Every Realm has its secrets. - A Saint to a group of pursuing enemy Saints.

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In that instant, Marc only saw pure darkness. It only lasted for a short while before the light of the bonfire became visible once more. However, the fire was visibly being suppressed by the solid darkness. It was constantly flickering and the light it gave off only extended just a dozen meters before abruptly ending. The light looked like it was being seen from inside a watery depth.

Marc looked up at the sky but the enchanting purple moon and brilliant starry nebulae and formations couldn't be seen at all anymore. Only more darkness, slowly moving and stirring in bizarre waves. Without the bonfire, he wouldn't have been able to see an inch past his face.

He shivered. This was really creepy. He now understood why this was called truedark. What if he'd still been wandering all alone in the desert? He wouldn't have been prepared for this at all.

He shook his head. No point thinking on what ifs. Rezak had said something about spectres. Where were they?

Almost as if hearing his thoughts, the slow moving truedark suddenly started to stir and shift faster in several different locations. Before Marc could say anything, the villagers had already started crying out in alarm?

The truedark substance was moving rapidly in several different spaces, congealing and accumulating together. From the shouts of the villagers, he could tell that it wasn't happening just in front of him but also on the other side of the bonfire.

Marc grasped the bone-knife, having already unclasped it from his waist.

The villagers around him all had different reactions. Some only stared. Some gripped weapons, knives, spears and torches. Others prayed in hurried undertones. However, he could tell they were all scared and trying not to be.

A glance back at the children, who were behind the line of adults formed to protect them, showed even they were trying to act brave. Although some were crying, they did it silently, mouths covered, like they didn't want to attract attention to themselves.

Uneasily, he continued looking forward to the truedark hotspots that were spinning faster and faster.

Although the heat of the fire behind him was dampened by the truedark, he still felt himself sweating and raised a hand to wipe his face. His mind drifted to the character of a web serial he'd read, in which that character could produce a fog just like the truedark that dampened light, heat and sound.

He shook away the innocuous thought. He didn't have time for those.

A shout came from Rezak, muffled, distorted and echoey but still recognizably his. He had to be amplifying his voice somehow with how loud it still was despite the truedark. After all, Marc could only barely hear the villagers beside him when they spoke at volumes.

"The spectres are appearing already. Remember. Stay calm and focused. Watch everyone around you for possession and restrain them if they are. The spectres cannot harm you unless they possess someone."

That said, the ascender stopped talking.

Marc looked past the spots where the spectres were forming to deeper into the truedark where he could still see flickering pinpricks of light. Despite the fact that Rezak and the others further afield couldn't have been more than 50 meters away, their torches looked to be a lot further away.

The ascenders and the villagers had formed a defence line around the bonfire in an effort to keep any monsters from getting too close to the weaker ones. Despite the flickering of their torches, they still maintained the same position so it seemed they hadn't started fighting yet.

The spinning of the spectre spawning spots sped up rapidly and Marc's attention quickly refocused on the one in front of him.

The truedark in the area had spun into a vortex that suddenly started reshaping itself into a humanoid form. In seconds, the transformation was complete.

The spectre - because that had to be what Marc was seeing - didn't seem all that different from the surrounding truedark. Marc would have thought it would look more substantial and solid but it only seemed to have the concentration as the surrounding dark substance.

Not only that, even though Marc could see it, he was getting conflicting messages about whether it was there or not. His eyes and brain kept telling him there was nothing there, just more of the foggy truedark substance. However, his mind told him a humanoid, floating spectre was there. It was almost like seeing a pile of clothes in a dark room and thinking it was a monster, except this time, even turning on the lights did nothing to stop it and the feeling was getting more insistent not less.

The disorientation from the clashing experiences was unnerving and did more to scare him than the appearance of an ugly, eldritch being appearing would have.

The truedark outline - the spectre - floated amidst the swirling dark, its form rippling slightly and its presence seeming to darken the immediate area around it, like it was absorbing the meager light that managed to reach it.

