Chương 108: Oblivion

Lloyd stared at the purple window, quietly flickering right in front of him in the gathering dusk of the clearing, casting a soft, faintly wavering violet glow over his tired, sweat-beaded face, glinting off the trunks of the nearest trees.

Around him, the daytime hum of the forest was gradually fading — the sparse chirping of insects, the rustle of leaves stirred by the wind — giving way to that particular evening stillness that settles over places like this right after sunset, heavy and almost tangible, as if the very air here had thickened along with the encroaching dark.

"I've already collected six souls, if you can even call them that. But I haven't felt any real change. Maybe I need to gather all twenty-five souls?"

He shifted his gaze to the wolf, its body already soaked clean through with its own black blood, slowly seeping into the ground, making the beast look even more horrifying dead than it had alive — the dark pool beneath it kept spreading across the flattened grass, and a few stray flies, drawn by the smell of decay, buzzed busily over the wound, occasionally landing right on its frozen, clouded eyes, as if utterly indifferent to how monstrous the thing beneath them was.

"So I need to kill nineteen more Shades. I wonder what I'll get for killing a higher-ranked monster. Probably a lot more." In his hands, woven out of those familiar white sparks, the gold pocket watch appeared again, and he studied its face intently, eyes narrowed slightly, lit by the last remnants of daylight filtering through the treetops in narrow, slanting beams that trembled with every gust of wind.

"I've still got forty-five minutes. Time to get moving."

Lloyd got slowly to his feet, feeling a dragging weariness in his legs and shoulders after the recent fight, along with a dull, nagging ache in his shoulder with every sudden movement, and took one last look at the wolf, his eyes lingering on the mushrooms covering its body — they had remained completely unchanged, as if the creature's death hadn't touched them at all, as if they lived some separate existence entirely disconnected from their now-lifeless host.

Strange thoughts crept into his head, pulling his attention away from the weight of the fight he'd just been through.

"I heard these mushrooms are supposed to be edible. I mean, there are whole Player guilds that make their living bringing exotic monster meat into the world — supposedly it's pretty tasty. And apparently it pays well. Maybe I should get into that too, once I've sorted everything else out."

A particularly sharp wave of rot suddenly hit his nose, drifting off the wolf's body as the wind gave the treetops a stronger shake, twisting Lloyd's face into an involuntary, almost comical grimace of disgust, and he took a cautious half-step back, pressing his sleeve over his nose. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Yeah. Definitely not today." After that brief internal monologue, he rubbed the back of his neck, working out the stiffness in his muscles, adjusted the strap of his backpack that had slipped off his shoulder, and set off deeper into the forest, glancing warily around at every rustle of leaves, every crunch of a branch underfoot.

He kept the sword in his hands, ready to fend off a sudden attack at any moment — a habit he'd picked up over the past few weeks far faster than he would have liked, but one that had apparently proven far more useful than anything else he'd learned in this new, merciless world.

The forest around him gradually began to change: the trees grew sparser, their trunks thinner, and the ground beneath his feet, instead of soft, springy earth, more and more often gave way to rocks jutting up like sharp gray fangs, ones his sneakers kept nearly catching on.

The dusk thickened by the minute, painting everything in muted shades of gray and blue, and the first scattered stars had already begun to appear high above the treetops, flickering timidly through the gaps in the leaves, as if testing the strength of the darkness settling over the forest. After a while, though, nothing happened.

The forest remained oddly quiet, broken only now and then by distant cries from unseen birds or the long, almost lulling rustle of wind through the canopy — the kind of sound it would have been so easy to doze off to, if not for that constant, bone-deep wariness. Lloyd finally reached the cliff's edge and, stepping back, sat down, leaning his back against a large, cold rock jutting out of the ground near the drop.

"Looks like it's not time yet. I think it'll settle down soon." He summoned the watch again in his hands, its hands glinting dully in the near-total darkness that had settled over the forest, casting a faint golden glow across his tired face, flickering in time with its steady ticking.

"Exactly thirty minutes. I should make it." He reached for the backpack lying beside him on the ground, unfastened the stiff clasp with fingers numbed by the evening chill, and pulled out a small, worn leather journal, its pages frayed at the edges, its spine creased, dark stains worked into the cover — traces of past journeys that hadn't always gone smoothly.

This was the very journal where Lloyd had been recording literally everything since the beginning: interesting facts about this new, strange world, descriptions of the monsters he'd encountered, phenomena that defied every law of physics he'd known from his old life, and the world itself, as much of it as he'd managed to piece together in this short time, so full of upheaval and discovery, none of which had come easily to him.

He opened the journal to the first blank page he found, pulling a stub of pencil from an inner pocket of his backpack, but before he started writing, his eyes drifted, almost against his will, to the very first page of the journal — the one filled with cramped, occasionally hurried handwriting, where he'd written down everything he knew about this world: theories and facts gathered piece by piece, scattered observations, hastily sketched diagrams, arrows and notes scrawled in the margins, clearly jotted down in haste, snatched between one danger and the next.

And the name of this world, written in slightly larger, heavier strokes at the very top of the page, as if set down by a hand still trembling with nerves on that very first day, read...

"Oblivion."