V5C25: Land of the Damned

“This crack should end over there… Fuck, we might have only this place to explore safely- Nope, not the case either.”

“W-Why do you say-”

“We have roughly fifteen metres on the ground, in terms of sight, but the light behind us ends fourteen metres from us. Furthermore, there is a quiet rumbling that you should have heard, and it matches with the exact moment that I noticed the change in the crack… alright, I’m changing the name of these things. Light fissures, that’s better, isn’t it?” she asked a purely rhetorical question.

Luckily, the other two understood and didn’t question the change, although she was almost certain that they hadn’t bothered with the name to begin with. With the current situation being what it is, she was perhaps the only one who had gone through enough situations like this one to be sufficiently calm to even care about naming. She was perhaps the only one to care about it in the slightest – even at calmer times – due to Laws, bloodline power and the countless techniques that she had begun to accrue in her arsenal.

If not for her attention to names, she would just have a complete mess of an archive in her head, and it would be as good as not having the Ascendant’s Library at all.

“Then, these light fissures might also bring us forward and allow us to discover something more?” Bao Kang Min partly suggested and partly inquired, as he couldn’t be sure whether she had already considered this, “Perhaps they aren’t so bad after all?”

“Most likely, they are absolutely shit. Think about it – we are in a strange place, possibly under someone’s control, and they are suddenly deciding to lead the two of- I mean, three of us towards something. What are the possible chances of this actually ending up well, with us going to a place that helps us and results in us benefitting from this whole endeavour?” she shook her head, “I truly hope that I don’t need to explain myself further.”

“It isn’t such a good thing, then?”

“No, Bao Jing, it is not. We could be coming into the open mouth of some kind of terrible monster, and this could be happening literally, for all we know. As such, I would love to illuminate the area, but…”

This time, there was no need for confirmation or questioning, even for the clueless daughter of a powerful man. None of them were able to do all that much with their energy, as it seemed nearly impossible to bring it out of the body beyond the skin, and so none of them could use standard methods from the Planar Continents to illuminate the world around them.

Bao Kang Min and Wei Yi knew some more ordinary means of generating light, one that otherworldly demons might resort to before planar methods, but this wasn’t of much use either. Torches and flame both needed wood of some kind to generate. While wet and moist wood would have been bad, it couldn’t be worse than having nothing at all, nothing that seemed flammable and nothing to start the flame was obviously the worst possible situation. Furthermore, it couldn’t be guaranteed that ordinary flame would be of any use here in the dark, and it could be that the light fissures were the only source of light here.

“Eleven metres. The thing is definitely shrinking. It seems that, unless we wish to brave the darkness, we don’t really have any other choice than to step forward and see what goes beyond the fifteen metres before us,” Wei Yi pointed to their front, “Look, we still have fifteen metres before us.”

Since they still had fifteen metres, the light fissure continued, and thus they had somewhere to go.

It took some time for the environment to change in any way. Sure, the earth was clearly slightly different, clearly, but the light fissure itself barely differed as they continued. First, it would twist to the left, then to the right, and then it would continue on for a little while, then this would all just loop over and over again with the two turns cancelling one another out to result in a vaguely straight road towards some kind of destination, one as yet unseen by them.

One thing that did not appear to struggle was her perception of time, although it was difficult to tell due to the absolute lack of sunlight, or a cycle of day and night. The darkness just was, no matter what anyone or anything other than the light fissures did to it, and so the only thing she could rely on was her walking speed, and that of her two followers at that moment.

The man was steady and kept up with her, whereas the young woman struggled to do so, managing to be just within reach of them at all times mostly due to being afraid of being left behind. When necessary, she would dash forward and try to stick to their pace only to fall behind in moments and be forced to repeat her movements. In a way, she was just as repetitive as the pattern of the snaking light fissure, although she was also providing them with her occasional muttered complaints and requests for forgiveness immediately afterward, prompted mostly by the fact that the star metal gauntlet remained on the Ascendant’s hand and could be brought to one’s attention easily.

She continued on and on with the rest of them, and only after an entire hour passed did she finally track down a change to the world around her.

