"When will we reach?" Nyx complained beside , his voice flat and fatigued.
I didn't answer.
We had been walking for the past eighteen hours.
The road behind us had long since vanished, devoured by forest. The town lights had blurred long ago. Only the moon remained, pale and uncaring above a world that didn't want us.
Out here, beyond the walls, the world felt different.
No guards, no lights, and no checkpoints. Just wind hissing through skeletal trees and the low, constant hum of things better left undisturbed.
This wasn't a place ant for people.
Which is probably why I belonged here.
Nyx walked beside in silence for once. His tail twitched with every step. His usual sarcastic comntary had burned out hours ago. Even he knew this wasn't the ti to crack jokes.
The deeper we went, the more wrong the world felt.
"The Temple of Oath wasn't in the main storyline," I finally said, breaking the silence. "But it was in the lore. A side quest never fully explored."
He raised a brow, barely visible in the moonlight. "That sounds fake."
"It's not."
Because I had proof.
Buried in the death log of a minor character, soone who only showed up to die three Chapters later was a line.
One single, maddening line, tossed in like a joke between his half-hearted sob story and his underwhelming last stand.
'I swear it's there ... beneath the red sky, where the canyon bleeds, and the chains still sing.'
That was my only clue.
No map.
No directions.
Just a poetic suicide note in a sea of throwaway text.
And I made a map out of it.
"You ever tried to find a lost ruin based on the death monologue of a guy who got stabbed in the throat by a moth spirit?" I asked Nyx dryly.
He snorted. "Is that a real question or just you trauma-dumping again?"
"Little bit of both."
It wasn't just that one entry either. I had cross-referenced that quote with two more.
One was from a half-burnt rchant journal which appeared in the novel, where the author briefly ntioned "a scar in the land where illusions warp the air."
The second ca from the description of an old artifact: "Never break an oath, for the temple rembers."
They were puzzle pieces.
Shards of lore that no sane person would bother piecing together unless they were obsessive, desperate... or .
They painted a blurry picture: a ravine sowhere near the edge of the Western Dukedom. A place erased from most maps. Buried inside the Forest of the Dead.
A place the world had chosen to forget.
Which made it the perfect place for soone like .
Still, knowing where it was and surviving it were two very different gas.
Forest of the Dead was infested with late-stage fourth-ring beasts of psychic type.
While I was barely at the initial stage of the second ring.
Each ring was divided into initial, late, and peak stages depending on the hue of the ring ford behind the user.
Light hue defined the initial stage, balanced hue defined the late stage, while dark hue defined the peak stage.
The only reason I dared to enter this forest was because most of the beasts here weren't physically dominant. They were ntal, who replied on illusion-based attacks.
This made it more dangerous to most arcanists who usually relied on brute strength.
But I wasn't like them, and I had two things which made think I could enter this forest.
First, my psychic affinity. It was a rare affinity that only one character had in the entire novel. It gave a ntal barrier and also made my thought process faster. I wasn't a supercomputer by any ans though.
And the other reason?
Desperation.
I was betting on two things right now: my sowhat high immunity to illusions... and my genius complex. No one could ever outwit .
At least not when it ca to intelligence.
Sorting my thoughts, I rechecked the lore once more.
The only reason I had been able to recheck the lore was thanks to the cracked phone I kept strapped to my inner coat pocket.
The sa battered thing that reminded of my ticking ti.
I rember, last week, it blinked to life once again with a new ssage. One that was different from his daily reminders.
Just one ssage.
It said:
[The update is complete.]
That shouldn't have ant anything. But when I tapped it, the screen glitched... and then there it was.
My novel.
A word-for-word copy of [Ascension Of The Arcane King], the novel I used to read religiously.
It allowed to go through the parts of the novel that I had read.
The sad part, you ask?
I still didn't know a fair chunk of things.
And if that wasn't enough, the author asked to reach the epilogue in seven years, when the actual novel that I read spanned across ten years, while the last arc hadn't even started.
I knew nothing about the final arc. Unlike other pages that were torn or dissolved, the pages regarding it simply didn't exist.
Neither now nor before.
As if the author hadn't written it yet.
So here I was, piecing together scraps of lore the original readers skipped over. A death quote here, a haunted artifact there.
