Damon once again found himself in the fairy dungeon space with the pale blue trees all around him. He was back in the sealed core region, except now there were cracks and fissures everywhere.
Strong pulses of mana rippled here and there. The dungeon itself suddenly felt unstable.
Damon blinked several tis, his vision still warped from whatever he’d just witnessed or survived. The mory of those eyes lingered like a burn etched into his soul.
His breathing was ragged, and his mana was fluctuating uncontrollably. He stumbled forward, steadying himself against a cracked trunk.
Damon was utterly exhausted, and he was sure his brain had lted or sothing, but the chaos around him was much more pressing. "Damn it. This thing is going to explode or sothing. I don’t have much ti. Where the hell is that tomb?"
The ground answered him with a low, rumbling groan. The entire dungeon was falling apart. Mana surged wildly through the air, spiraling into small tempests that bent space itself. Trees splintered into shards of crystal and ash, dissolving into motes of light that drifted upward like dying fireflies.
Damon squinted through the chaos, scanning the horizon. Nothing was visible. He unleashed his primordial senses without hesitation. Then he sensed it.
Buried deep in the collapsing terrain, a few miles ahead of him was the Fairy King’s Tomb.
Damon kicked off the ground, shadows rippling under his feet. His movent blurred as he raced toward the tomb’s direction, every step sending cracks rippling across the ground. Then he saw it.
The tomb’s entrance was no longer a sealed monolith of fairy stone. It had ruptured open, revealing a staircase of glass-like crystal descending into an abyss of shimring light. From within, faint whispers echoed.
Damon knew it. This whole thing was going to be one big trippy ss.
He stopped at the edge of the staircase, the eerie glow from below casting fractured patterns across his face. Each whisper that drifted up felt like it was speaking directly into his mind, soft, lodic, and maddeningly familiar.
It wasn’t one voice but a chorus, layered and distorted, overlapping between pain, worship, and sothing dangerously close to laughter. He heard his mother, his brother, Kate, Erin, and even the new girl, Alzara.
"Yeah," Damon muttered, exhaling sharply, "definitely trippy."
The air around the entrance shimred like liquid glass, bending reality in slow, undulating waves. Every few seconds, the staircase itself seed to shift, sotis spiraling downward into infinity, sotis splitting into countless mirrored paths that vanished into light.
The space wasn’t stable. It wasn’t even pretending to follow the laws of nature anymore.
Damon imdiately activated his primordial senses again. Doing this would drain him a great deal, but he didn’t care. He definitely did not have the ti to play these gas at the mont. He needed to cut straight through the bullshit and fast.
His ntal strain deepened as he tried to focus and pay attention to the real reality around him. For a mont, nothing changed, but then he saw it.
The illusions peeled away like layers of skin. The shimring light dulled, the endless staircase shrank, and the distorted whispers cracked into static before falling silent. The glass walls around him lted into bleeding reflections, warped images of himself dissolving into red mist one by one.
When the final layer broke, Damon stood at the entrance of what looked like an ancient throne room buried beneath the dungeon.
At the far end of the hall stood the real tomb, a crystalline coffin suspended above an altar of obsidian roots. Within it rested a figure far too perfect to be human.
Silvery hair floated weightlessly in the liquid mana that filled the coffin, and its body shimred faintly with layered runes that glowed in sequences, almost like breathing.
The Fairy King.
For a second, Damon expected the man to co alive. Was this guy even dead?
Damon frowned, his eyes narrowing as he stepped closer. He expected sothing to jump at him and try to kill him, but nothing of that sort happened. He looked around, and the coffin seed to be the only thing in the area.
"So it was just a tomb all along?" Damon muttered under his breath.
The next second, cracks started appearing all around him. His ti was officially up. The entire dungeon was breaking apart. The reality itself was exploding. He was going to be kicked out anyti now.
Damon’s heart rate sped up. He could feel an imnse pressure suddenly building up on his body. "Fuck." He imdiately blinked next to the coffin, throwing away all caution to the wind.
"A re C rank ant dared to enter my tomb?" A voice sounded in his ears.
The voice sent shivers down his spine, but Damon simply did not have the ti to give two shits about it. He was already ntally exhausted and felt as if he was going to collapse any second now. The dungeon was also exploding.
He just wanted to try one thing before he was kicked out of here. As the pressure on his body reached an alarming level and he felt the familiar pull of a dungeon portal, Damon hurriedly lunged forward and touched the coffin, willing it to get into his storage ring.
As soon as he touched it, a deafening hum ripped through the chamber, so loud it vibrated through his bones.
Blood burst from Damon’s nose and ears as the entire dungeon core reacted violently. The obsidian roots beneath the coffin writhed like serpents, stabbing into the air, trying to defend their master. The veins of mana running through the walls flared blindingly bright.
From all parts of the dungeon, all sorts of fairies rushed to the location of the tomb, each one screeching and wanting to rip Damon apart into shreds. To make matters worse, the coffin vibrated violently, resisting him. Everything was working against him, and there was no ti to do anything about it.
***
Chapter 6 Mass Release sponsored by Rhi Bran!
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