"When will we reach?" Nyx complained beside me, his voice flat and fatigued.
We had been walking for the past eighteen hours.
The road behind us had long since vanished, devoured by forest. The town lights had blurred long ago. Only the moon remained, pale and uncaring above a world that didn't want us.
Out here, beyond the walls, the world felt different.
No guards, no lights, and no checkpoints. Just wind hissing through skeletal trees and the low, constant hum of things better left undisturbed.
This wasn't a place meant for people.
Which is probably why I belonged here.
Nyx walked beside me in silence for once. His tail twitched with every step. His usual sarcastic commentary had burned out hours ago. Even he knew this wasn't the time to crack jokes.
The deeper we went, the more wrong the world felt.
"The Temple of Oath wasn't in the main storyline," I finally said, breaking the silence. "But it was in the lore. A side quest never fully explored."
He raised a brow, barely visible in the moonlight. "That sounds fake."
Buried in the death log of a minor character, someone who only showed up to die three Chapters later was a line.
One single, maddening line, tossed in like a joke between his half-hearted sob story and his underwhelming last stand.
'I swear it's there ... beneath the red sky, where the canyon bleeds, and the chains still sing.'
That was my only clue.
Just a poetic suicide note in a sea of throwaway text.
And I made a map out of it.
"You ever tried to find a lost ruin based on the death monologue of a guy who got stabbed in the throat by a moth spirit?" I asked Nyx dryly.
He snorted. "Is that a real question or just you trauma-dumping again?"
"Little bit of both."
It wasn't just that one entry either. I had cross-referenced that quote with two more.
One was from a half-burnt merchant journal which appeared in the novel, where the author briefly mentioned "a scar in the land where illusions warp the air."
The second came from the description of an old artifact: "Never break an oath, for the temple remembers."
They were puzzle pieces.
Shards of lore that no sane person would bother piecing together unless they were obsessive, desperate... or me.
They painted a blurry picture: a ravine somewhere near the edge of the Western Dukedom. A place erased from most maps. Buried inside the Forest of the Dead.
A place the world had chosen to forget.
Which made it the perfect place for someone like me.
Still, knowing where it was and surviving it were two very different games.
Forest of the Dead was infested with late-stage fourth-ring beasts of psychic type.
While I was barely at the initial stage of the second ring.
Each ring was divided into initial, late, and peak stages depending on the hue of the ring formed behind the user.
Light hue defined the initial stage, balanced hue defined the late stage, while dark hue defined the peak stage.
The only reason I dared to enter this forest was because most of the beasts here weren't physically dominant. They were mental, who replied on illusion-based attacks.
This made it more dangerous to most arcanists who usually relied on brute strength.
But I wasn't like them, and I had two things which made me think I could enter this forest.
First, my psychic affinity. It was a rare affinity that only one character had in the entire novel. It gave me a mental barrier and also made my thought process faster. I wasn't a supercomputer by any means though.
And the other reason?
I was betting on two things right now: my somewhat high immunity to illusions... and my genius complex. No one could ever outwit me.
At least not when it came to intelligence.
Sorting my thoughts, I rechecked the lore once more.
The only reason I had been able to recheck the lore was thanks to the cracked phone I kept strapped to my inner coat pocket.
The same battered thing that reminded me of my ticking time.
I remember, last week, it blinked to life once again with a new message. One that was different from his daily reminders.
[The update is complete.]
That shouldn't have meant anything. But when I tapped it, the screen glitched... and then there it was.
A word-for-word copy of [Ascension Of The Arcane King], the novel I used to read religiously.
It allowed me to go through the parts of the novel that I had read.
The sad part, you ask?
I still didn't know a fair chunk of things.
And if that wasn't enough, the author asked me to reach the epilogue in seven years, when the actual novel that I read spanned across ten years, while the last arc hadn't even started.
I knew nothing about the final arc. Unlike other pages that were torn or dissolved, the pages regarding it simply didn't exist.
Neither now nor before.
