Chapter 123: Speculations About the Gray Mist!

Night had settled over Norcrest.

Beyond the enormous window, neon light spilled across the city in layers, turning the darkness into a glittering sea.

Joren sat behind his desk, seemingly watching the view.

His thoughts were somewhere else.

Back in that gray mist.

That warped, chaotic world drained of color.

And the Shadow Fiend.

A peak Rank Five beast king.

Anywhere else, something like that could dominate an entire region.

Yet after only a few minutes inside the gray mist, it had gone mad.

Not ordinary madness.

Its body, mind, even the very foundation of its existence had collapsed.

Flesh had swollen into an unnameable mountain covered in eyes and mouths. Thought had dissolved into a mass of overlapping whispers, with almost nothing left of the creature that entered.

"What exactly was that place..."

Joren frowned.

Until now, his understanding of this world had been relatively simple.

A catastrophe struck the planet.

Voidbeasts invaded.

Humans awakened martial power.

The two sides fought over territory and survival.

Brutal, yes, but understandable.

Two species fighting for the same world.

The gray mist did not fit into that picture at all.

Before it, even a peak Rank Five beast king had been as fragile as soaked paper.

Joren straightened and woke the computer on his desk.

The tactical watch on his wrist automatically connected to the Frontier Marshal access key.

[Identity confirmed.]

[Welcome, Norcrest Frontier Marshal Joren.]

The screen flickered.

A moment later, the internal Alkaid Authority database opened.

Only Frontier Marshals and senior military officers could access this archive. Much of what it contained had never been made available to ordinary citizens.

Joren entered a search.

A loading circle spun for three seconds.

[Search results: 0]

He paused.

Nothing?

That made no sense.

The gray mist existed somewhere within the cracks of reality. Someone with a spatial Talent could apparently enter it by accident.

Over the past hundred years, Joren could not possibly have been the first person to encounter it.

Wrong search term?

He changed the wording and tried again.

This time, results appeared.

Most were grayed out.

Across them were bright red restriction marks and rows of warnings that cast a harsh glow over the screen.

Joren’s Frontier Marshal clearance was enough.

He opened one.

[Recorder: Alkaid 003]

[Record Date: Year 35 of the New Calendar]

[Summary: During the seventh spatial transition experiment, a high energy reaction was observed at coordinates X unknown, Y unknown. Physical laws within the region displayed severe instability. Visual data returned by the probe showed gray white mist. Contact with the probe was subsequently lost. Analysis of the final audio transmission confirmed the sound to be... laughter.]

[Note: This phenomenon has been classified as Forbidden. All research related to it has been terminated. Warning: Do not gaze into the abyss.]

Click.

Joren closed the file.

Only a few lines.

Still, they carried far too much information.

"Year 35..."

More than seventy years ago.

So humanity’s upper ranks had encountered this phenomenon decades earlier.

They had even studied it.

Whatever happened afterward had clearly gone badly enough that the research was terminated and the records buried.

Even a database at this level contained little more than a vague fragment.

"Laughter..."

Joren remembered the Shadow Fiend after its body had become that mountain of flesh.

Hundreds of voices laughing through one throat.

A faint chill crawled across his scalp.

He rose and walked back to the window.

Norcrest looked almost invincible from here.

Massive walls.

Dense batteries of energy weapons.

Thousands upon thousands of Awakened Warriors.

Yet after seeing what existed beyond normal reality, all of it suddenly seemed much more fragile.

A castle built on sand.

One large enough wave and everything could disappear.

A thought flashed through Joren’s mind.

What if the Voidbeasts were only the surface of the problem?

What if those endless hordes were not invaders at all, but refugees being driven outward by something like the gray mist?

What if the real crisis facing this world was not the beasts roaming the wilderness?

What if reality itself was being eaten away by some unknown law?

Or perhaps the gray mist was something worse.

A bruise spreading across the corpse of the world.

Once the first idea appeared, others followed.

Was martial Awakening really a miracle of human evolution?

Or had some other power scattered it across humanity as bait, creating weapons meant to resist the gray mist?

The deeper Joren followed the thought, the less solid the world seemed.

Too many possibilities.

Too many missing pieces.

For a moment, the unknown pressed down on him like an invisible hand around his heart.

His breathing tightened.

A long silence passed.

Then Joren spoke.

"Fuck this."

His voice was quiet, but it sounded unusually clear in the empty office.

He shook his head hard and threw the entire chain of speculation out.

What was the point?

If the sky collapsed, there were still stronger people standing above him.

Even if the whole world turned out to be some absurd stage built by idiots, or the playground of some unnameable existence, so what?

Joren was not a savior.

He had no intention of becoming a philosopher either.

If his fists were hard enough and his blade was fast enough, then gray mist, black mist, gods, demons, monsters, none of it mattered.

Anything that showed a health bar could die.

Fear came from insufficient firepower.

Crude saying.

Still true.

If Rank Five was not enough, then Rank Six.

If Rank Six failed, then Rank Seven.

Rank Eight.

Rank Nine.

Keep going.

Become strong enough to shatter a planet with one punch.

Strong enough to cut causality apart with one blade.

By then, if the gray mist wanted trouble, it could ask [Heaven’s Sin] for permission first.

"System."

The pale blue panel unfolded across his vision.

Clear numbers.

Clear abilities.

And more than fifty thousand Bloodstars still sitting in reserve.

The restlessness in Joren’s chest faded almost immediately.

This was real.

This was something he could trust.

Compared with vague theories and fear of the unknown, strength he could see increasing in front of him was far more useful.

In this fucked up world, that was the closest thing to truth.

"There is nothing in this world one blade cannot solve."

Joren looked out over the night again.

The edge returned to his eyes.

"If there is..."

"Then use another."

The trip to Highcrest City in three days had become even more necessary.

Not only for his equipment.

He wanted to see the center of the province for himself.

A place filled with powerful people.

A place where far more secrets were likely buried.