Chapter 231: 231. A Gateway to the Past
Still, I felt an attraction toward it. Down here, at the empty bottom of the ocean where nothing should exist but stone, sand, and the suffocating weight of endless water, a single fracture lingered in reality itself.
A lone anomaly, a wrongness, a piece of the world that didn’t belong.
Who wouldn’t be drawn to it?
The silence around me was absolute, yet that crack called to me more loudly than a hundred voices. So, like any foolish but curious soul, I moved toward it. Slowly, cautiously, step after hesitant step, my eyes locked onto its faint glimmer.
At first, I thought it was just a shard of glass. Then, as I neared, it became clear that it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t just a crack. No, it widened, deepened, unfolded into something greater.
A fracture. A rift.
A gate... A doorway to... somewhere else.
That thought lodged in my chest, and I couldn’t shake it off no matter how much I tried.
"Hahhh..." I let out a breath. "I should be cautious. Anyone sane would walk away. But... a deeper part of me wants to step through, to see what lies beyond..."
The truth was simple—I had already died once. What worse could possibly happen now?
That was the reasoning I clung to. But still... something gnawed at the edges of my awareness. The feeling of eyes pressing down on me, of a presence I couldn’t see. I wasn’t alone here. Someone or something was watching. Assessing. Waiting to see what I would do.
My brows curled into a frown. "Tsk."
I clicked my tongue and pushed the unease aside. Dwelling on it would change nothing. Instead, I raised my right hand, hovering it just above the rift.
The crack pulsed.
It was alive. It throbbed faintly, like a heartbeat. As though it was reaching for me, trying to pull me closer. But I could sense another force restraining it, holding it back, refusing to let it fully connect.
"Haahhh..." A sigh escaped me, heavy and resigned. "Even if I die here, what does it matter?"
I let the words flow. "I don’t carry many burdens. I don’t owe anyone. I’ve already done everything I could to please the people around me, lived whatever life I was given... what little I could achieve, I achieved. And if it all ends here, if this is where my story stops..." My lips curled into a bitter smile. "Then it amounts to nothing. Just like everything else."
My gaze lingered on the rift. And the words that followed came without thought, instinctual.
"But maybe that’s what makes my life interesting... because I did what I wanted. Even if I was shackled with debts, responsibilities, duties I didn’t ask for—I tried to relieve them in my own way. I didn’t just crawl. I chose. And so, even if I die now, I won’t regret it..."
A pause.
Then, softer than a whisper, almost ashamed, I added:
"Not like I’m physically capable of regretting..."
That was it. The final straw. The push I needed. My thoughts went silent after that, no more hesitation. I didn’t try to reason or analyze. I just leaned forward and plunged my head into that crack.
And then—
The world changed.
At first, I still saw the ocean floor. The cold silt, the unmoving waters, the eternal night pressing down like a coffin lid. But then it flickered.
The scene stuttered like a faulty lightbulb, blinking between states too quickly to follow. Flickering, stuttering, flashing—until suddenly it all cut out.
Like static snapping off, it was gone.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
From that darkness came movement. A shift in the void. Then the movement sharpened, resolved, bled into light.
Auroras.
Ribbons of color, flowing and dancing across the black canvas like the northern skies I once saw on Earth. Shimmering blues, radiant greens, trails of white gliding across unseen winds.
But even that bled away. The auroras dimmed, the colors melted, replaced by a vast purplish void that churned like liquid fire.
It ignited around me, flames of violet and black. They did not burn, yet they wrapped my entire body, seeping into me, consuming me, as if testing whether I would crumble or endure.
Then, slowly, inevitably, that too shifted.
The flames parted, and a vision took form before me.
A land.
A land without end. An endless plain stretching into infinity, beneath a sky too vast and strange to describe.
All around me crawled creatures—deformed, grotesque, malformed reflections of animals I knew. They resembled the beasts of my time, yet twisted, incomplete. A menagerie of half-shapes, the beginning drafts of life itself, made flesh.
And I stood there, caught between awe and dread, in a land where creation had not yet been perfected.
"Creation had not yet been perfected..."
That sentence buzzed in my mind like an irritating insect. My eyes widened and then narrowed into a sharp slit, as if my body instinctively recognized the truth before my mind dared to believe it.
"I... I have regressed back in time... back to an age when creatures were still crude sketches. When nothing was refined, nothing was polished. This... this is the beginning of evolution itself."
