As much as he wanted to call bullshit, Jason had more important things to focus on. “So all I have to do is find one of those tears in space and cross over to the other side, right?”

“If you’d like to earn a quick death, then yes.” She tilted her head sideways, the curious gesture rather frightening due to the empty eye sockets and the frayed shroud of hair. “When I was sealed, I’d been surrounded by an endless plane of red sand. According to you, that region is now a mountain. With such a change in the landscape, the vast majority of spatial tears would likely trap you in rock or soil. Even if you weren’t crushed by an immense pressure, you’d suffocate soon enough.”

Jason thought about the sinkhole he’d fallen into. If Aelia hadn’t created an earthquake with her strange technique, then that tear in space would have remained buried several metres beneath the ground for countless more years.

“What about the one I came in from?”

She gave him a withered smile. “Can you reach it?”

He could jump maybe twenty metres into the air, at best. “How do you plan on getting me out of here?”

“That hole, of course. If you can’t reach it, then all you have to do is train until you’re capable of clearing that distance.”

“But I barely know how to cultivate! I’ve only reached this level because of good luck, and because I had the help of a good friend.”

“This pseudo world will collapse in a decade or two, though I doubt you’ll last that long if you choose to remain here.” The woman’s dry lips twisted into a bully’s smile. “I ask you again, have you resolved to do whatever it takes to get out of this independent space?”

Jason suddenly felt as if he had a block of ice in his stomach, an uneasy sensation that was quickly snubbed by a desire to leave this place far behind him, to leave it as a part of his memory that he would never revisit. After all he’d done since he’d fallen into that sinkhole, how could he get cold feet now?

His voice hardened. “Yes.”

“Then you’d best get some rest. I’ll need at least a day to create the proper arrayment and it will require a significant amount of blood.”

“That’s one thing we’re not short on.”

“Your blood.”

Of course, why wouldn’t it be my blood?

Jason walked over to the platform’s peripherals and sat atop its edge, his feet dangling in the darkness as he tried to calm his nerves. “Just call me over whenever you’re ready and tell me what I have to do.”

He repressed a sudden wave of self-pity, terribly conscious of the fact that his eyes might as well have been shut for all he could see. The only positive aspect of this forced blindness was that he couldn’t see the bodies cluttered around the platform’s base.

Things just keep on getting worse.

He sat there for hours, looking back on all of the events that had led him to this ghastly reality. The Interspatial Migration, Redfox Village, the Netherwolf Tribe, the Bloodhand Sect; things had been rough for Jason since his first moments on Venara, all the way up until the present time.

Why do I have the most fucked up life? Will I ever be the same?

Jason cursed his bad luck for over an hour before he fell asleep at the edge of the platform. He awoke some time later to a sharp pain in his leg, and opened his eyes to find that there was no difference in visibility from when they’d been shut. It took him a few ragged breaths to get his bearings before he expanded his spiritual sense and remembered where he’d fallen asleep.

“Come.” The woman’s weak voice cut cleanly through the darkness.

He rubbed at his leg. What had she done to him? He walked over to the archaic pillars with a quiet sigh.

“I’ve finished making the preparations,” she rasped quietly. “Now it’s your turn.”

“What exactly is going to happen?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Are you ready?”

“No, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” Jason withdrew a dining knife that he’d snatched from the inn he’d previously stayed at and held it to his left palm. “How much blood do you need, exactly?”

“Cut your wrist.”

“Cut my—are you serious? I’ll die!”

“I will seal the wound.”

“If you can heal injuries, then why haven’t you healed yourself yet? I’d have to be pretty goddamn stupid to slit my wrist just because you said that you would heal it.”

“These chains prevent me from restoring my body to its original appearance. They feed off both my inner essence and my spiritual energy, for that is what sustains them. Because of this, these chains will never break so long as I’m alive.”

“Why do you need my blood?”

“Your blood is not the only ingredient for the arrayment. You will also slit the wrists of those five, after you’ve dragged them all directly beneath me and arranged their hands so that they’re touching one another, equally spaced apart so that their arms form a five-pointed star. Then you’ll cut yourself and hold out your wrist so that your blood falls and mixes with theirs.”

Jason stood there in the darkness for a long time, the cold steel of the dining knife pressed against his wrist with an unsteady hand. People used to say things like ‘If somebody told you to jump off a bridge, would you?’ Thinking about it objectively, this was much more ridiculous.

“I…”

He couldn’t do it. Or at least he thought he couldn’t, until he was possessed by the cold, detached part of him that was born in this wretched place. Before he knew it he’d gathered the five Neomen and arranged their arms just as the woman had instructed. Several seconds later, an excessive amount of warm blood began to pool beneath her dangling feet, ten steady streams trickling out from just as many slit wrists. Another quick movement and fresh blood was fountaining out of one of his wrists, which felt as if it were on fire while at the same time growing oddly cold.

He dropped the knife with a clatter and proceeded to bleed out for an indeterminable amount of time. In such a state, a second felt like a minute, and a minute like an hour. He eventually fell into a fit of terrified screams as he wondered if he had been fooled and was actually about to die, by his own hand, no less.

