Chapter 87: Another world?

Barry slowly opened his eyes. He expected to see the burning ceiling of the grand assembly hall or feel the intense, searing heat of the liquid lava pools. He expected to feel the agonizing pain of a sword piercing straight through his heart. Instead, the first thing he felt was the rough mud pressed directly against his left cheek.

There was no sound of clashing weapons, no screaming kings, and no roaring demon voices. Everything around him was completely silent.

Barry forced his body to sit up, his movements slow and incredibly struggling. His joints felt stiff, as if he had been sleeping for there for several days. The moment his balance was secure, he reached his hands up and violently ripped open the front of his shirt to check his chest.

He froze, his eyes staring down at his skin in absolute shock. The hole near his heart was completely gone. The blood that had soaked his clothes was dry and crusty, but the flesh underneath was entirely whole. In the exact spot where the assassin’s blade had pierced through his torso, there was nothing left but a dark scar that ran in a straight line down to his stomach.

His core paths felt calm, and his physical energy was fully stable, though his muscles still felt deeply exhausted from the previous transformation.

“I am alive?,” Barry muttered to himself,

“The wound is completely healed. But how?”

He stood up,

shaking the loose dirt from the sleeves of his torn clothes.He adjusted his stance and looked out across the surrounding land to check the coordinates.

The sight that met his eyes made his breath catch instantly. He was not inside the Manesi Capital. There were no walls, no palace tower, no people.

As far as his eyes could see in every single direction, the ground was a completely straight, There were no trees, no roads, and no signs of living water.

Even worse, the entire area was a massive endless graveyard. The ground was literally piled high with thousands of rotting bodies. There were dead human soldiers wearing strange, unfamiliar armor designs that Barry had never seen before in the outer provinces. Lying right alongside the human remains were the multi-limbed carcasses of bizarre monsters and alien beasts, their bodies covered in dark scales and broken bones, rotting away together under a dark sky.

It looked like a brutal war had taken place here a long time ago, leaving nothing behind but a field of dead assets.

Barry felt a sudden surge of unease inside his chest. He needed to understand where he was and how many miles he had traveled from the capital province. He closed his eyes and reached inward, trying to call upon system to check his status maps.

“System, open the main display,” Barry said .

Instead of the familiar, clean golden screen opening smoothly in front of his eyes—

[Sy…st…em Er…ror! Co…rrup…tion de…tec…ted!]

Barry’s eyes narrowed. The screen in front of his vision was completely fractured, the text boxes flickering wildly like a broken lamp. The letters were jumbled together, showing strange symbols and lines of blinking red warning marks that completely blocked him from reading his numbers.

“The system is completely glitched,” Barry analyzed , “It’s not responding to my regular commands correctly.”

He tried to shift his focus to the side tabs, targeting his private warehouse space. “System, bypass the display error. Open the inventory slot and draw my sword.”

[War…ning! Storage func…tion is cur…rently lo…cked!]

[Unable to access local inventory codes. Resource extraction is unavailable.]

The text flashed twice before disappearing completely, leaving his vision empty. Barry reached behind his back, but his hands caught nothing but empty air. His new sword, the thousands of gold coins he had collected, the rare spiritual stones from the treasury, and all the healing potions he had stored away were completely locked inside the broken space. He could not pull out a single item.

Barry stood alone in the center of the massive corpse field, a serious expression showing on his face as he looked down at his bare hands. He had no weapons, no map guides, no system assistance, and no idea what world he was standing in.

He took a deep breath, forcing his mind to remain calm as his survival instincts took over. “No gold, no sword, and a broken screen. It looks like I am starting from the bottom of the ledger again.well, as long I am alive, i can do it”

He adjusted his clothes and took his very first step forward, walking slowly across the ash of the dead fields to find a way out of there.

“I don’t know if Suzy and others are okay, i have to know where I am and try to find a way to go back”

‘I hope you are fine Suzy ‘

The dry ash crunched softly under my step as I kept walking through the endless rows of rotting bodies. The environment around me did not change for miles. Everywhere I looked, the land filled with thousands of dead human soldiers and multi-limbed beast carcasses rotting together in the dirt.

However, as I walked, I paused for a moment and looked down at my palms. I slowly clenched my fingers into tight fists, testing the internal pathways of my body.

A wave of spiritual energy vibrated smoothly through my muscles. I let out a slow breath, a calm expression returning to my features. The system was completely short-circuited, but my core was far from empty. The physical strength, the immense durability, and the high-tier reptile vitality that I had earned during my peak Ascendant breakthrough were still fully active inside my flesh.

I kept my pace slow and unhurried, walking across the fields for another thirty minutes to measure the boundary lines.

Eventually, the endless piles of human and beast carcasses began to thin out, changing into a track that wound around the base of a massive mound of old, bleached bones. The bone pile was as tall as a house, blocking the view of the open plain ahead.

The moment I stepped closer to the side of the bone mound, my hearing picked up a distinct sound carrying over the wind.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

It was a sound of chains scraping against the rocks, mixed with the weak footsteps of a large crowd of people. Along with the footsteps, I could hear harsh grunts that did not sound human at all.

I immediately pressed my back against the surface of the bone pile, using the shadows to keep my body completely hidden from the track. I turned my head slightly, peering around the edge of the bones to inspect the incoming layout.

A miserable line of human survivors was marching slowly down the path. There were at least fifty people in the chain—including old farmers with gaunt faces, exhausted young women, and hollow-eyed men. None of them wore proper clothes; they were covered in nothing but ragged, grease-stained sacks that were torn at the seams. iron collars were clamped tightly around their necks, connected by a chain that forced the entire group to march in a straight, submissive line.

Marching right alongside the chained survivors were three monster overseers. These beasts stood over eight feet tall, their bodies covered in a layer of dark green scales. Their heads looked like a cross between a wolf and a lizard, They wore leather vests over their chests, and each one held a long whip that pulsed with a faint, low-tier magic energy.

“Move faster, you useless cattle!” the lead beast overseer roared, his guttural voice sounding incredibly harsh .

He lifted his arm and violently lashed his whip across the back of an old human man near the rear rank of the chain.

Crack!

The sound of the whip echoed off the bone mound. The old man let out a weak scream as the leather tore a fresh line of blood across his shoulders. His knees gave out instantly from the physical impact, and he collapsed flat into the ground , his falling weight pulling the rest of the chain down with him as three other survivors stumbled onto the ground.

The beast overseer did not show a single flicker of patience. He stepped forward, lifting his scaly boot directly over the old man’s head, preparing to stomp down with enough force to make him dead .

I stood behind the bone pile, my eyes narrowing into vertical slits as I analyzed the entire scene.

I don’t know where I am but the rules of this world were completely different. Humans were nothing but low-tier slave assets here, and the beast clans held the absolute monopoly over the local workforce. They ran the population without a single worry about compliance lines.