Ren came back to his senses, gasping and with his body feeling like he’d lost a fight against a mule. Sometime during the series of visions, he’d fallen prone on the ground. Copious amounts of drying blood surrounded him…his blood! It was with blurry eyes and a heavy head that he looked around at the blood-stained garments of Asher, laying about.

The room refused to stand still, everything shaking and overlapping as he struggled to focus. He felt sick, nauseous even, and his head blared with overlapping chimes of alerts that he struggled to focus on. During fleeting moments of clarity, he realized that the noble’s expensive clothing had acted as unwilling dams, saving the Bazaar tickets from being awash in a flood of his synthetic blood.

‘Wait. Bazaar tickets?’ Ren frowned.

The name had sprung into his mind the instant he gazed upon the stack of a thousand leaflets made of glowing parchment. He looked inwards, and was shocked to see the state of his blood.

Dark splotches speckled the liquid and it had such vitality to it, Ren was hesitant to call it synthetic anymore. It felt so much more alive than it ever had, and he realized that the uncomfortable warmth he’d been feeling was generated from his blood flowing through his body.

Not only his blood, his sinew, muscles, bones, circuits and meridians felt sturdier. More resilient, somehow. As his gaze shifted towards his core, a gasp escaped his lips. First, the pool of Demigod’s blood floating next to his Cultivator’s core had significantly shrunk, leaving ample space between itself and the black boundary Xerxes had created to trap and siphon off the excess vitality. Secondly, the last vestiges of restraints against radiation within his physical core had been breach—

BOOM.

The room shook so viciously that Ren was briefly lifted off the ground, before slamming hard against it, face first. His lids shut tightly as his face twisted into a grimace, while dust and loose debris fell around him.

Ren cursed, still writhing and groaning on the floor. ‘This better not be another blasted vision!’ He was curious by nature, but after experiencing the aftermath of the first session, he was not interested in jumping in for another round. Besides, his thoughts felt sluggish and he fought against the vertigo of the disjointed information his senses relayed back to him.

The harder he tried to focus, the more his concentration waned, making it nearly impossible to maintain a coherent thought. Like a butterfly darting from flower to flower, his attention flitted from one idea to another. It didn't help that his vision remained glitchy, like watching a series of images flip from scene to scene. Sometimes faster than normal and being nothing but a blur, while at other times moving so slow that he was stuck processing events from seconds ago while reality muzzled on by.

'What is wrong with me?'

Twisting around and laying on his back, he moved his right arm to swipe the grime from his face when he realized it was stuck to something. Peering through glazed eyes, he saw his palm fastened to a dull metal orb and realization slowly dawned on him. Bringing his arm to rest on his chest, he confirmed exactly what he was looking at.

Somehow, throughout his seizures and subsequent visions, his right palm had remained stuck on the [Eternal Bazaar]. Even now, as he lay sprawled with his limbs in a tangle, the Orb steadfastly refused to let go. Surprisingly, it felt nearly weightless unlike it had previously. He idly wondered what had changed with the artifact as his sight shook once more.

Thinking of the artifact triggered a response he’d not been expecting. Surprisingly it came from his own software interface itself as information rolled past his eyes.

[Eternal Bazaar]

Owner: AI Model PD-840, codename Ren

Bazaar Tickets Spawned: 1000/1000

“Oh?” Despite his disoriented state, a sly grin wormed its way to Ren’s face. Things just —

BOOM.

Ren was thrown forward, his shoulders crashing into the Orb’s altar and the air forced out of his lungs. Shrill squeaks pierced the air and the sounds of clawed feet scratching against stone followed closely. He scrambled to his feet just as the smell of musky hide reached his nostrils. Ok, this was definitely not another vision. His system had stabilized some more so he was able to view the muscular monstrosity of a Mutated Molerat.

It looked just like the one he had briefly encountered on his way into the Svool Treasure House. He paused briefly, wondering at how smoothly the name of the establishment came to him. It felt like something pulled out of his own memory and not something he had just learnt in a recent vision.

The sound of sizzling flesh brought him out of his distracted thoughts in time to see a Molerat burn to a crisp against his alcove’s ward. The odor of the charred monster was a putrid stench so repulsive, as to be vomit inducing. Like some macabre form of smelling salts, it momentarily cleared his ringing head of dizziness, jolting him into a stronger state of alertness.

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BOOM!!!

Ren braced himself on the altar as the next tremors began. He needed to know what was happening out there so he leapt forward, stopping just before the flickering ward protecting his alcove from the occasional monster. In the middle of the Octogonal Room—or Storage suite as Briluk had called it—the massive stone table had been cracked and overturned.

In its place a large lump had formed, ruining the pristine mosaic floors and Ren had to brace himself as something massive slammed against it from underneath. This was the source of the loud thuds that he’d woken to. It felt like an earthquake everytime the unseen creature slammed against the stone floors, and he could see it was only a matter of time before it broke through.

