Chương 36: Life After

Day Two A sudden, freezing downpour jolted Gray awake. He lay sprawled in the soaked grass, limbs splayed like a starfish against the earth. Above him, a thick canopy of gray clouds smothered the sky, making it impossible to tell noon from midnight. He pushed himself up on trembling arms and surveyed his surroundings. An endless grass plain stretched in every direction. He squinted into the hazy distance, desperate to spot a landmark, but a sudden, sharp shift in the weather shattered his concentration. The rain.

What started as a heavy drizzle sharpened into thousands of icy needles. The stinging downpour pricked his skin like a doctor's syringe, striking him everywhere all at once. A few drops he could have brushed off, but this relentless barrage was sheer torture. Gray sprinted for cover. He ran for what felt like a mile, shoes slipping in the muck, but the landscape refused to shift. It remained a flat, featureless prairie blurring into the horizon.

After slowing to a panting walk, he noticed an anamoly etched into the terrain. Footprints. Soggy tracks were stomped deep into the wet dirt ahead. He followed the trail, chasing the prints for another exhausting mile, until the single set of indentations abruptly doubled. No way… it can't be. Dropping to his knees, Gray dug his raw fingers into the mud and scooped out a shallow hole, piling the loose earth into a mound beside it. Then, he ran again. He followed the looping path with a sinking dread in his stomach.

Sure enough, a mile later, he found it. The crater and the muddy mound. It was only two days into the trial, and he already wanted out. The realization that he was trapped in an infinite space with no escape only intensified the feeling. He racked his brain for a plan, anything that could get him out of this, until an idea finally struck him as he stared into the crater. If there isn't any shelter, why don't I just make my own? Dropping to his knees, Gray clawed frantically at the ground.

He excavated the muck until the pit was a foot deep. But before he could lower himself inside and pull the excess earth over his head, the ground trembled. Right before his eyes, the soil unnaturally crept back into place, sealing the space and undoing all his labor.

"Fine!" he screamed, throwing his arms wide to the punishing sky.

"If you want to test my willpower, go ahead!" Day Fourteen On Day Five, he had tried slathering himself in mud to shape a crude armor against the weather. Unfortunately, the relentless rainfall washed it away in seconds. Things had deteriorated significantly by Day Six. The rainfall shifted from annoying needle pricks to tiny daggers, slicing into his battered skin. Surprisingly, his frayed mind slowly adapted to the agony, rendering it a dull, tolerable throb by Day Ten.

Now, he lay limp in the grass, his eyes hollow and his breathing shallow. The storm raged on, but a sudden, rhythmic thrumming pierced the white noise of the rain, snapping him out of his daze. A portal. It wasn't a standard loot portal. The construct was gigantic—towering at least seven feet tall—and pulsed with a white light. The System was still unavailable to him, locking him out of his Identify skill, but his gut screamed exactly what it was. The exit. Adrenaline surged, forcing his stiff muscles into action.

Gray sprang to his feet and bolted toward the glowing tear in space.

"See? That wasn't so hard!" he rasped, forcing a dry, cracked laugh.

"Could've been a lot worse." But his victorious grin instantly melted as he stood at the threshold of the rift. His gut had been wrong. This wasn't the exit—it was an escape. If he stepped through that light now, he would be forfeiting the trial entirely. He took one step toward the radiant rift. Then another. Then, he froze. Pivoting on his heel, he turned his back on salvation. Escaping this torment now meant losing his powers to his Soul Blade.

He'd live the rest of his life stripped of his strength, essentially crippled in this new reality. That would be the real torture. He tore himself away from the temptation, and sprinted across the endless plain—skidding to a halt just before crossing the perimeter. After a fortnight trapped in this cage, he understood its architecture perfectly. It was an invisible, one-mile-wide dome. Out of sheer, agonizing boredom, he had spent hours dragging his heel through the mud to trace its exact borders.

Whenever he crossed that unseen line, the domain violently rubber-banded him back to the opposite side. Mapping the boundary hadn't unlocked any hidden mechanics or clues to beat the trial. He only did it because there was literally nothing else to do. Day Twenty By Day Seventeen, the dagger-like drops no longer registered as pain. His body had adapted to the punishment so thoroughly that he actually treated the relentless barrage like an aggressive, deep-tissue massage.

