SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 416: The Soul Realm

Bruce sighed, the urge to open his eyes was sudden and strong. He let it flow and he opened them.

He was sitting cross-legged on nothing. The ground beneath him, if it was ground, was a soft pale grey, and it gave faintly under his weight in a way that no ground ever had. A white mist surrounded him on all sides, slow-moving, somehow refreshing rather than oppressive. Every breath of it cleared something in him he had not known was clouded. The mist had no source and no direction. It simply was, as if the air itself were lightly luminous.

He looked down at himself. His body, but not his body, at least what looked like his body, was glowing.

A soft, internal light, bleeding gently through the skin, brightest at his chest and palms, faint along the bones of his face. He raised one hand and turned it. The light moved with the hand. It was coming from inside him.

He sat with that for a moment. His own glow was disorienting in a way he had not expected. He had expected the place to be strange. He had not expected to be strange to himself.

But he knew that it was to be expected that this was surprising…

He had viewed his soul multiple times, but all he could see back then was the glow. He didn’t expect his soul to be the exact replica of his body with a blue-like glow coming from it…

He suspected that he was just discovering this now because this was the first time he was seeing the soul directly. When he viewed his soul in the past, he did it by viewing through the body’s structure, so he could only see that glowing phantom-like structure.

It’s only natural that this was not his body. His body was sitting in the labyrinth, breath stilled, watched over by his wife.

This was his soul. And he was in the realm where souls lived. He had finally found his way to the Soul Realm. Akashic told him that he’d find his way back to his body and would be able to descend to the Soul Realm and back to the physical realm at will once he awakened his soul talent…

Back then, he had asked Akashic how to awaken his soul talent. Akashic told him it didn’t know, that he should be able to figure it out once he got to the Soul Realm…

So figuring out how to awaken his soul talent was Bruce’s first goal…

Sighing, he let his hand fall.

He took stock. His soul felt no different from his body. The sense of having limbs, of having a chest, of weight and posture, was identical. He could feel his own face when he touched it. He could feel the give of the strange ground under him.

But underneath that familiarity, something was deeply, alarmingly wrong.

He was weak.

Not weak in the way a tired man is weak. Weak in the way a candle is weak compared to a forge. His soul, which in the physical realm had carried the resonance of a cosmic-tier cultivator, was here a small, faintly luminous thing. The glow he was producing was, he understood now, the entirety of what he had to work with. It was not impressive. It was barely there. In this realm, by this realm’s standards, he was nothing.

His soul standing in this realm couldn’t compare to his body’s current standing in the physical realm…

He smiled. It was a small, dry smile, and it surprised him a little.

’So this is the Soul Realm, huh?’

…

Meanwhile, in the labyrinth, Sophie’s heart spiked.

“No.” She checked again.

Then again.

Fingers trembling harder each time. Because hearts did not simply stop. Not his.

Bruce was too strong. Too stubborn. Too alive.

The man who walked calmly through disasters could not possibly be sitting dead in front of her.

Bruce had stopped breathing.

Not the slowed breath of deep meditation. Not the long pauses she had watched him hold during meditation. His breathing had completely stopped. It was as if he was lifeless.

His chest no longer rose. His shoulders did not move. The faint pulse she had been tracking at his throat, automatic, the small reassurance of a living husband sitting in front of her, was gone.

She was on her feet without remembering standing.

“Bruce…”

Her hands hovered above his shoulders. She did not touch him. Some old training, some half-remembered teaching, told her not to break a meditation at the wrong moment, but everything in her was screaming that something had gone wrong, that he had done something he could not come back from, that she had let him sit down in front of her and die.

He had not warned her this would happen.

She had not thought to ask.

Sophie’s mind collapsed into chaos at that very moment…

’No. No no no no! What’s going on?!’

Her heart slammed violently against her ribs as sweat formed along her brow. Her gaze was filled with worry…

Her fingers trembled violently above Bruce’s shoulders as she stared at him.

Too still. Far too still. There was no breath. No pulse. Nothing.

The silence around him felt wrong, horrifyingly wrong, like the world itself had paused around his body.

Her throat tightened instantly.

“Bruce…?”

The word came out weak. Small. Afraid. But there was no response.

Her vision blurred.

A cold panic exploded through her chest so violently it hurt to breathe.

What was happening? People didn’t stop breathing during meditation. They didn’t just… stop. Had his heart failed? Had the labyrinth done something to him? Had he pushed himself too far?

She didn’t know. She didn’t know. And that terrified her more than anything.

How could she have let Bruce be taken from her so easily…? How could she have sat there and watched this happen?

“I should’ve stopped him. I should’ve really stopped him from doing this…” She was heartbroken and filled with regret, but how could she have known…? It was beyond her…

Sophie staggered back half a step, hands clutching at her own arms as if trying to stop herself from shaking apart.

“No… no, no, no…”

Her eyes stayed locked on him desperately, searching for movement.

Anything. A twitch. A breath. A pulse. Something.

But Bruce sat there motionless like a statue carved from stone. Like a corpse.

Even the labyrinth felt wrong around him.

Bruce had always carried presence, immense, steady, impossible to ignore.

But now the space around him felt empty in a way that frightened her. As if something essential had truly left.

The thought nearly broke her.