[You have absorbed an Awakened-grade Soul Shard.]
[Your soul has grown stronger.]
[You have absorbed an Awakened-grade Soul Shard.]
[Your soul has grown stronger.]
The familiar voice of the Spell echoed coldly in his mind, like a sentence being read aloud over and over.
Ren crushed both shards and absorbed them. It felt like a stream of warm water coursing through his spine… not as wild and painful as the first time he awakened, but still enough to send a shiver of dull pleasure down his back.
He summoned the rune board, its pale blue light flickering in the darkness like the breath of a sleeping beast.
[2/1000]
Ren curled his lips. A smirk without a smile.
"Damn it…"
It should've been four. Four shards, he was supposed to gain four from two Awakened-grade creatures.
But his Flaw… the fracture in the core of his soul… had devoured half of it, like a bleeding, hungry mouth.
Ren's soul didn't just absorb power, it lost it, bit by bit.
His eyes shifted to another section of runes:
Flaw: [Splintered Core]
Description:
His soul is incomplete.
A fracture runs deep into its core, as if someone once tried to tear it apart… but failed.
No one knows why it still exists.
No one knows why he's still alive.
Only fate holds the answer…
But when did fate ever care for the forsaken?
When absorbing Soul Shards, a portion of the energy disappears without a trace, unconverted, unreclaimed, lost.
As if something else was hungry too.
This Fall didn't just weaken him, it made progress cruelly slow.
It was a wound that wouldn't heal.
A splintered echo in the core of his soul, each absorption a reminder:
Ren wasn't like the other Sleepers.
He didn't rise from the bottom… he fell from the top.
Ren shook his head, as if to banish the black mist crawling across his consciousness. Dark thoughts like thorns hidden in shadow.
"So what?"
As long as he's alive… everything's still possible.
At least… that's what he forced himself to believe.
Ren clenched his fists.
A faint surge of strength flowed through his muscles, dim, incomplete, but undeniably stronger than before. He could feel it.
Beneath the cold, dark cocoon...within this coral graveyard maze and among monsters that knew no sleep… Ren was still alive.
And that was enough.
For now.
Hunger twisted in his stomach like a skeletal hand. He had been moving all day, surviving on nothing but a few sips of sweet water scavenged from an old ration pack.
Not much.
Not enough.
His body began to tremble in silence, not from cold, but from exhaustion.
Ren reached toward a pouch woven from black seaweed, its outer layer hardened by saltwater and dried mud.
Inside… was monster meat. Still there. Still edible.
But every time he thought about chewing that stringy, gray flesh, nausea rose in his throat.
He had killed it. Skinned it himself. Carved out the meat that wasn't yet rotting.
But eating it… was something else entirely.
The taste of iron, the slime of venom, and the lingering scent of something that didn't belong to the human world.
Ren swallowed dryly, his eyes drifting unconsciously to a corner of the cocoon. A few spider hatchlings lay curled up, their legs twitching lightly as if stirred by wind… or not quite dead.
They had died from his blood.
Part of Ren wanted to throw up. Another part… was considering it.
Their flesh...if it could even be called that, was soft, gelatinous, and cold. More like raw eggs than corpses.
Their eggs were the same: sticky as swamp muck, glimmering like metal under a light that didn't exist.
Ren had never thought he'd eat the corpse of a creature that once gnawed on his own flesh. Nor had he ever tried his own blood.
Ren's blood… was toxic. It had killed the spiders. But it had nearly killed him too, the night his first nightmare ended.
Now, it still ran through him...slow, silent, like a beast in chains.
Ren bit his lip.
He wasn't sure if the toxicity would affect him if it were reintroduced into his body via digestion... or if it would decompose in the flesh of the parasites.
But the options were becoming fewer.
Between hunger and toxins, was the answer perhaps in taking a risk?
In the end... Ren gritted his teeth, pulling out a piece of monster meat from the seaweed pouch.
Cold. Slimy. Tough like rubber.
It was the meat of the Carapace Scavenger he had slain, a temporary trophy. No fire to roast it, no tools to clean it, just his chitin knife and bare hands.