To keep his fraying sanity intact, he started shaping mud figures, holding one-sided conversations with them as if they were living people. The torrential downpour dissolved them back into brown sludge almost instantly, but having a companion—even for a fleeting handful of seconds—was the absolute highlight of his miserable days. This afternoon, he attempted to build a sculpture of his brother, Hyun. Calling it a "sculpture" was generous. It looked more like a lumpy, deformed snowman forged from wet dirt.

Lacking carrots or twigs, Gray simply jammed his thumbs into the mud to hollow out two eyes and carved a sagging, crooked smile. He rubbed the back of his neck, deliberately avoiding the melting figure's empty gaze.

"Look, I just wanna say… I'm sorry," Gray mumbled to the earth.

"I learned my lesson. The people around me helped me realize how much I disrespected you. If you're still furious, if you never want to see me again after what I did… I get it." Lifting his chin, he locked eyes with the dissolving mound of dirt. His tone sharpened, a defensive edge creeping into his voice.

"But it's not like I was one-hundred percent in the wrong there! I mean, come on! You gotta admit there are some people in this world who just shouldn't be allowed to live, right?" This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. Mud Hyun didn't respond. Which in Gray's mind, was exactly how the real Hyun would have reacted. His Soul Blade responded instead. By smiting him. A blinding flash of white split the sky.

The ensuing thunderbolt vaporized Mud Hyun instantly, catching Gray in the blast. The strike didn't kill him, though a part of him wished it had. A shock of blistering heat exploded inside his skull, shooting a fiery current all the way down to his toes. He gasped, collapsing onto his hands and knees. But before his brain could even process the agony, another bolt hammered him. Then another. And another.

The relentless electrical barrage tore at his insides, yet his heart kept beating; his Soul Blade refused to grant him the mercy of death. Deep down, Gray understood exactly what was happening. The weapon was testing his limits, aggressively hunting for the precise threshold where his mind and body would finally shatter. Gray's pride wasn't about to give it the satisfaction. So he fell down on both knees, and slapped his muddy hands together, pleading with the heavens.

"Please stop, I beg you! Don't you think casual smiting is a bit overkill… oh great Soul Blade god?" He clamped his eyes shut and threw his hands over his head. Seconds ticked by, but the blow never fell. Gray slowly peeled one eye open. Exhaling a shaky breath, he slumped backward into the grass. Exhaustion dragged him under, and he passed out to the ambient drumming of the unending rain. He managed exactly thirty minutes of rest before the sky violently woke him again.

A fresh surge of electricity blasted him upright. His muscles locked in a rigid seizure, and his vision swam with blinding white spots. As the burning afterimages slowly faded, a towering shadow on the horizon caught his attention. A colossal gray structure. Forcing his twitching limbs to cooperate, Gray pushed himself out of the mud and stumbled toward the anomaly. The closer he staggered, the more distinct the shape became.

It was a churning hemisphere of dense, swirling mist, anchored completely out of place in the middle of the endless prairie. It looked nearly identical to his own Shroud Domain. Didn't Gozen mention something about this during his trial? Gray mused, wiping rain from his face. Something about being trapped in a fog that caused severe hallucinations? He paused just shy of the swirling perimeter. The irony wasn't lost on him.

In any normal scenario, hurling oneself into a cursed, mind-altering haze was suicidal stupidity. But Gray couldn't care less. He had survived twenty grueling days of mind-numbing monotony. Trapped beneath identical skies, pacing the exact same flat fields with absolutely nothing to do, he was completely starved for stimulation. He would gladly embrace a waking nightmare if it meant an escape from this boredom. He broke into a dead sprint.

Throwing his arms wide, he charged the ominous barrier like a man rushing to embrace his long-distance lover at an airport. Boots kicking up thick clumps of mud, he practically cannonballed into the misty veil. The world instantly vanished. The roaring storm cut out, leaving a heavy silence. He wasn't wandering through a foggy haze like he had anticipated. Instead, he was suspended in a pitch-black void. The sharp, icy sting of the rain was completely gone, instantly replaced by a suffocating pressure.

It clamped down on the center of his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs and sending a spike of pain burning straight up his throat. Gray gasped for breath, his lungs screaming as if the Soul Blade had teleported him directly into the vacuum of outer space. His curiosity didn't matter, though. The mist had sealed shut behind him. He was trapped in an absolute, crushing darkness. And true to its cruel nature, his Soul Blade refused to let him pass out or die.

He clawed at his throat as the deep, aching agony took root. Diving headfirst into this cursed smoke had been idiotic. He would have traded a limb to feel the sharp, icy daggers of the rain against his skin again rather than endure this suffocating pressure. He broke into a blind sprint, desperate to collide with a wall, a door—anything. But just like the endless grass plains, there was nothing. Only an infinite stretch of nothingness. Day Three-Hundred Seventy An entire year had passed.

