Chapter 81: Shore Obscured By Fog Previously

We all looked toward the mountain at the same time, and the sheer distance between it and where we stood settled over the group like a physical weight.

It sat far enough away that the peak blurred slightly at the edges and was softened by haze and distance, with an entire stretch of unknown ground separating us from wherever Ouroboros expected us to go next. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

I couldn’t even begin to estimate how long it would take to reach it from here without knowing what kind of terrain stood between us and the mountain, and after everything we had just gone through, the uncertainty was almost as uncomfortable as the distance itself.

There was no obvious path waiting for us, no clear indication of what Ouroboros had intended beyond that distant landmark, only the mountain sitting silently beneath the crimson sky.

I turned my attention back to the vial still resting in my palm.

I didn’t touch the ichor directly.

Because that much, at least, I did understand instinctively.

It was the same cold certainty that had guided every other decision tonight, settling firmly into place the moment I actually considered it.

There was no complicated reasoning behind it, no memory I needed to search through. Something inside me simply knew that direct contact would be a mistake. The knowledge felt almost foreign in its certainty, but after everything that had happened tonight, I had stopped questioning instincts that had kept me alive.

’Angel blood.’

The thought carried more weight than the tiny vial deserved to have.

Angel, sitting at the very top of a hierarchy almost no humans would ever climb high enough to even glimpse properly. Whatever an Angel truly was, the difference between such a being and me wasn’t something I could measure with ordinary numbers.

I could understand ranks. I could understand cores. I could understand the difference between someone stronger than me and someone weaker than me.

But this was different. An Angel existed several impossible steps above anything I currently was, and the blood belonging to such a being naturally carried that same impossible difference.

If I let so much as a drop of it touch my skin directly, my body wouldn’t simply reject it the way it might reject any ordinary poison.

Because if I did it, my core would burst outright, unable to contain something built for a being that existed several impossible steps above anything I currently was.

So instead, I did the only sensible thing available to me.

I poured my own spiritual power into the sealed vial, careful and deliberate, and guided the whole thing, container and contents together, directly into my own core, letting the vial itself act as the barrier between me and whatever waited inside it.

I kept my control as steady as possible throughout the process, resisting the urge to rush simply because I wanted to know whether it had worked. There was too much unknown surrounding the ichor already, and the last thing I needed was to make a careless mistake with something that could apparently destroy my core if handled incorrectly.

The vial moved deeper into my core.

Then it settled.

The moment it did, I felt it.

It was a faint and distant warmth, pulsing slow and steady somewhere deep in my chest, twelve invisible points ticking over in perfect rhythm like a clock keeping time for something far larger than myself. The sensation wasn’t violent.

There was no sudden surge of spiritual power or overwhelming pain, only that quiet warmth existing somewhere beyond the reach of my ordinary senses. I focused on it for a few seconds, trying to determine whether anything else had changed, but there was nothing I could immediately identify.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding for a long time.

"You good?" Arthur asked, watching me carefully.

"I think so, man." I flexed my fingers, thinking of testing for any lingering strangeness. Thankfully, there was nothing. "Better than good, actually. Just... a lot to process."

"Join the club," Theodore muttered.

His response earned nothing more than silence from the rest of us, but I understood what he meant. There was no shortage of things to process after what had happened tonight, and the fact that I now had Angel blood sitting inside my core was only one of them.

We turned our attention back toward the edge of the hill, and I finally noticed what the earlier chaos, the fire, the fog, the fight, had kept hidden from all of us until now.

The thick haze that had obscured the lower ground since we had first arrived on this cliff had thinned considerably, whether from the force of Ouroboros’s awakening or simple time passing, I couldn’t say.

Whatever had caused it, the difference was enough for the landscape beneath us to finally become visible. I hadn’t realized just how much of the surrounding terrain had been hidden until now. Before, the fog had reduced everything below the cliff to vague shapes and shifting colors. Now, enough of it had cleared for us to see what actually waited beneath the hill.