The forest deepened around as I continued to walk. Trees felt as if they stood too close together now.
Roots curled out of the ground like claws trying to drag under. The canopy above had swallowed the moon whole, and the only light was the faint shimr of mana hanging in the mist like cold breath.
I had finally entered the Forest of the Dead.
"Hah..."
I exhaled.
Even my breath sounded unwelco here.
At so point, the air began to feel thick.
Beside , Nyx walked in silence.
No remarks.
No sarcasm.
Just his paws padding softly against damp leaves.
His fur was puffed slightly on edge. His shadow affinity usually made him feel at ho in the dark.
But not here.
This was the kind of place where people went missing. Not because they got lost.
But because sothing found them.
Snap!
Suddenly, the sound of a snapping branch ca.
I froze.
The sound had co from behind the tall bushes over to my left.
"Grrr..."
A low growl followed it. It was intense and very close.
'A spirit beast.'
I ducked on instinct just as sothing burst through the bush.
A twisted wolf-thing, crawling with mana and nurous glowing eyes, ca into view.
It didn't look right. Its limbs bent the wrong way. Like a beast drawn by soone who vaguely rembered what wolves looked like.
Its fur shimred with malice, and its many eyes blinked independently, glowing with twin light-blue rings.
He was at the initial stage of the second ring, just like .
But natural beasts were stronger than arcanists at the sa stage. Raw, unfiltered spirit energy surged through them.
Just like how the rings of the owner showed the level of a tad spirit beast, the eyes showed the level of a natural, untad spirit beast.
"Grr..."
It snarled.
"Stay close," I muttered to Nyx with eyes locked onto the beast.
He didn't joke this ti. His eyes narrowed.
"Grr.."
With a low growl, the creature lunged towards .
I rolled aside, hitting the ground with a muted thud, and drew the dagger I bought using the coins I had borrowed from that stupid rchant before.
A cheap blade, but sharp enough to bleed sothing.
The black grimoire hovered by my side.
I didn't use the other grimoire.
It was too flashy. The glow alone would paint a target on us for everything nearby.
Spirit beasts were territorial and smart.
One spark of chain magic and I would have a pack on in minutes.
Nyx darted in front of and, with a flick of his tail, illusion magic blood in the air.
Shadow around us started to wriggle and soon took the shape of five little cats.
The beast growled, thinking of them as real.
After a few seconds, it finally jumped at one.
Whump!
And slamd his head into a tree trunk.
Swish!
I moved at a quick speed and appeared right behind the wolf.
Taking advantage of the distraction, I ramd my blade into its eye, soft and wet, and it twisted hard.
Feeling the pain, the wolf tried to flank , but I bent my joint and turned before sliding beneath it and running my blade through its abdon, splitting it open.
Schlck!
Blood spilled onto my hands as I rolled clear. The beast collapsed in a heap behind .
Thud!
It twitched once before going completely limp.
I stayed still and waited.
But no more beasts ca. Just silence. Deeper than before.
"Huff..."
I exhaled and wiped the blood off my dagger with a half-rotted leaf. Nyx sat beside the corpse, tail flicking and eyes narrowed.
"This reeks of a trap," he said quietly.
"I know."
"And we're still doing this... why?"
I didn't answer right away.
Because how could I?
I was walking toward a temple that might not exist, following a trail stitched together by the forgotten ramblings of dead characters. Every minute I stayed out here, every step I took chasing ghost stories, the clock ticked closer to the Academy's entrance exam.
If I went there with two hearts, it would be instant death, and if I didn't go, I would lose a year of my ti.
Because no one survives with two hearts.
No one lives with two grimoires.
Until you were them...
It was a death sentence in all but na.
I was stuck in a deadlock. One that I found very amusing.
So I needed sothing.
A weapon the world didn't know I had.
Wrapping my thoughts, I picked my bag up before giving the corpse one last glance. It was a creature bent by its environnt, forgotten by the world.
Maybe I wasn't so different.
"A person doesn't survive this world by being strong," I said finally.
Nyx flicked his ear. Listening.
"They survive by being unknown."
So we kept walking.
Deeper into the rot. Into the whispering wild.
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