The words sounded insane, ridiculous even, yet every fiber of my being screamed that it was the truth. Those malformed, misshapen things crawling and twitching across the land—what else could explain them?
Their jagged limbs, misplaced eyes, grotesque organs barely functioning in some twisted approximation of life. They were... prototypes. Drafts before the final design.
Yes, surely I had regressed back to the primordial stage of existence.
But before my thoughts could spiral further, the ground itself interrupted me.
THUD—
It wasn’t just a sound. It was force. The earth shook beneath me, the vibration crawling up my spine. A miniature earthquake that made the soil tremble, stones quiver, and my balance waver. My head snapped toward the direction of the tremor, instincts screaming that something vast had moved.
And then—
I saw it.
At first glance, it resembled a lizard. But that comparison was almost an insult to the monstrosity before me. Its skin wasn’t scaled—it was plated, glistening like the glossy shell of a cockroach, layers overlapping in a grotesque armor.
Its face was a nightmare of misplaced anatomy: mandibles jutting out at sharp, unnatural angles, and eyes—too many eyes—swarming its visage, scattered without symmetry, each one darting and twitching independently.
But none of that compared to its size.
It was colossal. A malformed giant that made me feel like a speck of dust. I wasn’t even the size of one of its nails. My entire body could be crushed beneath a single careless twitch of its foot, erased without effort.
And yet, for all its horrifying enormity, it was not looking at me.
Its cluster of shifting eyes... were staring upward.
"At the sky? What... why is it staring at the sky?" My voice faltered as I tried to read its intent. It wasn’t daydreaming. Those countless eyes were all locked onto the same fixed point, high above, something in the air that I could neither see nor sense.
The creature let out a sound then.
A sound my ears could not properly process. It was language, yet not. Meaning tried to form in my head but collapsed into raw static, leaving me more unsettled than silence ever could.
And then—
It moved.
The ground shuddered violently as its gigantic body surged forward. In one instant, it was on the ground; in the next, it had launched itself skyward with impossible speed.
Logic crumbled as I watched its grotesque form ascend—cockroach-like wings erupting from its back, thrumming violently, carrying that monstrous weight into the sky.
"Running...?" I muttered, my throat dry. "Is it... fleeing from something?"
It wasn’t the posture of a predator seeking battle. Every motion of its vast body screamed desperation. Fear even. That malformed titan wasn’t hunting... it was escaping.
"Odd... why would something like that ever need to run away?"
But my words died midway.
Because the scene before me shifted into something far more disturbing.
The plain stretched endlessly, an open expanse of dry soil and pale grasses, and upon it were countless creatures. Dog-sized at most, covered in coarse fur like a bear’s, their bodies lumbering clumsily on five crooked legs.
They were herbivores, peacefully chewing at the grass, disgusting though they were. Their faces resembled squashed, rotten fruit, skin sagging and warped in hideous ways.
I almost gagged at the sight of them. Yet as hideous as they were, something about the peace of their mindless grazing felt... tolerable. At the very least, they weren’t attacking anyone.
But then, the peace shattered.
One by one, their bodies convulsed. Their distorted faces twisted further in agony, limbs locking, spines arching as if invisible chains were tightening around them. They made sounds, guttural and raw, like the screams of a dying animal mixed with the gurgles of drowning.
They were suffocating.
But—suffocating on what?
I whipped my gaze across the plain. There was nothing. Just grass, earth, and open sky. Yet, inexplicably, every single one of those five-legged beasts writhed in agony as if their very air had turned against them.
It was cruel. It was unnatural.
I could only watch as the creatures squirmed, writhed, and convulsed, their bodies jerking violently against an invisible force crushing them from all directions. Their final sounds faded into silence, their forms slackened, and one by one, they collapsed lifeless to the soil.
The silence that followed was worse than their screams.
Something shifted in the air.
Above the dead plain, a distortion shimmered. Vapor, thick and heavy, began condensing from nothing, swirling together as if pulled by unseen hands. A mass formed—a mist. Slowly, it began to pull.
It sucked in the corpses.
The mangled remains of the five-legged abominations rose into the air, dragged helplessly into the thickening vapor. Flesh, bone, and blood—all absorbed into that hungry mass.
I stared, unable to comprehend.
"What... what in the hell is this place?"