The pain from consolidating spirit energy was gone, however, Lark seemed to found himself in another dimension again.

Am I back inside the white expanse? He dipped his hand under the white sand and realized he actually could feel its grainy texture fall between his fingers. That’s different. Before, Sphinx said the Mind Space blocked all sensory functions like pain.

How did I get back in here though? Was it after passing out? He cupped the sand in his palm and threw it against the nearest brick wall. Stacks of shadows appeared after the anticlimactic splash. Piercing sun rays blocked his vision and it sorta burnt him, reminding him of summer heat waves in the Las Vegas desert. Patches of slick sweat formed under his chin as he continued surveying the area.

Gross. Lark swiped back his hair, raking his fingers against his oven-ready scalp. He barely took another twenty steps before giving up. Unable to spot where the Cyan Cottage was, he called out for Sphinx.

“Sphinx are you there?”

Surrounding him was only sand and decrepit brick walls, which his echo bounced from. It was kind of creepy, how quiet it was inside his head, but it wasn’t just that. Somehow the arrangement of the abandoned posts gave him a sense of déjà vu. Then it hit him. It was because he had seen it before in Wangshi’s memories. He did a 180, and what he saw shouldn’t have been surprising, but he still gaped dumbstruck at the Ancient Jade Forest. What was he doing back in Celestia?

“We’re inside SIM.” Sphinx appeared relaxed, lying atop the brick wall. Lark shifted his gaze to the robed version of himself.

“What am I doing here?”

“Did you forget already?” Sphinx said sarcastically, “Your spirit training.”

“I thought the Trinity Watch already helped me recover that—”

“You can’t get out of this if you want to get stronger,” Sphinx ended over their conversation with a simple fact. “You can’t get anywhere without power. I’m sure you already realize this truth.”

Lark grimly smiled. Although it was true, he still didn’t want to hear it from him. “Alright. I get it. So how I do go about this—should I run laps?”

“Humans are a summation of parts,” Sphinx said, ignoring Lark’s somewhat earnest reply. His voice filled with callousness, yet warmth emanated as his eyes peeked at Lark through thin gray slits. “In order to look at the big picture, you must decompose.”

A new fear, which ran deeper than Lark’s initial meeting with his look-alike, caught him off guard. This Sphinx, full of complexity and skewed words, was truly scary. It didn’t help that Sphinx looked at him strangely.

“Go die, please.”

Excuse me?

“Print Jaime Graham.” Sphinx held his hand over the ground, where the dust unsettled and immediately Lark spotted a white circle with a small circumference comparable to a teleportation terminal. Without hesitating, Lark drew as much distance as possible between him and the white circle.

Right after he moved, the ring turned red. An ‘x’ cut through it.

“Too weak, huh?” Sphinx lazily noted and Lark could only breathe a sigh of relief until another white circle appeared. This time a lot closer to him.

“Let’s try a monster then. Print Sandworm.”

The white light contracted again and grew wider in diameter.

Crud, it’s coming. Instinctively, Lark rushed to hide inside the Ancient Jade Forest.

“Let’s see how long you can hold out.” The cackle in Sphinx’s rotten voice pushed Lark to dive deeper and faster into the Birdsong trees. He had no time to plan ahead when he heard the bone-chilling Sandworm roar. The earth trembled as the chase began.

He’s a psychopath! Lark cringed as a stray tree branch swatted him across the cheek. Fragrant wood sliced the top of his cheekbone, leaving scathing red welts. He pressed the back of his hand against the cut but didn’t stop running.

“It’s about twenty meters behind you,” Sphinx's voice traveled like an announcer’s voice inside a stadium. Lark shuddered and ducked through another set of trees. How could he fight back? Wangshi hadn’t taught him any sword skills, nor did he have a weapon and it was impractical to fight against that thing barehanded. Not to mention, Huan was only able to kill that thing with an Ancient beast. Did Sphinx really want him to die?

“By the way, the current sensory setting is logged at 75% realism. Soon you’ll feel the effects of dehydration and hunger. Careful.”

That annoying piece of — “Argh!”— He tripped down a hidden rill. Rolling onto his stomach, Lark felt the rocks quake under him.

“Damn, it’s almost here.” He clenched his fists. Wait, I still have a chance!

He flipped his spatial ring ‘on.’ All he had to do was capture it like what he did with Gushi… but would the Sandworm fit inside the storage space? As he was pondering this, nearby trees were uprooted and sent flying into the air.

“Argh! Whatever! You better explain yourself, Sphinx, cuz after this, I’m gonna kick your ass!” Lark shouted and grabbed Wangshi’s kitchen knife from the sphere.

“That’s the spirit!” came Sphinx’s overjoyed cheer. “In reality, no one will explain why you have to die. So deal with it to the best of your abilities, please. Figure it out on your own. I’ve already given you too many hints.”

He’s explained nothing! Were life and death just a game to this psycho? Lark growled and traveled over the rill to the opposite side of the exploding trees. Lark’s breathing grew haggard as he kept going straight. Just what can I do to win? Escape? Fight? It seems like he really intends for me to die before I can figure this out.

But what he can do, I can too. Lark stretched his knife-wielding arm out. “Print Gushi!”

The knife pointed towards a small stump, where a white circle contracted and produced a small silver slime. It worked. Hope flooded in his veins as he ran to his summoned beast.

For a dull moment, the forest was quiet, but his breathless lungs disturbed the air around him. Then, he felt it- a magnitude of chaos erupted below him. It pierced skyward, spewing gray dust in all directions. Blood drained out of his face.

“Gushi—get away!”

Tiny wings sprouted on the sides of the buoyant slime and they flapped momentarily before being sent into a spiral of sand. It wasn’t his first time seeing the Sandworm, but he had underestimated how enormous and terrifying a slithering body over twenty meters actually looked up close. He barely had time to see where his slime landed before the blind worm burrowed its head back into the sand, indicating a second attack to come.

His heart raced. How far away was Gushi? Gray dust hung heavy in the air and natural light barely pierced through its density. The slime’s shiny coat barely stuck out from the forest canopy, hanging arched like a strange fruit. Five yards up?

Lark traipsed around the dugged-out hole before climbing the tree Gushi was stuck on. This was a bad idea calling out Gushi like this, he should’ve timed it better so that the slime could’ve enabled its Boiling Body for a better defensive maneuver.

“H-hang on. Almost got you.”

The slime’s antenna slowly moved to the sound of his voice. It drooped back down as soon as the sandworm emerged from the gravelly pit.

It’s brownish pink body spread out over Lark’s eyes like a ceiling and its hungry mouth opened wide. At first, Lark couldn’t believe it—coming so close to danger—so unreal. Yet, he couldn’t pull his eyes away from the dark cloud over him. He saw the patches of skin embedded with gray sand and dirt, ribbed, and squishable, furiously moving towards Gushi.

Chills shot through his body as he grabbed a hold of its messy flesh by the nails. His grip weakened, however, he stabilized himself long enough to swing his other hand holding the knife into the source.

He screamed, louder than he ever thought possible. Feeling the shiver of rippling meat under the knife’s blade, he screamed more and more as if he were the one being stabbed.

The monster bucked him as he slid down its body. Bolts of pain went through his arm when the sandworm launched its tail towards its own gaping wound. This was it, he thought, noticing the tail coming for his face. He pushed the knife’s handle deeper into the red muscle and pulled the loosened flesh to the side before dropping to the ground with a thud.