What lay beneath it now was nothing like the crimson forest we had already been to.

Black water, which could be called opaque, stretched out along a wide, curving shoreline below, still and glassy in some places, sluggishly rippling in others, its surface catching no reflection at all despite the faint ambient crimson light bleeding down from the swirling clouds above. Even from this distance, there was something unsettling about its appearance.

The water didn’t seem to reflect the sky, the surrounding trees, or anything else. It simply remained black, absorbing the faint light above it without giving anything back.

This wasn’t ordinary water.

I could feel it even from up here, a low, corrupted pressure radiating cleanly off the surface. It was thick with the same Unorthodoxy that had clung to every Calfeeth we had fought tonight. The sensation wasn’t something I could see, but I didn’t need to.

My senses were enough to recognize that whatever existed within that water belonged to the same corrupted environment that had produced the creatures we had already encountered.

Water that belonged here, in the Realm of the Evil, and nowhere else.

Along the shore itself, a scattering of dead trees leaned at odd angles, bark stripped bare and pale, their lifeless forms standing against the black shoreline.

Half-buried among them were worn slabs of what looked unmistakably like wood, weathered and split, poking up out of the black sand like something that had once been built with purpose and long since been abandoned to rot.

There wasn’t enough left for me to understand what the original structure had been, but the sight of those fragments immediately made the place feel older than it appeared.

"That’s new," Sera said, crouching at the edge for a better look.

"Wasn’t there before the fog cleared," Mary added.

I studied the shoreline a moment longer, something uneasy stirring behind my ribs, though I couldn’t immediately place why. There wasn’t one particular thing I could point toward. The water was strange, the trees were dead, and the wooden remains were unfamiliar, but none of those things alone explained the feeling.

Maybe it was simply the fact that this was another part of the Realm of the Evil.

Or maybe it was the fact that we’d spent the entire night surrounded by things that had repeatedly proven capable of killing us.

Either way, I didn’t like it.

Mary straightened after a moment, rolling her shoulder experimentally. "My spiritual power’s recovered. Enough to use Moon’s Door again, at least."

"Can you get us to the mountain?" I asked.

She shook her head immediately. "Not that far. The distance alone would drain me completely, and I’m not doing that out here, not with everything else still unaccounted for." She considered the shoreline below for a moment, calculating. "I can get us down to the shore, though. That’s manageable."

That was enough.

"Better than climbing down like I mean, Arthur can spin us around but well you can do it better anyway," Theodore said.

Nobody argued.

There wasn’t much point in doing so. Mary had already recovered enough spiritual power to use Moon’s Door, and getting down to the shore without exhausting ourselves was obviously preferable to making the descent manually.

We still had to reach the mountain eventually, and wasting strength before we even left this area would accomplish nothing.

Mary shook her bracelet, and Moon’s Door bloomed open in front of her, the familiar door with magical patterns spinning lazily into place before splitting apart down the middle, fog spilling low across the hilltop’s ruined wood.

I looked back once more at the mountain in the distance, then down at the strange black shore waiting for us instead.

The mountain remained exactly where it had been, its peak barely visible through the haze, while the shoreline below had only just been revealed to us. It felt strange knowing that this entire stretch of land had been hidden from our sight until now, especially when we had no idea what else might be waiting beyond it.

Still, there was nothing else to do.

The same uneasy pull settled deeper into my chest, quiet but insistent, the same kind of instinct that had steered me correctly all night so far. I couldn’t explain where it came from, and I couldn’t turn it into a logical argument even if I tried. It was simply there, sitting beneath everything else I was thinking about.

Something about that shoreline didn’t feel like a resting point.

It felt like a beginning.

One by one, we stepped through the door, the cold fog curling around our ankles, and the hilltop, the ruined tree, and the last traces of Ouroboros’s presence disappeared behind us entirely.