**Chapter 629: Dark Domain**
Seeing the Mirror Moon Statue floating unusually high in Gethsmoor, seemingly beginning to restore its form, a faint sense of foreboding arose in her heart. Struggling against the pain, she accelerated her speed and rushed toward the Mirror Moon Temple, which had transformed back into the appearance of a church.
When Gethsmoor finally burst into the Mirror Moon Church and broke through the doors into the grand hall, what she saw was a floating silvery glow suspended beneath the dome. Although Gethsmoor didn’t understand the significance of that silvery light at first, her instincts told her that the presence that had been obstructing her in various ways from the shadows must be within that silver glow.
They had found the Mirror Moon Church ahead of time and manipulated it to suddenly appear in the world, sabotaging her summoning rituals. This church transformed into a giant statue, using strange illusions to interfere with her actions… Ever since Gethsmoor came to Gramorn to carry out her task, a presence suspected to be from the Prit alert faction had thrown one obstacle after another in her way, causing her plans to fail repeatedly. Faced with so many setbacks, Gethsmoor was seething with anger, wishing she could tear the mastermind behind it all to shreds.
Gethsmoor knew that the mastermind had a close connection to this Mirror Moon Church, and now, within this church, no one fit her expectations more than the existence within that silver glow. Thus, when Gethsmoor stormed into the hall, she immediately aimed for that gentle silvery light and charged forward. She could vaguely see a figure flickering within the silver light, and she was certain that it was her target.
Charging into the silver light, Gethsmoor swung her six arms, each bearing a sharp spike, ruthlessly stabbing toward her ultimate target in this battle. However, what greeted her was an oncoming wave of darkness.
In Gethsmoor’s vision, just as she was about to strike her target, a wave of pure blackness spread out from the figure within the silver light, rushing toward her and the surrounding space. In an instant, she could see nothing, and the silvery figure completely vanished from before her.
However, this did not deter Gethsmoor’s assault; she maintained her attacking posture and rushed toward the place where the figure had been. Yet when Gethsmoor reached her intended position, she struck nothing. Her full-force attack hit empty air, and for a moment, unbalanced, she began to fall. Her descent was not towards the floor of the church, but into a space of darkness.
“What…”
Seeing this situation, Gethsmoor summoned her spirituality, rising back into the air. She hovered mid-air, observing her surroundings, but all she beheld was darkness.
Darkness, profound darkness, an empty void where she could not see her own hands, an endless, boundless darkness… Before Gethsmoor, only pitch blackness remained.
Faced with this scene, Gethsmoor initially thought something was wrong with her vision, that her eyes had been affected by some extraordinary force. So decisively, she dug out her own eyeballs and crushed them, reforming them after turning them into bl**d mist. Yet before her, there was still nothing but pure darkness; her regenerated eyes saw nothing. This darkness was so pure that even Gethsmoor, as a Red Tier Level “Shadow,” could not see here.
“Hmph, a pure black space, is it?”
Confronted with the scene before her, Gethsmoor scoffed, then slowly descended until she landed on the ground of the pitch-black church. There she stood still, not making any movements.
At that moment, Gethsmoor relied on her keen hearing to observe all sound around her, preventing any sudden attacks that might emerge from the darkness.
Sure enough, after a brief silence, Gethsmoor heard a series of rapid footsteps approaching from behind her. Acting decisively, she threw a bl**d Piercer toward the direction of the footsteps, but it did not halt the approach of the sound. Gethsmoor sensed something rapidly closing in on her.
“Did it dodge?”
With that thought, Gethsmoor manipulated her held bl**d Piercer, bracing for the impending attack. She then heard the sound of a sharp blade slicing through the air. Gethsmoor raised the bl**d Piercer to block the incoming attack, successfully deflecting an unseen blow with a sharp clang. Gethsmoor then countered with the other arms holding bl**d Piercers, but did not land a hit on anything.
‘It dodged…’
Seeing the situation unfold, Gethsmoor mused to herself, and then she immediately prepared a fiercer offensive. Yet, she could not strike the target, and after a brief struggle, the unseen foe seemed to retreat again, slipping back into an untraceable shadow.
Witnessing this turn of events, Gethsmoor resumed vigilance, focusing intently to listen for the sounds around her. Soon enough, that familiar sound of footsteps indeed came from another direction.
As always, Gethsmoor launched an attack toward the incoming sound once more, re-engaging with what seemed to be an invisible enemy. Her bl**d Piercers blocked several of the opponent’s attacks, but all her strikes remained ineffective. After a fierce “battle” of exchanges, that invisible target retreated again, leaving Gethsmoor unsuccessful in her pursuit.
