Chapter 218: Beginning (XVIII)
In the aftermath of the child’s birth, time on the floating mountain of Hubin moved with a heavy, precarious urgency.
Erin Volter’s physical body recovered with staggering speed. By the third day following the harrowing labor, the lingering ache in her abdomen had completely dissolved, and her strength had fully returned.
Yet, physical health brought no peace to her mind.
Erin spent those quiet days sitting on the wooden porch of her small house, holding the infant in her lap while the little blue dragon—a tiny, serpentine whelp with crackling, dark-violet scales played around her. The baby boy never cried, never fussed, and required no sustenance. He simply shifted his dark, non-Euclidean limbs in the quiet air, a living tear in the fabric of reality resting against her chest. To Erin, the child was a physical mirror of her worst choices, a constant, silent reminder of what she had sought, what she had gained, and the terrifying price she had paid.
On the morning of the fourth day, the sky above Hubin broke.
The calm twilight hue of Rilth’s upper atmosphere violently inverted, turning into a sickly, bleeding crimson. The ambient pressure on the mountain dropped so rapidly that the ancient obsidian trees began to groan under an invisible, crushing weight.
Inside the central palace, Roshhide’s hollow blue eyes snapped open. Even stripped of his spatial authority, his primordial instincts alerted him before the intruding entities could breach the horizon.
He did not walk to Erin’s wooden house. He did not say goodbye.
Dense, billowing currents of pitch-black dark mana erupted beneath Erin’s feet. Before she could react or cry out, the darkness swirled aggressively around her shoulders, solidifying into two massive, shadowy wings—the exact same smoky appendages Roshhide had used to rescue her on the very first day she had fallen from the sky.
The smoky wings beat downward with explosive force, launching Erin and the swaddled infant straight off the edge of the floating mountain, hurling her at blinding speed into the sea of white clouds below, far away from the impending slaughter.
High above, as Erin plummeted through the cloud layer, she felt a brief, catastrophic distortion in the sky behind her. She tried to turn her head, but a soft, luminescent teal blur intercepted her mid-fall.
The Doom Overseer caught her seamlessly upon its broad, silky back, its long, deep-blue ribbon-antlers sweeping gently around her to lock her securely in place.
"Do not look back," the Doom Overseer’s ancient, telepathic voice vibrated directly within her soul, laced with a somber, unyielding gravity. "Look only forward."
"Who are they? or What are they?!"
"The Gods of this realm," the Overseer answered smoothly as its broad paws beat against the air currents, gliding across the sky at hypersonic speeds. "They are only a few and they descend to execute a fallen peer."
Erin’s breath caught in her throat. Driven by her innate curiosity, she strained to peek over her shoulder toward the receding silhouette of the floating mountain.
"Do not attempt it," the Overseer warned sharply, its tone turning icy and strict. "You do not wish to see what they truly are. One single glance at their unvarnished forms, and the fragile framework of a human mind would shatter beyond repair. You would spend the rest of your days a screaming, hollow shell."
The feline beast paused, its eyes flickering with an ancient, haunting light as it glided above a vast, jagged canyon.
"Among those descending deities," the Overseer added softly, "are the very entities whose gazes you felt when your spirit drifted into the place of all beginnings."
A violent shudder ripped through Erin’s entire frame. Memories of her ill-fated Oracle vision—the suffocating void between past and future, the cold, hungry eyes lurking in the gloom, and the horrific sight of her own blood-soaked death—flooded her mind with paralyzing force. She squeezed her eyes shut, burying her face into the Overseer’s warm teal fur, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs.
She forced herself to breathe. She did not want to see them. She did not want to know them. That horrifying threshold of fate was behind her now. All that mattered was surviving, escaping this nightmare planet, and returning to the mundane reality of Earth.
For two full days and two full nights, the Doom Overseer traveled across the vast, terrifying expanse of Rilth without stopping for a single second.
Sitting atop the majestic beast, Erin witnessed the staggering, tragic scale of the alien planet. They flew over endless, scorched deserts, past towering, perfectly straight mountain chains that pierced the clouds like stone spears, and over vast, dead plains where red lightning continuously struck the barren earth.
Yet, amidst the alien desolation, Erin’s sharp eyes picked up several impossible, jarring anomalies.
