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Into The Night

  Into The Night

  Darkness swept over me, the absence of light somehow feeling like a physical force despite being the very essence of the lack of substance. Even my mutation enhanced dark vision simply went out like a candle in a tsunami, depthless darkness robbing me of sight so thoroughly I couldn’t even tell whether I had my eyes closed or not. There was something more to the roiling blackness around me, something that made it feel like the ground was falling out beneath me, like the walls weren’t just hidden but gone. It felt as if I were at the bottom of a bottomless sea, or in the lightless void between galaxies, like I was surrounded by a nothingness that had impossible weight and depth to it.

  Despite the shifting shades of black around me, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sigil of shadows I’d carved, visible even in the unending darkness it poured into the world. I could feel it burning itself into my mind, pouring darkness out into my thoughts and spilling out the folds of my brain to darken the inside of my skull. My mouth was frozen open in a silent scream, darkness pouring like a cloud of incomprehensibly dense smoke from every hole in my head. I could feel the unearthly cold of darkness given form flowing into my lungs, seeping into my blood, and flowing through me.

  I was drowning in the shadows pouring out of my mind, my entire being was falling into a darkness that had no beginning and no end. I could feel myself fading away, the blazing darkness of the rune in my mind seeping into my soul and blackening it. My consciousness was fading into the darkness, becoming one with something older than time and utterly alien to the human mind. I was being hollowed out, made into nothing more than an extension of an infinite darkness that witnessed the birth and death of gods and dimensions like they were nothing more than momentary candles. If this impossible void had anything approaching a consciousness, I doubted it even registered my existence; this wasn’t an attack, this was a side effect of my limited being brushing up against the infinite.

  That thought brought a strange smile to my face, a humourless laugh slipping through the geyser of shadows spilling through my teeth to echo into the dark. This was exactly the sort of thing I had dreaded most, being the fucking collateral damage to some unfathomable existence that had been strong when the stars were young. I hated that idea, loathed it; the thought that I wasn’t even worthy of being a footnote in my destroyer’s story lit a spark of nihilistic rage in my gut that had simmered since I learned of the concept of mortality. It was a small and guttering flame, one instantly drowned in the darkness pouring out of the sigil I could feel physically burning itself into the structure of my brain; but rather than allowing the oily dark to smother it, that hateful flame began to feed on the very shadows right alongside my will.

  That fire of hate and willpower burning in my gut slowly dimmed and darkened, but never burned out even as it churned the darkness into equally dark smoke that flowed into my lungs. Unlike the darkness I was drowning in, I could breathe this shadowy smoke, tainted with my very own essence as it was; from there, this processed shadow slowly pushed out and replaced the raw darkness gnawing on my bones, flowing through my veins and staining every cell of my body. I watched the flame within me slowly turn black as it processed the darkness pouring out of my mind into shadowy smoke my body could process, and the moment this strange transition finished I felt my lungs involuntarily take in a breath of air deeper than I ever had before.

  Cultivation Raised! Cultivation Level: Awakened Darkness

  Skill Gained: Spiteful Shadow Breathing

  Skill Gained: Darkness Cultivation

  Skill Evolved: Magical Dark Vision to Primordial Dark Vision

  Trait Gained: Darkness Cultivator

  Will +10

  Endurance +10

  Fortune +10

  I knew immediately that something had changed fundamentally about me, some core aspect of my being had been altered forever. I felt a strange new weight to my being, as though the darkness spewing from the brand on my brain was leaving some sort of tangible residue on my every cell with every cycle. The stat increase felt different, not the blazing hot pleasure the system usually granted but something colder, a strangely serene feeling as if liquid shadow were pouring over the affected aspects. Even the flies supping on my flesh were tainted by this change, the darkness suffusing me seeping in through the fluids they licked up to change them in turn. My increased Fortune felt especially strange, as if a pool of shadows had settled into the indent my own spiritual weight had placed on the veil, the insubstantial absence impossibly yet notably deepening the already ominously strained pit of fate.

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  Feeling the fabric of fate bend under me like an uncomfortably thin sheet of plastic under a rock was disconcerting enough to almost take precedence over… well, everything else that was going on, but only almost. I felt like I was dripping in unnaturally smooth crude oil, as if some tangible form of darkness were coating me from head to toe, inside and out; I felt spiritually bloated, heavy in a way that wasn’t purely physical. But on the plus side, the very same highly concerning changes making me feel as if half of me was submerged in an impossibly deep sea allowed my pitch black eyes to pierce the supernatural darkness around me, once more revealing the dilapidated facsimile of a former apartment building.

