This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

Aura scurried through the pitch-black tunnel leading to and from the breeding pit's chamber, retracing her path back to the three-way split.

The weight of what they had just seen—the grotesque, ritualistic cycle of Abyssal evolution—hung over Kain and the others like a shroud of unease.

How many blue-grade spiritual creatures had they churned out over the years?

Moreover, how many similar breeding pits were there scattered across various relics and Abyssal entrances throughout the Empire?

They needed more information. Perhaps the center chamber could answer some of their questions.

The right hallway had been a nightmare of living flesh and tormented souls being helplessly fused into a gate.

The left hallway had been a horrifying forge of endless Abyssal warriors formed through cannibalism.

But the center hallway…

The center hallway was normal and quiet.

Too normal.

Aura's tiny form hesitated at the threshold, her nose twitching. The cavernous tunnel stretched forward made of seemingly normal-looking stone, smooth and undisturbed, its walls lacking the grotesque pulsations or ink-like coating of the others.

The tunnel appeared normal until it almost reached its end.

Kain's breath was slow, and controlled, but he couldn't shake the discomfort pooling in his gut.

Kain had anticipated the most important area to the Abyssal creatures being in the center, but…

"Why is this place so… normal?" Clara asked, her voice laced with unease.

"It's not normal," Nadia muttered. "It must be hiding something."

However, whether she believed that or was saying it to comfort everyone was unknown. After all, they had all been hoping that the center chamber held the answers to their unanswered questions or, better yet, the key to ruining the Abyssal creatures' plans entirely.

Aura continued forward, slipping through the dark, her small frame silent against the lifeless stone. The chamber at the end of the hallway wasn't large—nowhere near the scale of the breeding pit or the flesh-forged Gate.

And yet, something about it felt infinitely more dangerous.

The chamber was simple—almost unassuming.

Three things stood within it. No more. No less.

At the center of the room, a single black stone sat upon an altar of carved bone.

It was small—no larger than a fist. It did not pulse. It did not glow. It simply… sat there.

Aura crept toward it cautiously, her senses stretching, searching for signs of life or danger.

But the stone was lifeless. And yet—Kain and the others felt uneasy.

"What is that?" Benji murmured.

"A rock?" Claudia guessed, though her voice wavered with uncertainty.

Aura got a little closer. But still, nothing happened.

No sudden surge of power. No eerie hum of abyssal corruption. It remained completely unremarkable.

And that, more than anything, worried Kain and the others. The unknown was always more terrifying. And they knew, based on the prominent position of this 'rock' in the center chamber it must be incredibly important.

Something deep within them all screamed that the stone wasn't just a stone.

But there was no way to know.

Aura moved on.

In a corner to the right of the room, almost as if it had been tossed aside on the floor due to its unimportance was a massive, fractured crystal the size of a melon.

But unlike the cold, lifeless black stone, this one was fighting.

The Relic Core.

It pulsed—slow, laboured, like a heartbeat on the verge of stopping. Its once-pure energy still shone at its core—a brilliant, shifting golden-blue light—but it was trapped, strangled by countless black tendrils that coiled around it like parasitic vines.

The tendrils pulsated, twisting, writhing, slowly digging deeper into the crystal's fractures, infecting it bit by bit. The core shuddered, trying to push back, but its light was flickering.

It was losing. Aura crept closer and suddenly—

A 'voice.' But it wasn't really words nor speech.

Just a whispering presence, brushing against their minds through the connection with Aura to convey a single message.

"Help…"

"The core is still resisting," Benji muttered. "But it won't last. The Abyss is forcing its corruption onto it. Once it's fully controlled, by them, they will likely begin to fuse it into the gate they made and open up a stable channel to the real world."

"Why do they even need the gate if they have the core?" Kain asked. After all, he'd learned something about relic cores while studying to be a Pathfinder. It was typical for relic cores to fight against being controlled, even when the controller wasn't an abyssal creature. However, once it is controlled, they shouldn't need to put the effort into making that gate.

"We haven't been exposed to Abyssal Creatures too often," Benji began to explain his hypothesis, "but my guess is that either the energy they use isn't like spiritual energy and can't be used to efficiently control the core, or this relic has a strength limit on the creatures that can pass through it, and that gate is to help exceed that limit. Perhaps it's both. Either way, we should be grateful that they needed to delay."

Aura backed away from the Relic Core. Stay updated via My Virtual Library Empire

The moment she did, the black tendrils loosened, almost as if they were sensing her presence and had tightened themselves around the core to guard against her. The golden-blue light inside the core continued to dim, a weak, flickering ember in the suffocating dark.

It didn't have much time left.

"We need to find a way to take the core, without question. But first, we should see what else is in here. The more information we obtain the better." Nadia decided against just immediately making a grab for the core and bolting.

Not to mention finishing their exploration of this last chamber shouldn't take too long, there was only 1 unexplored object remaining.

At the far end of the chamber, behind the unidentified crystal in the center a coffin stood upright—a massive, glass-like crystal, carved into the shape of a perfect black monolith.

The thing inside seemed dead at first glance.

Its body was encased in midnight-black armour, etched with markings that seemed to shift when not directly observed. Its limbs were too long, its fingers ending in blade-like claws. A single slit for what Kain assumed to be an eye sat at the center of its forehead, closed—unmoving. Its mouth was slightly open in its rest and they all could see the rows of razor-sharp teeth, not too dissimilar from the rows of teeth of the original Abyssal worms in the breeding pit.

Aura hesitated, but the others felt it too. The pressure in the room had shifted during her approach.

The eye inside the crystal coffin did not open. The limbs did not move. The body did not breathe.

And yet, Aura—tiny, unnoticed, insignificant—felt the crushing weight of awareness.

Aura turned and ran.