Embedded directly into the rocky hillsides and torn plains were fragmented pieces of human civilization. Erin gasped, her green eyes widening in utter disbelief as they flew over a valley where a massive, rusted Ferris wheel lay on its side, choked by parasitic violet vines. A few miles further, she saw various human buildings between a torrent of hills.
Erin stared at the sights in stunned, heartbroken silence, but she did not ask the Overseer about them. She didn’t want to know.
On the evening of the second day, the scorching air dropped into a biting, bone-chilling freeze.
The terrain beneath them transformed into a pristine, blinding wasteland of endless snow and ice. The howling gale bit mercilessly through her clothes, but the Overseer’s ambient aura formed a protective thermal envelope around them, shielding her and the infant from the zero temperatures.
Not long after entering the frozen expanse, Erin saw it.
Hovering just a hundred feet above a jagged, snow-covered valley was a colossal, swirling tear in reality. It looked like a massive, festering purple bruise carved straight into the atmosphere, bleeding a faint, metallic mist onto the frozen ground below.
The Reverse One-Way Gate. The doorway back to Sector 4 on Earth.
Erin reached into her coat, pulling out the intricate, dark-porcelain mask carved with silver runic lines that Roshhide had given her. She carefully placed it over her face. The moment the porcelain touched her skin, the mask seamlessly adhered to her features, a subtle, cool pulse of spatial mana wrapping around her body to act as a dimensional anchor.
She looked down at the snow beneath the portal.
Situated near the base of the rift were three distinct military staging camps erected by human hands. Heavy, reinforced canvas tents, rusted communication arrays, and frozen supply crates marked the perimeter. But as the Overseer glided over the camps, Erin’s gaze registered the grim truth.
The three camps were dead silent. There were no patrolling guards, no heat signatures, and no signs of movement. Everyone who had come here was dead. The snow had buried their remains long ago.
"Hold tightly, Erin Volter," the Doom Overseer commanded, its physical voice echoing loudly over the howling blizzard. "The dimensional boundary between our worlds is hostile to those of Rilth. We pass through now!"
The Overseer did not decelerate. It bunched its powerful hind legs, coiling its muscular frame like a steel spring, and leaped directly into the center of the bruised-purple tear.
Erin squeezed her eyes shut, wrapping both arms securely around the swaddled infant and the little blue dragon, bracing her soul for the transition.
BOOM!
The spatial passage was a violent, catastrophic nightmare.
It felt as though her consciousness was being torn apart atom by atom and shoved through a microscopic needle. The pure mana of Earth and the corrupted dark mana of Rilth collided within the threshold like two opposing stars, generating a violent, shearing friction.
CRACK!
The dark-porcelain mask protecting her face instantly fractured under the pressure, shattering into millions of useless, glowing dust particles that dissolved into the void.
A agonizing, psychic shriek echoed in her mind as the Doom Overseer took all the damage of the transition. The ancient feline beast’s physical vessel buckled under the violent backlash, its luminescent teal fur burning as the dimensional threshold forcefully repelled its presence.
THUD!
Erin slammed hard onto solid earth. The kinetic momentum threw her off the Overseer’s back, sending her tumbling violently across a hard soil floor.
Beside her, the Doom Overseer crashed heavily into a tree, its massive body skidding dozens of feet across the ground, letting out a ragged, wet gasp of pain.
Above them, the spatial fabric convulsed. With a deafening, sonic snap that sent a shockwave through the forest, the bruised-purple Reverse One-Way Gate violently collapsed inward and completely vanished from existence, permanently sealing the bridge between the two worlds.
Erin lay dazed on the forest floor, her vision swimming in hazy, spinning circles. Her body ached, her lungs gasping for the crisp, familiar air of Earth.
Slowly, her breathing stabilized. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, shivering violently in the cold. A sudden, frantic instinct surged through her chest.
"The Child..." she gasped weakly, her voice trembling. "Where is the child..."
She looked down at her lap, her pale hands reaching out to pull her child close.
Erin froze. Every drop of blood in her veins turned to absolute ice.
Her arms were completely empty.
There was no swaddled cloth. There was no featureless, void-born infant. The little blue dragon too, was gone.
The swaddled child and the dragon had completely vanished during the dimensional transition.