Satya continued walking on the ancient path that he had followed from the Sakura Veil.
Soon he reached a place that resembled a town entrance, but it was utterly barren.
It seemed to have been broken by the passage of time.
Satya finally found some resemblance of civilization, but it too seemed to be destroyed.
Satya looked at the path ahead.
It seemed different starting from the town. In front of him, he could see a stone path covered in dust accumulated over the years.
Then he looked at his feet, which stood on a dirt path no different from the paths of his village.
The thing truly separating the two worlds seemed to be a shrine.
Everything else had changed throughout the centuries, but the shrine remained the same—sacred and truly divine.
"The First Shrine to Transcendence,"
The Shadow mumbled under its breath.
"Did you say something?"
Satya asked when he heard a faint sound.
"…"
The Shadow remained silent.
The shrine's boundaries were now covered by overgrown vines; therefore, nothing had truly remained the same as when people lived there.
Satya stepped into the shrine, which separated the town from the rest of the forest.
Satya opened the shrine door and looked inside. Inside the shrine was nothing but a miniature replica of the mountain it stood upon.
It was adorned with gold and jewelry.
Even after all this time, the inside of the shrine remained without a speck of dust, which confused Satya, as the gate from the outside looked as if it had not been opened for centuries. Even he himself had opened it with great difficulty.
Still, Satya paid respects to the shrine and the idol of the mountain.
The old townspeople had perhaps once prayed to the mountain. For them, it was sacred.
And in a world of imagination, a prayer can truly mean a lot. Therefore, Satya also prayed to reach home.
But unbeknownst to him, his prayer would have the opposite effect going forward.
After praying, Satya looked for the Shadow, but it seemed to remain outside the shrine, staring at the idol from afar.
"Why don't you come inside and pay respects, Shadow?" Satya asked.
"We were exiled from ever entering these shrines, traveler. That's why we can only watch from afar," said the Shadow in a pessimistic tone.
After exploring the shrine, Satya moved on to the town.
Once he took the first step into the town, reality seemed to ripple, and something about it changed.
The ripples were truly minor—so minor that a normal person would not have even felt them. But it was Satya who stepped through here, and he was not a normal person anymore.
The Shadow seemed to have taken a detour around the shrine, yet it still entered the same way.
But this time, there were no ripples.
Satya saw a stone with some markings carved on it. He could almost understand what was written on it, but as he was about to recognize it, the Shadow said,
"The First Step."
So that was what was written on it.
After this, Satya walked ahead, fully alert of his surroundings. After a while, he saw the house he had seen at the entrance of the shrine.
Looking at the house, the Shadow grew colder and heavier. Satya found the Shadow's behavior truly odd.
The house was the same as he had seen before. Its roof had fallen down, destroying the front. There was overgrown moss and vines on its broken walls.
It looked as if nature was trying to reclaim it.
Satya carefully navigated the house and entered through the back door. The backside of the house was mostly intact.
He saw some furniture lying around, then started to rummage through the entire house for useful items.
He soon entered a room that looked like the kitchen. There, he saw a table and plates still laid out on it, as if a family had been enjoying a meal together. On the plates was dirt—not the natural dust of time, but the dirt of something that had decomposed entirely.
"…"
Satya remained silent, looking at the plates on the table. He decided to leave them be.
After searching through the house inside out, Satya found many useful things for his travels. He found some rugged and worn clothes.
Some of them he used as a bag, and he wore a tattered robe with holes. But it was still better than nothing.
It was almost night by the time he finished securing useful things, so he started a fire and cooked his beef jerky.
He could now actually cook it properly because he had obtained a steel bowl and some other items to make his journey easier.
"Ah… tasty,"
Satya's eyes lit up when he tasted well-cooked meat after a long while.
After having a heartfelt meal, Satya decided to sleep. But he still slept outside, because he had a gut feeling that something was odd inside the house.
"Finally… a real bed,"
Satya was overjoyed when he finally lay down on the bed.
He had brought the bed outside with a bit of effort, and now he was enjoying every moment of it.
"Hey Shadow… is something wrong? You've been too quiet since the shrine."
"Ah… it's nothing. I was just… lost in some memories,"
the Shadow replied in a low tone. Hearing this, Satya decided not to dig further and closed his eyes.
Something had reached the shrine by then. Passing the shrine just as the Shadow had. It entered the town.
Suddenly, giant ripples were sent through reality. Satya was jolted awake by the disturbance.
"What happened, Shadow?" Satya asked in worry.
"Nothing… traveler. Go back to sleep," the Shadow replied in a normal tone.
Just as the being entered the town boundaries, it underwent a transformation. It became more real and stable.
It felt the gaze of the Shadow upon it, its bloodlust spreading throughout the entire village. Yet it steered clear of Satya and the shrine.
Feeling the gaze, the being became afraid. Normally, it would have run away by now, but this time it did not. It looked back at the Shadow with the same killing intent.
{The people of the past are nowhere to be seen, yet their shrine remains the same for eternity—always with a sense of divinity, of this utterly wrong eternity.})