Chapter 685

Chapter 685: Dark Passage

The instant that boundless darkness and chaos rushed over him, Ted Riel knew something was wrong.

When he tried to cancel the teleportation at once and step back through the “door,” he found his power did not answer him. The ghostly door that had been at his side only a second ago had already vanished into the endless dark and chaos.

Calm down.

As a Truth Keeper, he drew a slow breath. In the shortest time, he forced himself to calm down. He held back his instinct to start observing and sensing everything around him. In the dark, he stood still where he was. He did not try to see or hear anything.

He slowly pulled his senses back in and held his own thoughts under tight control. Using the “mental discipline” he had trained for many years, he pushed down his natural mortal curiosity, his drive to explore, and his habit of making connections.

This would help him resist any hostile power that might exist in this place. It would also keep him from reaching out too quickly for “knowledge” he was not ready to touch.

Rahm taught that countless truths lay hidden in the dark. In darkness, anything could appear—but the things that did not harm mortals were less than one in ten thousand.

The numbness in his mind slowly spread and turned into a wall that shielded his thoughts. The Blessing of Folly given by Rahm had come. Ted Riel let out a light breath and felt a bit more at ease. Only then did he begin to hold on to the bare minimum of reason and judgment, while carefully rebuilding his senses. He lifted his gaze toward what seemed like endless chaos.

Murky, dreamlike Shadows filled his sight. The darkness looked like a boundless wasteland, and at the same time like a forest of countless towering, unnamable giants. Some huge structure jumped at the edge of his vision. It seemed to float above that wasteland, drifting blind and confused.

A sharp, brutal headache struck him.

For a moment, Ted almost could not stand. The defenses and caution he had built with all his strength shattered in a single second. The instant he saw those giant shapes, countless sharp, tiny, dizzying noises flooded up from the depths of his mind. They tore at his reason like endless cruel saw-teeth. They scraped away his personality and began to eat all his humanity, logic, and memories.

Streams of dim, chaotic light flashed between the floating giants. With that flash, a thought rose in his heart, one strong enough to shake even the firmest Saint into despair—

Subspace.

“Not good…”

Ted Riel only managed to squeeze out one word from his mind before he felt himself losing control of his own body. He felt strange limbs growing from his back, and some thick, icy liquid flowing in his veins. His vision split in the darkness. Countless wild viewpoints he could not control swept around, staring into the dark from every angle. The roaring noise almost crushed his reason—

Then, in the next second, his powerful will surged up from deep inside. He hurried to seal off those alien senses and shred the alien voices in his head. He branded his own identity as an Elf over and over again into his heart.

In that brief moment of forced clarity, he suddenly felt a power appear—and with it, an illusion took shape before him.

He saw a flickering red light like a cold, rational single eye floating in the dark. Many smaller lights flashed around it in neat rows, like an array. A huge outline like a silent tombstone rose behind those lights, standing still in a mist that had appeared from nowhere.

All of Ted’s remaining reason was drawn to those lights. Without thinking, he lifted his head and let his gaze fall on that glow. His thoughts were combed, reshaped, and pulled toward that lord of wisdom—

Rumble—

A phantom roar shook him out of the vision. The lights vanished before his eyes. He was back in the dark, chaotic place.

He understood what had happened.

The protection of the God of Wisdom had come. For a brief instant, Rahm had cast him a single glance.

His mind was protected—but only for a time.

A faint noise slowly rose again from the depths of his heart. Ted Riel saw twisted, jumping Shadows creeping back into his vision. He knew at once he had no time to waste. He pulled the Book of sacred miracles from his robe and tried to construct a new door back to the Mortal Realm.

But then, an unseen force came from nowhere. He felt his body suddenly lift away from the wasteland in the dark and get pulled swiftly through the darkness.

In the dark, he watched that chaotic wasteland retreat fast from his sight.

He saw the silent giants rush toward him, then pass through his field of view in indescribable twists, swellings, and shrinkings, and vanish into the far edge of space.

He saw an upside-down mass in the sky surge toward him like a crushing blow, then fade away without a sound like a mirage.

