Chapter 719: Spirit Abyss
Chapter 719: Spirit Abyss
Victoria and Rael were quickly met with a swirling mass of all sorts of colors, which violently attacked them at first.
But after just a few seconds of getting adjusted to the colors, the whole scenery changed, becoming less random and more coherent.
The buildings of the modern era were in front of him.
Even the people who walked around resembled regular humans.
Only a few had weird discrepancies, but they were barely noticeable.
This seemed to be one of those layers that Burger had mentioned.
Most likely the mortal layer.
[Nope, it’s just called Layer 1. The Spirit Realm is not that creative,] Burger chimed in.
Rael let out a sigh.
Well, the Spirit Realm sucks then. Not having a name for a cool place is pretty shitty, you know?
[Oh shut up, would you. This place is an utopia,] Burger replied with a pout. [Living here, you could either be forever happy or sad. It’s like a world of your dreams, except if you want to live here, you have to pay rent in the form of contracts.]
Rael tilted his head.
You have to contract people to stay here?
Burger hummed in satisfaction, then proceeded to say:
[Yep. It depends on the people you contract, and honestly, your grade as a Spirit. If you’re a high-ranking spirit, the system is much more lenient on you.]
[On the other hand, if you’re a piece of shit lesser spirit, you have to contract hundreds of people to even put bread on the table. Honestly… It’s such a shitty system.]
Yeah, but I can’t help but feel like only having one contractee is not meeting your quota either. Are you about to get kicked out? Rael mused.
Yet Burger didn’t seem that amused by that prospect as he scoffed and stopped answering.
Rolling his eyes, Rael glanced over to Victoria who, although beside him, seemed completely out of it.
Only then did he realize she was currently inside the Prophetic Realm.
Smiling in satisfaction, Rael joined her in the Prophetic Realm, and to her surprise, she was conjuring some sort of portal in the middle of nowhere.
The portal’s colors were a little strange, but they also seemed to resemble the fragments of what the Spirit Realm had to offer.
She continued conjuring that portal, and in the meantime, Rael stepped forward, planning to explore the Spirit Realm.
But just then, he remembered the warning Burger gave.
And so, Rael stopped dead in his tracks and let out a sigh of disappointment.
If this place wasn’t really real, then what was the point in exploring it?
Nonetheless, he decided to switch tactics and instead approached Victoria and asked if he could help.
To his surprise, she was fairly chill about it, and all she asked was for him to infuse his mana into the portal.
Naturally, with his mana being a much higher grade, and him having an infinite amount, it only took a single minute for the portal to finally form.
And once it was done, Victoria nodded.
“Good… This should take us to the lower layer of the Spirit Realm. However, do be warned that what I’m doing here is pretty much taboo. If you follow along from here on out, then you will be targeted by the Spirit Kings just as I will be.”
Rael shrugged.
“I’m already this deep. I don’t think it matters anymore. Plus, if every Spirit King is as powerful as Astaroth, then I’m not that worried.”
“Hmm… Then you must have not seen the extent of the Soul Dragon’s strength,” Victoria said.
Before he could even ask what she meant, she suddenly dashed through the portal and vanished.
He realized that the portal had become less stable, and there was even less mana.
But once he looked further, he realized that it had just about enough mana to take them inside and outside.
Coincidentally, Victoria seemed to account for Burger too, so it was going to be a fairly tight squeeze.
Nonetheless, Rael took a deep breath and, without hesitation, dashed through the portal as well.
For a moment, his body felt like it was being ripped apart, and even the surroundings began to blur as the knowledge and sights of hundreds of eras passed through his mind.
The gazes of the spirits were especially hard to absorb, since there were just that many of them.
But traveling through this portal gave Rael a new perspective of how large the Spirit Realm was.
In order to pass through one layer, he needed to first pass through a singular layer.
However, that layer was compressed beyond belief.
Millions, if not billions, of layers were stuffed into just one layer, the same layer that Rael and Victoria had arrived in.
And that was the same for every layer Rael passed, until finally, his mind was no longer flooded with all that information, and he could finally relax his mind and body.
Yet as he glanced ahead, taking in the sights of a completely pitch-black realm, Rael’s expression couldn’t help but sour.
He was really curious how something like this could be considered inside the Spirit Realm.
There wasn’t even a city, only mountains and darkness, surrounded by a few swirling orbs which appeared to be Spirits, except they didn’t actually have a form.
This place was more trippy than anything.
And once Burger spoke up, Rael soon realized why that was the case.
[This is the boundary between the normal spirits and the high-ranking spirits such as myself. We refer to this place as the abyss, and it’s a place where a spirit gets corrupted if they stay for too long.]
[Once that happens, they lose their memories, forms… you get the gist. Basically, they’re just floating around like lifeless husks now. Sadly, this is one of the layers the regular spirits have to pass if they want to become a high-ranking spirit.]
Rael could practically hear his smile.
[As fate might have it, I rose from the very bottom of the food chain to the top! Hahaha! I await your foolish self at my doorstep!]
He really was a massive chuuni.
Anyhow…
“Can we create a portal here?”