Chapter 281 - Gateway of Flames

The shattered moon in the sky was letting through little to none of the light of the sun right behind it, although it quite certainly should have done so. The Demon stared up at the sky at this wondrous sight and tried to figure out what exactly was happening here during this 'Shattered Eclipse'.

Eiro slowly made his way through this thick-grown forest that seemed weirdly familiar to him, although he wasn't able to remember anything about this place. The dried-out leaves underneath Eiro's feet were being crushed as he walked.

He didn't know where he was going, just that he was going in the right direction. And then, he reached a clearing in this forest. Or that's what Eiro thought at first, until he stepped over the large mound of dirt that blocked his sight of the ground.

Instead of a natural clearing in the forest, there was simply nothing here at all. A seemingly infinitely deep, perfectly circular hole stretched out underneath the Demon's feet, until a certain few words flowed into the Demon's mind.

"Horr zhu lugo jir targh, horr targhar jir urtur as partus horr requom argor thu lart tragh. Horr gol jir part as sird horr requom xarg thum unzhur dir." The Demon spoke these words, not knowing what they even meant. He vaguely recognized some of the words from spells, but nothing managed to give him a hint toward the true meaning of these words.

But that didn't seem to matter too much for now anyway. Eiro felt something touch the center of his back while he was practically mesmerised by the powerful combination between these words, the infinitely deep hole in the ground, as well as the shattered moon.

And then, the light touch to the center of his back became something stronger. It became a push as the Demon slowly fell forward without even fighting what was happening. He didn't feel any sense of danger, and didn't think it was necessary to start flapping his wings in the slightest.

Eiro's body twisted around and he looked at the sky from within this hole. At some point when he fell for a little while already, he managed to see this moon in a new way. The sky itself had disappeared, blocked by the walls of this hole, and the only thing that he could see was the shattered moon through the circular hole he had been pushed into by that six-fingered hand.

Everything was dark, as dark as it possibly could get, and the only thing that the Demon saw was the faint light shining through the cracks of the moon. But then, that very light started to shift. As if the cracks were changing, the parts of the moon shifting around.

It took Eiro a while to realize that what he was seeing weren't the cracks of the moon anymore, but rather something completely different. They were thin threads of light that were reaching out to him, as if chasing him down the hole.

Slowly, the Demon stretched his hand out toward the closest of those threads, and watched as it wrapped itself around Eiro's fingers, then his arm, and then his torso.

Soon, other threads caught up and assisted the first one in covering the Demon's body. At some point, the threads stopped coming toward him, since all of them were already loosely covering his body. Now Eiro was just in the middle of a pitch-black space while his body was the only source of light around.

Then suddenly, the glowing threads became a bit thicker while their light began to fade. It didn't take long until these threads became so thick that they really covered every bit of the Demon's body, and they changed to be more like roots growing on top of him rather than simple threads.

Even if Eiro tried to fight against this now, he was unable to. These roots had restrained him perfectly and there was little that he was really able to do about it. He somehow didn't feel any imminent danger from this either.

Soon, the roots had covered every part of his body with the exception of his left eye. And that was when Eiro noticed something. He was looking down, and in the distance, he saw something approach. It was the ground of the forest that he stood in before. And directly underneath him was the same hole that he had been pushed into.

The Demon was rapidly approaching that place and soon noticed that it seemed like he would fall right into the hole again. And so, he did. But the moment that the darkness of the whole surrounded him, the roots covered his eye at last and he was enveloped in deep darkness anyway.

After that, Eiro was unsure of what was going on. He could tell that he was still falling and twisting around in the air, but it seemed like he was just never really stopping the descent. He could hear the air currents around him change as he continued to fell. Sometimes he was out in the open where the wind was blasting, but somehow never affecting the way that this ball of roots was falling, and then he would suddenly notice a rapid change in the air currents due to him entering the hole again. And not too long after, he would start feeling the air currents change once more to show that he was outside again.

