sjar Chapter 419: Soul Realm 3
Chapter 419: Soul Realm 3
Whatever this energy was, whatever it was made of, it was invigorating on the way in and consuming on the way out, and by the time you noticed the cost, your edges were already soft, soon you’ll turn to mist yourself and drift with the mist too...
The dread in Bruce’s chest, the cold premonition that had not left him since he opened his eyes here, was not paranoia. It was his soul, what little of it remained, telling him it was under attack.
He took a slow breath, and tried not to enjoy how it felt.
The figures in grey were the next problem. Carriages. Scythes. Coming to take people, choosing some, leaving others. He did not have enough information to know what that meant. It could be bad. It could be worse than bad.
But he noticed, sitting with it, that the people the figures left behind were not surviving either — they were the ones in this cluster, in this mist, slowly being eaten. So whatever the figures did, ’being left’ was not safety.
He pushed that aside. He could not solve the figures from where he was standing. He could only solve what was in front of him.
What was in front of him was that the mist was killing him.
He reached for his body talent on reflex — Godly Healer, the foundation of everything he had built in the physical realm — and found nothing. Not a flicker. Not a thread. The talent was tied to mana, and there was no mana here.
He searched more carefully.
In the Nether Realm, he had felt small amounts of mana still — suppressed, overpowered by nether energy, but still present, the way a candle is present in a windstorm.
But here, there was nothing. Not suppressed mana. Not weakened mana. Not a single trace.
The Soul Realm did not run on mana at all. Whatever this place used to power itself, it was something else entirely, and his physical-realm techniques were as useful here as a key in the wrong lock.
He sat with that for a moment.
Then he thought, ’Soul talent.’
The Akashic had told him, before the descent, that every soul that survived this place did so by awakening a soul talent. That was the leeway. That was the way out of the mist’s slow eating. A soul that had awakened a talent could resist. A soul that had not awakened could only dissolve.
He had asked the Akashic how to awaken it.
The Akashic had told him, with something like apology in its voice, that it did not know. Each soul awakened on its own terms. The method was not knowledge the Codex possessed. Bruce would have to find the way himself.
He was, in other words, on his own.
He took another breath of the mist — careful, shallow, trying to take in as little as possible — and made himself think.
If he could not find the answer in himself, he would find it from someone who already had it. There had to be souls here who had awakened. The older woman’s group had not, or they would not have been sitting in the mist letting it eat them. The baker certainly had not. But somewhere, in this expanse, there had to be someone who had.
He would find them. He would ask them how.
That was the plan. It was a thin plan. It was the only plan.
He started walking.
He walked for what felt like hours.
Time was difficult here. The mist did not have a sun, did not have a sky, did not change. The light was always the same soft, sourceless grey. He had no way to measure how long he had been moving except by the growing tiredness in his soul-body and the slow, deliberate way he had to keep pushing himself forward.
He passed souls.
So many souls.
Most were the hollow kind. They sat or stood where they had arrived, eyes open but not seeing, mist rising off them in slow trails. Bruce tried to speak to them. He stopped each one he passed and asked, "can you hear me? Do you understand me?"
Most did not respond at all. A few turned their heads in his direction with the slow uncertain motion of someone who was not sure where a sound had come from. None of them answered.
He saw a young man, perhaps twenty, who turned to look at Bruce with what seemed like real awareness — and then the awareness drained out of his face while Bruce watched, the way water drains out of a tilted cup, and the young man’s eyes went flat. Bruce stood in front of him for a long moment afterward, not knowing what to do.
He moved on.
He saw a woman holding a child. Both of them already past the point of response. The mist rose off both of them at the same rate.
He moved on.
He understood, in a slow horror that built with each soul he passed, what was happening to all of them. Their consciousness was being eaten.
Not their bodies — they had no bodies here. Their minds. The thing inside them that knew it existed, the thing that was them, was being slowly corroded and chewed away by the mist, and once it was gone they would become like the others. Hollow. Drifting. Still walking, still standing, still vaguely shaped like people, but no one home inside.
And then, eventually, even the shape would go. The mist would finish the work. There would be nothing left.
This was what was happening to him too.
Slower, maybe. He was a stubborn man and he was keeping his attention deliberately, keeping his thoughts moving, keeping his sense of self firm in his head. ’I am Bruce Ackerman. I’m a native of Earth transmigrated to Velmora... My wife is Sophie. My loved ones is Lily, Lucy, Sophie and every other person’s that had helped me on my journey to SSS in the physical realm. I came here on purpose. I came here on purpose to raise my Soul to SSS and evolve to Ex here and in the real world.’
He repeated it as he walked, a quiet drumbeat under everything else.
But he was still being eaten.
He could feel it now, properly, once he knew what to look for. A faint, constant draw at the edges of him. The way a slow leak drains a barrel. He could not see his own edges to check them, but he did not need to. He knew.
He had a finite amount of time before he became like the young man with the draining eyes.
He did not know how much time so kept pushing on with determination...
The conscious ones were rare.
He understood this clearly after the third hour, or what felt like the third hour. He had passed dozens upon dozens of souls. He had seen exactly one person — the older woman in the cluster — who could carry a conversation.
The rest were already too far gone, or close enough to gone that they could not focus long enough to answer a question.
He stopped briefly at one more small cluster, four souls grouped loosely around what looked like the remains of a chair that had no business existing here. He asked them his questions.
They could hear him, but their answers were fragmented; one of them gave him a name that was not the name of anything he had asked about, and another simply repeated ’cold, it’s cold’ over and over until Bruce stopped asking. Bruce thought the cold was manageable, but he didn’t know that the colder the mist felt to someone the closer they’re to having their consciousness completely devoured, it’s crazy...
Sighing, he left them and kept walking.
The premonition in his chest was getting worse.
It was not a single feeling anymore. It had layers. There was the original dread — the soul-level awareness of being eaten — and now there was a new layer of urgency that came from the simple math of his situation.
He was searching for something rare. He did not have unlimited time. Every minute he spent searching was a minute the mist took from him.
He started moving faster.
The grey under his feet gave more easily when he hurried, and twice he had to slow down because he felt himself starting to sink — not literally, but the sense of the ground refusing to fully support him, the way thin ice refuses to fully support weight. He learned to move at the fastest pace the floor would hold.
He passed more souls. More hollow ones. More slow dissolutions. A child this time, sitting alone, not moving. Bruce had to stop and lean over with his hands on his knees for a moment after that one before he could keep going.
He could feel his consciousness getting stressed, he felt more and more dread...
’What the fuck is this place,’ he gritted his teeth, his chest tightening... maybe he shouldn’t have come here, but it’s the only way forward, he has to find a way no matter what...
’I am Bruce Ackerman. My wife is Sophie. I came here on purpose.’
He reminded himself as he kept moving.