It slowly floated forward a few meters and then stopped abruptly.

Marc's heart raced faster and he reflexively gulped. Unbidden, a chuckle escaped his mouth, a nervous tic that always happened whenever he was stressed. He rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants and gripped the bone knife harder, aware it wouldn't do much against the monster.

"Keep calm," he muttered, the truedark distorting the words and making his voice sound strange to his own ears. "Focus. It can't possess you with a calm mind. It can't hurt you unless it possesses you." Or unless it possessed another person, who could in turn hurt him.

The spectre was staring at the group, almost consideringly. Marc swept his eyes across to see all of them were doing so. Somehow, their rippling made it easier to track them, distinct as it was from the movement of the surrounding truedark. For a few moments, the two groups watched each other, quiescent.

Then all at once, the spectres moved forward.

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Caylon's hearts throbbed with energy and he released a slight grin as he let loose of his almost-constant grip on the lifeforce, allowing it to rush triumphantly through his body. He let out a sigh at the exhilarating feeling of power and speed that his body gained.

During cultivation, he had to keep a tight grip on every single strand of his energy in accordance to his ascension art's instructions. While not cultivating, his energy flow was freer but still matched his ascension art's pathways, following the cycles of his heartbeats.

Only when he was in battle could he truly let his lifeforce flow into every part of his body and move as fast as it could. It always felt like unleashing a wild horse and letting it run free. The feeling was addictive.

Sometimes he wished he hadn't ruined his life in the Verdant Depths stealing the bizarre ascension art but he knew it was worth it.

Despite the restrictive method of cultivation, his lifeforce cultivation progress was actually faster than his attribute leveling and he hadn't met any bottlenecks others usually complained about. He was already on the cusp of Rank 1 Lifeforce. He only had to raise his attributes to match and he would unlock the path to Tier 1.

Hopefully, the coming battle would help with that, if it didn't kill him. Still, he was confident he would be able to escape with his life if things got too dangerous.

Truedark was something Caylon hadn't wanted to experience again. At least, not without some preparation. When he'd first come to the Renardan region, he had foolishly braved the desert in the nighttime, wanting to farm monsters for essence.

He'd ventured deep into the desert, hoping to get more powerful monsters to hunt. He also hadn't bothered to get anything other than some cursory information about how truedark worked, which on second thought was kind of stupid.

He'd almost lost his life that night. Monsters possessed by spectres almost doubled in power, depending on their power before possession. Not only that, their sense for blood and flesh - especially of living creatures - skyrocketed.

He shivered. The area where they'd slaughtered the goblins had to be crawling with spectre-possessed monsters.

Hopefully, the blood there clouded their senses long enough for them not to notice the trail of another large source of blood and flesh, fresher and alive.

Hopefully, they'd also run far enough away from the truedark origin point to only get weaker spectres.

It would have been best for them to move unceasingly towards the village areas near Renarda City. There, the spectres were as weak as they could possibly be and the truedark didn't suppress light and sound as much. However, the villagers were too weak and slow for that. A running battle would have only increased casualties so the best option was to hold a position until the end of truedark.

It was going to be a long night.

His horns sensed an accumulation of energy somewhere to his left and after a moment of focus to decipher the cause, he ignored it. Spectres this far out couldn't possess him. He only had to watch out for the monsters they possessed.

A short while after, he sensed another energy signature, unmistakably tainted with the spectre's energy. He tracked it as it approached him and raised his daggers. He had chosen not to take a torch as holding one would only restrict him to using one hand to fight.

His base senses were better than a human's and passively enhanced by his lifeforce, he could see and hear quite a bit even in the truedark. However, what he was really relying on was the energy sense his horns granted him.

He wasn't quite practiced enough at using them; he still couldn't distinguish between spirit and ether usage and sometimes found it hard to separately recognize different energies when they were close to each other but he'd gotten good enough at recognizing lifeforce 8 times out of ten and the spectres' energy signatures were easy to distinguish once he properly found them.

