Dex's back slammed into the solid ground with horrifying force, emitting the sickening crunch of several ribs shattering in his chest. But the momentum didn't stop at the initial impact. His body began to tumble with terrifying violence, like a ragdoll, down a steep, rugged slope littered with thorny bushes and jagged rocks.
The descent was a bloody nightmare. With every roll, sharp rocks tore through what was left of his clothes and slashed his skin, while saplings and protruding roots battered his limbs mercilessly, breaking more of the delicate bones in his shoulders and legs. The pain was blinding, and the phoenix heat within him began to fade, reducing to a feeble flicker fighting against death. Despite this complete physical violation, and despite every human instinct screaming at him to protect his head or break the fall with his hands, he never loosened his tight embrace on Lumia. He kept his arms locked around her like a vise of iron and steel, taking every blow on her behalf.
The violent fall and tumbling lasted only a few seconds, but on the scale of pain, it felt like a century. Suddenly, the rugged ground vanished from beneath them. They had reached the end of the slope... the edge of a giant rocky cliff overlooking an endless abyss, a completely blinding white void.
They didn't stop at the edge. Inertia launched them into empty air, sending them plummeting vertically into that abyss.
Dex closed his eyes, awaiting the final impact, an impact that would turn their bodies into unrecognizable gore at the bottom of the unfathomable depths. But that impact never came.
Instead of a fatal collision with rocks, their entwined bodies suddenly plunged into a thick, dense, and freezing layer of "White Fog." It wasn't ordinary meteorological fog made of water droplets; it was an ancient magical fabric, so dense it felt like it could be grasped by hand. This fog acted as a natural barrier, a soft yet impenetrable wall separating the "Danger Zone" filled with dark monsters from "another" realm that did not obey the same laws of the forest.
The moment they breached this foggy barrier, something incredible happened. The terrifying roar of the "Eclipse Minotaur" was cut off abruptly and absolutely, as if a thousand-meter-thick steel door had been violently slammed shut in the beast's face, severing every trace of its presence, its pressure, and its crushing gravity.
The density of the magical fog interacted with their falling bodies, dramatically slowing their vertical descent, as if they were sinking into a vat of cold gelatin. After seconds of slow floating, they finally landed, with a soft and gentle thud, on a floor that was neither rocky nor muddy. It was a floor covered in a thick layer of moss, soft as silk and glowing with a pale blue light.
Dex's arms finally released Lumia, and he lay flat on his back. He was gasping for air with extreme difficulty, his chest rising and falling agonizingly slowly, every breath escaping accompanied by bubbles of pink blood. The vision in his blue eyes was gradually fading, the edges of his sight surrendering to a creeping blackness.
His human body was literally shattered; broken bones, third-degree burns caused by his own energy, and deep, heavily bleeding wounds. The mana inside him was drained to the very last drop, and the Phoenix Core had returned to a deep, dark slumber.
He made a Herculean effort to move his head just a few centimeters to see the vague silhouettes around him before losing consciousness. This forest was not the Falus Forest he knew. There were no black oak trees or roots twisted like snakes. The scene around him was closer to an angelic dream... he saw the trunks of pure white trees, towering so high they pierced the low-hanging fog clouds, their leaves not green, but radiating a soft, soothing golden light, like suspended stars.
He had done it. They had fallen into the "Hidden Sanctuary," the heart of the sacred forest, a zone forbidden even to the beast gods, the only place where what they were looking for might exist.
But the price was exorbitant, perhaps his very life. In the final moment of his consciousness, he felt Lumia's slender hand, which was no longer cold but warm and full of life, touch his bloodstained cheek with extreme tenderness. He heard her voice crying out his name from afar; for the first time, her tone wasn't devoid of emotion, but saturated with panic and tears.
"Dex... please... Dex, don't close your eyes!"
That was the last thing he heard before the deep, pitch-black darkness swallowed him, his senses shutting down completely, leaving their fate hanging by a thin thread in the heart of the unexplored sacred forest.