Then it would change again, and again, and again, forming something like a hypnotic pattern to the Demon's mind. It was the only thing that he could really focus on, or even sense at all.

At first at least, sometimes Eiro felt changes in the temperature as well, it was something like a background pattern that was accompanying the general tune the changes of the air currents were creating.

Soon, Eiro was unable to really figure out how long he had been inside of this ball of roots. It felt equally like a minute as it felt like one, ten, or even a hundred years. It was the same sort of ambiguity that he felt when conversing with the will of the world earlier. 

As if it was just out of grasp, teasing the tips of his fingers. A word that laid on the tip of his tongue but that he couldn't remember no matter how hard he tried. Something shifting around in his peripherals that disappeared after he turned his head.

And at some point, Eiro's mind simply stopped. He stopped thinking, he stopped reacting. The only thing that he did was focus on the patterns created by the very world around him, affecting him and everything else in subtle ways.

The world's time stopped, and meanwhile a thousand years had passed.

And all at once, everything came flooding into Eiro. He stood there in the center of the shifting, distorted beam at the center of the spirit gateway. As if all of the time that he spent within that ball of roots, and all the thoughts that he missed thinking caught up to him, Eiro broke down and dropped onto his knees.

He could feel something, a powerful force, enter his body from every angle with a speed and strength that felt like it was about to rip him into tiny bits and pieces.

Eiro wasn't even able to scream, as he didn't have an ounce of control over his body at the moment. Conscious or sub-conscious, no part of him was able to interact with other parts of him. The Demon sat there in agony as he felt this burning heat within him that was singing away at the center of his body, creating a gaping hole within him.

Not a physical one, of course, it was more akin to an emotional emptiness. Something that had no physical correlation, but was still there nonetheless. 

Once more, Eiro felt time pass by without knowing how long it had been. But this time, it was different. Before, it felt like it could have been an infinitely long or an infinitely short amount of time just the same, and there was little to no difference between either of those two possibilities. Now, on the other hand, it felt only as if time was being stretched out to the longest that it could be. A single blink took a month, and single twitch took a year.

Eiro was in agony. Now he understood why he had been wished 'good luck' before. Surely, not everybody could withstand this. But Eiro did. Eiro withstood everything, simply because he had to. He couldn't just die here for no reason, he still had to recover his own memories and those of the children as well.

But that wasn't the direct reason why Eiro was even doing this. Rather, this was all something preventative. Eiro wanted strength that he could rely on without it having to come to these extreme measures.

Eiro wanted overwhelming strength with which he could crush his enemies. He wanted to have immediate access to everything and anything he may ever need to beat anyone that stood against him. That's why he couldn't let a unique chance like this pass up. He couldn't throw this away, and he certainly couldn't give up midway through either.

This Demon had to fulfill the nearly prophetic name of his legendary skill. He had to become a 'Supreme Demon'. 

And then, with a sudden realization, the Demon noticed that something had changed again. He was sitting in an empty, dark room with nothing but a light glow coming from behind him Slowly, Eiro pushed himself off the ground with a sore body as he heard a voice behind him speak.

"What did you just do? What happened to this spirit gateway?" The Salamander Kingstood behind Eiro, watching all of this in disbelief. Many, if not most, of the Salamanders and Vulcani already disappeared together with the gateway itself, it seemed.

Eiro looked back at him a bit confused, "What... do you mean?" 

"What do I mean? You absorbed this spirit gateway, what exactly just happened?!" The King asked in a confused voice, and Eiro looked up at him before turning his head toward the notification that popped up when he did.

"I don't remember, I apologize." Eiro replied bluntly, but it seemed like the Salamander King wasn't exactly all too happy with that answer. After all, how could he? There was no way that he would end up simply accepting such a powerful rift between the realms to simply vanish into thin air.

But Eiro didn't pay attention to the Salamander King right next to him anymore. Instead, he kept staring at the notification floating in front of his eyes.

[You have absorbed the ]