I was right!

He almost became excited, but it was impossible to feel any sort of positive emotions while swimming in such a frightening area.

Focus on what you need to do. Don’t think about anything else.

He took a deep breath and then set about untying the fabric belts that held their robes in place. He knotted them together until he had a long, wet rope, which he used to tie the bodies into a bundle. Once the unmoving trio had been properly secured, he began towing them back in the direction of the bridge, which he arrived at a couple of hours later.

Rather than climbing up onto the unsteady meshing of rope and wood, Jason swam along its length to the distant island of rock, and then followed the next bridge to the platform at the cavern’s centre. It was much easier than carrying them across the narrow walkways that could barely accommodate a single person.

Terrible as he felt doing it, Jason tossed the bodies up onto the smooth stone above, first the two men and then the young woman. Since there were no handholds on the sides of the platform, he backtracked a bit and then hoisted himself up onto the nearest bridge, countless rivulets of blood dripping from his body as if he’d just stepped out of a hellish shower.

Since the withered woman was still trapped in a deep sleep, Jason rested by her side for about an hour and then forced himself to eat some biscuits that he had in his spatial bag. He struggled to keep them down, somehow succeeding after he erased all thoughts from his mind, as he did during cultivation.

He stared down at the spirit stones in his hand, both of which had lost a considerable amount of energy. These were the last two that he had. He had secretly rationed one of the stones that Nolan had given him after they had been forced to flee Redfox Village, keeping it stowed away in case of an emergency. Before going off to attempt to rescue Nyla and Quin, his friend had given him two more, one of which he’d spent on tickets to the caravan that would have taken him to Ferguson had he not been kidnapped by Aelia and Lucia. Who knew that the extra stone would become so valuable so soon?

Unable to stomach the last bite of his biscuit, Jason chucked it out into the darkness. If Amy wasn’t such a stupid bitch, then I wouldn’t be here right now! He sat down and hugged his knees, his eyes beginning to water. He cried for a time, but fought past it, choking down his weak sobs and lifting his head to stare at the sleeping woman from where she hung limply in her web of silvery chains. A pity party wouldn’t do him any good right now, not when there was work to be done. There were still two more corpses to collect.

Sitting there on the cold stone with only a condemned, coma-stricken woman and three dead youths for company, an odd iciness began to nestle in Jason’s heart. If he wanted to make it through this ordeal and escape this place in one piece, then he would have to steel himself to do whatever might be necessary in order to make that happen.

Closing off his thoughts and ignoring his instincts, Jason dove back into the bloody lake. He broke its macabre surface with a stomach-turning splash and then swam out into the darkness in search of the other two corpses that the chained woman had entrusted him to retrieve.

***

It took ten days for Jason to find the two remaining bodies. Every hour of every day was spent swimming through the lake in an aimless search for people with either shock or horror on their faces. He found them in what he viewed as the outer boundary of the devious body of liquid, floating silently in the blackness like the countless others that he’d encountered.

Finally!

A young man and woman hugged one another with bloody tears on their saddened yet astonished faces. The man appeared to have attempted to shield the woman from something in their final moments, though Jason couldn’t even begin to guess at what. The thought that some sort of unknown creature might be lurking out there in the darkness, perhaps hiding somewhere within the lake, sent frequent chills down his spine, and filled him with the urge to rush back to the nearest rope bridge and claw his way out of what he wished were water.

As he did with the others, he slipped off their slimy, blood-soaked belts—an unknown fabric that was both soft and coarse—before knotting them together and lashing them around the young duo. After which, he swam with all his might toward the platform where the chained woman resided. When he finally arrived at the large protrusion of rock, he tossed the bodies up onto its smooth surface in an unhanded manner.

“I’m sorry,” Jason muttered to the bodies once he’d followed them up. Even with his strength, it was difficult to throw an adult over three metres into the air when he was wading in the lake.

The corpse-like lady hadn’t so much as moved a finger since she’d lost consciousness all those days ago, which left Jason with little choice but to idle around the manmade island of finely chiselled rock while he waited for her to awaken.

Two weeks had passed since he’d fallen into this lightless cavern. He tried not to think about the mysteries that defined the devilish place, namely the presence of such a horrific amount of blood, and the countless bodies that floated atop it. Sit, eat, shit, sleep; these were the only things that Jason’s days now consisted of. Deep down, he’d already given up on ever making it out of this nightmare alive. What was the point? His family and friends were all dead and he didn’t have many belongings or any place to call home. Why was he struggling so hard to make it out of here? What was waiting for him outside, in the heart of that giant mountain range in a world that he was completely ignorant of?

