Chapter 269 The Abyss Stares Back

The last time Guy evacuated his stomach's contents so violently was in his first mission through Syria. The jaundiced, burned and bloated forms of people after they drowned in their blood was a gut-wrenching sight, one that completely wrecked his psyche.

That brutal image was now replaced with the sight of a literal hill of corpses caught mid-scream - as if their life was stripped out of them through the most painful methods of torture. Worst yet, this torture was self-inflicted. Bloody tear marks marred their faces, streaming down from their eyes; the victims didn't want to do it, but they could not stop themselves. Their eyes were lifeless, cradled carefully within their blood-stained palms, yet their hollow eye sockets were scraped clean with animalistic efficiency. Each and every single person inside that building had died the same, sick way.

Guy lurched over and hurled out... whatever remained in his stomach. He could not spend another second past the reinforced metal doors. He couldn't make heads or tails of what lay in there. He didn't even know how he got here. There were way too many questions swirling in his mind, and the sensory assault of such much death just pushed him over the edge.

Alas, this wasn't something Guy could just sweep under the rug. There was a gap in his memories. A cursory glance of the sky, and noticing the Sun moving back towards the horizon, indicated that the gap was appreciable since his earliest coherent memory was set early in the morning and well before the Sun even reached the zenith of its trajectory.

"What happened in those seven or eight hours?" Evidently, a lot.

"I need to backtrack myself," Guy decided. He took a long breath and steeled his resolve. With a forced push, he shoved the metal door open and entered the den of corpses once again. The pungent stench of urine and faeces accented by the metallic odour of blood assaulted his senses once again. He carefully tip-toed through the narrow hallway, avoiding stepping on any bodies as he walked along and making observations as he did so. There wasn't much to see, apart from dead bodies, that is. The hallway was fairly basic, though it lacked the general dilapidated theme the "architecture" outside was going for. The walls had gunk and moss growing from years of poor management, and the floor was cracked and uneven from erosion or rogue weeds. There was no natural light entering the hallway - there were no windows to allow it to ingress - and even the frequent lamps illuminating the area emanated a dreary light. The path snaked and dipped and rose from underground a few times, with forks in the path that would have waylaid him if not for the trail of blood and bodies indicating the correct direction. With only the dead bodies to derive conclusions from, he noted the similarities as well as the differences in their states, hoping that maybe the pattern and/or deviations in patterns may signal an answer.

To that end, till now, he had yet to notice any deviations in the way that these people died. It was uniform, to an eerie degree.

'Is it possible to mass produce murder of this magnitude? How is it so consistent, down to a T even?' This was inhuman and reeked heavily of some evil unorthodox magic.

His precarious journey was reaching his end, and he realised this as rooms of varying sizes and functions started to spawn off from the seemingly endless and gore-laden hallway. He approached one such door and slowly pushed it open. The hinges elicited an ominous whine due to years of negligence. The door opened wide enough for Guy to peek in, and he saw a similar scene within. There were two people in here, both suffering the same self-inflicted torture-suicide. The room they were in was something like a storage space. There were shelves upon shelves of items, some that seemed familiar (rare alchemical and enchanting materials), others that were sketchy (unique resources extracted from magical beasts), and most that were downright illegal (human body parts amongst other things).

​ Guy moved past the next door, which revealed a set of stairs leading further underground. Following the path into the circular sub-basement, he observed jail cells all around with what appeared to be a torture board at the centre. The stench of human waste and blood was much stronger in here, and the remnants of torment hung heavily in the stale air of the unventilated and claustrophobia-inducing chamber. This was the only room Guy had come into so far that was devoid of death, which felt ironic.

Leaving that, and returning to the earlier halls, he arrived at the final doorway, which was less of a door and more of a large entryway into a massive underground field with a girthy pillar at the centre holding up the ceiling. There was artificial light embedded into the rough, stony walls illuminating the area. And against the pillar, at the centre, there was the figure of a human being propped up straight.

Guy approached the entity apprehensively. His senses were telling him that the person was dead, but it was very recent. The mana oozing out of him indicated that he was much stronger (possibly Second-Half of Core Formation to early Core Condensation realm). As Guy turned around the large pillar, he came face to face with another eye-less dead man, but with a twist. The man's eyes were extracted, but instead of just being held in his hands they were embedded into the man's palms. In front of the man, on the ground, was a "suicide letter" scribbled in the man's blood.

Guy swallowed a mouthful of saliva and oriented his head to read the text.

"I am the leader of the Beggars' Sect in Sunspear-"

Guy gasped as he finished the sentence. It all started to make sense!

"No... No, no, no..." Guy shook his head in denial as his eyes scanned the text.

"A child's eyes are the most innocent. They look beyond the rational calculations of an adult's sight and see the world for what it could be, not what it is. Thus, by robbing over two hundred and forty-three children of their eyesight, I have deprived them of their innocence. I am a sinner who has committed an unpardonable crime; my hands are stained with blood and my heart weighs heavily with the consequences of my actions.

As atonement, I hereby relinquish my eyesight: I do not deserve to see after depriving the world of two hundred and forty-three innocent and creative minds. I wear my sight in my hands: to evoke that one must be mindful of what they do just as well as what they think. I relinquish my cultivation: for it is built on a foundation of one of the vilest sins known to mankind. And I relinquish my life through the most painful path possible: for death without suffering is not punishment enough for my crimes.

Furthermore, I have included every single detail regarding the functioning of the Beggars' Sect and its affiliates. I have razed this establishment to the ground with my own hands, and eradicated everyone involved both remotely and directly."

Guy's mouth dried up just as rapidly as his heart palpitated. With unstable footing, Guy stumbled backwards and fell on his bottom.

"No, no, no... NO!" Guy grabbed his head in distress. "What have you done? What have... I... done?"

Guy would retch, but his bowels had been drained clean from before.

It had finally happened. The unlikely event he dreaded ever since he realised that another passenger was riding the vehicle that was his body. Guy was so sure... so sure that he could control the Other Guy.

Guy started to hyperventilate. His mental capacities were being overloaded by the magnitude of the actions he'd committed while he wasn't in control of his body. Almost instinctively, Guy decided to recede into himself as a defence mechanism. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he happened to find himself inside the RoK.

He hoped to find an inkling of tranquillity and stability to gather himself, but he was once again assaulted by the garish sight of a large tear in space originating from the void-black mask at the centre table. The visuals were jarring; it was like a two-dimensional tear had formed on a three-dimensional area and reality itself was being parted. The tear was narrow, but long, and was pitch black on the other side.

This clued Guy in on the technique the Other Guy used to intrude into his consciousness. Usually, the Other Guy would be isolated behind the void-black mask, which was usually the portal used to bring him forth from Guy's subconscious. Upon delving into the subconscious, Guy's RoK changed into the Church, so one could equate the RoK with the conscious and the Church with the subconscious. Before, his consciousness and subconscious were isolated. But now, somehow, the two segments of his soul were connected through this crack.

Guy approached the tear cautiously. He had an idea of what lay beyond it. He extended a finger and pried open the crack slightly. The process was difficult and it mentally strained him to even shift the cut by half a centimetre. With enough space to peek through, Guy moved his face closer and matched his eye with the peephole he'd created.

And for the first time in his life, Guy realised that the phrase "the abyss stared back," could actually be taken literally.

From the other side of the crack, another eye looked back.

"Greetings," a familiar (his own) voice spoke from the other side. "We meet again."