Joren sheathed his blade.
His boots pressed into the black slime still writhing across the ground, producing a faint hiss.
The stuff moved like it was alive.
Thin strands crawled greedily over his boots, searching for gaps, trying to reach the warm flesh inside.
"Hmph."
Boom!
Violet annihilation lightning burst from Joren’s legs.
Every trace of black slime within ten meters evaporated at once, leaving behind only wisps of dark smoke.
[Ding!]
[Void Thrall, Aberrant Fusion killed. Bloodstars obtained: 10000.]
Hm?
Void Thrall, Aberrant Fusion?
So after the Shadow Fiend mutated, the system had reassessed what kind of life form it actually was.
And more importantly...
Ten thousand Bloodstars.
Joren’s eyes narrowed slightly.
The Golden Dragon Falcon had also been peak Rank Five, yet it had only awarded seven thousand.
The Shadow Fiend had gone completely insane and its original body had nearly collapsed, but after being corrupted by this place, it was somehow worth even more.
"So it lost its mind, but its level of life actually increased."
Joren looked down at the last traces of black residue on the ground.
That explained how it had regenerated almost instantly.
It also explained why it could devour thunder.
If Joren had not possessed an unreasonable heavy weapon like [Heaven’s Sin], combined with [One Force Breaks All] to sever its connection with this space, the fight would have taken far more effort.
A new system prompt appeared.
[Spend 10000 Bloodstars to plunder mutated purple Talent, Unnameable Form?]
Joren’s breathing paused for a fraction of a second.
A mutated Talent?
That was new.
"Plunder."
Ten thousand Bloodstars disappeared instantly.
The next moment, Joren felt as though he had swallowed a piece of red hot charcoal.
At the same time, countless cold, slick things seemed to enter his veins and wriggle through every corner of his body.
"Hehe..."
"Can you see me..."
"Flesh... tastes so good..."
A moment later, the crawling sensation beneath his skin faded.
Joren slowly exhaled and opened the new Talent panel.
Purple text appeared before him.
[Talent: Unnameable Form]
[Grade: Purple]
[Description: When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. So tear out its eyes and make them your own. You have touched laws belonging to the Old Ones. You are an observer walking along the edge of sanity.]
[Sanity Collapse: Active ability. Once activated, an unnameable field of mental corruption surrounds you. Any enemy who looks at you or perceives your existence suffers 300 percent true Mental Force damage every second and is forcibly afflicted with random negative states including Confusion, Fear, and Self Destruction. Targets with Mental Force lower than yours can be directly assimilated into puppets under your control.]
[Void Feast: All of your attacks gain the Gluttony effect. When an enemy is wounded by you, the essence within the damaged flesh is forcibly plundered and converted into healing or physical recovery.]
Joren stared at the two effects for a couple of seconds.
Then his mouth curved into a rather unpleasant grin.
"Twisted."
"I like it."
"That was ten thousand Bloodstars well spent."
Satisfied, he closed the panel.
The gray mist around him had grown thicker.
That sensation of being watched had not faded with the Shadow Fiend’s death.
It had become stronger.
Something that belonged to this place seemed to have noticed what happened.
Perhaps the battle had disturbed it.
Perhaps the death of that little thief had.
Far away, the twisted silhouettes of black structures no longer seemed entirely still.
They were moving.
Slowly.
Toward him.
"I should not stay here."
Joren gathered his thoughts.
Obtaining a fragment of this unnameable power did not mean he could run wild in someone else’s territory.
A powerful new Talent changed nothing about the nature of this place.
The Shadow Fiend was proof enough.
This was the reverse side of reality.
A forbidden place for sane minds.
"Time to go."
Joren stopped hesitating.
Boom!
His body became a blurred streak and shot straight upward through the gray world at Mach 20.
Six thousand eight hundred meters in one second.
Sixty eight kilometers in ten.
No matter how enormous this place was, at that speed, he should eventually reach some kind of boundary.
A wall.
A barrier.
Anything.
One minute passed.
Then five.
Then ten.
Joren’s brow tightened more and more until he finally stopped.
He hovered in the air, his face gone still.
Nothing.
No edge.
No end.
Not even the scenery had changed.
Above him remained the same oppressive lead gray sky, its clouds hanging impossibly low.
Below him stretched the same black land, split by cracks filled with oily fluid.
And several kilometers ahead, through the gray mist, stood the same cluster of twisted black structures tangled together.
Same shape.
Same angle.
Even the half withered optic nerve hanging from the strange streetlamp nearby was exactly where it had been ten minutes ago.
If this were folded space or some kind of loop, [Void Walk] would have sensed the disturbance the instant he crossed a spatial node.
There had been nothing.
The entire ten minutes of flight had passed without the slightest ripple in space.
Which meant that physically, he really had been flying in a straight line.
Then why had nothing changed?
[Worldheart Awareness].
[Omniscient Field].
The information returned to him, and Joren’s expression sank.
Everything really was identical.
Not an illusion.
Not a projection.
The buildings existed.
The cracks in the ground existed.
All of it was real matter.
This place was like a cheap map copied and pasted infinitely in every direction.
No matter where he went, the same piece of terrain waited ahead.
This was exactly the kind of moment when panic would kill faster than any monster.
If he started flying around blindly like a headless insect, he could exhaust himself to death and accomplish nothing except leaving this place one more fresh corpse to distort.
Joren closed his eyes.
He cut off his vision entirely.
In a place filled with mental corruption and warped perception, sight might be the least trustworthy sense of all.
He stopped examining the terrain.
Instead, he turned his attention inward.
His thoughts.
His Mental Force.
The way his mind was processing direction, distance, and movement.
A moment later, Joren’s eyes snapped open.
"So that is what it is."
There was no infinitely extending world.
His body might barely have moved at all.
He might even have spent the last ten minutes circling the same place.
Space had not been folded.
His perception had.