Ren gnawed at it bit by bit, not chewing thoroughly, unable to let the taste of its rancid bitterness cling to his throat like mud.
But his stomach, which had been empty for almost two days, seized it like a starving man grasping at hope.
A few minutes later, the nausea passed like a cold wave, but Ren held it together. He needed energy. Anything to keep breathing.
But... just as he finished eating, the air seemed to grow heavier.
No more hunger.
No more immediate goal.
Only exhaustion, and a dull ache like an underground stream of blood leaking from within.
It had been almost two days... since Ren last slept.
He dared not sleep.
Dared not surrender his body to the nightmares silently creeping from the dark.
But now, amidst the musty smell of iron silk, in the pitch-black darkness like tar, surrounded by spiderlings' bodies and the remnants of fear...
Sleep came, like a gentle death.
Ren didn't resist. He had no strength left.
The sensation of fullness in his stomach was like a warm embrace, the only thing left between the stone, saltwater, and the blades of survival.
Consciousness slowly slipped from his fingertips, melting into deep sleep...
A sleep without warning.
Perhaps... the last one.
He sank into the darkness.
A sleep without dreams, without shape, only emptiness surrounding him. No time. No sound. No fear. As if he had melted into the realm of death, peaceful... and cold.
But the Dream Realm does not let anyone sleep peacefully. A violent tremor exploded under his back.
A screech.
Not the sound of wind or waves.
But the wail of a giant creature, full of hatred and madness, echoing through the fibers of spider silk.
Ren jolted awake, heart pounding like thunder, his throat choking as if squeezed shut.
The ground... no, the entire stone maze was shaking.
Not in a rhythmic pattern like the tide, but as if some monster was screaming, crushing each stone layer in search of something.
Or... someone.
He forced himself to stay still, not breathing too loudly. Outside the cocoon, the spider silk tightened in waves, then trembled violently like a taut string.
Something massive was coming.
It didn't knock.
It was smashing through walls.
And it was getting closer.
No... not just shaking.
Ren felt his body... sliding.
No, it wasn't him crawling. It was the cocoon.
It was being pulled.
A slow but steady movement. The ground squealed beneath, the dry silk scraping against the rock
like claws dragging across a grave.
Ren froze, heart racing.
Something outside, not just one... was silently pulling the cocoon through the maze.Iron Spiders.
They didn't cut the cocoon. Didn't rip it apart.
They just... pulled.
Step by step.
The massive iron spiders, as silent as death, were clearing the area or running from something more terrifying.
Ren could feel it. The darkness was shifting.
Not in the usual way.
But like a nightmare crawling through every stone wall, exhaling its poison into the maze.
A predator in the night.
And the spiders... were fleeing.
They weren't fighting.
Not defending their territory.
They just wanted to retreat.
And Ren wasn't a survivor, just an object being dragged along.
Ren stayed motionless, his heart like a hammer in his chest. Even the slightest movement would be swallowed by the booming sound behind him.
A scream... unlike anything he'd ever heard.
Not a shriek. Not a roar. But a combination of both, as if metal was being torn apart in the throat of a long-dead monster.
The Black Sea screamed beneath. And then... it rose. Ren couldn't see it, but he knew, every hair on his body stood on end, every muscle involuntarily tightening.
It didn't belong to this world. It wasn't a creature. It was a rage.
A curse rising from the depths, dragging flesh and darkness with it.
The Iron Spiders didn't fight. They crawled as if their lives depended on each step.
A whole swarm of them, dozens, crossed the steel threads like a living bridge over the storming Black Sea.
Ren's cocoon swayed in mid-air, hanging on a thread stretching over a precipice.
The sea breeze swept past, bringing with it the pungent smell of decay and an icy chill that made his skin crawl.
Below, something massive was shifting.
Ren couldn't look... but he felt it.
A gaze. Not from a living creature, but from the Dark Sea itself, looking through the threads, through the flesh, straight into his soul.
A cracked soul.
Exposed.
Ren clenched his stomach, holding back the tremors in his breath, not daring to move.
If he dropped a single drop of sweat.
If he shifted a finger.
He knew... it would raise its head.
....And it would see him.