Chapter 135 - 93 : The Fall (1)

Chapter 135: Chapter 93 : The Fall (1)

The sensation of falling consumed everything else. Cold air rushed violently across Ethan’s face, tearing at his hair and clothes as the cliff walls blurred past on either side. Somewhere above, the distant sound of stone breaking echoed through the abyss before fading into the roar of the wind.

Ethan looked down.

There was still no ground beneath him, only darkness stretching farther below. He kept falling, the depth seeming to grow rather than diminish the longer he descended. At some point, the distance stopped making sense. There should have been an end, a bottom, something waiting at the end of the fall, yet none appeared. The darkness simply continued beneath him, swallowing everything as he dropped deeper into it.

His body continued downward, the air tearing past him and whipping his clothes against his skin. Yet through it all, Ethan’s eyes remained open, fixed on the darkness below.

At first, Ethan kept his attention on the walls of the abyss rushing past him. Then something strange caught his eye.

The darkness ahead seemed to move.

It was not the air or the shadows cast across the stone. The space itself appeared to shift, as though something beneath reality had stirred. Several dozen meters away, a thin line appeared in the darkness. It was almost impossible to see at first, but the line slowly widened, spreading across the space like a tear opening through a piece of cloth.

For an instant, Ethan saw something beyond it.

There was no landscape or sky on the other side. Only a darkness far deeper than the abyss surrounding him.

Then the tear snapped shut.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed as he watched the place where it had disappeared. Another thin line appeared farther below, widening into another tear before closing almost as quickly. Then another appeared, followed by another, each opening at different points as he continued to fall. Some lasted no more than a heartbeat, while others remained open slightly longer before abruptly sealing themselves.

Whenever one appeared, the surrounding darkness seemed to shudder around it, as though space itself recoiled from the wound opening within it. Another tear appeared farther below and vanished just as quickly, leaving the darkness to close over it again.

It was as though the space itself had been wounded, and these tears were the wounds struggling to close.

A cold sense of dread settled in Ethan’s stomach as the realization began to sink in. He had escaped one danger only to fall directly into something that might be far worse.

He had no idea what those tears were or what waited beyond them, but the thought of falling into one filled him with a deeper sense of danger. If he continued falling normally, there would eventually be a ground waiting below. He might survive the impact, and if he did, his body could heal or he could use the blood stored in his ring to recover. But those tears were different. He had no idea where they led or what might happen if he passed through one.

Falling to the ground was dangerous.

Falling into one of those tears was something he could not even begin to imagine .

Ethan tried to change his position, twisting his body in the air as he searched for anything he could use to alter his descent. But there was nothing beneath his feet and nothing within reach. The walls rushed past him too quickly, and there was nothing he could push against to redirect himself.

He could only keep falling.

Then another tear opened.

This one appeared directly beneath him.

Ethan’s pupils contracted as he twisted his body, instinctively trying to move away from it, but he was already too close. The space beneath him suddenly distorted, bending inward as though the darkness itself had folded over. For a fraction of a second, the world seemed to collapse into a single point around him.

Then Ethan fell through.

There was no impact and no sensation of crossing any kind of boundary. One moment he was still falling through the abyss, the wind tearing past his body. The next, everything vanished.

There was no sky above him, no ground beneath him, and no wind against his skin. Even the sensation of falling disappeared. Ethan’s body simply hung suspended in a place where direction itself seemed to have lost its meaning.

Then something struck him.

His body was violently flung sideways.

Then downward.

Then sideways again.

There was no way to tell which direction was truly which. Ethan was like a boat caught in the heart of a storm, tossed wherever the raging sea carried it. He had no control over his body and nothing to hold onto, leaving him completely at the mercy of the strange forces surrounding him.

His shoulder twisted violently. His ribs compressed under the strain, and something inside his chest cracked. Pain exploded through him, sharp enough to tear a gasp from his throat.

