant. A moniker. Belonging to someone else. She—this existence—was new. A rebirth. A renewal, even.

Some of those senses were familiar, though. Her touch revealed some kind of grainy, powdery surface underneath her. Sand? Maybe? Colours weren’t what they used to be. There were no real defined shapes, just vague impressions and imprints in her mind’s eye.

Except for one small thing. A tiny orb of shifting colours. Familiar, somehow. Had she experienced such a thing before?

It floated in closer. The orb was blinking at her, sharper than anything else she had ever envisioned. Yet it also seemed to be warning her about something.

Haltingly, at the behest of some strange notion she couldn’t identify, she looked back.

A roar. An eruption of such incalculable, incomprehensible power, she might as well have been a… a what? A grain of the very sand under her, caught in… in some inescapable… tide? That was it. Like… an ocean of sorts. One beset in a storm.

Oceans. Storms. Despite the blast of overwhelming force at her back, those strange concepts seemed to ground her, to reignite something ephemeral yet real in the back of her mind.

What were they?

The orb continued blinking in front of her. So close now. Close enough to reach out and touch…

She did so. A limb she didn’t recognize—didn’t even feel right but responded to her will all the same—rose and brushed the glimmering little ball with curved talons.

A world opened up. Deep and dark, at the bottom of some strange pit where no daylight ever reached. She was pulled forward, yet also somehow stuck to the location she’d found herself in. It was sort of like… like a part of her consciousness was pulled away, while her physical form remained behind.

Was that bad or good? Did good or bad even matter?

The world continued expanding. She started to become enthralled by the possibilities. What was all this? Strange brown-and-green towering beings, this brightness seeping through everything, this liquid murmur running past her, strange creatures flitting this way and that, pleasant trills and warbles melding accompanying each other in a delightful combination.

So… beautiful. So unreal.

The power behind her, the stream of unending fury and calamity, pushed her. Her physical form. She was jerked back to her real location, her consciousness returning.

That orb had given her a taste. A taste that she sought more of. One that ignited a hunger that she didn’t even know she possessed. More. She needed more.

All the more since the power behind her was ravenous to an even greater degree. If she didn’t take the orb’s offer, the eruption at her back would claim her. Consume her. Some strange notion she couldn’t identify was sure of it. She wasn’t safe here. Safety… as if that mattered.

No, no it didn’t. The hunger did. She had to have—

A stinging pain bloomed beneath. Pain. What a strange, new sensation. She looked down to see a squirming creature chomping down on her blackened midsection.

It was difficult to make sense of what exactly she was looking at. In the middle of her torse, a spiraling coil of fleshy tubes had sprung free. There was a lot of liquid as well. Darker than the depths she’d first seen within the orb. Was that good or bad? Again, no matter.

The little creature biting her though… that was a separate concern. Why was it biting her? Had she done something to it?

A limb went to stop it. In a sinuous motion that her mind couldn’t fully grasp, her hand reached down so that a talon brushed the strange little being’s furred back. There were little wings on it too. Curious. Hmm, curiosity… was she now intent on finding out more about—

She froze. Her mind wasn’t her own. Her being wasn’t—

Rieren. That was who she was. Ever-living Abyss and all-knowing Aether. Rieren. She was Rieren.

And she was… ruined.

A monster. The Abyss had done to her what it did to everything that it got in its clutches. It had converted her to one of the beings the gods needed to fulfill their nefarious purposes. Reviled, filled with this desperate hunger, her thoughts abuzz and astir and barely hers, she was a mess. What in all broken heavens had happened to her?

Batcat was looking up at her. The little Spirit beast was staring into her eyes. It looked blurry. Distorted somehow. Of course, everything did, had been doing so since she had regained consciousness.

It was only when the teras started dripping to the ground that she realized that she was crying.

Rieren was in no condition to fathom why she might have been crying her eyes out, but it was enough to know that she was doing so. Maybe it was that fact that she had come so far only to fall now. That she had struggled through so much only to lose in the end. That she had survived everything… until the Abyss itself had been flung at her.

What hope was there for one who had been turned by such a degree into a monster? There was no known cure to Abyssal corruption. No way to revert it back. Nothing that could fix it.

And why would anyone want to do so? Shaking, she managed to raise her malformed new limbs up to a position where she could vaguely make them out through the film of tears. These—these twisted aberrations. Why would anyone want to fix these? They deserved to be killed. To be destroyed and annihilated, eradicated from existence lest they cause worse harm to others.

They needed to end.

With every breath keening through her twisted nostrils, Rieren managed to grasp one limb with the fingerlike appendages of the other. A shrieked ripped free when she pulled with all the strength her newfound body contained.

The limb tore. Blood spurted. Pain bloomed, but distant. Rieren was screaming more at the horrific sensation, at the fact that she needed to perform this kind of self-mutilation. Biting down so that her shriek turned more into a growl, Rieren pulled hard again. This time, with sickening squelches, splintering cracks, and a heavy splash, the offending limb came loose.

Rieren stared at it, eyes wide and blood-tinged, breath heavy and rattling. Then she pelted her own arm as far as she could.

Some heavy sensation made her bow forward so that her forehead was pressed to the ground. Maybe it was pain, just felt differently in this strange form. Maybe she was just overwhelmed.

All Rieren could do was bite the grainy ground, blink away the endless tears, and grasp at her bloody stump with her remaining limb.

But the pain… the pain was decreasing. It fell to the wayside, and in its place, more of Rieren’s consciousness slowly returned. Batcat’s plaintive call made her twist her head to take note of her left side.

The arm was coming back. Rieren’s whole body froze. This insanity… couldn’t she be spared from this madness even after literally tearing herself apart?

Why wouldn’t the blister-cursed Abyss leave her alone?

Her limb was regrowing out of the stump. Recognition of the process fired up a strange light in her mind. The bone regenerated first, before slowly birthing the flesh knitted with blood vessels, flaps of muscles covering it up and tendons attaching it to the bones, nerves snaking over the entire fleshy construction before layers of fat and skin covered it up. Pale skin.

Human skin.

Rieren gasped. This was… this was Divine Resilience. She was being healed into a person again. Not a monster. Her—her Perk was still well and alive, and it was bringing her back.

It took a while for the arm to regrow. Recollections were returning slowly but surely, and one of them informed her that limb regeneration was a quite slow process. She wouldn’t get her arm back just like that in no time at all. Not until the perk had grown stronger and evolved some more.

But it did open up a possibility. Rieren might just have found a way to turn back to a person again. She grinned hard, spitting out all the dirt she’d bitten into her mouth.

A monster? Monkey’s balls, not even the Abyss itself was going to take Rieren’s identity from her.