  Well, “pierced” may be something of a slight exaggeration, in all honesty; I could make out the features of the room I’d been in before, but it was as if there were a layer of dense black fog choking the air. If I stared hard enough, I could see all the way to the graffiti coated walls and even make out the shade of red the dungeon’s rather clear message was painted in, but at a glance I could barely make out the silhouettes of the door leading further into the dungeon. The open door leading further into the dungeon. The door I very distinctly did not open.

  Something moved in the shadows around me, just outside the reach of my Paranoia; something that wasn’t there when I turned to look. A faint noise reached my ear, so quiet I was almost sure I imagined it if it weren’t for the way the flies buzzing almost drunkenly around me seemed to jerk about in response. My ears twitched, straining to make out what it was I was hearing, only for ice to trickle down my spine when I finally did; it was laughter, or… at least, it had the cadence of laughter. Listening closer, it sounded more like someone sobbing with the rhythm of laughter.

  Oh. Oooooh. I almost forgot I tried to infect the darkness rune with my Blight tainted blood. I had figured the attempt simply failed outright, the pure darkness chilling my bones hadn’t felt Blighted in the slightest after all. But… but if that wasn’t the case, if even just the initial burst of solid shadow had been tainted, would that have been enough to infect any monsters lurking about? I doubt the dungeon just gave up on killing me because I moved a room away from its earlier ambush, and if whatever it had set up to make me regret coming here got caught up in the blast…

  Which means I likely saved myself from my own fuck up there, as I have no idea how long I was out of it before I got something of a loose handle on this whole “cultivation” thing. Of course, the price of potentially saving me from getting eaten by this wretched pit was releasing a soul devouring super plague into it, and if it really did infect a dungeon monster… then it could potentially use this place as a factory for producing infection platforms, right in the middle of a hugely populated city…

  Well, I suppose there’s a massive influx of- Wait, why didn’t I get credit for killing whatever got infected? Has nothing actually died? Did the notification just come and go while I was out of my mind on shadow juice? I don't know enough about the mechanics of the Blight or runes to say if the spiritual sickness could somehow infect darkness itself to form physical bodies, nor if it could somehow deny me my cut, but I found it highly suspect. I suppose it could also be some trait of dungeons, perhaps these living charnel pits were more stingy when it came to distributing experience…

  If I live through this, I'll have to investigate that oddity; if I survive the next few minutes, of course.

  But that mystery weighed far lighter on my mind than the need to be anywhere but here as quickly as I could. With one last wary glare towards the dark door, I turned and scampered back the way I came. There was no keyhole to peek through but my Paranoia saw nothing threatening on the other side (not that I fully trusted any of my senses, but with nothing better to go on I had no choice but to rely on it) I hopped up, grabbed the door handle, and swung the door open.

  Fortunately, it seemed the monstrosities dueling it out had left; whether my little distraction scared them away or they left for unrelated reasons, I didn't know. I aslo only cared academically, what mattered to me was the mere fact there was no sign of any lingering dangers between me and escape. The darkness lingered longer than the runes of fire and water I'd used before, permeating the building almost entirely unfaded even who knows how many minutes after I'd formed the rune. Whether that was some property of darkness itself, a quality of the dungeon wood I'd carved into, or some hidden trait of my own blood was yet another question to investigate somewhere safer.

  With the way seemingly clear, I didn't hesitate to wrap the shadows tighter around me and sprint for the exit. Unless this hell pit can change its layout, there should only be two hopefully empty rooms between me and the very, very relative safety of the wretched city outside. Crossing the room two barely fathomable beasts in the shape of men had nearly killed me as quickly as I could (which is rather quick nowadays), I hopped through the gaping hole in the wall that mutant crusader burst through without issue and found myself standing just before the front door not a handful of seconds later.

  Very suspiciously, the door was hanging open, swinging lightly on its squeaky hinges in some invisible breeze. I grimaced at the sight, glancing around me for any sign of an ambush. I saw nothing untoward aside from the creaking door itself, but that gave me no comfort; just because I can't see the ambush coming doesn't mean it's not there, just that my senses are failing to detect it. Assuming you're safe because there's no sign of danger is how you wind up getting dragged off into the dark by threats you didn't see coming, after all.

  With a deep and resigned sigh, I shook my head, stretched my shoulders, and once more took off at a dead sprint. My enhanced Perception kept the world from blurring more than a little bit around the edges even as I felt the wind of my movement shifting the oil beneath my fur. I was across the room and out the door frame faster than anyone would guess a creature as diminutive as myself could achieve…

  And just as I'd half-predicted, a massive hand shot out from behind the door to close around my head the very moment I crossed the threshold.

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