Battle Qi, Holy Light, and that eerie Shadow Power whipped up an energy storm.
The shockwave scraped away layers of the ground, and flying debris and dust swallowed everything.
Lynn was blown backward by the storm, but he clung to the scroll in his hand.
He didn’t dare let go, even as shards of stone cut his cheeks.
The light finally reached its peak.
The teleportation began!
In the final second before the white light completely swallowed his vision, he saw them.
Through the dust, three pairs of eyes were staring intently at him.
In Vivian’s icy blue eyes was undisguised killing intent.
In Alicia’s golden eyes was a twisted obsession bordering on madness.
And in Lilith’s pitch-black eyes, there was nothing — only a bottomless void that could suck in a person’s soul.
A split second later, Lynn’s body was pulled by a massive force, and he vanished from the spot.
Almost at the same instant he disappeared, three terrifying powers slammed into where he had just been standing.
Sword Qi crisscrossed, Holy Light purged the ground, and shadows devoured.
A bottomless crater was blasted into the earth.
The storm died down.
The dust settled.
Only three figures remained on the ruins.
Vivian held her sword, Alicia hovered in midair, and Lilith stood at the edge of the deep pit.
None of them looked at each other.
“Silence.”
A deathly silence.
After a long while, Vivian spoke, her voice cold as a block of ice. “He won’t get away.”
“God will guide me to find him,” Alicia’s voice was hollow yet devout.
Lilith said nothing.
She only stuck out her tongue and lightly licked her lips, a look of immense pleasure appearing on her face.
The game seemed to have become much more interesting.
***
Space was like a crumpled rag.
Lynn felt like he had been stuffed into a high-speed spin cycle, but instead of water, he was surrounded by thick, multicolored paint.
Up, down, left, right, front, back, inside, and out — all sense of direction was stripped away in an instant.
His body was stretched like a noodle one moment and compressed like a meat patty the next.
His bones wailed, his internal organs churned, and his soul felt as if it were being violently ripped from his physical shell by this brute force.
The [Random Teleportation Scroll].
The word “Random” was now magnified countless times in his mind, flashing with a blood-red light.
‘Dammit, I forgot to read the user agreement!’
The stability of such a low-level item was bound to be abysmal.
Before the thought even finished, the tearing force abruptly vanished.
“Weightlessness.”
An extreme sense of weightlessness seized him.
He was “spat” out of the chaotic colors, and before his eyes was a bottomless darkness.
The wind whistled in his ears as his body plummeted at high speed.
What was below?
He didn’t know.
How high was he?
He didn’t know that either.
He tried desperately to adjust his posture in midair, but he found his body wouldn’t obey at all.
The spatial distortion from earlier still had his muscles spasming.
The only thing he could do was keep his eyes wide open, fruitlessly trying to discern something from the absolute darkness.
“Darkness.”
Endless darkness.
There was no light, no sound, not even the sensation of air flowing — only the fall, a never-ending descent.
Fear flooded his heart like a cold tide.
This unknown was even more despairing than being caught by those three crazy women.
*Thud!*
A dull, heavy sound.
The expected shattering of his bones didn’t happen.
He seemed to have crashed into a massive, soft web.
A strange elasticity absorbed most of the impact, throwing him high into the air before he landed gently.
Pain slowly radiated from his back.
Lynn lay on the flexible, mesh-like material, gasping for breath.
Before the relief of survival could even register, the sight before him stole his breath away.
Far, far above his head was a small “hole” that was slowly closing.
That was where he had fallen from.
Around this hole, he saw… stars.
“No, not stars.”
They were countless glowing runes.
These runes formed brilliant chains that converged from all directions, collectively locking down the space beneath him.
The “web” he was lying on was woven from several of those chains.
‘What the hell is this place?’
Lynn struggled to his feet and looked down.
Below him was an inverted city.
“No, it wasn’t a city.”
It was a magnificent ancient ruin that defied description.
Giant stone pillars reached toward the sky, supporting this independent space.
Dilapidated shrines, broken arched bridges, and silent statues — everything was shrouded in a hazy glimmer.
This light came from the ancient runes on the stone walls and the ground, identical to those on the chains above.
The air was thick with the scent of something sealed for 10,000 years: ancient, dry, and carrying a faint, lingering… scent of blood.
‘System, System! Where am I?’ Lynn shouted in his mind.
**[…Bzzzt… Relocating…]**
**[Warning! High concentration of unknown energy interference detected! Positioning system failure!]**
**[Current Area: ???]**
**[Danger Level: ??? (Beyond detectable range)]**
Lynn’s heart sank to the bottom.
A place even the System couldn’t analyze.
He had spent 500 Survival Points to buy himself a one-way ticket to hell.
He gripped a nearby massive chain and managed to steady himself, looking around.
This place was too big.
It was so vast that he felt like an ant that had accidentally fallen into a kingdom of giants.
He was at the highest point of the entire ruin; the web of rune chains acted like a seal for the entire space.
Climbing out from here was impossible.
The only way was down.
Lynn composed himself and began to carefully climb down the chains toward the main structures below.
The chains were thick, their surfaces covered in complex patterns, feeling cool to the touch but not slippery.
With every bit of distance he descended, the full view of the ruins became clearer.
The architectural style was completely different from the Empire, the Church, or any nation he knew.
There were no exquisite carvings or lavish decorations, only a primitive, rugged grandeur that pointed toward the very essence of power.
Huge murals were etched into the walls.
By the light of the runes, Lynn saw the content of the murals.
They didn’t depict humans, Elves, or Orcs.
Instead, they showed bizarre, indescribable giant creatures.
They soared through the stars and played in the chaos.
Then, war broke out.
A group of winged, humanoid beings wielding light spears descended from the sky, engaging in a slaughter with the giant creatures.
Stars fell, and the world collapsed.
The final scene of the mural showed the giant creatures being slaughtered.
Their corpses became mountains and rivers; their blood became the oceans.
And the leader — the largest one with countless tentacles and eyes — was pierced through by countless rune chains, dragged down, and sealed within a realm of endless darkness.