There was a small change in elevation, as the world looked to slope down by a couple of degrees, leading to them descending down towards something, something hopefully new. They did not speak to one another, for the moment, but it was clear that this silence couldn’t persist forever. The darkness was too quiet, too still, too terrifying and disconcerting for reasons that none of them could explain in full, and yet were all too obvious at the same time.

For them, that took another half an hour to actually find something worthwhile – not a simple change in the slope’s angle, or the height of the terrain, or the size of the light fissure, which had opened up just a little bit further, meaning that they needed to pay a little bit of attention to avoid stepping into it and getting their footwear stuck.

No, this was no minor change, but was instead a monumental development. From the darkness, a strange, orange lamp suddenly emerged, and a moment later they saw the wall onto which it was attached. Furthermore, this was a reasonably ordinary seeming wall, at least on first glance, and it was possibly part of a larger building that was also entirely normal and entirely ordinary, which was even more fantastic, as seeing one random element that was out of place in this world was possible, but the more and more they saw, the more unusual this was.

She wasn’t sure whether this was better or worse than seeing only the continuing darkness.

“This place… it doesn’t look southern, not quite,” Bao Kang Min whispered, afraid to let his voice reach too far, “I’ve not been to the north, so-”

“Yi District-like architecture, by the looks of it. The material is odd, but I’ve seen stone buildings like this in a lot of places. That being said, I still think that this is as bad as those stalagmites, don’t you think so as well?” Wei Yi cut in, taking a step closer while making sure that she wouldn’t come into contact with the material, “Look, it just doesn’t seem right, does it?”

“I’m not sure…” Bao Jing muttered, getting just as close as she did, “It looks just like a set of stones piled together, stuck together with some kind of material that probably wouldn’t be of use in the Bao District…”

“No. Well, that is what it looks like, but at the same time, something about this doesn’t look right, not in the slightest. Fortunately for us, we don’t need to care about this kind of thing, at least not now. We need to figure out what the structures mean for us,” the Ascendant explained, stepping away from the wall and pulling the young woman away from it too, as she did not seem to be intending to do so on her own. Whatever the reason, she would rather not take risks with her current companions.

Bao Jing was not particularly concerning to her on her own, but if the world was able to affect her if she touched the wrong thing, then that might change. The dirt and stone entity that had pulled them into this world was clearly capable of something impressive, and if it could affect those that came too close to certain elements of its world, then it could be that her body would be hijacked and used against Wei Yi and Bao Kang Min. At that point, their forced parity would allow the woman to deal a inflict great harm upon them, if not outright killing one of them due to whatever empowerment she could receive within this strange world.

Until some degree of personal ability could be reclaimed, one way or another, it would not be ideal in the slightest to allow for anything of the sort to even attempt to occur.

Since there was one light available, they proceeded towards it and then discovered that there appeared to be more light over to the right, as the radius of the singular lamp was only sufficient to cover around thirteen metres whereas the three of them were able to see two more metres in that direction than in any other direction.

They were forced to walk slowly, as they found that the terrain would change quickly as they advanced. It took only a few steps for more semblances of structures to be unveiled, and while a few remained as clear and accurate as the first wall that they came across, one that was missing any windows through which they might peer through, the rest were not at all the same. Most of the walls were clearly made of the same dirt that composed the stalagmites they had come across before, and those structures were of a similar earthly shape, rising from the ground with their largest diameter being at the very surface, then going up and up, higher and higher, until disappearing from their vision.

Whereas the ordinary-looking structures possessed a certain disconcerting trait, these were far more blatantly unpleasant to behold, although the explanation as to why continued to elude them. They – in this case, Wei Yi and Bao Kang Min, at least – knew that in a normal cave, these same shapes should be comforting and ordinary, even if the darkness came in just as close, but here it was clear that something unknown to them was at play. The shapes were wrong, eerie.

Hence, they sought to advance with great speed, or as great as the darkness would permit them, and found other differences emerging from the void.

The light fissure beneath them began to shrink and instead the dirt and stone track changed to a set of collected stones that appeared to form an ordinary stone road, although this was not quite the case once more. Just as with everything in this reality, it was still wrong, and this time was the only one that she was able to explain in any detail at all. She could tell that something about the stones did not match with the standard appearance and formation of stones in the Planar Continents, and their arrangement needed to be changed in order to accommodate the differences with the material. The Ascendant knew all too well that this was something that could be the gateway to the truth of a great deal of other oddities within the world, but even then she could only state with certainty that these were not mere ordinary stones.