“Tch…”
Faced with this scene, Gethsmoor was furious. In the presence of an unseen enemy, all her vicious thoughts of revenge were futile. An internal fire of frustration raged within her.
Then, relying on her hearing, Gethsmoor repelled another attack from the invisible enemy, and she fortified her stance, remaining with her senses geared for the next attack. However, this time she waited for quite a while without any sign of an incoming attack.
In light of this situation, Gethsmoor showed confusion. Just as she was wondering whether her opponent was preparing something significant, a sudden pain shot through her back. She could feel that it was a wound inflicted by a sword. Her back had been deeply slashed.
‘What!’
Clenching her teeth, Gethsmoor endured the pain and countered towards her rear, but her attack did not hit anyone, just as before, she struck air.
‘What’s happening!? Why didn’t I hear anything!?’ At that moment, Gethsmoor’s mind was filled with shock. She had heard nothing at all. Why had she suddenly taken a hit? Did her opponent float over? But Gethsmoor didn’t hear any disturbance in the air.
As Gethsmoor was bewildered, she suddenly felt another sharp pain at her side. Her flank was struck, entirely unguarded, by another blow, causing her to cry out.
“!!”
After this exclamation, Gethsmoor finally realized where the problem lay. She found that she could not hear her own voice! She couldn’t hear anything anymore and had lost her sense of hearing!
Faced with this situation, Gethsmoor froze. She hadn’t expected that after losing her vision, her hearing would also vanish. No wonder she had been unguarded and received two hits in a row.
After continuously losing her means to perceive the outside world, Gethsmoor became increasingly panicked. To prepare for the next attack, she began to sense the bloodstains she had left on the enemy’s weapon, trying to utilize her connection through her bl**d to discern the enemy’s location. Initially, this tactic was successful; through spiritual perception, she evaded two slashing attacks from the darkness. However, on the third attempt, her throat was cut, and she was astonished to find that her spiritual perception was also diminishing within this darkness, eventually vanishing.
Having lost three modes of sensory perception of the external world, Gethsmoor became even more frantic. She began to strain to smell the stench of bl**d in the air, hoping to detect her enemy by catching the scent of her own bl**d on their weapon. She also started to destroy the floor beneath her, aiming to break through the floor of this dark church and escape into the outside world, away from this strange environment.
With her not-so-sensitive sense of smell, Gethsmoor barely managed to block one attack but was still struck, losing two arms. As she realized her sense of smell was fading, she fought more desperately to break through the floor beneath her. Finally, at the moment she completely lost her sense of smell, Gethsmoor delivered a powerful punch that shattered the floor of the church, causing her to fall through the gaping hole and out of the Mirror Moon Church.
Just as Gethsmoor felt joy at having finally escaped that damned pure black church, what she encountered next filled her with despair.
Darkness, still an endless, pure darkness without a trace of light, a silence without sound pervaded her surroundings, leaving her not in the Twinkling Star Lake bathed in moonlight, but rather in an even broader abyss of darkness.
Not only within the church, but the entirety of the Twinkling Star Lake and even all of Gramorn now lay shrouded in absolute darkness. Gethsmoor had escaped one cage only to find herself in a larger prison.
Faced with this scene, Gethsmoor felt a chill in her heart, but she thought little beyond that. She rushed into the darkness toward a direction she herself was unaware of. She only thought about escaping from this cursed darkness, believing it to be finite; she was certain she could break free.
Yet, before Gethsmoor could get far, another wave of pain struck her. In a sudden turn, she felt her abdomen pierced by a sword from behind. The mysterious enemy had caught up with her!
Once again attacked, this time Gethsmoor steeled her resolve and, based on the location of her injury, turned to slash at the direction where the enemy should be. What she received was a solid block, and even after losing her vision, hearing, and sense of smell, Gethsmoor was able to guess the enemy’s location once more, though her counter remained blocked.
Then, knowing escape was futile, Gethsmoor floated in place, readying herself for the incoming attacks.
Gethsmoor could no longer see, hear, smell, or perceive… the only thing she relied on now was her strong vitality. After each slash she received, she quickly deduced the enemy’s position from the pain and launched swift counterattacks, using her injuries to ascertain the enemy’s appearance.
In this way, amid waves of painful strikes, Gethsmoor kept retaliating against the invisible enemy; though her counters were either dodged or blocked, she persistently adopted this strategy, hoping for a mistake from her opponent, yearning for a miracle to occur.
However, the miracle never came, replaced instead by deeper despair.
In the midst of painful counterattacks, Gethsmoor noticed that the enemy’s onslaught had seemingly begun to weaken. The once vicious blade began to hurt her less and less.
Gethsmoor initially thought the enemy’s strength was waning, that she might survive through her regenerative power. But she only recognized the issue when her arm was severed.
