"So where's the trap?"
Unable to figure it out for the mont, Jenkins turned to the corpse on the obsidian table.
"To get out of here, I have to offer up soone's bones and flesh. Any bright ideas?"
"There are plenty of bones and flesh underground! Don't sacrifice us, sacrifice them!"
The hundreds of voices cried out in unison.
With no other ideas coming to mind, Jenkins took the piece of wood he'd broken off a headstone and began digging again in a random spot. He soon unearthed another male corpse. This one was also shrouded in white cloth, its clothing nearly identical to the last, and even its face was similar.
The only difference was that the first corpse looked like a young man in his twenties, while this one appeared to be a middle-aged man approaching his forties.
The obsidian table was large, so Jenkins hauled the second corpse over and laid it down beside the first. As expected, the mont the body touched the stone table by the bonfire, the strange gale rose once more, drawing countless souls from the graveyard's soil and into the second corpse.
It, too, opened its eyes, and from it, Jenkins received a second story.
The multitude of souls in the second corpse hailed from roughly thirty years ago. But they hadn't died in the great plague of that era; their deaths preceded it.
In life, most of them had been factory workers or hired miners. Their causes of death were exhaustion, occupational diseases, and workplace accidents.
In the years leading up to the great plague thirty years ago, the developnt of this world's technology had diverged completely from that of his original world. Thanks to improvents in the steam engine and the creativity of inventors, a steady stream of steam-powered products was realized in factories. Factory owners, seeing the advantages of assembly-line production, drew more and more young people from the cities into the vast industrial machine, forcing them to build value for their masters and for civilization with their own flesh and blood.
Capitalists are never saints, no matter the world. And so, all the evils Jenkins could imagine and so he couldn't, the atrocities seen in history books and those that went unrecorded, had led to the tragedies of the souls now speaking to him.
The birth of civilization's fla was ant to light the path forward for humanity, but that fla ca at a price—it required fuel. It required people to be burned. These were the ones who had been consud by the fire. And even after being burned, their souls were imprisoned here, waiting for Jenkins, a man trying to keep that sa fla alive, to decide whether to spare them even in death.
"To get out of here, I have to offer up soone's bones and flesh. Any bright ideas?"
He asked once more, and the cry from the second corpse was entirely predictable.
"Sacrifice soone else! Sacrifice soone else! There are more bones here, more flesh! Don't sacrifice us!"
The answer was the sa as before, which didn't surprise Jenkins in the least. He tilted his head and glanced at the bonfire beside him. The fire had dwindled since his arrival, now nothing more than a faint, flickering ember.
At this point, he didn't even have ti to dig up a third corpse, let alone think things through.
[I must remind you]
"Don't bother. I know," Jenkins said before the tal skeleton could finish writing.
Sacrificing the two corpses before him and burning so of their souls to buy himself more ti to think was, of course, the most logical choice. But doing so felt like walking straight into the Mysterious Realm's trap. A Mysterious Realm doesn't test one's conscience, so it would never offer such an easy way out.
Perhaps sacrificing so of the souls would indeed buy him so ti, but it would likely make finding the true exit even more difficult.
With that thought, Jenkins lifted his right foot and stomped it hard onto the ground.
"Aura of Death!"
A gray halo of light erupted from under his descending foot, sweeping across the entire graveyard. It was so powerful that even the blue flas of the bonfire trembled, as if about to be extinguished by the blast.
This place was already saturated with the thick spirit of death, but it had remained inert beneath the soil. Now, drawn out by Jenkins's ability, all the spirits in the graveyard began to stir restlessly.
Only a final sliver of the ghostly blue fla remained. A heavy darkness pressed in, chilling him to the bone. Even the two corpses on the obsidian table began to shiver.
Jenkins consciously guided the eruption of deathly energy, channeling the aura into the rotting head protruding from the ground. At the sa ti, he drew his White Bone Holy Sword and plunged it into the earth.
The spirit of death and the White Bone Holy Sword began to exert their control over the undead simultaneously. The rotting head, along with the body beneath it, shot out of the ground and began to shamble uncontrollably toward the dying bonfire.
It was resisting, but Jenkins had seized temporary control over all the spirits of death in the graveyard. With the added power of his other death-related abilities and the sword, the rotting animated corpse stood no chance of breaking free anyti soon.