Ironically, he now missed the sensation of choking. At least when he was starved for air, his panicked brain had something to focus on. Somewhere around Day One Hundred, his lungs had simply adjusted. His body adapted to the lack of oxygen, rendering him completely immune to the suffocation. Gray tried to end it all. Countless times, in fact. Since there were no walls to crash into, he had to get creative with the floor. He violently bashed his forehead against the ground, bracing for a fatal impact. Nothing.

No crunch of bone, no blinding pain. The floor merely absorbed the blow, rebounding his skull like a firm trampoline. Another desperate attempt involved wrapping his own hands around his throat and squeezing until his fingers cramped. He had to admit, his IQ might have plummeted a few points in this sensory deprivation chamber. He figured a normal person would have lost their mind after a year alone with their thoughts. Honestly? That would have been a mercy.

He would have gladly embraced insanity if it meant hallucinating someone— anyone —to talk to. But the Soul Blade wouldn't allow it. The cruelty was deliberate. The domain forced his mind to remain fully lucid to register every agonizing, empty second. Then, the silence broke. A tiny fracture of light splintered the darkness in his peripheral vision. For a long minute, Gray just stared at it. He didn't dare believe it was real, assuming it was finally a long-awaited crack in his sanity.

But the glow bleeding from the fissure steadily grew, flaring so violently bright that it scorched his pitch-black accustomed eyes. A dangerous spark of hope ignited in his chest. He scrambled off the bouncy floor and charged toward the beacon. The escape portal. It was the exact same towering rift he had encountered on the grassy plains a hundred days ago. Or was it two hundred? Three? He had lost track of the math somewhere in the dark, but none of that mattered now.

He didn't give a damn if stepping through that light meant failing the trial. He just wanted out. Sometime over the last twelve agonizing months, he had made peace with living the rest of his life as a cripple. His dream was to find a career where he wouldn't be isolated. He craved a lively environment where he could interact with as many people as possible. That lifelong passion for video games had cemented his decision to open a PC Room.

The biggest hurdle to that fantasy was surviving the aftermath of the Natural Selection. If he wound up as an indentured servant under a tyrannical owner, he'd simply have to swallow his pride and beg Ava to buy out his contract. She seemed compassionate enough to throw him a lifeline. The shop would be a gaming sanctuary. It would serve as a haven where broke kids could rent high-end rigs for dirt cheap to kickstart their own gaming journeys. That was exactly how Gray had spent his youth.

When his parents refused to splurge on a decent computer, he practically lived at the local PC Room. He spent countless hours grinding levels for a mere three bucks an hour—or just a single dollar if you signed up for the membership. Once the business finally turned a profit, he could think about settling down and starting a family with a perfectly normal woman. He wanted a down-to-earth, girl-next-door type with a bright smile who didn't carry a sinister aura—the exact opposite of Nabi, and her murderous aura.

He realized, with a twinge of guilt, that he hadn't factored Hyun into this future. Thanks to that overpowered class, his brother was guaranteed to become a formidable Kaiser. Hyun would inevitably climb the ranks and leave him far behind. The power gap between them would only grow wider until they eventually drifted apart. Hyun was destined for absolute greatness, while Gray was perfectly content with a humble, quiet life. Gray stared at the gigantic escape portal.

He finally planted one foot forward and stepped into the blinding light, fully prepared to embrace his new, mundane existence. The entire world flipped upside down. The void was completely gone, but he wasn't sitting in Gozen's living room where his physical body waited. Instead, the domain dumped him onto yet another massive plain. He squinted hard. His eyes watered against the piercing rays of three suns directly overhead. The oppressive storm clouds had vanished, replaced by an endless expanse of sky blue.

A fragrant wave of sweet pollen assaulted his nose as he surveyed the new landscape. He stood ankle-deep in a vibrant meadow bursting with colorful wildflowers, with lush green grass swaying gently in a warm, comforting breeze. It felt like an absolute paradise. Only two things ruined the pristine scenery. The first was Gray himself. A year in the dark void had left his posture hunched like a decrepit old man, and his massive, bruised eye bags practically drooped down to his cheekbones.

The second anomaly stood just a few yards away. A lone figure waited in the middle of the floral field with their back turned. They held a familiar weapon resting casually across their lower back, gripped loosely in both hands. Tobari.