My breathing slowed. The world around me began to lose weight. Not the weight.
As if gravity were unraveling from me.
Again.
That cursed feeling took hold—like falling in free fall, but in reverse. My stomach churned. It was like being pulled upward by an invisible force, with no air, no ground, as if the universe had flipped upside down and I was plummeting into the stars.
The light vanished.
And then, it all began again.
When I opened my eyes, I was already inside it.
Inside the ring.
The ring's world.
In front of me, terror hit me like a punch to the chest.
A colossal snake, with black scales and ember-colored eyes, stared at me with its jaws wide open. The same creature that had guarded the sixth mountain. Its curved fangs dripped with silvery liquid, and its forked tongue trembled, ready to strike.
I threw myself backward, landing on my rear, heart pounding in my chest.
But the strike never came.
I stayed still, paralyzed, watching. The creature didn't move. And then I realized.
It wasn't free.
It was trapped inside a translucent sphere.
A massive, glassy orb, suspended in midair, filled with a dense, shimmering liquid that drifted slowly within, as if time inside it followed a different rhythm. The snake twisted in restrained agony, but it was nothing more than an imprisoned image, a caged echo.
From it, silver sparks escaped, slipping from the orb's surface like broken threads of silk, rising toward the gray sky and being absorbed by the very fabric of the surrounding reality.
The world was worse than I remembered.
Chaotic. Insane.
The black walls—those same ones I saw in the first trial—were everywhere. But now they floated. They turned slowly in the air like fragments of a forgotten temple in zero gravity. Some still bore ancient inscriptions glowing in crimson tones, as if alive, bleeding symbols from a language impossible to decipher.
Fragments of staircases, pillars, broken arches, and disjointed bridges floated too, all suspended in a vacuum that wasn't space, but a total absence of logic. There were places where water flowed upward, where light cast shadows, where sound curved around me.
The sky was still opaque. An eternal gray, endless, as if I were trapped beneath the belly of a sleeping beast.
And the sun—a dead sun.
Gray. Dull. Yet still glowing, like a cauterized wound in the firmament. It pulsed slowly, expanding and contracting like a tired heart.
And in this place forgotten by the gods, where reality was a broken idea, I felt that invisible prison again.
My affinities were sealed.
Lightning and gravity—both locked away behind heavy gates.
Everything, except one.
Space.
The only thing still answering.
And for some reason, I felt that here it wasn't just an affinity.
It was a key.
A language.
Or perhaps, the only way to survive.
I rose slowly, facing the fragmented world ahead of me.
I didn't come here to repeat the mistakes of the first time.
Now I had clear goals. And a ticking clock.
I would no longer be tossed from trial to trial like a pawn.
I looked around, the whole world still unraveling in its twisted logic, floating fragments of black matter, shattered ruins spinning slowly without direction, like satellites of a dead god.
The natural energy pulsed in every direction. Stronger than ever.
It was like standing in the lungs of the universe, the epicenter of a cosmic heart beating at a frequency my mind could barely grasp. Space here wasn't just distorted.
It was alive.
With a slight effort, I closed my eyes and connected to the environment. The primordial energy circulating inside me. My essence as a demon. I felt my cores starving. Thirsting for it all. As if they knew this place, for all its insanity, was fertile ground for growth.
But before I could begin to meditate, my eyes caught something in the distance.
What looked like… the second trial.
Impossible to ignore.
A staircase—or rather, a grotesque trail made of broken black wall pieces—floating in the air and stacking into steps that climbed into the beyond.
It began from the void in front of me and ascended past the horizon, as if trying to touch the gray sky. But even from afar, I could see the ruptures—the space around that staircase collapsed in on itself. Dimensional rifts opened, devouring the steps, disintegrating parts of reality like paper burned by the wind.
'Not yet,' I whispered to myself.
I wouldn't climb it.
This time… I would choose the order of things.
If this place truly was a pure spatial anomaly, then there was no better place to cultivate and absorb natural energy than here. The biggest problem I'd had in Atlas so far was that I hadn't left the castle to find a proper spot for cultivation. Even more so, considering how problematic my third affinity was, this ring had become both my blessing and my curse.
And I wasn't in a position to be picky.
I focused on sensing the pulses around me. The energy distribution. The invisible cracks in reality. And it became almost obvious.
The spot with the highest spatial energy concentration was right there—on the sphere.
On the serpent's translucent prison.
It made me uncomfortable. But the truth was, it made no sense to avoid it. The sphere pulsed in waves. Every spark that escaped carried part of the cosmic energy to the rest of this world, but here, at the source, the density was overwhelming.
I approached cautiously, leaping between debris until I reached the top of the sphere. When my feet touched its surface, a chill ran down my spine. It was like stepping on living ice—the orb vibrated with a low, constant frequency, resonating through my bones.
I sat in a meditative position. Legs crossed. Hands on knees. Mind clear.
I closed my eyes.
And began to absorb.
The flow rushed through me like an ancient, dense river—almost solid. It wasn't just energy—it was my only lifeline to conquer this dungeon.
The very nature of space, condensed, twisted, vibrant. My prana core reacted instantly, spinning in internal spirals like a furnace being ignited.
The first drop of saturation flowed.
The process had begun.
I seized the moment and entered my inner world.
My inner world has always been a reflection of who I am—or who I'm becoming.
There, I floated in nothingness. Suspended in the middle of the universe. No sky. No ground.
Below me, the same black, endless abyss. An opaque spiral that swallowed everything, with no visible bottom. Gravity in its purest form—overwhelming, cold, inevitable.
Above, the storm.
Colossal lightning bolts slashing the skies with divine fury. Electric lines so alive they seemed to scream as they fell, trying to tear apart the fabric of reality. It was raw power. Total destruction.
For a long time, this was my balance.
Floating between these two forces. Never rising too high—or I'd be torn apart by lightning. Never descending too far—or I'd be crushed by the abyss's weight.
But now…
Something was different.
Around me, new cracks appeared. Fragments. Like shards of broken glass.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of tiny rifts floated in the space around me, reflecting pieces of infinity like shards of a cosmic mirror. Each one pulsed with energy impossible to ignore.
Space.
The scars of my affinity were spreading like a beautiful disease—or a traumatic birth. Hard to tell. These rifts sliced through the void, bent reality, broke the symmetry of my inner world.
And there was more…
What was once completely still was now spinning.
Subtly. Almost imperceptibly. But the spiral was turning. The world was turning, the abyss was turning, the storm of lightning was turning.
Slow. Slow like the birth of a galaxy—but real.
My inner world was beginning to rotate.
And that was the hidden truth of the spatial element in me: expansion didn't happen in a straight line but in motion. An eternal spin, like a planet's axis, like the warp of space-time.
I tested the old mechanics.
Tried to rise.
And, as before, I was bombarded by cascading lightning, each strike angrier than the last. Gravity pulled me back with overwhelming violence, as if the abyss refused to let go of what it claimed.
I tried to descend.
And the pressure rose. With every meter downward, my body was crushed, the repulsion intensified, the core burned. It was like being pressed between two worlds—one trying to destroy me, the other to consume me.
In neutrality, I floated.
At least there, balance still existed.
But with each drop of spatial energy absorbed in the outer world, that neutrality became more unstable.
The rotation gained fractions of force. Almost nothing—but present.
My inner world… was moving.
And I was very curious to discover what would happen the moment it began to spin for real.