Together, they walked down this street, with at least two walls visible at once, one on either side, with no doors appearing yet, but traces of windows were manifesting. Some indentations within the walls could be seen, at times peeking out through the dirt and stone of the stalagmite-like residences and at others being placed in ordinary positions in ordinary-looking homes, but they did not contain glass.

Much like some kind of caricature of reality, the material was instead a dark, partly smooth pane of some kind of slate. From the side, and from the furthest point that one could stand from it and still see the world, it did almost look like a poorly made piece of glass, lacking in all transparency and typical beauty. The moment that they did get even an inch closer to one of the windows, they collectively saw that this was an illusion created purely from their own expectations of reality, not by the seeming truth shown to them by their eyes.

They were rough, lopsided and uneven, clearly looking more like stone than anything else.

“So… are these actual homes, or do they just look like it?” Bao Jing asked a reasonable question for once.

“We’ll need to find the place where the buildings actually open up, whether they have doors or some other opening that can reasonably be looked through. It would be ideal if we didn’t need to touch anything, as that would be rather dangerous until we have any reason to believe that we will be safe when we touch the walls, floor, ceiling or whatever else we may find inside,” Wei Yi responded, “To be fair, there’s no real reason that these buildings should be different from the terrain, light fissure, or anything else, but it is best to be cautious right now and await confirmation. For instance, if another genuine human was to touch the buildings and be fine, then there’s something, at least.”

“What if the effect is delayed, and we will all be infected with some kind of energy that will slowly affect us, or perhaps activate after a certain point and catch us off guard with its effects?” Bao Kang Min suggested.

“Hence why I said there’d be something, not that there would be a solid, concrete reason to not worry.”

The man nodded, while she was able to appreciate coming across him as well as the young woman, not just the latter. Even without her, he might have been able to adapt to the environment of the strange, dark world, but she would have lacked anyone reasonable to communicate with, which would have been highly unfortunate.

On the other hand, she would have appreciated if the young woman had appeared somewhere else, where she might get stuck until the matter of this dark world was resolved. She did not need someone like her, especially when she just seemed to have the worst elements of a certain other young woman whose presence she had appreciated far more. Adding the fact that she wasn’t known by Bao Kang Min made her even less welcome, as it meant that there was no basis whatsoever to assume that she was even real and not yet another facsimile of reality like the buildings that they were walking past.

They were continuing just as before when they suddenly came across a fork in the road, where it split perpendicularly and permitted passage towards the left and right. Neither side immediately caught their attention, as the structures on both sides were near identical, and there was no signs or indicators that would suggest that one direction was a better choice, but they finally located a small trace of a door frame on the left, so they headed towards it first without discussion.

Furthermore, just as they got close, this door, which maintained an element of foreign nature and uncanniness while barely resembling an ordinary wooden door, opened up right before them, revealing both a figure and a large open room behind the figure.

Due to the current state of her abilities, she couldn’t assess what the other two were thinking, but her attention leapt not to the figure but to the room behind them instead. It would not be odd to find a room inside of a building, of course, but to suddenly find that one could look far further than just fifteen metres for no obvious reason was very much a different story. So long as she wasn’t seeing things, then that meant that the rules of the world either had more complexity, or that it was possible to subvert them, which would be exactly what she wanted. Abusing existing Laws to benefit herself was one of her specialties after all of her work, so perhaps this place would even offer the ability to break through the boundary of the Dao of Law.

Returning to the other matter of importance and concern, however, the figure that they saw on the other side of the door almost looked human – no, it seemed to be entirely human, without a single oddity. They saw a man, dressed in similar garb to that of the earthen entity from the banquet, with a bushy grey beard and unkempt short hair, as well as a face that looked partly otherworldly.

Despite that, this looked to be a human, and it looked to be unaffected by the world in which he was forced to reside, presumably.

“People out on the streets? At this time?” he spoke in an accented but understandable language, looking over them, “The earthen horrors have risen on this day, and you come as well. Strangers from a strange land… Come inside if you do not wish to be devoured by those things. Those abominable things from beneath the earth that emerge when the times change once in the dark’s recession, and the light’s arrival.”