As if the author hadn't written it yet.
So here I was, piecing together scraps of lore the original readers skipped over. A death quote here, a haunted artifact there.
The forest deepened around me as I continued to walk. Trees felt as if they stood too close together now.
Roots curled out of the ground like claws trying to drag me under. The canopy above had swallowed the moon whole, and the only light was the faint shimmer of mana hanging in the mist like cold breath.
I had finally entered the Forest of the Dead.
Even my breath sounded unwelcome here.
At some point, the air began to feel thick.
Beside me, Nyx walked in silence.
Just his paws padding softly against damp leaves.
His fur was puffed slightly on edge. His shadow affinity usually made him feel at home in the dark.
This was the kind of place where people went missing. Not because they got lost.
But because something found them.
Suddenly, the sound of a snapping branch came.
The sound had come from behind the tall bushes over to my left.
A low growl followed it. It was intense and very close.
I ducked on instinct just as something burst through the bush.
A twisted wolf-thing, crawling with mana and numerous glowing eyes, came into view.
It didn't look right. Its limbs bent the wrong way. Like a beast drawn by someone who vaguely remembered what wolves looked like.
Its fur shimmered with malice, and its many eyes blinked independently, glowing with twin light-blue rings.
He was at the initial stage of the second ring, just like me.
But natural beasts were stronger than arcanists at the same stage. Raw, unfiltered spirit energy surged through them.
Just like how the rings of the owner showed the level of a tamed spirit beast, the eyes showed the level of a natural, untamed spirit beast.
"Stay close," I muttered to Nyx with eyes locked onto the beast.
He didn't joke this time. His eyes narrowed.
With a low growl, the creature lunged towards me.
I rolled aside, hitting the ground with a muted thud, and drew the dagger I bought using the coins I had borrowed from that stupid merchant before.
A cheap blade, but sharp enough to bleed something.
The black grimoire hovered by my side.
I didn't use the other grimoire.
It was too flashy. The glow alone would paint a target on us for everything nearby.
Spirit beasts were territorial and smart.
One spark of chain magic and I would have a pack on me in minutes.
Nyx darted in front of me and, with a flick of his tail, illusion magic bloomed in the air.
Shadow around us started to wriggle and soon took the shape of five little cats.
The beast growled, thinking of them as real.
After a few seconds, it finally jumped at one.
And slammed his head into a tree trunk.
I moved at a quick speed and appeared right behind the wolf.
Taking advantage of the distraction, I rammed my blade into its eye, soft and wet, and it twisted hard.
Feeling the pain, the wolf tried to flank me, but I bent my joint and turned before sliding beneath it and running my blade through its abdomen, splitting it open.
Blood spilled onto my hands as I rolled clear. The beast collapsed in a heap behind me.
It twitched once before going completely limp.
I stayed still and waited.
But no more beasts came. Just silence. Deeper than before.
I exhaled and wiped the blood off my dagger with a half-rotted leaf. Nyx sat beside the corpse, tail flicking and eyes narrowed.
"This reeks of a trap," he said quietly.
"And we're still doing this... why?"
I didn't answer right away.
I was walking toward a temple that might not exist, following a trail stitched together by the forgotten ramblings of dead characters. Every minute I stayed out here, every step I took chasing ghost stories, the clock ticked closer to the Academy's entrance exam.
If I went there with two hearts, it would be instant death, and if I didn't go, I would lose a year of my time.
Because no one survives with two hearts.
No one lives with two grimoires.
Until you were them...
It was a death sentence in all but name.
I was stuck in a deadlock. One that I found very amusing.
So I needed something.
A weapon the world didn't know I had.
Wrapping my thoughts, I picked my bag up before giving the corpse one last glance. It was a creature bent by its environment, forgotten by the world.
Maybe I wasn't so different.
"A person doesn't survive this world by being strong," I said finally.
Nyx flicked his ear. Listening.
"They survive by being unknown."
Deeper into the rot. Into the whispering wild.