Everywhere he looked, cracks and small craters appeared all across the room’s floor. It was from these holes that the two foot long Molerats surged out of. From where he stood, he could spot five of the monsters stuck in the cracks, hissing and scratching to fight their way into the Storage suite. Their beady eyes were eerily locked on him, and the first one to free itself from the hole, immediately bolted towards his alcove with rabid intensity.

It took no heed that a ward protected him, nor of the smoldering remains of its previous predecessors laying dead at the threshold. Flying through the air, it leaped for his throat, beady eyes laser focussed on his and not on the ward that was moments away from snatching its life away. As luck would have it, the monster’s fatalistic focus was rewarded because the ward flickered off at the last second, letting it through.

Eyes widening, Ren batted the monster away with his left hand, relying purely on instinct. As his hands made contact with the Mutated Molerat, he felt an unexpected pull within his body. With little time to analyze further and needing to dispatch the threat, he reached for a dagger, ready to send it into the monster's head when he stilled his hands.

It was with a grotesque curiosity that he watched as the monster hissed in pain, with visible rot spreading across its skin. In seconds, ethereal maggots perforated its body, gnawing it into oblivion. They burst out of its flesh in a shower of gore, before burrowing back into the hysterical Molerat. Ren stared at his hands, and back at the dead Molerat. Did he do that?

A crackling pop startled him into a jump, as two Molerats slammed into the flickering barrier of his alcove all at once. In its single mindedness to reach him, the first monster unwittingly shielded the second from making full contact with the ward. Consequently, it paid with its life, while the second, eager to tear his throat out, followed soon after.

“Ok, I get it! I’m no longer welcome here,” he quipped, dashing backwards to secure the treasures he’d accumulated.

At least that’s what he’d planned but he found himself stumbling through the alcove, tripping over air and garnering ugly bruises. His balance was completely shot and he found himself on the floor gazing through the ward at the eight Molerats working their way out of the cracks in the Octogonal room’s floor. From their progress, he estimated he had a few more seconds before they broke free.

BOOM!!!

This time the impact was magnitudes greater than the previous ones. The deepest squeak Ren had heard so far pierced the air, sounding much like a victorious warcry. Struggling to his feet, he lowered his center of gravity and rolled with the following quakes that coincided with the clawing sounds from the oversized creature that had finally poked a hole through the Vault floor.

Hells, that thing was ugly! And time was running out.

First, he looked at the [Eternal Bazaar] still stuck to his palm and willed it into the Interspatial Necklace. Like an obedient pup, it easily entered and this time, its warping properties did not damage the shelf he stored it on. Next, in went the thousand Bazaar Tickets stacked on the floor. In no time he had stored everything of worth, including the noble’s bloodsoaked clothing.

The last thing he tried to take with him was the altar itself. Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried, he could not send it into the storage artifact. If time wasn’t pressing, he would have loved to dissect the reason and find a way to break the item into pieces. Alas, with the intensity of earth shaking thuds, squeaks and clawing happening, Ren knew he had a small margin of error to escape safely.

Case in point, the Mutated Molerat currently clawing at his hands even with his golden knife buried in its stomach. Carefully, he held the monsters snapping head between his fingers and tried to replicate the rotting phenomenon. Nothing. He concentrated harder, trying to recall the hollow feeling that had passed through him the first time.

“Aha!” he chuckled in joy as the sensation and the Molerat’s squeals of fury quickly turned into shrill hisses of pain.

Since he’d initiated the process this time around, Ren was able to notice how the dark splotches in his blood shrank as the monster rotted and was consumed by phantom worms digging into its flesh. When the process was done, Ren frowned as he noticed his blood was almost wrung dry of the dark splotches. He also felt winded, which was a novel experience in and of itself.

Hmm. So it was a limited resource. Too bad.

He tossed the decomposing carcass off his blade and stomped viciously onto the head of another Molerat, forcing its brains to violently explode out of its skull. Without stopping, he ran straight through the flickering ward, confident in the authority of Brithluk’s Signet Ring to protect him.

Shielding his face with an arm, he swatted a Molerat mid-leap and volleyed another away with a powerful kick. As he dodged forward, his back flared with spikes of pain as three sets of Molerat claws latched onto him, digging deep furrows into his flesh. But Ren didn’t stop to deal with them. His goal was to escape into the hallway as quickly as possible.

He’d just lopped off the head of another Molerat when a blisteringly fast claw pierced through his chest and blasted him away. Two of the RatKing’s razor sharp claws shredded his intestines and punctured his spleen. But the last claw? The last claw missed a dead-strike at his physical core by no more than a hair’s breadth!

Instead it grazed the physical core, literally rattling Ren’s world and sending his system alarms into a frenzy. In the stunted moment of realization, he breathed a sigh of relief knowing he would not have to discover which would break first; his Earth crafted 24th century core or the claws of a magically enhanced RatKing.

Still, it was of little consolation as he found himself hurtling headfirst towards a solid column.