As the torrent of power gradually subsided, Charles, or rather, the being who had undergone a complete transformation, slowly opened his eyes.
He felt a clarity unlike anything he had ever known.
It was as though he had spent his entire life viewing the world through frosted glass, only for that glass to finally shatter.
Everything was veiled in hazy, ever-shifting, uncanny colors.
Things felt both cold and warm to the touch, their textures at once hard and soft.
Depending on the angle from which he observed them and the state of his mind, they took on entirely different, even contradictory forms.
No language known to humankind could describe them with any precision.
“Is this… the true nature of the world… as seen through Insight?”
He lowered his gaze to his faintly translucent palm.
What flowed through the veins beneath his skin was no longer bright red blood, but a chaotic substance that glimmered with specks of starlight and slowly writhed like a living thing.
He was no longer the Charles he had once been.
He had glimpsed the Abyss, and the Abyss had, in turn, branded a fragment of its projection into his soul and flesh.
“Now that I’ve attained ‘Enlightenment,’ I must return to the Dream as soon as possible and find the path forward.”
Charles suppressed the visions churning through his mind and forced himself to focus on reality… or rather, on the “reality” he now inhabited.
He proceeded cautiously along the edge of the filthy canal at the bottom of the shipyard.
The viscous sewage rose past his calves, giving off a sickening mixture of cloying blood and decay.
At an inconspicuous bend in the canal, he discovered a ladder embedded in the stone wall, almost entirely smothered in moss and some kind of transparent slime.
The slime coating the badly rusted rungs seemed to hold the fear and despair of countless Hunters who had fallen from them.
It felt icy and slick beneath his hands.
Looking up, he saw several ghostly “human-shaped oil lamps” embedded in the stained walls on either side of the waterway.
Upon closer inspection, he realized they were not decorations at all, but a cruel form of living seal.
The distorted, frozen faces behind the transparent lampshades had dilated pupils and mouths stretched wide in silent screams.
They were the remains of Hunters from generations past whose Insight had risen too high, until they could no longer bear its weight and broke beneath it.
It drifted and twisted as though alive, occasionally gathering into fleeting strings of incomprehensible, distorted cuneiform.
Charles focused his newly acquired Insight and barely managed to decipher fragments of the information within.
They revealed the true identity of the area’s real “Lord,” the terrifying creature known as the “Maneater Boar.” It was, in fact, a monstrous embryo born when an experiment conducted by the Healing Church was corrupted by some unnameable force.
Every heavy breath the creature took seemed to distort space itself, causing the surrounding sewer passages to contract slightly into the disturbing shape of a birth canal.
Tattered clothing and fragments of the Hunters who had failed to escape still hung from its vicious tusks.
This cursed region was home not only to the elusive Maneater Boar, but also to swarms of Giant Rats with festering backs, bloodthirsty Carrion Crows with crimson eyes, and, most horrifying of all, Rotted Corpses.
Half-buried in mud and refuse, their bodies were made of decaying flesh, sludge, and unknown parasites.
Highly corrosive dark green venom coursed through them, keeping most creatures at a distance.
Though their bodies were mangled and their movements slow, the way their claws could emerge without warning from the most unexpected patches of filth made them all the more terrifying on an instinctive level.
As Charles tried to slip across a relatively dry stretch of gravel, a seemingly harmless mound of sludge beside him suddenly stirred.
A Rotted Corpse snapped open its lidless eyes, which resembled rotten grapes.
Its withered claw, coated in slimy muck and tipped with sharp black nails, seized his ankle with astonishing speed.
Bone-deep cold and searing pain struck him at once.
“Get off me!”
Charles growled and swung the heavy Saw Spear downward without hesitation.
The claw was severed cleanly, but venom sprayed from the stump and splashed across his trouser leg.
Acrid white smoke rose immediately as several holes burned through the fabric.
He dared not stay and fight.
Dragging his aching leg, now scorched by venom as well, he fled clumsily toward the ladder.
More Rotted Corpses began awakening within the mud, producing wet, slithering noises as they slowly but relentlessly closed in around him.
Just as Charles prepared to climb out of that nightmarish place, he caught sight of the filthy water beneath him from the corner of his eye.
What it reflected was no longer the wooden structure of the bridge house, but a vast, rotating double sky filled with unfamiliar stars.
Above lay the familiar, deceptively tranquil projection of the Hunter’s Dream.
Below stretched a deeper and more twisted starfield, the true vision of the Great Ones revealed through Insight.
A deep roar mixed with guttural bubbling came from the shadows. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
The enormous Maneater Boar slowly emerged from behind a heap of bones.
But the sound it made froze Charles’s blood.
It carried the same tone as the lingering resonance of the church bell tower.
“Child, what you call ‘growing stronger,’ the power you so desperately seek, is nothing more than a means of making that shell of flesh into a more suitable vessel for the ‘descent of a deity.'”
As it spoke, the monster plunged its massive, blood-soaked hooves into its swollen belly and tore it open.
There were no organs inside.
Only a curled infant, its skin so pale it was nearly transparent, ceaselessly sucking down some kind of thick Blood.
The infant seemed to sense Charles’s gaze and turned its head slightly.
On the back of its neck was a Hunter’s Mark identical to the one on the back of Charles’s hand.
“This world has gone mad! It’s truly gone mad!”
Charles forced himself to dismiss the horrifying sight as the result of excessive Insight and its lingering aftereffects.
Clinging to what little reason and survival instinct remained, he seized the ladder and began climbing with all his strength.
“Clang! Clang! Clang!”
He shoved open the rusted iron grate above him, producing a piercing shriek of metal scraping against metal.
When he finally crawled out of the hellish sewers and returned to the relatively “normal” surface, he found the stone bridge ahead shrouded in fog as thick as blood.
It led toward an unknown region.
The scene upon the bridge resembled an apocalyptic painting.
Refugees shoved and cried as they argued with expressionless Church guards armed from head to toe.
The setting sun burned red as blood, stretching and distorting every shadow until they resembled writhing tentacles crawling across the ground.
“I don’t want to die here! Let us through!”
“Where are the followers of the Healing Church? Can’t they do anything?”
“My lord, please! Give my children a chance to live!”
“In the name of the Healing Blood!”
A guard captain with a vicious scar across his face brandished a serrated halberd, its blade still stained with blood that had yet to dry.
His voice was as cold as iron.
“Those who retreat shall be forgiven. Those who dare cross this line shall all be sacrificed!”