Chapter 136 - 93 : The Fall (2)

Chapter 136: Chapter 93 : The Fall (2)

It did not matter if the memory was important or meaningless. He reached for whatever appeared, trying to gather the scattered pieces, because he feels like his sanity his slipping away. Anything that could occupy his mind while everything around him continued to tear at his senses. He tried to arrange the memories, but they refused to stay in place, slipping apart whenever he thought he had managed to grasp them. The more he struggled to hold them together, the more they seemed to scatter, leaving him desperately searching through the fragments for something familiar enough to keep his mind anchored. Even his breathing, his heartbeat, his own body, anything he could use to anchor himself, but even those began to feel distant.

Am I still alive?

The thought came quietly before another distortion struck him. His body stretched, and pain ripped through him so completely that thought itself disappeared. Then Living Blood moved, and the pain eased. Another distortion came. More pain. More healing. Ethan stopped counting. He stopped trying to understand how many times it had happened. Time had lost all meaning. A single moment could stretch until it felt endless, while an eternity seemed to pass between one breath and the next. There was only the next wave of pain, the brief relief of healing, and the growing certainty that another wave would follow.

At some point, Ethan began to understand what made this worse than death. Death would have ended it. Here, he could not even escape by dying. His body refused to let him. Living Blood kept dragging him back from the edge, sealing wounds that would have ended an ordinary person’s life, only for the space to tear him apart again. His greatest advantage had become the thing keeping him inside the nightmare. A desperate thought surfaced before he could stop it.

Let me die.

The thought vanished almost as soon as it appeared. He hated himself for thinking it. He hated the space around him. More than anything, he hated that he was so weak, and that he could not even choose how this would end. Another violent pull tore through him, and his vision went white.

When it returned, he saw himself. Or something that looked like himself. One Ethan seemed to be falling through darkness. Another was spinning helplessly through empty space. Another stood perfectly still, staring into nothing. A fourth had no body at all. They overlapped for an instant like broken reflections in shattered glass, then vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

Ethan’s thoughts froze.

Which one is real?

He had no answer. The fear that followed went deeper than the pain. If his senses could no longer tell him what was real, how could he trust his own mind? His thoughts began slipping apart, and he desperately tried to remember his name.

Ethan.

The word felt distant.

He repeated it silently.

Ethan.

Again.

Ethan.

It was the only thing he could hold onto. Another distortion struck, twisting his body violently as agony flooded through him. His mind almost went blank, but he clung to the name.

Ethan.

His thoughts scattered again.

He reached for it.

Ethan.

The darkness swallowed everything else. He could no longer tell how long he had been suffering, whether he was still falling, or even where his body ended and the space around him began. But somewhere inside that endless torment, one thought remained. He was still here, and he was desperately trying not to lose himself.

The darkness seemed to stretch endlessly, swallowing everything around Ethan until he could no longer tell where one distortion ended and another began. Then, through the chaos, something caught his attention. Far ahead, a faint distortion hung within the darkness. At first, he thought it was another tear in space, but this one was different. It was larger, deeper, and somehow more stable. It looked almost like a passage, though Ethan could not tell whether it truly was one or merely another distortion taking a different shape. He had no way of knowing what lay beyond it, but at this point, he no longer cared. There was nowhere else to go. Whatever waited there, it was the only direction available to him.

The turbulence around him suddenly changed. The forces that had been throwing his body in every direction began to converge, drawing together until their chaotic movement became a single violent pull. For the first time since entering this strange space, Ethan felt himself being carried somewhere instead of simply being tossed around. His body was dragged toward the distortion with terrifying speed, and the darkness around him seemed to collapse inward as he approached. His body compressed under the pressure, every bone and muscle straining as though he were being forced through a space far too narrow to contain him. Pain surged through him, and even his Living Blood struggled to keep pace with the damage. He could barely think anymore. All he could do was endure as the pressure tightened around him, driving him toward the strange opening ahead.

Then he passed through.

The sensation was almost impossible to describe. The crushing pressure vanished so suddenly that his body seemed to expand into emptiness. For one brief moment, there was nothing. No pain. No violent movement. No sense of direction. Just a strange, weightless silence that felt almost unreal after everything he had endured. Ethan’s mind barely had time to register it before something inside him seemed to give way.

His consciousness faltered.

The exhaustion he had been fighting, the pain he had endured, the constant strain of forcing his mind to remain aware through the chaos, all of it seemed to catch up with him at once. His thoughts became slow and distant, slipping away before he could grasp them. Living Blood was still moving through his ruined body, desperately repairing what it could, but Ethan no longer had the strength to remain conscious long enough to feel it.

The darkness began closing over his vision.

He tried to hold on.

He could not.

His thoughts scattered into nothing, and the last thing that remained was the faint sensation of his Living Blood moving through his ruined body, desperately continuing its work. Then the sensation of weightlessness changed. Gravity seemed to take hold of him, and his body began to fall freely. Cold droplets struck his face and soaked into his clothes, the dampness barely registering through the haze consuming his mind.

His consciousness slipped further away. The feeling of falling remained, along with the cold rain and the faint movement of Living Blood within him, but even those sensations were becoming distant. His body continued to descend through the storm as his mind finally went dark.

Something crashed into the earth.

BOOM!

The impact tore a shallow crater into the rain-soaked ground. Mud and shattered earth burst outward in every direction, while water from the saturated soil splashed over the broken edges. Nearby branches snapped under the force, and loose leaves were thrown from the surrounding trees before rain quickly began settling over the disturbed forest floor. At the center of the crater, a man lay motionless, his body half-sunken into the soft earth.

For several moments, nothing moved.

Then came the pain.

Ethan’s eyes opened.

Barely.

A weak breath escaped his lips, but even that small movement seemed to tear through him. Pain was everywhere. It was not the sharp agony of a broken bone or a wound he could locate and endure. This was deeper, spreading through his entire body as though something had reached inside him and was tearing through everything at once.

It felt as though thousands of enraged bulls had been released inside his flesh, charging blindly through his organs and meridians, smashing into everything in their path. Every part of him seemed to hurt at once, leaving him unable to separate one source of pain from another. His body felt as though it were being torn apart from the inside.

Ethan’s vision blurred. He tried to breathe, but the attempt sent another wave of agony through him. His fingers twitched against the wet ground, feeling cold mud beneath them.

What... happened?

He struggled to remember.

There had been the cliff.

His fall.

Lightning.

Then...

Nothing.

Ethan tried to move his arm. Pain exploded through his body, and his muscles immediately went slack. His eyes almost closed.

He forced them open again.

No.

He could not sleep.

Something inside him was wrong. Terribly wrong.

The pain was the only thing keeping him conscious, yet it was also the very thing dragging him toward unconsciousness. Every time his mind began to slip away, the agony dragged him back, only for the exhaustion to pull him down again. He could feel himself hovering somewhere between awareness and darkness, unable to tell which one would claim him first.

If I fall asleep...

His breathing became shallow.

Will I wake up again?

He did not know.

That uncertainty frightened him more than the pain.

Ethan had always believed there would be something he could rely on when things went wrong. Somehow, there had always been a way forward, whether through his cultivation, the strength of his body, the Blood Seed and Living Blood that had carried him through wounds that should have ended him, or simply his own ability to think his way out of danger. He had survived because he could find something to use, something to understand, something to fight with.

But lying there in the rain, barely able to move, Ethan could feel none of those things answering him.

Right now, he had nothing to reach for.