This made it look as if it were fighting itself as it walked, yet it still shuffled step by step toward the fla.
"You can't sacrifice !" it wailed at Jenkins in the last vestiges of light.
"You don't have a story too, do you? I don't have ti for stories right now."
"It is a dead man; it needs bone. I am an undying man; I need flesh. Haven't you considered the aning behind that? It only has bones, but I have both bone and flesh. I am your second path. If you sacrifice , you'll be at its rcy. I'm the one on your side!"
Jenkins frowned and stopped forcing the creature toward the fla. He didn't believe its words—nothing in this place would ever be on his side—but he was intrigued by its claim of being an "undying man." Connecting that to the aning of the Reverser of Fate Ritual, sacrificing an "undying man" here seed like it would literally be reversing the fate of the "Undying Man."
"Is that why?" he wondered. "Is that why the Difference Engine controlled the skeleton but left this corpse alone?"
He addressed the rotting corpse again. "The fla is about to go out. If I don't sacrifice you, do you expect to take on the master of this realm? If you can offer a better solution, then maybe I'll believe you're on my side."
"Didn't you find other bodies? Sacrifice them!"
"I'm more inclined to believe that's a trap, too. You're out of options. Either give another way to light the fire, or you're going in."
The flicker of blue fla was about to vanish. Everyone and everything, man and corpse alike, was now completely shrouded in darkness, the only illumination coming from the scorched yellow bones beneath the ember.
"The bonfire doesn't just burn bones with souls attached. Any material containing spirit will burn! But the effect is poor. You'll never find the exit that way! Other items can only burn to give you temporary light."
Jenkins imdiately tossed one of the tal cocoons from the previous Mysterious Realm into the bonfire. He had worried it might snuff out the fla, but the ember instantly consud the cocoon. The light flared, expanding to nearly the level it had been when he first arrived. But the cocoon burned incredibly fast—one would last ten minutes at most. With the remaining two and all the items in his bag, he could hold out for an hour, tops.
"What is that? How is it burning so brightly?" the rotting corpse asked, puzzled. Jenkins guessed it was because the cocoons were designed to nurture souls and had thus absorbed so of their spiritual power. He didn't explain, however. Instead, he released his control over the corpse. It imdiately shrank back into the ground, leaving only its head and two hands exposed.
Now, Jenkins, the tal skeleton, and the rotting head were all gathered around the bonfire.
Jenkins spoke to the head again. "Since you claim to be on my side, do you know how I can find the door?"
"Of course. Don't offer it bone. Offer flesh!"
Jenkins grunted and changed the subject. "This skeleton... it wasn't always made of tal. You know what happened, don't you?"
"Of course. A presence from outside this world interfered with what was happening here. I hid, buried myself in the dirt. It just sat there like a fool, so it was changed."
"What else did this presence from outside the world do?"
"Look up."
Jenkins tilted his head back and saw a pitch-black sky, utterly devoid of light. It was a terrifying sight, like an abyss hanging inverted in the heavens. The longer he stared, the more he felt sothing in its depths staring back at him.
"An abyss? Could it be..."
"Yes. It projected a massive abyss into the sky. I can feel its terror—it's the longing of the living for undeath, the jealousy of the dead for the living. For everyone's sake, you'd best not test the sky here..."
From this, he deduced that the power introduced into this second Mysterious Realm was none other than that of the Calamity Beast sealed beneath Nightshade Manor: the Undying Abyss.
After their encounter at Nightshade Manor, Jenkins and the Church knew its appearance was linked to the cultists and the Difference Engine. They had guessed it was an attempt by the machine to better understand the power of Calamity Beasts while causing so trouble for Nolan. Only now did he realize there was more to it. Even back then, the Difference Engine had been harvesting the power of Calamity Beasts.
"I just want to leave. I have no intention of provoking it," Jenkins said, though he knew that even if he did nothing, the abyss in the sky wouldn't remain quiet forever. Based on the pattern from the last realm, he knew that when the power of a Calamity Beast entered a Mysterious Realm, it must also abide by the rules. Therefore, the abyss must be waiting for the right mont to awaken.
But for now, the most important thing was to find the door. Jenkins picked up the wooden board that had been leaning against the obsidian table once more.
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