Behind him, the portal sealed shut with a crack, severing the connection to the forest and leaving behind an absolute silence.
For several minutes, Virgil didn’t move.
’I feel like shit.’
As soon as the last of the adrenaline left, the curse dropped on him like an anvil.
Every muscle in his body seized as he began coughing violently, splattering the stone beneath him with black blood.
It felt as though parts of his soul had been split into irreparable pieces, leaving nothing but a hollow numbness in him.
Virgil gritted his teeth as he rolled onto his back and stared upward.
’Is this the second trial?’
There were no trees that blocked the sky anymore; above him was a canvas of red that seemed to have no end.
The reaper hadn’t exactly told him how all the trials would take place, so he had no idea.
Slowly, he pushed himself up, forcing his knees under his weight and dragging himself upright.
His legs trembled.
He wiped the blood from his mouth and looked around.
He stood on the precipice of a massive bridge. Below him were the ruins of a civilization— broken statues and enormous destroyed structures that were swallowed by sluggish, pale green rivers.
Virgil dragged his boots forward, the bridge swaying lightly with every step.
Blood continued to seep through his shredded clothes as he walked.
He had assumed that after he cleared the first trial, the reaper would heal his wounds.
However, that didn’t seem to be the case.
The bridge ended abruptly in front of a ruined structure.
He stopped beside one of the statues.
Its body was covered in cracks and its face was completely gone.
He looked at the remains before returning his gaze to the view in front of him.
Surely, he still wasn’t in the first trial.
He went in deeper until he found two rows of statues, lined up perfectly to form a path towards the mountains, towards a massive opening in the stone.
A cave.
"Ah."
He followed the path, leaving the red canvas of the sky behind as he stepped into the cave.
The darkness was absolute for the first dozen paces, forcing him to form lightning sparks to see. But as he got deeper, luminescent moss began covering the wall in thin patches, casting a pale, underwater-like glow over the tunnel.
The air in the cave was thick and stagnant, yet somewhat calming.
The cave was not a natural formation. The walls were unnaturally smooth, with irregular shapes that looked like cracks stained with blood.
Except, they weren’t cracks.
They were carvings.
Virgil stopped and stepped closer to the wall.
The moss illuminated the stone well enough for him to see the figures.
They were crude caricatures scratched deeply into the rock, as though they had been clawed by bleeding hands.
The first carving depicted a stick figure standing before a flat, vertical rectangle.
He walked a few paces further. The next caricatures showed a repeating loop.
The same figures died in panel after panel, drawn over and over again with small variations, crushed by stones, burned in flames, pierced by spears.
Next to each panel, a tally mark was etched into the rock, hundreds of them stacked together until the stone was reduced to a shredded mess.
"An execution cycle?" Virgil muttered, his voice hoarse. "Or a torment loop."
He moved to the next set of scratches. The sequence became darker. The central figure was no longer fighting or running.
It was forced to sit in the center of a circle of corpses as more began to pile up, forced to watch as the same deaths replayed on the surrounding walls like a carousel of slaughter.
"Who carved this?" Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Possibly one of the sons of Death?
"No, maybe not."
He had to remember this place wasn’t just a trial ground. It could be the tomb of the dead civilization outside.
One of its people could have drawn this.
If it was, the carvings would make perfect sense.
Someone had been forced to watch as their people were slaughtered again and again, until they were the last survivor left, fleeing into this cave to carve the history into stone.
In the final visible caricature, only one figure remained. But it was entirely colored in with deep, dark, overlapping scratches that made it impossible to tell what it was doing.
Then, it ended.
He tried looking for more carvings, but it seemed like this was the last one.
He stared at it for a few minutes before turning his back on it, pressing deeper into the cave.
The tunnel sloped sharply downwards, and the moss grew sparser as he found himself in total darkness once again.
Virgil considered turning back. However, since the statues had explicitly led him here, he had to see it through—no matter how bad of an idea it seemed.
The tunnel opened into a circular chamber.
In its exact center was a large doorway.
It was carved entirely from polished, seamless bone. Pale and impossibly smooth. Where a door panel should have been, there was only a wall of dense, ivory stone that swallowed the surrounding light.
Virgil stopped three paces away. The bone door emanated nothingness. No temperature, no mana, nothing.
He took one final, steadying breath, suppressing the burning pain in his chest.
He stepped up to the ivory threshold, raised his bloodied hand, and struck the center of the bone panel three times.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The sound was flat, swallowed instantly by the pale stone without an echo.
The ivory surface rippled like cold liquid, wrapping around his knuckles and pulling his arm into the solid frame.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Seth!" a muffled voice called out from the hallway. "Come on, its time for dinner."