Chapter 120: A Place With No Way Out

Ravian slowly opened his eyes after apparently losing consciousness, though he knew neither when nor how it had happened.

Then they widened in shock.

Ravian felt strangely calm despite his terrifying situation, and that alone magnified his panic countless times over.

Why were his thoughts settling at a time like this, when he should have been devoting every cell of his mind to escaping?

The answer was simple...

Someone was manipulating his emotions and mind in some way, forcing him into that state of calm and keeping him from resisting.

Then the features of the room around him slowly became clear again, while at the same time he sensed that he had never left it at all, even though the mental manipulation made every passing second feel as though he had been carried somewhere new.

It was the same room assigned to him in Viola Manor, which meant he hadn’t left it yet... at least, not until now.

But Ravian wasn’t seeing the room through his physical eyes.

For a brief moment, his perception rose above his body, and he saw himself sitting in front of the empty Seal Box. The sight was clear, but it rapidly receded, as though the room had fallen to the bottom of a bottomless well.

Transparent threads appeared around his soul.

They weren’t gray like the threads of Void power he had wielded during his ascension, nor black like the Void itself. Their color changed every time he focused on them: violet one moment, faded blue the next, then colorless.

The threads wound around his arms, neck, and chest.

Ravian drove his aura along the connection that still linked his soul to his body and coiled it around the exposed layer from within.

One of the threads shuddered.

At the same time, a point of Void magic, gray and verging on black, formed above the thread’s point of contact and attempted to erase the sliver of distance separating it from Ravian’s soul.

To his surprise, the thread actually bent strangely under the influence of the Void’s power.

But it quickly returned to its original shape and didn’t break.

Then more appeared.

Ten threads.

Then a hundred.

They didn’t come from a single direction, but from everywhere, as though the space surrounding him had never been empty, but had instead been filled with layer upon layer of an immense net whose boundaries he couldn’t see.

[Analyzing the structure of the external authority.]

[Probable nature: a soul-based authority with Mirage-like properties.]

[An extension beyond the current tracking range has been detected.]

[Other soul reactions have been detected within the same structure.]

Ravian’s gaze fixed on the last message. It seemed that the soul power of those other existences had somehow intersected with his own, allowing Sovereign Pride to sense and analyze them.

[Number of additional reactions sensed: 8.]

[Conclusion: the host is not the only target.]

Although the System had only just confirmed it, Ravian had already inferred as much the moment the other soul reactions were detected.

And in the next instant, he saw them.

Eight distant points hung suspended in the darkness.

The distances between them were so enormous that he couldn’t begin to estimate them, but the net folded those distances together as though they didn’t exist. From each point, an indistinct spiritual form was drawn out, and then all eight souls surged toward him at the same moment.

Not one of them was anywhere near another.

And yet the threads had gathered them all into a single center.

Nine souls.

Nine souls laid bare in a moment unlike any other.

And one net stretched across an expanse whose end Ravian couldn’t determine.

Ravian condensed the aura around his soul once more.

He wasn’t trying to defeat the power before him. He was gathering information, testing what it responded to, and searching for the moment when the pressure or direction of the pull would change.

Every power possessed a rule. And every rule possessed a limit.

But before he could find it, the net snapped shut.

The eight points vanished from around him.

His spiritual form abruptly disappeared, and his consciousness went with it.

All his senses cut out at once.

[Warning.]

[The host’s spiritual form is being drawn into an isolated domain.]

[The transfer process could not be halted.]

[The domain’s location could not be determined.]

That was the last thing he saw.

Then the darkness swallowed him.

When Ravian opened his eyes again, no air entered his lungs.

It seemed as though he had no need of it.

He raised his hand in front of his face.

It looked human and solid, bearing all the familiar details, but no warmth ran beneath the skin, and no pulse moved within the veins.

And he was wearing the same strangely comfortable clothes he had been wearing during his ascension to the Walker rank.

’This is...?’ Ravian clenched his hand.

His spiritual form? But it looked alive and somewhat different from the one he was familiar with.

And this time, he hadn’t assumed it of his own will, as he had while facing the Descent of Truth.

His soul had been torn from its place and brought here.

He lowered his hand, adjusting to the situation with calculated composure that skillfully concealed his fear of the unknown, and then looked around.

There was no ordinary room, no recognizable ground, and no sky. Instead, the place resembled an enormous palace, absurdly vast and nearly devoid of decoration.

He stood on a gray surface that resembled polished wood despite its strange color, while dark mist blanketed the heights overhead, as though the place had no ceiling. Not a single sound arose, not even when Ravian moved his foot across what appeared to be the floor.

Eight other figures had come to rest around him, each at the same distance from where he stood.

Some of them were standing, while others were kneeling or sprawled out as though they had just fallen from a towering height. Their ages, clothing, and bodies all differed, but one thing united them all.

Not one of them cast a shadow, though that was natural enough given that they were all in spiritual form, just as he was. Ravian couldn’t see a single shadow anywhere around them.

Ravian counted them once.

Eight besides himself.

Nine including him.

They began recovering consciousness one after another.

A woman in a blue robe gasped before realizing that she wasn’t breathing. A broad-shouldered man sprang up and stared at his hands, while a thin young man backed away two steps as he gazed at the mist surrounding them. As for the rest, their gazes shifted between the strangers and the place from which there seemed to be no way out.

"Where are we?" one of them shouted.

No one answered him.

An elderly man lifted his head and said in a steadier voice, "I was ascending to the Walker rank."

Several gazes turned toward him.

The statement immediately caught Ravian’s attention, and the pieces began falling into place inside his mind.

"So was I," said the woman in the blue robe.

Ravian didn’t speak.

The possibility had already occurred to him, but he watched their reactions as they heard it. The confusion that passed across their faces wasn’t manufactured.

And before they could exchange another question...

The mist around them suddenly moved.