In the darkness, Gethsmoor could not see how severe her injuries were, but she certainly understood the magnitude of pain caused by losing an arm. It did not exceed the cross-section of the arm itself.
Gethsmoor knew how much anguish severing an arm would inflict, and now she was shocked to discover that the pain from losing her arm was far less than the pain she had felt before. At this moment, she realized that it wasn’t the enemy’s attacks weakening; it was her capacity to feel pain diminishing.
Gethsmoor recognized that slowly, her remaining sense of touch and pain were fading rapidly, swallowed by the darkness along with her other perceptions.
“No… No!!”
Only at this point did Gethsmoor feel fear. When losing her previous senses, she had merely panicked, but now that her sense of pain was vanishing, real terror began to take hold of her. The proud, disdainful individual who had once sneered at all was now genuinely fearful.
“Please! Don’t take this away!! Pain!! This is a gift from the Queen to us!!”
In the darkness, Gethsmoor began to wail, as she lost herself in chaotic attacks around her, trying to prevent the disappearance of her sense of pain. Yet, all her efforts were in vain; Gethsmoor found herself feeling less and less anguish. Her last sense faded increasingly, until it ultimately vanished altogether.
“Stop! Stop it!!”
At that moment, Gethsmoor had completely lost her inner arrogance. The only emotion left within her was fear.
After losing her sight, hearing, smell, and spiritual perception, she finally lost her sense of pain and touch. Now, she could perceive nothing; everything she saw, heard, felt, and touched was engulfed in endless darkness.
Perception… is the channel for obtaining information. Losing all means of perception equates to facing endless unknowns, and the unknown… is the source of fear, the truest form of terror. Hence, within the spiritual expression of “Shadow,” one of the most crucial layers is fear – endlessly hidden within the eternal dark, the mystery of the unknown is one essence of “Shadow,” and also a dominion wielded by the deity of shadows.
Having lost all sensory perception, Gethsmoor had completely lost her mind. She no longer attacked wildly but began to create countless bl**d needles, frantically stabbing them into herself. She unleashed all the divine essence gifted by the Spider Queen upon herself, desperately generating extreme pain, seeking to once more experience agony in order to break free from terror.
However, nothing worked. No matter how she inflicted self-harm, Gethsmoor couldn’t feel a single pang of pain, and so she commenced a frenzied cycle of creating bl**d spikes to pierce herself, yearning to relive pain. In this manner, she sank into endless self-consumption.
“Pain… gift… Queen’s… gift…”
It was uncertain how long Gethsmoor remained in this dark void where she could sense nothing. Eventually, her spiritual essence was fully exhausted. Without the support of her essence, her regenerative abilities could no longer sustain her, bringing Gethsmoor to the d*ath she had wrought upon herself.
“Crack…”
Suddenly, the sound of shattering glass echoed throughout the pitch-black space. Cracks emitting silver light began to spread, ultimately consuming the entire realm.
Finally, the pure black space erupted, shattering as if glass fragmented into countless pieces. As the dark shards dissipated within the space, moonlight rained down from the sky, illuminating the surface of the Twinkling Star Lake once more.
In the night sky, a full moon hung high in the firmament. The surface of the Twinkling Star Lake shimmered under the moonlight, and by the shore, two peculiar figures stood there.
One was a twisted, ghastly corpse, a bl**d-soaked female corpse pierced all over by sharp bl**d Piercers, anchoring it to the ground, bl**d continuously flowing from its wounds, staining the earth and flowing into the nearby water. Her wide-open eyes and mouth displayed an expression of fear.
The other was a strange girl before that terrifying corpse, dressed in flowing silver hair and white gauze, slightly hovering in the air. Her skin glimmered like crystal and mirror, translucent and exquisite, particularly noticeable around her hands. Although there was a sense of transparency around her chest, waist, and face, she largely retained fair skin, and on her delicately carved beautiful face, silver pupils displayed an expression of indifference.
Under the moonlight, the Mirror Girl gazed quietly at the lifeless Gethsmoor before her. She did not move, seemingly waiting for something, and not long after, an unusual movement occurred within Gethsmoor’s corpse.
The once motionless head of Gethsmoor, under the influence of some mysterious force, slowly began to move again. Bowing silently, it directed its gaze at the girl before her. In the widened eye sockets, eight pupils began to spin rapidly, ultimately fixing upon the object in front of her.
Confronted with this sight, the Mirror Girl spoke with a tone as cold as ice.
“It’s been a long time, Morigan. Are you doing well…”
Listening to the girl’s words, Gethsmoor’s head twitched mechanically a couple of times before opening her mouth to speak in a hoarse voice.
“Selene…
“You… at this moment, you can still maintain your self, even intervene in Brithun… unexpected…”