Before he could even understand what had happened, the force shifted again. His body lurched in the opposite direction, wrenching his spine and dragging his limbs with it. His chest tightened under the sudden pressure, then released as another violent pull sent him tumbling through the darkness.

His Living Blood reacted immediately.

It surged through his body, rushing toward the damage. A broken rib slid back into place. Torn muscle knitted together, and the pain began to recede.

Then the force changed again.

The healing was torn apart almost as quickly as it formed.

Ethan was thrown through the darkness once more. His body stretched under one force, compressed beneath another, then twisted violently as the space around him seemed to shift without any pattern he could understand. He could not tell which way he was moving anymore. Every attempt to find his bearings vanished as quickly as it came.

His stomach churned. His senses screamed.

Where was he?

What was happening?

He tried to gather Qi. The moment his consciousness reached inward, something slammed into him, shattering his concentration. Pain burst through his skull, and the darkness around him broke apart into fragments. For an instant, he saw a streak of silver light, then a crooked line, then darkness again. His thoughts struggled to follow what his senses were giving him, but everything changed before he could make sense of it.

Pressure closed around his body. It felt as though he had been forced into a space far too small to contain him, every breath crushed out of his lungs while his bones groaned under the strain. His ribs cracked, his vision blurred, and somewhere inside him, Living Blood surged instinctively, repairing the damage before he could even react. The pressure disappeared, and relief came for less than a heartbeat before he was thrown again. Something tore across his abdomen, and Ethan felt the warmth of his own blood spreading through the darkness. His body immediately began repairing the wound, flesh drawing together as the burning eased.

Then the space shifted.

The wound opened again.

Ethan’s eyes widened as the realization struck him. It was not giving him time to recover. His body could heal, but healing meant almost nothing here. Every time his flesh closed, the next distortion simply found another way to tear it apart. There was no rhythm to it or pattern he could anticipate, no moment when he could gather himself and prepare for what came next.

His body folded in on itself. For a moment, the sensation was so intense that Ethan could no longer tell whether his bones were bending or his entire body had been reduced to something smaller than it should have been. It was like being crushed inside a bottle while something outside kept forcing more pressure into it, leaving nowhere for him to escape. Then the pressure released, and his body expanded violently. Every joint screamed. Something inside his chest tore. Living Blood rushed through him, sealing the damage before another distortion struck.

Ethan’s mind recoiled. He wanted to scream. He did, or thought he did, but he could not tell which. The sound seemed to come from somewhere impossibly far away, as though another person were screaming while he simply watched. His body no longer felt entirely like his own. It was something distant that kept breaking and healing beneath forces he could neither see nor understand. Pain became the only thing he could trust, and that frightened him.

He had always relied on his senses. Sight, hearing, touch, the subtle awareness of his own body. Even in this unfamiliar world, they had remained his way of understanding danger. Now they were turning against him. He could not tell whether he was moving or the space around him was moving, whether the pressure was squeezing his body or forcing it into a shape that should not exist. Sometimes he felt as though he were falling, then the sensation became sideways motion, followed by a sudden pull that made every direction meaningless.

He tried to hold on to anything familiar. His life before all of this, his transmigration, the village, Stonebridge, the Pine-rest Inn, the people he had met there, the days when cultivation had still been something he barely understood. The memories came one after another, but not in any order. One moment he was thinking about the village, then the Inn, then something that had happened years later, only for another memory to push itself into the middle of it. He tried to follow them, to piece them together into something that made sense, but the pain won’t let him, they kept slipping away from whatever order he tried to give them.

He thought of the Immortal Ring, then the blood, then the changes in his body. The bounty came next, followed by the hunters, the chase, the battles, Wailing Mountain, and the cultivators he had encountered along the way. Then followed by the Foundation Establishment cultivator, the Azure Cloud Sect, the flying sword, and the lightning that had chased him toward the edge of the cliff. The abyss-like cliff came back to him, then the fall, then those strange tears in space. He tried to hold onto each memory, but they kept colliding with one another, pieces of different moments becoming tangled together until he could barely tell which had come before the other.