“What the… are you human?” Wei Yi asked.

He replied in kind, “Are you, strangers? Can I be sure that you do not conceal earthen flesh beneath that skin of yours?”

“I believe myself to be human, and I am rather sure that I have flesh and blood beneath my skin. However, I have not seen what lies beneath your skin, and for all I know, you merely look human while also having no relation to the earthen abominations, as you referred to them, albeit in a slightly different arrangement of words.”

“Unless you wish me to cut open myself, and for you to do the same in turn, then I see no method to resolve our current disagreement. However, we have little time, for the earthen horrors will soon be upon us all.”

“Can you see into the darkness, or are you just guessing?”

“I am stating the facts. We have lived in these dark lands for many years, and we know how to make our way through the land. Now, come inside and let us dispute the matter here.”

He turned around and walked in, turning around a few steps in and finding them still standing at the threshold.

“If you do not make your way inside, the darkness shall spread into here as well, and then you shall lose your only opportunity to observe the place at which you have arrived this day,” the man stated, putting his hand on the side of the door, “Step inside, or else you shall not be given another opportunity, not by me, at the very least.”

Bao Jing glanced at Wei Yi, Bao Kang Min looked around, and Wei Yi sighed as she realised that they did not have much of a choice at the moment. Due to the strange nature of the world, it was hard to be sure whether the man was a positive omen or not, but if she refused his help then she might not receive any positive omens over here in a very long time, leaving them to wander the dark while earthen horrors stalk them, likely with far better perception within the abyssal blackness that engulfed them at all times.

The Ascendant did not wish to permit herself to be consumed by them.

As such, she proceeded to step inside, with the other two following her without much of a delay. Whether or not there were truly earthen horrors out there, the decision had been made.

When they came inside, there did not seem to be an immediate problem, nor did the next step lead to anything dangerous, so far as they could tell. The man shut the door the moment that they entered, and then led them to a seating area. Since the darkness was, for the moment, dispelled, they could finally see all the way from one end of an area to another, although the sight that greeted them was scarcely different to any of the other facsimiles of the Planar Continents.

Chairs, tables and other furniture that might have looked to be made of wood or ordinary stone, except that this was clearly not the case. Even those things that could be convincingly made out of any kind of stone still maintained the same oddity, with a shape that did not quite suit them, or odd edges, bumps and indentations that made it clear these things did not come about in a usual manner.

They were brought to an area with several seats of various kinds positioned in a rough circle, and offered them, although both Wei Yi and Bao Kang Min naturally declined. Only Bao Jing gladly accepted, clearly tired from the long walk and glad to get any kind of opportunity to rest her weary feet. The other two naturally looked at her for a little while to confirm that nothing would occur to her, but even after it looked like she was unaffected by any kind of vile influence, neither of them wished to even attempt to sit in the same chairs.

“If you will never rest, then the earthen horrors will claim you far more easily. However, I cannot stop you from doing as you wish, so I will not waste my time,” the man said, “I am a grave digger, so refer to me as such if you prefer.”

“There are other people here, for whom you can dig graves? Where are they? Are their homes also capable of keeping out the dark? How exactly does that work?”

“You have too many questions. It is simple. These homes keep out the dark, and are kept lit by the blood of the world. At times, perhaps it is the blood’s presence that causes the earthen horrors to pursue us and attempt to devour us, although we could never survive without the world’s blood illuminating our domain. Out in the darkness, it is difficult to overpower the darkness with the tools of us mere mortals, so we are forced to construct as many homes as we can instead.”

“The rest of the questions, then. Go on.”

“There are few of us. We have to survive with the minimal number of resources that we are able to obtain, and-”

A sudden knock on the door interrupted him, prompting them all to look in the direction of the sound. It was a strong sound, followed by a brief pause and three more knocks, after which came another delay and then two more knocks. This sounded highly practised, a pattern that the grave digger had to be used to, and so his reaction made a great deal of sense, for he sprung up right away and rushed to the door, knocking a few times in return as he awaited a response. Only once the next response was also accurate did he open the door.

On the other side, a figure with a large hat that covered most of his shaven face stepped inside, and behind him there were a number of far more familiar people, all of whom Wei Yi remembered from the Bao District.

