"Agh..." Hades groaned as he slowly climbed out of his slumber.
His body felt crushed under immense pressure, as if hundreds of kilograms were weighing him down.
While he couldn't feel any bone fractured or any wound on him, the exhaustion was excruciating. It had been a while since he experienced something like this.
He parted his eyes little by little. The room was dimly lit, sparing him the need to adjust his vision.
"Where am... I?" he whispered. The last thing he remembered was finding himself in a burning land... the raw sensation of being overpowered was too vivid to dismiss. For a while, he thought he was truly there—lost in that place.
It felt awfully similar to the void... The same suffocating pull he once felt in the Sovereign's Realm. Yet this was worse—so much worse. It was as if he were being swallowed whole.