“H-heal me already!”

“Not yet.”

“But I’ll die!”

“Be quiet, I need to concentrate.” She hacked out another glob of dark blood, which hovered in the air for a moment before separating into five tiny droplets, each one finding a different Neoman as they soared over to them and disappeared into their nostrils.

“Fuck you!” Jason’s head was growing faint. He had no doubt that he would have lost consciousness if there were a light source to illuminate his suffering. “You need to fix this!”

He tried to calm down, urging his inner essence to flood into his left arm and congregate around the deep incision that he’d just inflicted upon himself. To his horror, a foreign energy suddenly smashed into his body like a tidal wave and froze the flow of his inner essence.

He fell to his knees with a heart full of regrets, overly nauseous and increasingly cold. Try as he might to cover the wound, his right hand did nothing to stem the bleeding of his left wrist. The woman’s cackling laughter echoed in his ears as the pool of blood beneath her began to glow with a dim light. Very soon, a strong surge of golden radiance enveloped the entire platform. Jason snapped his eyes shut with a cry, sensitive as they were now that he hadn’t seen the light of day for nearly three weeks, and hadn’t seen any light in general since the woman had siphoned the energy from his remaining spirit stones.

The excessive radiance receded until an orb of light the size of a soccer ball floated up to face the woman. It emitted a dim glow that illuminated the surrounding area for seven metres in all directions. Jason slowly opened his eyes and noted that most of the blood had seemingly been evaporated by that strange light.

My wrist…it’s not bleeding anymore.

The powerful energy that had invaded his body had coalesced into a tiny bandage of iridescent energy, which he could see thanks to the light of the hovering orb. To his horror, the blood that remained beneath the woman—about a fifth of the original amount—suddenly slithered across the ground like a scarlet snake and slipped into the laceration on his wrist, unopposed by the bandage of energy.

His arm began to sear with a horrible pain that quickly made him forget about the agony of a slit wrist. In no time at all, the atrocious burn had spread to his other limbs and then throughout the rest of his body. He felt as if he’d been injected with a deadly poison, one that filled its victims with unparalleled suffering until the moment of their last breath.

Jason screamed at the top of his lungs, panting heavily as he struggled to deal with the scalding sensation that seemed to stab at every particle in his body. A few minutes passed before the pain began to recede, at which point he realized that he no longer felt lightheaded. Hauling himself to his feet with great effort, he stumbled toward the edge of the platform in a bid for escape, as he judged that it was too risky to continue to trust the chained woman. I should never have agreed—

“What a nuisance.”

He’d only taken a few wobbly steps when his body froze on the spot, anchored in place by the same oppressive energy as before. To his surprise, he was completely lifted off of the ground by a haze of iridescent light and then slowly drawn over to the centre of the platform. A stream of grey substance leaked out of each Neoman and drifted up into the orb of light like thin tendrils of dense smoke, all of them absorbed in a matter of seconds.

“Don’t blame me if something goes wrong,” the woman grunted.

It was then that the oppressive energy that kept Jason locked in place abruptly forced him to his knees, and he unintentionally stared into the face of the nearest Neoman, the young man with the proud demeanour. Very slowly, the young man’s eyes began to turn in Jason’s direction until the two of them exchanged gazes, at which point he noticed that the young woman nearest him was shedding fresh tears.

Jason had found it odd that their eyes weren’t dark and dim like the rest of the bodies that he’d inspected. Evidently, these Neomen had never been dead to begin with. As Jason was crushed by the reality that this realization implied, the last of the grey energy was absorbed into the floating orb, which pulsated several times, its size lessening with each undulation. Eventually, only a small bead of light remained.

The young man and his four companions gradually lost the lustre in their eyes, their wrists leaking less blood with each passing minute. Jason glanced down at the knife that he’d dropped, abhorred that he’d just been tricked into murdering five helpless people. Why didn’t you look at me earlier?

He didn’t have time to fully embrace the mountain of shame that came crashing down upon him, for that tiny golden bead suddenly quivered on the spot and then rocketed forward, smacking him right between the eyebrows. The instant it entered into his head, it suddenly felt as if someone had nailed an icicle deep into his skull.

He couldn’t move or think, and was simply aware that something had gone terribly wrong. Whatever had just entered into his mind was against the natural order of things. Very slowly, a hot pain began to boil within his head, accompanied by an odd, alarming pressure. It was as if his brain had begun to boil and bleed at the exact same moment. This was indeed the case, as he could feel every millilitre of blood that spread throughout his head as the hemorrhages continued on, unrelenting.

“You will be in pain…when you awaken…” said the woman, her voice losing strength. “But you will thank me when all is said and done. For now…I must rest… Do take care…not to starve…”

The words barely registered in Jason’s mind, as he was overtaken by an incredibly bizarre sensation that caused his awareness to fade. A strange amalgamation of visions and memories presented themselves in a manner that resembled a fractured pane of glass. Each fragment told its own tale, depicted its own story. He experienced them all simultaneously, and his head felt as if it might explode any moment.