The possessed monster lunged at him and he took a single step sideways, his blades flashing.

His eyes caught the split creature as it flew past his face and he instantly recognized it from his forays into the desert. A nocturnal flying serpent.

He hissed in irritation. He'd misjudged its strength. For an ordinary flying serpent, he shouldn't even have moved his feet at all. He had to conserve his energy, after all.

The next monster that came at him was a crawling stingworm which he diced into as many small pieces as possible. While it was a weak monster, he really didn't want to deal with multiple regenerated stingworm parts. That would have been annoying.

The monsters kept coming and Caylon handled them easily. After the fourth one, he started making sure to spill as much blood as possible when killing the monsters that came to him.

It would help attract more monsters to him and lighten the load on the fighting villagers. Never let it be said Caylon of the Verdant Depths wasn't a nice person.

After finishing off a wind fox by opening up its belly, the monsters began to come in faster. Stronger, too.

Caylon's lifeforce still ran untapped through his body, flowing through his skin. He hadn't used it at all fighting the weak monsters, except for the passive enhancement of his physique.

However, as a shrieker dived through the air above his head, trying to distract him from a hulking quadruped he couldn't recognize, he infused a strand of his lifeforce into one of his daggers and sent it flying. At the same time, he jumped onto the back of the charging four-legged monster, easily balancing on it.

He caught his blood-stained dagger as it fell, a flick throwing away the blood on it and the shrieker it had pierced, and raised both his blades to stab the bucking monster beneath him.

The attack enraged it and it increased its vigorous movements, only stopping when a lifeforce-assisted dagger parted its head from its body. As it crashed into the sand, Caylon jumped off its body, taking the opportunity to kick in the head of another wind fox that had been attacking a villager.

Caylon began to move more and more from his initial position and across his third of the defending formation, assisting the struggling villages with monsters too powerful for them.

He left the kills for them. They needed the essence if they were going to last through the night.

Not for the first time, he heard muted screams from the villagers staying at the bonfire and frowned. He hoped that was just someone being possessed and not the defence line having being broken. He really didn't want to have stayed here for nothing.

He shook his head and continued fighting. He couldn't leave his position so he quickly erased any thoughts about them to focus on killing every monster that came near.

He almost wished he could check his Schema to see his current Essence points count. Tier 1 was so close he could almost touch it.

His daydreaming almost cost him. A large bird dashed through the space he'd been occupying just a moment ago. It was blindingly fast and he had only just caught its fast moving signature in time to dodge it.

Caylon hadn't encountered the monster before but had heard stories of it from the ascenders of Renarda.

The desert stalker; silent as a shadow and fast as the wind were the words the drunk, one-armed ascender had used to describe the land-bound bird.

He'd thought he was exaggerating as lower-leveled ascenders were wont to do. Clearly, the man hadn't been exaggerating much if a spectre's enhancement could increase its speed to the point he'd almost been injured.

Caylon was already acting as the bird passed him. He quickly created a Technique Form in one of his hearts, around one of his ascension art's nodes and, almost immediately, his lifeforce fueled the technique.

Everything slowed. His heart beat sped up and his senses sharpened. His blood vessels felt full of vitality and his skin tingled with unreleased energy.

He moved.

Twisting on his heels, he turned to face the desert stalker, which was already turning to attack again.

He tracked its trajectory, his eyes capturing every single motion of its muscles, and took a single forceful step.

It dashed towards him, its beak angled high and its winged claws spread. Its neck only met Caylon's dagger, his step having pushed him up into a somersault that ended with his feet stomping the large bird's body into the sand. Its forward momentum only aided its beheading.

Instantly, Caylon stopped his technique. It was relatively cheap in lifeforce cost but dangerous when used for too long.

His heartbeats pulsed discordantly for a few seconds before they continued rhythmically beating together. Caylon ignored the discomfort to slaughter three weak monsters in quick succession.

Suddenly, his horns stung warningly.

All around him, the truedark rippled and roiled ominously.