“Grave digger, there are outsiders on the streets! The earthen horrors may be invading soon!”

‘Shit, they actually call him that? Does he not have a name? What exactly is this place, how do they survive, why do they look so much like humans… well, I don’t know whether that’s what the problem is, or if they are actually human, since both would cause issues, but I cannot figure it out for the moment thanks to the decrease in spiritual perception effectiveness,’ Wei Yi frowned, the other people once more being far lower on her priority as they did not appear to possess any obvious abnormalities or interesting elements that would demand her attention, ‘Perhaps I should just cut the guy open and see if he has everything that a man ought to. Even a differing blood colour would make it clear that these are not ordinary… but that could also be caused by whatever it is that they have to eat in here, so their blood might be dirt-like if they need to consume dirt or something of the sort regularly.’

Of course, with her mind still functioning at something near its peak, to take in the other unfortunate arrivals from the Planar Continents was not challenging, even as something that was mainly at the back of her mind. Aside from the already mentioned fact that they matched up with those that she had personally observed at the Fashionable Gentleman’s banquet, they were mostly ordinary in appearance and level of power, especially with the forced equalization of the world.

There was a total of seven, five men and two women. Two were in the third realm, two again in the fourth, and three in the fifth, but now the scale of ever-greater fear on their faces made it obvious that they were all brought down a step or three.

Five, four men and one of the women, had come with some degree of armour or other practical equipment, with one of the women hiding a dagger within a side pocket of her outfit, while one of the men held a sword far more blatantly. The last two, a man and a woman, had come in a fancy robe and dress respectively, clearly having intended to participate in no combat on this day, and that combined with the fifth realm of the woman caused her fearful look to be almost doubled in comparison to her two fellows in the fifth realm.

It took them a moment to pay attention to the building they entered, which they did without any of the reservation that Wei Yi had shown, and when they saw her group, relief lit up their expressions.

“More of the people from the banquet! Have you been here long, or have you also just arrived?” an armoured man in the fourth realm, the one with a blade, quickly broke off from the group and inquired, “It is good to see familiar faces either way. I recall you in particular, I think.”

He gazed at Wei Yi as she recalled that he had been sitting not far away from him.

“If there had been just three, that would have been a different story… We must take care,” the grave digger stated, “Quickly, mason, shut that door!”

The mason followed his instructions, breaking out of the momentary pause caused by him also noticing Wei Yi and the other two already standing within the building. Clearly, there was some kind of system for the appearance of the earthen horrors, or at least that was what the native people thought, and the seemingly ever-growing number of outsiders did not make them any more enthusiastic about their prospects.

“The horrors you two fear – are they able to invade these spaces?” she questioned.

“Usually, they tend not to. They are hostile, but to outsiders they are doubly so, and then even the sturdiest of doors and walls may not hold them back for hold. Hopefully, they have not caught sight of you from the darkness, or else…”

His words, too, were cut off by a collision with the door, this time the one that Wei Yi had entered through. However, unlike the systematic knocks used as some kind of password by the mason, what they heard next was the clear noise of something sharp scratching against the stone that made up the door. It could not have been human, no matter how odd a human could be.

They shared a glance of uncertainty.

“These earthen horrors happen to possess nails or claws of some kind, do they?” a quick nod from the grave digger affirmed her supposition, “What are the other traits? Can they be defeated easily?”

“If they could, we would have no fear of them! They are sturdy, and even the weakest is as strong as two men in their prime. Most will have claws, but some will stride on two legs while others stride on four. Some with have large, hulking forms, whereas others take on a thinner appearance, with which comes a far superior speed to their counterparts. They all share a gaping jaw with a jagged mouth, those spikes acting as teeth for it to devour the people of the land,” the grave digger explained, “They do not bleed, only releasing a thin mist of stone and dirt, but it is possible to kill them.”

“Any specifics, or should we just slash at them until they die?”

“You think that you can kill them? Ha…” the mason began to quietly laugh, getting louder and faster as the scratching at the door ramped up to outright bashing, causing the entire building to shake and dust to fall from the ceiling.

Then, after a sudden pause in the laugh and strikes at the door, the door was thrown off its hinges, flying into the building and falling just short of Bao Kang Min.

On the other side, a horror was clearly visible.