Chapter 211: Back to the Underworld

[Data collected... Parsing files...]

A man floated through the darkness, surrounded by nothing but empty black space stretching endlessly in every direction.

His black hair was clean but unkempt, with messy strands falling across his forehead. A few torn pieces of clothing barely covered his otherwise naked body, exposing the defined muscles of an almost perfect physique that looked as though it had been carved from stone.

With his eyes closed and his features relaxed, he would have looked dead if not for the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He seemed perfectly comfortable, sleeping as peacefully in the empty darkness as he would in the best bedroom he could find.

[Checking parameters... Vitality levels normal...]

[Consciousness scan complete... No response detected.]

A woman’s voice kept speaking inside his head, making his closed eyelids twitch slightly.

Annoyance gradually showed on his otherwise relaxed face as the voice disturbed his comfortable sleep.

[Checking mana reserves... 200% of active capacity.]

[Forced casting initiated...]

His face twitched again as mana filled the channels inside his body, spreading a warm, tingling sensation along their paths.

As a mana pattern formed and completed inside him, a green light began to surround his body, outlining his figure against the darkness.

The light gradually took the shape of letters that floated around him.

\<System.Override>

\<Access.Granted>

\<World.Edit>

The lines continued floating around him until the surrounding darkness suddenly began to change.

Magna’s eyes snapped open as he felt himself falling from a great height.

"Wha..." He stared up at the crimson sky filling his vision, unable to understand where he was.

Feeling hot wind rushing against his exposed skin from below, he quickly twisted around to look down.

His eyes widened at the sight of the ashen ground far beneath him, the distance shrinking with every second.

Only then did he realize he was falling from the sky.

He had no time to wonder how he had ended up there when he still needed a way to survive the fall.

He was so high up that he was certain every bone in his body would break against the ground below.

He hurriedly went through everything he had that might help, struggling to find an answer before he reached it.

Reaching into his pockets, he pulled out the 2 artifacts he still carried.

He tried to change their shapes into something that could save him, but neither responded, no matter how hard he willed them to change. They remained unchanged in his hands, almost as though they had run out of power.

After quickly returning them to his pockets, he went through the spells he had learned, searching for one he could use.

There was a fire spell for lighting fires and keeping warm, a water spell for washing and preventing dehydration, and the powerful Fire Pillar spell. He had learned all 3 by watching Mother Goblin.

He also knew Glacial Calamity, the strange spell he had learned from the Stoneman Chief, and the one from the Faceless Witch, but after considering his options, he chose Fire Pillar.

Pointing his palm toward the rapidly approaching ground, he began chanting.

"O Eclipse of the Fading Sun, Darkness that has gathered since before the First Light, Blind Mother of Ash and Ruin."

He hurried through the required sounds, guiding mana through his body’s channels to form the spell pattern.

His plan was to direct the fire against the ground, using the pressure to slow his fall, hopefully enough to survive.

But nothing came out of his outstretched palm. There was no fire at all.

He was sure he had done everything correctly. He could clearly feel the completed spell pattern in his mana channels, but it wouldn’t activate.

He tried again, repeating the honorific names while forming the spell pattern from the beginning.

Still, nothing happened.

"Fuck..."

With no time left to try anything else, Magna gave up on casting spells. He wrapped his arms tightly around his head, pulling his knees to his chest to protect his vital areas just before he hit the ground.

BAM!

The impact echoed through the area as he crashed into the black, ashen ground, throwing up a thick cloud of dust around the small crater his body had made.

The dust hung over the crater, barely shifting in the hot, still air.

Then a silhouette slowly rose from its center, its outline blurred by the dust.

Magna’s body swayed unsteadily from side to side before climbing out through the cloud.

"Cough... Am I okay? Cough..."

He stumbled out, black ash coating his face and bare skin, clinging to what remained of his clothes.

Somehow, he didn’t have a single wound. Apart from a little discomfort when he hit the ground, he hadn’t felt any pain either.

Once he had coughed a few more times and caught his breath, he checked his body, still unsure whether he had escaped unharmed or the adrenaline was keeping him from feeling his injuries.

"Huh?"

Looking at his hands and then his feet, he noticed something strange about their size.

They didn’t look like his. Or rather, they weren’t a child’s hands and feet.

His first thought was that he had died and transmigrated into another body instead of being reincarnated as a baby like last time.

He raised his head to look around again, taking in the crimson sky above the vast stretch of ashen ground, which continued as far as he could see.

"I’m still in the Underworld," he muttered, beginning to understand.

He was still wearing his clothes, most of them reduced to torn scraps, with the artifacts Titus had given him still in his pockets.

This had to be his own body.

Despite his hazy memories and the throbbing pain in his head, he forced himself to recall the last thing that had happened.

He had cast a spell, moved the enormous rock, and entered a dark space.

’How long was I in there?’

Looking down at his grown body, so different from the child’s body he remembered, he realized he had somehow grown up while he was in that darkness.

The pain in his head grew stronger as he tried to remember more, but he kept trying until a few important details came back to him.

His eyes widened in recognition.

"Gaia."

He waited for his AI’s familiar voice, but there was no answer.

What he had remembered was far more shocking than discovering he had grown up.

He had witnessed the creation of the Witch World and the other realms. He remembered watching the Underworld, Fairy Hive, and Realm of Giants come into existence.

There was also Purgatory, a strange world made entirely of doors that stretched on without end, where mysterious beings lived among overlapping realities.

But what shocked him most was the truth about their Creators.

The 5 Mothers weren’t 5 separate beings.

They had originally been a single entity that divided its own personality into 5 parts to make the creation of a universe possible.

Until now, Magna had ridiculed the 5 Matriarchs while reading their story, dismissing them all as incompetent Goddesses. Now that he had learned this impossible truth, he no longer knew what to think.

His head throbbed again as he struggled to accept what Gaia really was.

But it was even harder to understand who he himself really was.