He felt that, for a time, he had stopped somewhere.

In a daze, he lifted his head and saw an immense upside-down shape almost right before him. It looked like a grand yet gloomy building, with northern-style spires and eaves. He could just make out a dry fountain and a dead garden. Parts of the building were broken apart, as if some unseen power had eaten and torn them away.

In the next second, that fine western mansion turned into a shattered giant ship. It was nothing like any “ship” he knew. It looked more like a twisted, broken metal tube built from heaps of steel. It was clearly not whole, like a piece torn off some even larger structure.

Ted Riel had no time to study this shocking thing. In the next moment, he felt himself racing again through the empty void. Light and shadow, more broken and chaotic than before, surged over him like a tidal wave, filling his sight.

With those lights and shadows came knowledge.

Knowledge he had never touched before, but that now suddenly became clear and bright in his mind.

He saw torn structures of time and space. He saw warped stars squeezed into long rings under endless pressure, then turning into eternal flashes of light at the moment of their destruction, flowing like chaos in the depths of this space.

He saw the laws of math collapse at the end of time, and ancient stars out of control, torn into countless burning fragments.

He saw a ship wandering aimlessly in the dark. The ship was decayed and almost broken. It slid through the darkness as if on some eternal mission of exploration—or as if it were only a reflection from a far-off time and space. The ship looked familiar.

Then he saw a huge thing floating at the center of the endless void.

It was a vast throne, as if carved from gray-white stone. The base around the throne was shattered. A headless body sat upon it, keeping eternal silence in the dark.

This journey was about to reach its end—

For some reason, that thought flashed through Ted Riel’s heart. It was as if he had stepped beyond the rules of time and already seen the place where he would finally stop.

Then he stopped.

He seemed to be standing on a small, broken patch of ground. There was a person there—or something else—wrapped in Shadows.

Beside it lay a small heap of melted, shapeless remains. The figure that looked like a Human, yet had some strange half-formed structure, leaned against that heap. It was like a soldier who had died here in some age beyond memory, one hand slightly raised, pointing into the distance.

Ted Riel’s mind was drawn to this figure against his will. Compared with the countless gigantic things in this chaotic space, this figure looked especially ordinary and harmless.

But just as he was about to take a step forward, a great warning burst in his heart. He stopped at once.

Right then, a faint, ghostly great door appeared beside him.

It was the teleportation gate he had summoned before, the one he had somehow “lost.”

Ted Riel cast aside all hesitation in an instant. He forced himself to look away from the figure and crushed the urge to explore this unknown place. He turned and rushed straight into the ghostly door.

Passing through the door seemed to take only a moment, yet also felt like drifting for a century in chaos. Ted had never thought that a teleportation gate he summoned himself could tear him apart like this.

As his reason wavered on the edge of collapse, he dimly heard a voice at his ear. It was the sound of Humans speaking.

“I got him! Captain, I got him!”

A hoarse voice shouted, excited and proud.

A strong pull came from his arm. In his daze, Ted Riel felt someone grab him and drag him with all their strength. He heard the rise and fall of waves. He felt icy seawater soaking his limbs. A brute force hauled him out of the water onto a deck and threw him down on a hard surface.

“I caught him! This thing was drifting around on the edge of the dark… Yeah, it’s a person! This thing is a person!”

Who was shouting? So rough and rude… He didn’t sound like someone from the city-state. The voice was strange…

“He still seems out cold… Should I do mouth-to-mouth? Ah, now I’m nervous… Wait, Captain, I don’t even breathe… I only pretend to breathe for the mood… Should I still try?”

Who on earth was that?

Ted Riel struggled to think. He started to “reboot” his senses and every nerve in his body. He forced himself awake and tried his best to open his eyes.

In the darkness, the blurred, wavering shapes around him finally began to grow clear.

He saw the one who had been shouting. He saw a face, very close to his own.

It was an ugly mummified corpse. A horrifying face that looked as if it would rot into dust at any moment.

The mummified corpse was bending closer…

In that instant, Ted Riel suddenly felt that going back to Subspace might have been the better choice.