He found his answer on the seventeenth day while focusing on the metallic scent that filled the air, which had settled into his nostrils with such strength that he felt as if he would never experience another smell. What was waiting for him outside, he asked himself?

Fresh air.

It was then that he realized the reason why he wanted to live despite having fallen to the lowest point of his existence. The drive that had pushed him to swim out into the grim lake day in and day out, to disrespect the dead by inspecting corpse after corpse for a small, pentagonal tattoo. Simple as it was, the reason that drove him to do those things was that he didn’t want to die.

The chained woman woke up on the nineteenth day.

He’d just eaten the last of his food supplies when the light of his spirit stones suddenly began to dim. Thin tendrils of energy began to leak out of their glassy surfaces and into the unconscious woman’s body, the silent platform now completely enveloped in the thickest blanket of darkness that Jason had ever beheld. The woman’s legs twitched a few times before she raised her head and looked directly at him, clearly relying on her spiritual sense to perceive him.

“You managed to find them.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

She scoffed. “Have you resolved to do whatever it takes to get out of here?”

“Hold up. Before we go on with whatever it is you plan to do, you need to answer some questions for me.”

“Do I now?”

“I don’t care how amazing you were once upon a time, right now we’re in the same situation. Well, we’re both stuck here, anyway. If we’re going to make this work, we’ll have to treat each other as equals, got it?”

The woman was silent for a moment as a small shiver raked her naked body, limp strands of silver and black hair masking her once-beautiful, mutilated face. “What do you want to know?”

“My first question’s pretty obvious. Where the hell are we?”

She gave a skeptic snort. “We are in Neoman territory, or more precisely, an independent space that they created from a certain location on Venara, the world that you wandered in here from.”

“Independent space?”

“A reality completely separate from the one you just left behind.”

“What do you mean, a different reality?”

“I mean what I said. If you don’t understand, then an explanation would be wasted on you.”

“Alright… Then what’s a Neoman?”

The silvery chains began to jangle as the woman let out a mad laugh, though her dry cackle quickly turned into a hacking cough. “For starters, the young men and women that I had you collect are all Neomen. Like me, they are not from your world.”

Jason almost immediately discredited her words, but then remembered that he too wasn’t originally from Venara.

“They caused quite a lot of problems for me and my kin,” she said. “They killed my clansmen and sealed me here, though as you can see…their victory cost them dearly.”

He focused his awareness around the bodies that he’d lined up behind him, facing the woman and her constraints. “Why did you think that I was one of them?”

“Your core cultivation method, it’s the same that these five practiced, along with that man.”

They practiced the Ancestral Body Technique?

“Wait, so does that mean this place was made to keep you trapped here?”

“It was.”

Jason was seized by a creeping chill. The sea of blood, the countless bodies; he suddenly felt unsure about aiding in this woman’s escape. The five Neomen had clearly put an immense amount of effort into sealing her here, and had even sacrificed their lives to that end.

But they couldn’t have been good people, not with how many bodies are in the lake.

“Are all those people Neomen too?” He indicated toward the bodies that floated out in the darkness.

“An immeasurable amount of time has passed since this independent space was created. It’s long since begun to deteriorate, creating many rifts in its outer peripherals that open up to the area where the dimensional arrayment was originally cast.” Her voice took on an aged drawl, the unmasked despondency saying more than a stream of tears ever could. “They are like you, unfortunate travellers that happened to wander into one of those pockets in the years since I was sealed in this independent space. It has been…a long time.”

Hundreds of bodies bobbed silently around the central platform, not to mention those that remained out of the scope of his perceptions. Was he supposed to believe that all these people just happened to have been wandering around that mountain and entered into one of those tears in space?

“You can’t be serious,” he said. “That mountain was gigantic and we didn’t see anyone else on the way up.”

“Mountain? When this space was created, I had been standing in a vast desert. I’m sure many mountains have come and gone; deserts, forests, and oceans too.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I’m not sure. It seems as if it’s been an eon since somebody has wandered through one of those spatial tears, and nearly as long since the person before that. The Neomen excelled at manipulating time, an area unexplored by the arrayment practitioners of my world. Here, time stands still. And yet, it does not.”

This is insane.

What was an eon again, a thousand years? A million? Jason had seen several thousand people since he’d fallen into this so-called ‘independent space.’ If the time interval between his arrival and that of the last person was applied to all of the people here, then wouldn’t this woman have been trapped in this cavern for hundreds of millions of years?